Wall Street Journal "Forward Thinking" Series

Andrew Zolli, Futurist

Retrieved June 30, 2008 from http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/forwardthinking-zolli.html



Ray Kurzweil - Inventer

Retrieved June 30, 2008 from
http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/forwardthinking-kurzweil.html

Bad Memory Tricks

Continuing my interest in the brain and memory quirks...This from the New York Times:

OPINION | June 27, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor: Your Brain Lies to You

By SAM WANG and SANDRA AAMODT

We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

Constructing My World

(Haley Center, Complements of Auburn University Website)

During Winter quarter of 1974 in Auburn’s huge lecture hall, Haley Center room 2370, Dr. Gordon Bond, my youngish world history professor, wove together bits of the familiar – biology, literature, art, and government –as he lectured. I don’t remember what he was teaching, maybe the Renaissance, but the moment is important to me, because it was the first instance during my education when facts seemed to snap from artificial compartmentalization to synchrony. Ah! What I had glimpsed in high school had been staccato bullet points on teachers’ syllabi, yes, but, though disassembled and disparate, when reassembled, embellished, and elaborated upon, these same bullets began to describe and explain the world to me…all from differing vantage points. The literature that I read reflected the culture and the history we learned, but through a different lens. Scientific principles learned in biology labs were matched to the names of pioneers living in and influenced by distinct time periods. It was as if President Philpot had conspired with his faculty, uniting them in a plot to compel me to a more reflective, curious, and open stance as a student.



Dr. Bond had shown me an expansive picture of the world and its interrelatedness. Though the facts were not startling themselves, I remember the excitement that I felt as I mentally gathered, untangled and rewove the old and new threads. By combining disjointed information with a new perspective, he had helped me create a richer world view than if I had only attended to the new information.

I began to see that there were other valid cultures, religions, and political views than those of my conservative community. There were systems at work in the world, with patterns that were predictable, and they did not operate in a vacuum. Exciting ideas, if learned a little bit late. I’d like to say that I woke from my semi-conscious, passive attitude toward learning that day, but that is not what happened. It did not take long, though: one year later I found and fell in love with speech pathology. But it was this split second aha moment of self-awareness, wonder, and, yes, even constructivist learning that began that journey for me.

Blame that ADHD on the Net

The July/August Atlantic magazine's cover asks, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Nicholas Carr, a Dartmouth and Harvard-educated author who has published several controversial books about relationships between technology, business, and culture, wrote the cover piece. He offered anecdotes of his own and others' experiences with abbreviated attention and distractibality, attributable, he and they say, to Net surfing. Carr believes that the quick click/scanning/hyperlinking behavior so inherent in browsing content on the Internet results in changes to brain function. Similarly, researchers at University of Wisconsin, Madison, found that meditation activated electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with positive emotion (Robbins, 2004).

So, though Carr, a self-professed luddite, may be grossly premature in suggesting a causal relationship between Googling and increasingly superficial reading habits, I do believe that we may become what we do. I know that I have become more distractable and fidgety, and less able to concentrate for more than a few paragraphs on meaty reading material . I thought my brain was just old, but perhaps I have taught it to perform this way. Comforting to find company with a Harvard man.

Carr, N. (2008, July/August). Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic, 302(1), 56-63.

Robbins, M. (2004, January). Meditation apparently activates positive areas within the brain. Discover Magazine,25,(1), 45.

Confusing Wisdom and Memory

Musings from a Virtual Hammock

My personal hero for the day: SARA REISTAD-LONG of the NY Times, for her article on the aging brain, creative thinking, and wisdom. My friends know that my memory challenges terrify me. Reistad-Long, quoting researchers at Harvard, the University of Toronto, and the University of Michigan, reported on new paradigms of memory, attention, problem-solving, and wisdom. I took the good news as three bullets:

*Older people have a larger collection of accumulated knowledge than younger people -- and, therefore, have more information to store and manage.

*Younger people may appear to be more flexible in retrieving packets of information, but they are less flexible in being able to make creative connections between these packets.

*Older people access these collections to problem solve, and do so in a more holistic manner than younger people.

My favorite quote from the article:
“It may be that distractability is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
My little ADHD brain magnetized to that one.

Isn't this what we 50-somethings have long suspected? My friends, seeing the panic on my face when I realize that I have completely forgotten what should be so easily remembered, reassure me that I "have too much on my mind". I do. BUT, I always fear that the real reason that I don't remember is that I knocked myself unconscious while disassembling a swing set about 15 years ago. While that fear may be correct, the same injury could have made creative thinking more likely. Thank you for sharing, Ms. Reistad-Long.

Related article: For a Sharp Brain: Stimulation