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I stumbled upon the blog of a stock trader who used some crude techniques to monitor the activity in his brain's frontal lobe (which is responsible for executive function activities like planning and making decisions). He measures activity by looking at frontal lobe temperature, which is roughly correlated with blood flow, which is roughly correlated with neural activity.
He found that the activity dramatically dropped off as he engaged in web surfing. However, after he did a series of concentration-enhancing imagery exercises (he doesn't say what... Where's Waldo comes to mind... :-) and then went back to web surfing, his concentration level stayed high even as he surfed the web. He noted that his experiences of web surfing were different now that he was in a concentrated mindset -- his memory for what he read improved and he was more consciously self-directed.
So there are two very different mental modes of web surfing.
- The "web/channel" surfing mode, which provides the hypnotic and somewhat mind-numbing state that's reminiscent of TV.
- The "information seeking" surfing mode, which is much better for soaking up information whether we're focused on a specific topic or not, and has us much more mentally engaged.
It would be interesting to try browsing the web using his neurofeedback system and getting a clear sense for the distinction between these two states of web browsing. Switching back and forth between the two at will would be an interesting skill to learn -- it would give you the skill of being aware of the states and being able to snap into full concentration mode.
Ironically, the design of sites like YouTube has been oriented to make it as easy as possible to web/channel surf. Whenever you finish a video, several options for subsequent videos to watch dance in front of you. All you have to do is pick an image that looks appealing, and off you go. Just click. It's that easy. Don't like those options? Here are some more. It's a micro-sales pitch... a video and a couple of words. It takes less than half a second to decide on one, which is about what my channel-surfing rate was back when I watched TV. (I could decide if a given show was potentially worth watching in half a second).
He found that the activity dramatically dropped off as he engaged in web surfing. However, after he did a series of concentration-enhancing imagery exercises (he doesn't say what... Where's Waldo comes to mind... :-) and then went back to web surfing, his concentration level stayed high even as he surfed the web. He noted that his experiences of web surfing were different now that he was in a concentrated mindset -- his memory for what he read improved and he was more consciously self-directed.
So there are two very different mental modes of web surfing.
- The "web/channel" surfing mode, which provides the hypnotic and somewhat mind-numbing state that's reminiscent of TV.
- The "information seeking" surfing mode, which is much better for soaking up information whether we're focused on a specific topic or not, and has us much more mentally engaged.
It would be interesting to try browsing the web using his neurofeedback system and getting a clear sense for the distinction between these two states of web browsing. Switching back and forth between the two at will would be an interesting skill to learn -- it would give you the skill of being aware of the states and being able to snap into full concentration mode.
Ironically, the design of sites like YouTube has been oriented to make it as easy as possible to web/channel surf. Whenever you finish a video, several options for subsequent videos to watch dance in front of you. All you have to do is pick an image that looks appealing, and off you go. Just click. It's that easy. Don't like those options? Here are some more. It's a micro-sales pitch... a video and a couple of words. It takes less than half a second to decide on one, which is about what my channel-surfing rate was back when I watched TV. (I could decide if a given show was potentially worth watching in half a second).
