Conquering Cyber Overload

Ruminations on Productivity, Creativity, and Quality of Life in Our Digital World

by Joanne Cantor

Don’t Speak 'Til You See the Whites of Their Eyes

"What can I help you with?" asked the Apple Store clerk as he kept his eyes focused on what he was entering into his iPhone. "I'll wait ‘til you're finished," said I. "No, go ahead," said he. "I can multitask." "No, you can't!" said I, which finally got him to look at me and listen. Read More

Where Did I See That? When Paper Beats Pixels

OK, I agree. I could never give up my Kindle. E-books are taking up a greater and greater percentage of titles sold, and for good reasons. But there are at least three ways in which print on paper is superior to words on a screen. Read More

Mining Your Brain to Jump-Start Your Creativity

It's easy to spend lots of time working, but hard to come up with something new. Creativity may be necessary in a wide variety of realms—but where does that aha! moment come from? In a recent episode of "The Writer's Almanac," Garrison Keillor quoted an interview with J.K. Rowling on how she got the idea to write a novel about Harry Potter. Read More

Doing Your Best Work When You're Not "Working"

Here's the good news about our digital devices: We have convenient access to virtually limitless information. No matter how much we know, we can always get more information on any topic with another press of a button. But the good news is also the bad news: More is not always better. Read More

Beyond the Digital Burqa

There are many of good reasons to communicate digitally. It's convenient, of course, and we often have no choice because we're miles away from the people we want to talk to. But more and more, we seem to rely on emailing, texting, tweeting, and Facebooking when a face-to-face interaction is available. What are we hiding when we text instead of being there? Read More

Flooding Your Brain’s Engine: How You Can Have Too Much of a Good Thing

Does this ever happen to you? You're working on a memo, a paper, an article, or a project, and you can't find any information related to the topic?

Or is it more likely that the amount of information that readily comes to you via the Internet is just too much to handle? Read More

Competing with The Daily Show: Keeping Students' Attention

"You're crazy to even try!" came the blistering comment from a colleague. I had just reported that I planned to give presentations to students about turning off their laptops and smartphones during class and pay attention to lectures. . . A few months before that, I'd thought the same thing.

"The plane is circling the airport to burn off fuel before it makes an emergency landing. Stick with us right here. We'll bring you all the details." I kept hearing on-air reports like this through my earpiece as I waited to appear on a national cable news channel last month. Although there were many important events that day, the host returned four times to the airplane story ("still circling, stay tuned"), with no new information until handing it over to the host of the next program. It was finally reported that the plane had landed safely without incident. This makes me think more about how our digital culture has affected our need for the news. Because we CAN know about something as soon as it happens we feel we MUST know it NOW. Read More

This is Your Mind on Media: You’re Not Crazy—You’re Human!

“Anyone who's scared by a film must be raving mad,” says Peejay, one of 130 people who have commented on a recent story in the London Daily Mail. The article describes our research on the long-term effects of frightening movies.[1] Having performed an informal content analysis of the relevant comments, I can report that about 10% of the entries are like Peejay’s. Another 11% of the commenters claim that reality is much scarier than fiction. And 3% complain that such research is a waste of time and money. The remaining 76% of the commenters meet Peejay’s criteria for raving madness, I guess.

"The Internet is making us stupid!" —"No, smarter!"

There has been quite the back-and-forth in The New York Times between people like Nicholas Carr, who argues that the Internet is making us dumber; and Steven Pinker, who contends that it's making us smarter. The NYT has weighed in with its own editorial, arguing that the Internet is "a global library of fact and data . . . [that can] enrich our lives."

I agree with all of them.

In my last post, I argued that multitasking was like "Mining Your Inner Moron," arguing that it's inefficient, ineffective, and stressful. But why do we try to do it anyway? Here are some possibilities:

1) Employers think they need people who can multitask. Read More

Mining Your Inner Moron: Why Multitasking Is Such a Waste

"Right this way, folks!" shouts the carnival barker. "REDUCE YOUR BRAIN POWER WHILE INCREASING YOUR STRESS LEVELS!" Are you tempted to follow him? Of course not. And yet, if you spend a lot of time multitasking, you're achieving the same result. Read More

Strategic Sleeping: Snooze and Release Your Muse

Why is my brain more creative when I'm asleep? And how can I prime it to be even more creative? Neuroscience research says that while I'm sleeping, my brain is not. It's actively trying to make sense of what I've been working on. It also suggests that new insights occur when the brain relaxes its focus and allows distant connections to be made between previously unrelated ideas. But what does this mean in practical terms? Read More

Sleep for Success: Creativity and the Neuroscience of Slumber

I've gotten into the habit lately of waking up with friends and collaborators. It's not what you think. These helpers are the good ideas that come to me in the middle of the night or—if I'm lucky—first thing in the morning. I've long believed there was value in the expression, "let's sleep on it." But now that I've reviewed some of the very recent research on what goes on in the brain during sleep, I'm ready to take much better advantage of my sleep-induced ideas. Read More

Joanne Cantor, Ph.D, Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Conquer CyberOverload: Get More Done, Boost Your Creativity, and Reduce Stress.

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