31–37 of 37 posts
It could just simply be that people with worse memories are more likely to enjoy media multi-tasking than people with better memories.
In short, correlation != causation.
Learn Unix commands and cron. Automate everything. Use virtual desktops as separate work environments conmuting after finishing the first job, not to switch between Windows.
I grew up playing video games and watching tv at the same time, never impacted me back then, but do with phones ... hmmm.
> Results showed that attention lapses in the moment prior to remembering impacted on behavioural and neural memory signals and were associated with greater likelihood of forgetting. Can anyone translate this for me? This sounds like someone throwing a bunch of big words together to me. I don't have a Nature subscription but this seems like another non-study, 80 adults in a contrived experiment with flashing images t…
There is a (common) theory which states: Memory isn't like a disk drive. When you remember, the brain doesn't just read something from disk. Instead, when you remember, the information you're remembering is re-summarized and written back, possibly at higher levels of 'compression'. I put that in scare quotes, but when the brain uses references to other memories to reduce the space taken by any single one, compression…
Suppose two men were in an altercation with a woman, and during the altercation one of the men briefly flashed a knife. One man was black and one was white.
If the first person to question a witness asks something like "When in the altercation did the black man flash the knife?", there is a chance that the witness will remember the black man flashing the knife even if it was actually the white man who did so. If the first questioner instead just asked the witness to describe the altercation and any weapons that were used, that same witness would have been much more likely to correctly place the knife with the white man.
There have been quite a few experiments about this sort of thing, not only achieving altered memories but even going so far as to give people memories of whole events that did not happen.
BTW, expectations also can alter how memories are initially recorded. Even without someone asking a bad question like "When did the black man flash the knife?", if the white man is dressed in a suit and the black man is dressed like however the witness imagines a street thug would be dressed, there is a decent chance they will remember the black man as having the knife. If other stuff is going on and the flashing of the knife is just a passing detail, it gets remembered where it makes the most sense.
In our current criminal justice system in the US there are nowhere near sufficient safeguards to make sure that poorly chosen questions will not alter witness memory, or to even detect that it might have happened. I don't know if any other countries handle this better than the US.
Multi-screening? Maybe. It's a misnomer, though. Multi-crap apps open across multiple devices, I'll buy. It WILL kill your productivity. But take away my multi-monitor setup on my desktop or take away my virtual desktops and I'll go for your jugular.
I'm actually functional again! It's worth the unreliable calls and weekend spent hacking a power management OpenRC service together. That whole smartphone thing is built around finding creative ways to pull you away from useful things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I clicked through because I thought; "oh, shit. I cannot even get work done without two. Sometimes I use three!". I've been had!
I've heard some anecdotes that multiple monitors do reduce focus though[0]. I'm still on the fence though, the alternative to multiple monitors is often lots of workspaces, and switching between those can often feel just as jarring as looking to my left or right. Using i3, I often forget which workspace I left something on and spend 2 or 3 seconds cycling through every open workspace. [0]: https://michael.stapelberg.…
The positions are set in such a way that I can glance at the left without turning my head, whereas the right side requires me to switch focus / turn my head to give it my full attention.