You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Distraction' category.
“We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly.”
Sometimes boredom gets the best of us and, like Maugham, we need to change locations (in his case, from London to Paris). W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 63.
“Philosophy is not one truth, but thousands of truths. You don’t have to believe in just one thing. When you choose one idea, you close yourself to the rest.”
Marcel Wanders, Dutch industrial designer, Jane Szita, “A Life in Design,” Dwell (April 2006), 23.
“For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season. When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink – in combination with the invention of electric light – allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle.”
Charles Czeisler, neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School, asserts that an example of the industrial revolution trumping taking away our reliance upon nature. In this instance, the distraction (the clock) replaced the initial focus (the seasons). T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic (January 2005), 15-16.
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
Quoting Paul Erdós, a Hungarian mathematician; T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic (January 2005), 16.
There is a chaotic abundance of material distractions. Our walk is infiltrated with limitless collisions. In a computer model, Doug James, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon, created a virtual quarter mile high stack of plastic lawn chairs (3,601). He then toppled the plastic chairs to test an algorithm to predict the collisions, including the way that they bump and bend. After 14 hours, a computer counted 1.6 billion collisions.
David Pescovitz, “It’s Raining Chairs,” Wired Magazine (August 2004).
“The more television watched, the more likely the person suffered psychological effects.”
Two independent studies, one by William E. Schlenger (Research Triangle Institute of NC), and Sandro Galea (New York Academy of Medicine) found that TV added to the likelihood of post-traumatic stress associated with the 9/11 attacks. Richard M. Restak, The New Brain: How the Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind (Rodale, 2004), 78.
“The abstraction of language is superseded by the literalness of pictures – at a yet to be determined cost to imagination, which languishes as its work is done for it.”
Political scientist Benjamin R. Barber makes the case that the shift from the written word to the images on a screen (i.e. TV and movies) results in a “colossal Re-formation of the human condition.” Richard M. Restak, The New Brain: How the Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind (Rodale, 2004), 68.
“Whenever you attempt to do ‘two things at once,’ your attention at any given moment is directed to one or the other activity rather than to both at once. And, most important, these shifts decrease rather than increase your efficiency; they are time and energy depleting.”
Research tells us that multitasking is a lose-lose scenario. Richard M. Restak, The New Brain: How the Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind (Rodale, 2004), 55.
“When my feelings rule me, I am intolerant of pain and boredom; I demand that my needs for pleasure and distraction be met as quickly as possible.”
Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 85.
“The media darlings (celebrities, shows, fashion, etc.) have immense power. Steven Johnson estimates that Charles Dickens sold around 50,000 copies of Bleak House when the population of Great Britain was around 20 million. This amounts to nothing by today’s standards. If Dickens were to impact his country the way a hit TV show (which can garner 10-15 million viewers in a population of 280 million), Dickens would have to sell some 800,000 copies!”
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead, 2005), 134-5.
