Why Focus Makes Us Smarter. By Jason Selk Focus makes us smarter.
In a recent study using mice, when their attention improved, so did their cognitive performance. The same is true for humans. In any endeavor, whether it's to beat a world record in sports or become your company's CEO, when people learn to increase their focus, they get smarter, more productive, and perform better. Here are eight ways to sharpen your focus and become smarter.Stop putting out fires.Stop allowing yourself to be distracted by dramas and emergencies. Be willing to disappoint.When focusing on getting your top three process goals done every day, you may disappoint colleagues, clients, and customers from time to time by not dropping everything to help them.
Resist temptation.There's only so much self-control in your personal budget, so spend it on what's most important. Moderate "performance arousal. " Maintain a healthy body.Sharp focus is dependent on good health. Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design. 1.
Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion. 2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong . The Unabomber Was Right. Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda.
The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I too argue that the technium is guided by “technical necessity.” The truth of Kaczynski’s observations does not absolve him of his murders, or justify his insane hatred. As best I understand, the Unabomber’s argument goes like this: In short, Kaczynski claims that civilization is the disease and not the cure. It is easy to sympathize with Kaczynski’s plight.
The Unabomber cabin in lower left. Critical Thinking On The Web. Top Ten Argument Mapping Tutorials.
Six online tutorials in argument mapping, a core requirement for advanced critical thinking.The Skeptic's Dictionary - over 400 definitions and essays. The Fallacy Files by Gary Curtis. Best website on fallacies. Butterflies and Wheels. What is critical thinking? Nobody said it better than Francis Bacon, back in 1605: For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. A shorter version is the art of being right.
More definitions... Program for Critical Thinking 6 Dec 21 May.