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Easily Distracted People May Have 'Too Much Brain'
fysdt writes with this excerpt from New Scientist: "Those who are easily distracted from the task in hand may have 'too much brain.' So says Ryota Kanai and his colleagues at University College London, who found larger than average volumes of grey matter in certain brain regions in those whose attention is readily diverted. To investigate distractibility, the team compared the brains of easy and difficult-to-distract individuals. [Abstract] They assessed each person's distractibility by quizzing them about how often they fail to notice road signs, or go into a supermarket and become sidetracked to the point that they forget what they came in to buy. The most distractible individuals received the highest score."
The summary unfairly rewards low-grade abuse-resistant machines/brains.
It should've been "Focused, Productive People May Have 'Not Enough Brain'.
BTW:
FIRST POST!
What do you mean 'women works'? It's easy, all you do is take one apart, so that it stops working (if it ever had previously) and then you put it back together piece by piece, until it restarts. Narrow down to the precise moment that makes her work again, and you are half way there, from then on it's trivial.
You can't handle the truth.
Hah, indeed. I used to not notice my teacher calling my name in early primary school because I was so focused on my schoolwork. She encouragingly gave me the nickname "cloth ears". I can still be oblivious to things happening around me when I'm focused, though I am more likely to notice if someone says my name at least. I'd rather be able to focus like that than have everything distract me. Especially if I'm reading a book at home or something like that.
I was working in a busy office for the last couple of years with people often trying to get my attention, and my ability to focus on work dropped drastically even when they were being quiet. Now that I'm in a quieter office, things are improving again, because I'm no longer anticipating distractions.
With stuff like observing road signs, you can train yourself to be more attentive to them too. There's not that much point reading them every time on roads you know well, though being aware of possible new signs is useful.
which is totally what she said
The summary unfairly rewards low-grade abuse-resistant machines/brains.
It should've been "Focused, Productive People May Have 'Not Enough Brain'.
The article reconciles what you see as a discrepancy with the line:
...the brain's grey matter is pruned of neurons in order to work more efficiently.
He suggests that a greater volume of grey matter may indicate a less mature brain, perhaps reflecting a mild developmental malfunction.
Smoke a few bowls, and you too can forget what you went into the supermarket to get.
Squirrel!
It should've been "Focused, Productive
Oooh, Shiny!
This is something that has been known for a very long time. The NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) was pretty much founded on the premise that intelligent kids become disruptive in schools because they're bored witless (ie: become easily distracted) with the humdrum that is necessary for everyone else.
What this article (and summary) should be focussing on is not the fact that intelligent people can be distracted but on why society is under-utilizing their capabilities to such an extent that boredom is possible. Once a problem has been identified and a solution worked on for a specific sector (in this case kids) for 4 decades or more, it is surely not acceptable for the problem to be allowed to fester in all other parts of society. It is surely even less acceptable for researchers to not be aware that solutions already exist but aren't being used.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The practical application, IMHO, is for society to utilize intelligent people more for tasks that demand high intelligence. Distractability == boredom. In the Age of Enlightenment, this involved funding the highly intelligent to go make use of that intelligence. In the modern era, serious research is often confined to those who stay in academia - and, even then, with universities increasingly funded by corporations to perform all the menial work, the condition of research is pathetic.
What we need are dedicated facilities for the highly intelligent to push them to the limits of their mental capacity, funded not to produce specific results but to see what happens. "Blue sky" from an outside perspective, but not necessarily to the researchers themselves who would be free to do what they wanted. I absolutely guarantee the rewards of such a venture for society would vastly outstrip the costs, and the rewards for the intelligent to be in a meaningful environment rather than a mundane one would be beyond price.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Marijuana must truly be a "mind expanding" drug then, because the more stoned I am the more easily distracted and forgetful I am. :-|
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Actually, ADHD is normal. It would be required to survive in a jungle environment, where virtually anything could be a threat to you, so you need to keep flitting your attention from one thing to another to survive. The ability to stay focused on one thing to the exclusion of all others for a significant period of time is a relatively recent development in humans which is only useful in an academic environment where what you learn and when you learn it is dictated by others. In an ideal society, it shouldn't be necessary for everyone to have exactly the same executive function capabilities.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
That's not bias. It's called context and the Scientific Method: the theory that the article is basing its conclusions off is as the article states. Our understanding of the human brain is rather pitiful, so claiming a theory here as "unfair" is unfair to the theory itself.
Don't assume bias simply because a theoretical conclusion that is made doesn't agree with your own hypotheses. Science is full of opinions that evolve and shift, and this may be no exception. However, taking insult based upon a theory is exactly what ruins Science as a field; ignoring models because they violate "political correctness" is just bad Science. Maybe PC needs to step it up and join ranks for a paradigm shift.
The article doesn't say that more intelligent people are more easily distracted. It says that a specific region of the brain has more grey matter in children than in adults. When some adults fail to prune the extra grey matter, they tend be more more easily distracted than those who develop normally.
To paraphrase: if your brain doesn't rot in the usual way, you won't become a perfect cog.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Society under-utilizes gifted people because otherwise gifted people would become some kind of "elite" ;-)
Elite has everything to do with privilege and nothing whatsoever to do with being gifted (in the sense of higher intelligence, anyway).
I went to high school in a neighbourhood that had one of my city's most elite neighbourhoods on one side and a working class ghetto (home to a number of mafia families and one motorcycle gang) on the other. The 'elite' students were better fed, better dressed, better spoken and better behaved, for the most part, but if they were smarter, they hid it well.
Education and opportunity may give you a head start in life, but don't for a second try to pretend that these advantages somehow make you smarter or better than anyone else. Harvard may demand you work at a higher level, but its cachet is that you can make friends with rich people, and with luck some of that rich will rub off on you.
The highly intelligent are usually the opposite of elite: They are so caught up with ideas, and so desperate for the company of people who actually understand them, that they are willing to overlook most of the social markers (accent, clothing, income, residence) that most people use to grade each other.
Whenever I hear the term 'intellectual elite', I wonder if such a thing is even possible, because anyone stupid enough to hang that term on a group has to be lying.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.