Podcast available here. NOW YOU SEE IT Dick talks with Cathy N. Davidson, who teaches at Duke University, about brain science and attention. She makes a case for distraction as something that is actually good and says the brain is always naturally multitasking. Music in this show: “Mike Mills” by Air, and the Super Mario Bros. theme as … Cathy Davidson on NPR's The Story with Dick Gordon
If you are in the WUNC (91.5 fm) listening area, you can listen to Dick Gordon’s interview with me on “The Story” on Monday April 30th, during the 1pm EST and 8pm EST show, at approximately :40 after the hour. It airs at other times elsewhere so here are the listings: http://thestory.org/Stations It was a great conversation, so now I’ll be intrigued to hear the final version. Let me know what you think!
Did you know there’s a 6% increase in traffic fatalities on April 15, tax day? That’s about the same as the increase on Super Bowl Sunday (when drinking is involved). Forget cell phones and so-called “multitasking”! If we really want to know what “taxes” our attention, it’s, well, taxes.
“GALVANIC.”–Virginia Heffernan, New York Times.
A recording of this event can be found at http://www.stevehargadon.com/2012/03/live-tuesday-march-20th-with-cathy.html.
How do you count “integrity” as a vital component of “productivity” and “profit.” That is a profound question. How do you teach it, promote it, improve it as a quality?
Instead of blaming technology, as if the simple fact of technology dooms us to unhappy lives, it is useful to ask what is distracting us, why, and how can we adjust our behavior—our activities and thoughts—to allow for the optimal completion of the tasks we need to complete. Until we dispel the myth of monotasking, we are powerless. Once we understand that “distraction is our friend,” we can use our own frustration to help diagnose the real issue and begin to cure the problem.
Maybe it should be a requirement: before any expert passes a summary judgment on a whole generation, s/he needs to first spend some extended time with actual living, breathing members of that generation. Over and over, I read assessments about “teens today” that seem to homogenize as somehow “deficient” a whole generation that is as complex and diverse as any and every other generation. And “technology” is typically the explanation for this catastrophe of the younger generation.
“Among You” is a beautiful, poignant, even joyful exhibit selected from artist Lisa Lesniak’s series “Drawn To Compassion,” hosted by All Saints Episcopal Church on Friday March 16, from 6-930 PM, at 504 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, 90210. The exhibit is of loving, compassionate portraits Lesniak has made of the homeless people she serves as a volunteer “stylist.”
The bubble test, invented in 1914, was designed to solve the problems of variability and efficiency. It was not designed to test higher-order thinking, creativity, problem-solving or learning. If we can find a better way to solve the problem of variability and efficiency, then we can concentrate on the real objective of education: how best to prepare our kids to thrive in the life that they will lead once they are no longer in school.