Infotention

"Hours spent at the video gaming console probably train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers.

“Gamers see the world differently,” said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. “They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”"

Diff Displays reduces distraction by visually highlighting what’s changed on your screen since you last looked.

Safety advocates say the concept of high-tech displays for goggles — and for other sports eyewear — is information overload run amok, particularly when people are using them at high speeds. Yet Oakley, based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., is one of a handful of sports eyewear companies betting that thrill seekers and athletes crave the equivalent of a cockpit dashboard while skiing, snowboarding, cycling and running. The companies are in the vanguard of the next wave of personal technology, called wearable computing, which promises to further shrink the barrier between users and the information they seek."

The ancient and increasingly popular practice of mindfulness meditation has been used to manage stress, depression and even chronic pain. New research suggests it may also improve test scores.

Twitter search has its limits. For one, you can only search back so far, with Twitter making public search results available only for a limited period of time.

Information isn’t picky: Anyone, anything, or anybody can be a part of it anytime, anywhere, and by any means possible. Attention on the other hand, is finite; we only have so much of it, and in th...

“The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts,” wrote James Webb Young in his famous 1939 5-step technique for creative problem-solving, “becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.”But just how does one acquire those vital cognitive customs? That’s precisely what science writer Maria Konnikova explores inMastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (UK; public library) — an effort to reverse-engineer Holmes’s methodology into actionable insights that help develop “habits of thought that will allow you to engage mindfully with yourself and your world as a matter of course.”

Does this scenario sound familiar? You're stuck in meetings all day. You have absolutely no time. Yet your boss is asking you to stay on top

Sometimes you need to quickly immerse yourself in a new field. You might want to gain expertise or quickly gauge what the current issues are around a particular topic. One way of doing this is by c...

The tech-industry veteran Linda Stone on how to pay attention

"To get a better understanding of how focus and concentration work, I talked with Susan Perry, Ph.D, a social psychologist and writer for of the Creating in Flow Blog at Psychology Today. It's important to know what's happening in your brain when you're focused on something and what happens when you get distracted. From there we can look at minimizing those distractions and training your brain to focus better. After all, focusing is a skill and takes practice to develop."

Multi-tasking can be done effectively if it involves simple tasks that operate on completely different channels in our brain. For example, listening to the news while folding laundry.

:"So think about this history of past Information Ages the next time you hear a pundit blame the Internet for distraction, multitasking, diluted memory, asocial behavior, shallowness, loneliness, isolation, intellectual dilution and so forth.   It may be the World Wide Web, or something else.  Socrates would have urged us to blame our distraction on the alphabet. . ."

The following steps will offer you a bit of insight into how you can become a better researcher using some simple web tools like mind maps and bookmarklets.

"The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to maximize further learning. We can allow our attention to roam anywhere around us and glean interesting new clues about any facet of our local environment, to compare and potentially add to our extensive internal model."

"The proper role for your pre-frontal cortex is to decide what behavior you want to change, design the ritual you'll undertake, and then get out of the way. "It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing," the philosopher A.N. Whitehead explained back in 1911. "The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

Indeed many great performers aren't even consciously aware that's what they've done. They've built their rituals intuitively."