In case you’ve missed it , talking on your cell phone while driving is pretty dangerous. Although distracted driving may be more dangerous than drunk driving, the campaign to raise awareness and create a stigma around cell-phone use during driving chafes against introspection. Despite a large and growing body of work suggesting that distraction from cell phone use impairs reflexes, […]
Attention
When babies explore the world and stumble upon an interesting object, they check it out carefully. Usually by putting the object into their mouth. Adults tend to be more restrained in their oral explorations, but we retain a natural tendency for physical touch: when we become interested in an object we usually pick it up […]
Video games both challenge and entertain us. We play them for fun, and the more we play the better we get. But might the skills we develop while gaming transfer to other activities? This has been an increasingly hot research question in recent years, with an industry of “brain training” games willing to race ahead of the science, as […]
In order to read this text you are focusing your attention on this single task, and you are filtering out distractions from your surroundings. People with ADHD, myself included, have difficulty doing this. A radio playing in the next room can act like an unwanted magnet to attention. But we also often struggle with distraction from […]
Why do we sleep? Apparently, this simple question has no simple answer, despite decades of research. According to leading sleep researcher William Dement, “the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.” But just because we may not know why we need to sleep doesn’t prevent us from knowing […]
When two talking heads are better than two flips of a coin: Social interaction helps team performance Put a few people together on a team and you get teamwork, which Wikipedia lauds as “a means of assuring quality and safety in the delivery of services” in at least some domains. Put a few people together on […]
Like many mental health professional, the UK’s famed National Health Service (NHS) notes that “it can be easy to rush through life without stopping to notice much. Paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you – can improve your mental wellbeing.” This ability to “live in […]
Suppose you are asked to name a few pictures. You are shown the drawing of a tiger and you say “tiger”. Then a mouse appears and you say “mouse”, and so on. The experimenter avoids pictures of a gerenuk or babirusa, so you are cruising along nicely. And then this pops up: The holiday is […]
Imagine the following dystopian job: You are working in a factory, and your task is to look for that matching sock so the pair can be packaged together. To make things worse, you are given another sock every few seconds, together with a new drawer in which to look for its twin. To manage the […]
You are deeply involved in a conversation with someone at a party when suddenly you hear someone say your name, and, before you even know what happened, your attention is transported toward the voice that uttered it. This is an example of the cocktail party effect, first described in 1959 and recently extended even to visual stimuli. This […]