Two Interesting Articles on Some Recent Brain Research

This week I am calling to your attention two interesting articles – “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” and “Psychologists Discover We’ve Been Underestimating the Unconscious Mind”.  I hope that you find the articles interesting as I did.

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

http://ezp.waldenulibrary.org/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/pqdweb?did=2193659091&sid=2&Fmt=3&clientId=70192&RQT=309&VName=PQD

The focus of this article is on the topic of digital distractions faced by today’s students.  While the whole article was interesting one section, “The Lure of Distraction”, stood out as it spoke of results from some recent (2007) experiments.  In one experiment, boys (ages 12-14) alternated playing video games for an hour after finishing their homework and watching something action packed on television for an hour, every other night.  The researchers monitored their brain waves as they slept and “found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a ‘significant decline’ in the boys ability to remember vocabulary words” (Rictel, 2010).  The article went on to discuss the importance of “down time” for the brain to process new information.  This article could be a good starting point for additional research in the area of technological distractions and what effect, if any, they have on the brains ability to process information.

Reference:

Matt Richtel.  (2010, November 21). Growing Up Digital, Wired for

Distraction :[Business/Financial Desk]. New York Times  (Late Edition (east Coast)),  p. A.1. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from ProQuest Central. (Document ID: 2193659091).

Psychologists Discover We’ve Been Underestimating the Unconscious Mind

http://www.healthcanal.com/mental-health-behavior/17014-Psychologists-Discover-Weve-Been-Underestimating-the-Unconscious-Mind.html

This article served as a preview for a research article that will be published in the June 2011 issue of Psychological Science (a journal for the Association for Psychological Science).  The reason for the research seems to be to create a comparison between conscious and unconscious awareness in the brain.  The findings were quite interesting and showed that we can do some high level unconscious processing while multi-tasking with intentional or conscious tasks at the same time.  I look forward to reading the full paper when it comes out in June.

Both of these articles have value in that they show insight into new research about how the brain functions and how we learn.  Continued research in the areas mentioned by these articles will be interesting for anyone involved in the fields of psychology and education related topics.

-jeff