Making Curriculum Pop

Nice article on Neuroscience and New Media @ Newsweek by science writer Sharon Begley. Some highlights:

The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version.

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This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”

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The brain is wired to notice change over stasis. An arriving email that pops to the top of your BlackBerry qualifies as a change; so does a new Facebook post. We are conditioned to give greater weight in our decision-making machinery to what is latest, not what is more important or more interesting. “There is a powerful ‘recency’ effect in decision making,” says behavioral economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. “We pay a lot of attention to the most recent information, discounting what came earlier.” Getting 30 texts per hour up to the moment when you make a decision means that most of them make all the impression of a feather on a brick wall, whereas Nos. 29 and 30 assume outsize importance, regardless of their validity. “We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler, a management expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”


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Read the full feature HERE.

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Replies to This Discussion

Oops sorry put my post to this article in the main, apologies.

Heather - I was on vacation - hence the slow response -no worries on the location - in the end you NAILED it :) Glad you enjoyed the article!  

 

Here it the correct place now:

Great article, Maria Montessori said the same thing about classrooms years ago. We weren't listening! I generally take the approach technology should parallel good classroom teaching and management. I think that having your smartboard on all the time, with images fluttering and moving may drive some kids nuts. Droning on in a monologue will drive others doo-lally! So we do need to think about preserving our thinking, a little quiet never hurt anyone.

Thanks a lot for sharing this article.  It shows that curating and filtering information is now more important than simply acquiring information.  Hopefully, technology tools will be able to help us better with this.
Randall - my pleasure - glad you liked it!

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