Multitasking is a big part of the modern world. People are constantly doing two things at once; they send emails when they are spending time with their loved ones, they work out while texting a friend and they cook while they check Facebook.
However, all of this multi-tasking is bad for your brain. Recent studies have found that multitasking increases the production of cortisol, a stress hormone, and adrenaline, which can overstimulate the brain. This can cause a “mental fog” that makes it hard for you to concentrate or focus.
I think I’ve mentioned how bad multitasking is for you before. For myself, I’m becoming a fan of the Pomodoro technique, where you have a time and focus on work for a set number of minutes. It works well for me.
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Yoda may be talking about the dark side of the force here, but his Jedi wisdom is just as applicable to the dark side of social media and technology. Like the force, these tools provide…
Google has added a new feature to Search that will show you if your local library has the ebook you’re looking for in stock. If you’re old like me and didn’t know that you could borrow ebooks, well you can, and many libraries across the US have a digital collection that you can borrow from….
In 2016, Tristan Harris, whose job title at Google was “design ethicist,” left the company to focus on a new nonprofit he called Time Well Spent. The goal of Time Well Spent is to reverse what it calls “the digital attention crisis” — the brilliant minds at Google, Apple, Facebook, and elsewhere who “hijack our minds”…
Here’s what my browser generally looks like: work email in the left-most tab, always open. TweetDeck in the next one, always open. A few Google Docs tabs with projects I’m working on, followed by my calendar, Facebook, YouTube, this publication’s website and about 10 stories I want to read — along with whatever random shiny…
The system is getting in the way. Sir Ken Robinson has counseled education leaders all over the world. He’s seen what works and what doesn’t. And there’s a lot we can do in the United States — and in other countries — to improve. Take standardization and competition. We’re mass-producing lessons and units for the…
Lacking money or time can lead one to make poorer decisions, possibly because poverty imposes a cognitive load that saps attention and reduces effort. Source: Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function | Science I had thought I shared this before, but I couldn’t find it in the archives. The researchers talk about cognitive load. What is cognitive load?…
