Your Mind on Media

Why the i-book may not replace the textbook — yet

Joanne — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:10:41 +0000

I was just watching CNBC, which was covering Apple’s new iBooks2 software, something that allows highly interactive textbooks to be available on the iPad. It’s lauded as a money-saver (the textbooks will be $15.00 or less) and as a way to engage students by making textbooks much more interactive (in addition to making backpacks a lot lighter). But interestingly, many of the college students interviewed for the TV coverage said that they wanted to stick with printed books for now. They all expressed concerns that they didn’t have the self-discipline to resist the lure of Facebook and other distractions that the iPad makes so readily available. What do you think? Can you stay focused while reading on-line?

Social Media at the Beach

Joanne — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 18:38:27 +0000

I have the good fortune to be at the beach this week, and I already think I see a difference on the same beach over last year. More walkers seem to have earbuds in their ears and more people seem to be using their smart phones either while walking or as they lounge on their beach chairs. Is this progress? As for the earbud-wearers, I worry that they’re missing the wonderful stress-reducing sounds of the surf pounding. And the smart-phone users? If they’re spending most of their time keeping up with their emails and texts and playing Angry Birds and Words with Friends, are they really experiencing the pleasures of the beach?

Our wonderful gadgets have the side-effect of allowing us to be somewhere physically without being fully there. If people spend most of their vacations electronically connected, will they feel like they’ve had less of a vacation when they get home? Time will tell. As for me, I’m headed back to the beach without my iPhone.

Should Schools Shun Computers?

Joanne — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:29:33 +0000

An article on the front page of today’s New York Times talks about a school in Silicon Valley that prides itself on keeping computers OUT of the classroom. This practice is based on the belief that at a young age, hands-on experience—for example, learning fractions by cutting up and then eating a cake—is much more compelling than interacting with screens. Since computers have become so much more user-friendly, the argument goes, why not wait with these potentially distracting gadgets until later? Certainly food for thought. I’ve always felt that hands-on experiences, involving all five senses, were more useful than screen time for young children (and the rest of us, too). Maybe avoiding computers entirely is a bit extreme, but finding a way to moderate their influence so that books and other real, physical objects can have a central place in learning is not a bad idea.

How to Live to a Ripe Old Age

Joanne — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:50:35 +0000

On Sunday, my husband and I went to his uncle’s 95th birthday party. It was amazing how young and healthy Uncle Bill looked, and how totally with-it he was. I found out that he keeps himself very busy: With the help of an 87-year-old buddy, he designs, plants, and cares for the flower gardens at the apartment house where he lives. He bowls on Mondays. He drives his friends to the grocery store when they need to go, and he drives four women to church every Sunday. He even volunteers at the nursing home on Wednesdays! I asked him what his secret to healthy aging was, and he said, ” I keep myself busy and I eat a lot of fruit.” When we visited his apartment and saw his desk, my husband asked him where his computer was. “Oh, I got rid of it last year,” he said. “I got too many emails and I just couldn’t keep up.” By the way, so many people wanted to come to his birthday party, that they had to divide the celebration into to shifts to accommodate everyone. Seems like he’s got things pretty well figured out!

More Testimonials to Sleep’s Impact on Creativity

Joanne — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:56:04 +0000

In his recent Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor talks about the poet Li-Young Lee‘s contention that his brain hunts up ideas while he sleeps:

“Lee says his writing process isn’t very disciplined, even though he feels he’s on duty 24 hours a day: ‘When I wake up, there’s something in me even beyond my wakeful mind that’s been paying attention all night long to the divine and the uncanny. So the minute I get up, I feel I am already involved in the writing process, and I just grope my way to my study and see what happens.’”

This is consistent with what I talk about in my presentations and what research says about how the brain mulls things over when you sleep. In that semi-awake haze in the morning, before you start to focus on what you think you should be thinking about, more creative ideas are likely to be floating around. Be ready for them with a notebook and pencil by your bed!

The Creative Genesis of Harry Potter

Joanne — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:27:35 +0000

On a recent airing of “The Writer’s Almanac,” Garrison Keillor quoted an interview with J.K. Rowling on how she got the idea of writing a novel about Harry Potter:

She was on a train coming home to London from a weekend looking at flats in Manchester in 1990, when she suddenly got the idea for a novel. “I was looking out of the window at some cows, I believe and I just thought: ‘Boy doesn’t know he’s a wizard — goes off to wizard school.’ . . . I have no idea where it came from. I think the idea was floating along the train and looking for someone, and my mind was vacant enough, so it decided to zoom in there.”

Wow! That idea, which has led her to a fortune estimated at $1 billion, “just came to her”!

She’s partial to magic, so she says the idea was floating around, looking for someone. My take on it is that this was her idea alone to grasp. She probably had wizard ideas and boy-who-doesn’t-know-he’s-adopted ideas, and suddenly — those two ideas met and the creative leap was made!

The important part of this anecdote for me is the phrase “my mind was vacant enough.” Riding on the train and looking at nature passing by attracted her attention just enough to get her out of focusing on whatever normally would have occupied her mind, but left enough room in there for this wonderful creative connection to be made.

Giving ourselves breaks from endless information, entertainment, and connection can open us up to making creative leaps. Will two of your unrelated thoughts suddenly connect and be the next great breakthrough?

Get Going on Your Escalator Speech

Joanne — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:26:13 +0000

A new book ”Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little” (reviewed in today’s New York Times) says the “elevator speech” may be too long. We now have such a short time to catch our target’s attention that we should think about an escalator pitch, “short enough to make when you’re on the up escalator and your [target] is on the down escalator, passing by.” In writing, we’ve moved from email (long) to Twitter and texting (140 characters or less), and soon we may be limited to Haiku-length messages! When we talk, there are no formal time limits. (Are you old enough to remember when we talked fast on long-distance calls because we were paying by the minute?) However, we know our listeners are not only used to receiving information in sound-bites, they’ve got gadgets in their pockets clamoring for their attention if we so much as pause to take a breath. The challenge is to find a way to say something meaningful very quickly or develop ways to engage enough curiosity so our listeners stay tuned in to us.

The “Right” Way to Multitask?

Joanne — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:49:38 +0000

I was in the Verizon store picking up an iPhone for my son, when I saw that one of its touted features was improved multitasking. Knowing what research says about how multitasking slows you down and interferes with the quality and accuracy of what you’re doing, I was intrigued. But thinking more about this, I realize there are two issues here.

One the one hand, it’s good to have a DEVICE that can multitask. The term multitasking actually came from the realm of computers. Computers that are programmed properly and have a large enough capacity can do more than one thing at a time. On the other hand, people can’t multitask effectively because their brains don’t work that way. They can only pay attention to one thing at a time because their “working memory” is of very limited size.

The first ad I saw about the iPhone showed “multitasking” as a good thing. Someone was talking on the phone to make arrangements to meet his friend at the movies. Without dropping the call, he was able to check out the movie times in his area so they could make a decision on the spot. Although his phone was multitasking, the person was actually single-tasking — his focus was on making a decision with his friend on what they would see and when they would see it.

If, instead of searching for a movie to see together, the same person had been surfing the web for sports scores while his friend was talking about her day, that would indeed be multitasking — the bad kind. He can’t focus on two distinct things at once. She probably sensed he was not really there for her, or later, she discovered that he didn’t remember a word she said.

Check out the iPhone’s descriptions of their so-called “Right Ways to Multitask.” Here’s an example:

Listen to audio in the background

Now you can listen to audio from compatible third-party appswhile checking email, surfing the web, playing games, and performing other tasks. So when you want to follow a ball game or listen to music from Pandora, your productivity never skips a beat.

Your productivity never skips a beat? — in your dreams!

It all boils down to this:

multitasking for machines = good

multitasking for people = not so much!

Who is Cheryl K. Olson?

Joanne — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:31:27 +0000

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the California law that would have made it harder for minors to buy extremely violent video games, people have been asking me about the author of the New York Times op-ed piece that appeared on Monday. Ms. Olson and her husband Lawrence Kutner have been pooh-poohing the significance of the research on media violence for years. When their book Grand Theft Childhood came out, I wrote a critical review of it at the request of the editor of PsychCentral.com. It was initially posted, but then taken down because of complaints by the book’s authors. A shorter version of my review later appeared in the Journal of Communication, an academic publication. My original review is available on my web site. You can judge for yourself whether these researchers’ claims make sense.

Socially Networked Moviegoers–Is This is the Death of Focus?

Joanne — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:50:52 +0000

There’s an interesting AP article today about the problem of people texting during movies and distracting other viewers. What does this say about our ability to focus on one thing at a time, even when we’ve paid to sit in a dark room and be entertained? For some people, making comments seems to be part and parcel of experiencing anything. What does this say about our ability to lose ourselves in an entertainment experience? For other people, they can’t detach from work even for a couple of hours in the evening. What are the implications for our mental health when we can never detach from our work? There used to be an expression, “there’s a time and place for everything.” Now the operative mantra seems to be “everything, everywhere, all the time.”