After all, what’s Facebook fatigue without Facebook withdrawl?

I’m taking the week off from Facebook, primarily to prove that I can still live without it. Those of you who aren’t on Facebook may not understand why this is difficult to do, and I can empathize with that– I held out on the whole social networking thing for a really long time, and back before I plugged in, I found the whole phenomenon pretty ridiculous. Ever since I realized I was addicted, I’ve been trying to figure out the why and the how, so that I might find a cure.

I was up in DC for Keith and Natalia’s wedding a couple weeks ago, and on the plane ride up I read Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence. Goleman has an odd writing style; the vast majority of his books involve him citing the research of people he went to grad school with at Harvard who are all really, really brilliant. I feel like he tends to short-change all of the mediocre psychologists and neuroscientists out there who are doing difficult, complicated research that isn’t remotely interesting to anyone.

All kidding aside, I really like Goleman’s stuff– he provides the neuroscience behind my gut feelings, which is immensely satisfying to my left brain, which loves to feel like it knows what’s going on in the world. There was one section in the book where Goleman talks about how our brains are wired for social interaction, so much so that our thoughts tend to turn to our social relationships when we don’t have anything else going on.

David Brooks wrote an article the other day on our outsourced brains that made me think about the ways in which I’ve come to depend on a handful of web services to act as an extension of my brain. Google is an obvious (and nearly universal) example of this– the module that our brains turn to whenever a question pops up from the ether (though I wonder when everyone else is going to notice that Google is rapidly turning into a front-end for the Wikipedia).

As Google is the 50 year old bordeaux for the prefrontal cortex, Facebook is the crack pipe for the orbitofrontal cortex. Our brains literally cannot get enough of what our friends are up to, and Facebook provides all of the raw materials via the news feed. Just as Google leverages user feedback to improve spam filtering, I could see a future where Facebook could predict which of your friends were about to get together or about to break up, and tell you how your actions might influence the outcome. Wouldn’t that just be insanely cool creepy?

So that’s 24 hours without Facebook. Let’s hope that I spend the next 24 thinking about it a little bit less.

Labels: cognition, social networks

[ 0 comments ]

I haven’t blogged in almost a month, and I can totally feel it. My brain is so overflowing with ideas that I forgot to pay the electric bill this month, in between work, school, trips to DC and SF, and trying to come up with the ultimate Scrabble player ranking system.

I’m sure many of you have come across the spinning ballerina right brain/left brain test. I’m also sure many of you went through a 30 minute period of obsessively trying to make the ballerina spin the “other” way. (After several such 30 minute periods, I managed to make the ballerina switch at will, which led me to exclaim “I am master of my own mind!”) If you see the ballerina spinning counter-clockwise, you’re left brian dominant (logical, analytical, etc.) whereas if you see the ballerina spinning clockwise, you’re right brain dominant (creative, do things by feel).

For me, the ballerina spins clockwise by default, and it takes some effort to get her to switch and go counter-clockwise. I am (to my surprise, and maybe yours as well) utterly dominated by my right brain.

Well, maybe it’s not that surprising. If you look back at my post on not going to work at Facebook, there is very little evidence of any sort of rational thought. (As Facebook continues to hire amazing people and heads for a 15 billion dollar valuation, the decision seems less rational than ever.) That said, when I look back on major decisions I’ve made in my life, the only ones I regret are ones where I went with the pragmatic decision over what ‘felt’ best. I’ve been trying to learn from that, and figure out some way to get my left brain to shut the fuck up and let the right brain run the show.

Then there’s the whole math thing. For this, I’m going to reference my very first blog post ever. Looking back on it now, it reads like a plea from a right-brained student to all of those left-brained math teachers to teach math in a way that lets people like me connect with it. If I had never read The Man Who Knew Infinity, I might have become a lawyer or something (shudder.)

Labels: math, cognition

[ 1 comments ]

I started playing with lumosity today and was instantly hooked– it’s a website that has a series of cognitive exercises testing visual attention, working memory, and processing speed.  Processing speed was my favorite– it’s a series of simple arithmetic problems that you have to solve as fast as possible.  I can usually just glance at the equation and know the answer, and it’s strange when I see one like ‘22 - 8′ that misses my math cache and I have to actually think for a second to come up with the answer.

I’ve been rekindling my fascination with how people process information lately– really, ever since the Heather Gold Show at SXSW.  I’m a pattern matcher, I can solve problems when I manage to see the underlying structure.  The implication of this is that I’ll either figure something out incredibly fast or painfully slow– painful for me, since I usually solve things quickly and I can’t quite ever figure out why I see some things so quickly and not other things.   It’s also what makes me such a bad math teacher– I can see the answer like I’m looking at a picture, and don’t understand why other people don’t.

(The other obvious question is what could I accomplish if I spent less time measuring my cognitive ability and more time using it to do something.)

Labels: cognition

[ 0 comments ]