Pang’s Zombie Apocalypse Memorization Test
One of the questions I've been working through in my book is this: how do you decide when it's okay to outsource a cognitive function? When is it
Did Meditating Make Us Human?
This article by Southern Louisiana U. professor Matt Rossano, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in 2007, has an awesome premise: Imagine you travelled back in time 100,000
On distractions as a keyword
I've been mapping the various ways we use the term distraction. In my Taming the Digital Monkey, whose first draft astonishingly is drawing to its conclusion, I talk
“We should value memory as a means for endlessly rewriting the self”
Charles Fernyhough has an essay in the Guardian about memory and the self. Nothing terribly new if you already have more than a passing familiarity with the scientific
Quote of the day: David Weinberger
I disagree with some elements of this interview, but this line of David Weinberger's makes a good point: In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody
Hipstamatic and social picture sharing
My anniversary is coming up soon: my wife and I got married on New Year's Eve fifteen years ago. One of the things we did at the wedding
On Internet, information remember YOU: Evgeny Morozov on Delete
Okay, I have no idea what that title means. But I wanted to flag this review: According to Mayer-Schönberger, we have committed too much information to “external memory,”
Delete
Just found a good interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, in the Guardian: In Delete, Mayer-Schönberger traces the history of...
“Forgetting as a feature, not a bug”
Reading the great article but Liam Bannon, director of the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick, on forgetting as a feature, not a bug. His central insight
How computers and humans enact memory and accuracy
I'll save my current thinking about this subject for the book-- I'm trying to explain how our interactions with computers, and the language we employ when talking about