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Turns out there might be a biological imperative to explain our addiction to information that leads us to obsessively check our Facebook profiles for updates and inexplicably lose hours at a time searching for obscure bits of information on Google. Scientists refer to this desire as seeking or wanting, a practice that affects the dopamine centers of our brains and causes us to chase the potential reward just around the corner rather than settle for the tangible one right in front of us. This quest for what might be, creates a seemingly infinite feedback loop where [...]

The New York Times’ Idea of the Day Blog recently led us to an interesting article in the Atlantic discussing the complex predictions of “intelligence augmentation” and how our species will adapt to exponential information with faster cognitive abilities.  Author Jamais Cascio examines the history of human intelligence and argues that as our information filtering abilities increase it will be inevitable to experiment and then utilize technologies to make you smarter.
While an article in the Atlantic from last summer argues that Google is making us stupid, Cascio argues this summer that Google is making us smarter by providing an efficient [...]

It’s become a truism that our interactions with technology are changing the way we think and act. But the big question is how exactly we’re being changed. Some say it’s evolving us into higher functioning humans, while others claim our hyper-multitasking and reliance on technology as an outboard brain is dumbing us way down.
Another missive from the negative camp has come around -Maggie Jackson, Author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, says that our ability to deeply focus and pay attention is being swept away by our “cybercentric” society.
She claims that attention is hard-wired into [...]

Recent studies conducted by researchers at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon might go a long way in explaining our spending habits or in the case of the current economic downturn, our penny-pinching ways. Apparently, during every purchase we make there is an emotional tug of war taking place in two distinct parts of our brain that determines if we’re going to spend money or not. The study involved imaging shoppers’ brains while they contemplated these decisions. Jonah Lehrer, editor at large for Seed Magazine and author of “How We Decide,” explains:
They discovered that when subjects were first exposed to the [...]