The downside of flow: Machine gambling
I’m a big fan of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: his book Flow is one of the most important thing I’ve read in the last ten years, and one of
The rent-seeking model of attention capture; or, what could possibly go wrong with Skype Conversations Ads?
When I saw this article my jaw Hit. The. Floor. Skype calls to feature ads big enough to interrupt any conversation Skype to serve up personalized ads, hoping
“The trick isn’t to unplug from our devices- it’s to unplug from the distractions, information overload, and trash that make us unhappy”
Alexandra Samuel has a very nice piece in The Atlantic that uses the digital Sabbath urge-- her treatment's not as systematic as other recent pieces about the movement,
Fracture and embodiment
Instinct says there's a link I can make between the embodied cognition literature (exemplified for me by the work of Andy Clark) and firsthand accounts of distraction, partial
Wandering minds, distraction, and happiness: The Track Your Happiness study
Klint Finley points me to an answer to my question about the relationship between distraction and happiness: the Track Your Happiness study, conducted by Harvard scientists Daniel Gilbert and
Seneca, prophet of flow
There are a couple brief mentions of Stoic philosophy in Flow, but this weekend, when I read Seneca's Letters from a Stoic, I was really struck by how
Happiness and distraction?
I'min the process of knitting together my reading on flow, mindfulness, contemplation, etc., with an eye to 1) constructing a kind of grand unified theory to support contemplative