cognition

Game playing is universal, diverse, often involves social interaction, and can cultivate teen civic engagement.  The first national survey of its kind finds that virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement. The survey was conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a project of the Pew Research Center, and was supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

After several years as an administrator and then on my first sabbatical since 1995, I am returning to teaching in the Spring. One of my courses is called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" and is an introduction to the deep structure of thinking in the information age. I thought HASTAC readers might be interested in seeing my course description.

As readers of this Cat in the Stack blog know, one of my pet peeves is really bad extrapolation from an instance of human behavior to a reductionist biological explanation to evolutionary hoo-ha (I mean, theory).

Readers of this blog know I’ve spent the year, my first leave in well over a decade, at an undisclosed location. Really? Isolated and secretive—and yet helped direct the international HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition? Nice trick if you can manage it. Well, I have in two ways. First and foremost, I work with an amazing team. Incredible really. Humbling. Such fabulous, talented, imaginative, dedicated people—Jonathan, Mandy, Mark, Sheryl, Erin (and that’s just on the Duke side; our UCHRI partners, blogged about also on this blog) work just as hard. But, second, my undisclosed location has been mostly mental: finding a way, when not working on the DML Competition, to be mentally away. That’s lots harder than being physically absent.

Last night I saw two performances by the amazing butoh dance group Dairakudakan at ADF. They foster a style called Tempu-Tenshiki which literally means "being born into the world itself is a great talent."

 

Is It Possible To Trick Oneself Out of Discplinary Biases? This is a question I keep asking as I spin out my own ideas about neural plasticity and social neuroscience. I'm not sure. And perhaps that uncertainty is a good thing.

Inattentional blindness underscores the point that it's easy to miss what you're not looking for.

How does learning art, music, or dance impact our cognitive abilities?  

Here is a reposting from my TechPsych blog:

What does this fear of things going too fast really mean? What is the speed of thought, the speed of an epiphany?  Is a video game really faster? So fast that it rots your brain?