Daniel Levitin on Information Overload
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
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Modern society is in a state of data deluge, and our brains are struggling to keep up with the demands of the digital age.
In this excerpt from the event, Daniel Levitin explains how our brains organise a flood of information, and how we can harness that understanding to be more efficient, and less stressed in an increasingly wired and distracted world.
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It's funny how well this Victor Hugo quote from 1862 fits what was said:
“A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.”
i gotta say iam amazed by this man.
I question the accuracy of his statements. I wouldn't say that the mind wander mode is our brains' natural state, I'd say it's more an unintended side effect. The mode our minds are supposed to be in is focused, but we do need to have the ability to shift focus. If our focus is kept on one thing for too long, it gets burned out, we kind of need the jumping around thing to keep its activity balanced/versatile. However, I will say the mind wander is advantageous, but not in the way he said. He said it's like a recharging thing, whereas I see it as a way to connect seemingly unrelated things to gain further understanding and contexts of those things.
***** I have anecdotes...
***** There comes a point when Anecdotes are so numerous that it can't just be written off as coincidence or exceptions to the rule. The only real difference between anecdotes and data is that data was recorded and happened more often than anything else in their controlled study. Conduct the same study at a different time with different people, you could very well get different results.
Many people can attest to what I said, even if they don't have a study to back them. Come to think of it, this guy didn't really have a study either, he was just discussing things he observed.
Elfos64 And, one of the problems with anecdotes is too often they survive research that proves them to be just plain wrong. This interesting article gives some insights into why anecdotal "evidence" often trumps scientific evidence. www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-people-fly-from-facts/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20150304
Peter Roche That makes no sense, anecdotes can't be wrong, just inconsistent. The fact that there are a number of situations when the scientific conclusion wasn't the case shows there to be a problem. I don't recall this guy ever showing his evidence or data either. And even if he did, there are numerous ways to interpret data, this guy might not have interpreted it accurately. My anecdotes suggest he wasn't. I don't need to have different data to say that he interpreted his data wrong, I can just use the same data he did and interpret it a different way, assuming he even has data as opposed to collective experiences, i.e. anecdotes of his own in which he drew incorrect conclusions based on his observations.
Anyone who has tried meditation knows that the brains natural mode is to wander. It is great effort which allows meditators to focus their attention back on to the breath every 10seconds after it has naturally wandered away. Our brains are constantly providing us new rushes of thoughts to consider and focus and meditation fight that nature.
Wait, doesn't he work at Minerva Schools? He's awesome.