Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator (translated by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson, and published by MIT Press) has some great stuff about research, rest, and
University of Iowa historian Elizabeth Yale (she's a fellow at the Center for the Book) has a nice piece about Down House, Charles Darwin's home for forty years, in
From Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought: Voluntary abstention from conscious thought on any particular problem may, itself, take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent
In The Distraction Addiction I made the argument that our cognitive abilities and facility for using technology— in particular, our possibly unique ability for becoming mentally absorbed in
In The Distraction Addiction I talk about the concept of “nomophobia,” the fear of being without your cellphone (“No” “Mobile phone” “Phobia”) coined by British researchers in 2008.
University of Wisconsin professor and pioneering mindfulness researcher Richard Davidson writes in Huffington Post about why we should think of well-being as a skill we can learn and
I'm in today's Washington Post, thanks to Brigid Schulte, a Post contributor and author of Overwhelmed. In the United States, we work among the longest hours of any
From Oakland-based artist Molly McLeod: I’m a fan of the smartphone wallpaper as nudge, having created a few myself (and perhaps inspired WNYC’s Bored and Brilliant wallpapers). You
One of the things that plenty of CEOs in Silicon Valley pride themselves on is cutting out extraneous decisions, so they have bandwidth left to focus on the
Recently I ran across two mentions of train travel as conducive to mind-wandering: Writing in the Atlantic in 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes describes being “magnetized into an hour or