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homunculus (2)

Malnutrition, the silent epidemic - Photojournalist Ron Haviv traveled to Bangladesh to document a silent epidemic that may lack the drama to make the nightly news, but has the power to undermine a world's worth of young lives: childhood malnutrition.
posted by kliuless on Jul 22, 2010 - 6 comments

In Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, Jason Epstein posits "The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them... The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives." [more inside]
posted by netbros on Mar 3, 2010 - 19 comments

Optimizing Your Brain at Work is a pretty fascinating talk at Google by David Rock about managing your brain's internal states and attention, as well as threat responses with the goal of optimizing information processing. It is a Youtube link, and fairly long (~55min). He also mentions The Neuroscience of Mindfulness during the talk, so here is a convenient link to that.
posted by Vulpyne on Dec 3, 2009 - 28 comments

Thought-provoking NY Mag essay on the consequences of living in an age of perpetual distraction. Been thinking about this one a lot, in the context of MeFi and other addictions.
posted by jcruelty on May 26, 2009 - 52 comments

Dr. Aric Sigman has told us that TV is literally killing us, that it makes children pregnant, that Batman makes our kids violent and that multitasking ruins children's attention span. Now he says that social networking can cause cancer, strokes, and dementia. (PDF of press release)
posted by desjardins on Feb 19, 2009 - 58 comments

RoboMemo is a video game that can train the distraction out of children. [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea on Jul 2, 2008 - 22 comments

"Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation" (PDF). A recent article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences on the neuroscience of meditation, focusing on how meditation alters and sharpens the brain's attention systems. The research is being done at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior (previously), who have also recently published research on the "Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation" (PDF), which describes how meditation can cultivate compassion by physically affecting brain regions that play a role in empathy. They shared this research with the Dalai Lama at the recent Seeds of Compassion forum.
posted by homunculus on Apr 27, 2008 - 13 comments

Why can't I pay attention anymore? Maybe I have ADT or NADD. Did we already discuss this? I can't remember. I need to be more mindful.
posted by homunculus on Apr 9, 2005 - 28 comments

The Price of/for Attention

"While it's interesting (and soul-crushingly depressing) to discover bidding wars over keywords associated with human suffering, I'm focused on the idea that I can pull data about web users' interest in different subjects out of this data."

The fight to get attention on humanitarian crises, the dynamics of web browsing, and something like statistical game theory meet for a greased wrestling match in GoogleAds.
posted by freebird on Oct 1, 2004 - 6 comments

Playing computer games makes kids smarter? Although it reads like a headline from The Onion, a British study funded by the ESRC has come to that conclusion. "They seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better than other people and also had better general co-ordination. Overall there was a huge similarity with top-level athletes."

Gotta go and show this to my boss...
posted by jedrek on Jul 22, 2001 - 11 comments

"Munchausen" isn't just a fabulous movie – it's a syndrome where you pretend to be (or believe you are) sick in order to get attention. There is also a well-known syndrome called Munchausen By Proxy where a parent makes a child sick. And now (here it comes) there's Munchausen By Internet – people pretending to have illnesses on the net to get attention. It's a subject I would have scoffed at a few days ago, but now....
posted by fraying on May 21, 2001 - 5 comments