Most people treat a wandering mind like a defect. They see it as a leak in their productivity bucket. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we aren’t staring at a screen or checking off a to-do list, we are failing. But Daniel Goleman, the […]
Opinion | Think Less, Think Better (Published 2016)
A wandering mind has less innovative thoughts.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action
Abstract. Movements of the Mind explains what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, the book’s eponymous topic, it investigates an agent’s doing
Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime
Research on naps, meditation, nature walks and the habits of exceptional artists and athletes reveals how mental breaks increase productivity, replenish attention, solidify memories and encourage creativity
Procrastination: It's pretty much all in the mind
Scans show differences in the brains of those who love to put things offs compared with the "doers".
The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it
Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter
Opinion | There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate
Just as we changed our thinking around physical fitness, we need to change our attitude toward cognitive fitness.
The Busy Person's Guide to Thinking
Thinking better isn't about learning more; it's about doing a few simple things that really help create unstoppable progress.
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
Dec 2020 -- Jelle Bruineberg -- Embodied cognition and the attention crisis
Laziness Does Not Exist
Psychological research is clear: when people procrastinate, there's usually a good reason
The Second Brain That Grows Smarter and Lives on your Computer
How a spark from Andrej Karpathy, app called Obsidian, and “The Curator”, the app I built are changing the way I think.
‘Ugh Fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
Have you ever had a long-overdue task — a task which isn’t so bad in itself — but which you can’t even bring yourself to think about?
Smoke-away on Twitter / X
Andrej Karpathy: "What you want is the inner thought monologue of your brain... The trajectories in your brain as you're doing problem solving, if we had a billion of that, AGI is here roughly speaking." pic.twitter.com/C0kBUITPBv— Smoke-away (@SmokeAwayyy) October 18, 2024
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.