Most sections of Cognitive Productivity have an opening quotation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed choosing them. I’ve also appreciated the positive feedback I’ve received from readers about them.
Continue reading Opening Quotations: Hermann Hesse Displaces Rudyard Kipling and M. C. Esher
English has the largest lexicon of all languages. It is loaded with terms about affect (emotion, moods, motivation). Western culture has produced a panoply of emotion-conveying art that displays the tremendous power of “folk psychology”. Still, it does not equip us to understand and handle emotion as well as we could and perhaps should.
Continue reading Broad Cognitive Science Deals with Emotion, Motivation and Moods
As always, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the latest episode of Rationally Speaking Podcast. This one was On the Computational Theory of Mind, with guest Gerard O’Brien, philosopher of mind from the University of Adelaide. (Hosts: Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef.) Here are a few comments about this episode.
Continue reading AI, Cognitive Science and Understanding: Comments on RS-95 (Gerard O’Brien and The Computational Theory of Mind)
The Kindle® app is fine for superficial reading. And Amazon® has gradually been improving it… But when you want to delve into a book to solve problems, build knowledge or develop yourself, the Kindle app is very disappointing.
The following critique of the Kindle ebook App (on iOS® and Mac®) indicates how an ebook reader app could help us delve knowledge. Understanding this can help you overcome Kindle’s limitations. It can help you build your reading skills—even if you are already an “expert”. Many of my proposals are derived from cognitive science.
Continue reading What’s Wrong with the Kindle App: A Knowledge Delver’s Perspective
The bulk of Cognitive Productivity is now available for sale on the Leanpub website. I.e., chapters 1 to 14 (345 pages plus references).
I will add a conclusion (Chapter 15), do some more copy editing and other minor planned revisions. I will also continue to update the book based on reader feedback including peer review. (It is a Leanpub book, after all.)
You can think of the Cognitive Productivity book as three books in one: Part I. Problem and opportunities. Part II. The cognitive science of the matter. Part III. Applications.
The conclusion will, amongst other things, point to some unsolved problems, such as:
None of the published software, science or techniques regarding these problems, to my knowledge, is satisfactory. As it happens, I have been working hard on these problems. I’m eager to publish my new discoveries and solutions—next year. As usual, they involve new cognitive science and new technology. 2014 will be a big year at CogZest…
Here’s an update on Chapter 7 of Cognitive Productivity. I’ve published most of this chapter already. I’ve written a first draft of all but the final section of that chapter.
Continue reading Update on Chapter 7 of the Book, Cognitive Productivity
One of the biggest challenges we face in learning from text is that we process it in a dry, cognitive way. In other words, information processing (from knowledge resources) is highly cerebral. It involves language, reasoning, and relatively simple perception. Yet somehow we need to “compile” such very abstract information into low-level perception and motivation, so that we can use it to act. More generally, we need to program and connect very disparate areas of our mind.
Continue reading From Reading to Changing How We Perceive, Think, Feel and Act
Most of the information we process is digital. While the tools we use for learning are in some respects better than paper, in others they are worse. In this article, I claim that:
I had the tremendous honor and pleasure of interviewing singer/songwriter David Francey. Here you will find a podcast recording of the interview, which took place on 28 July during the 2013 Mission Folk Music Festival.
Continue reading David Francey: Productive Singer and Songwriter (Cognitive Productivity Podcast #1)
Higher education students are mentally taxed like never before. They have an enormous amount of information to process in an intense, short period of time.
Students face many conundrums. They have no choice but to use information technology to process information. Technology, however, also presents challenges. For example, students are bombarded with emails, social media updates, text messages, phone calls and other communications. Yet studying and writing requires undivided attention. Students must process scholarly information with all kinds of applications, such as web browsers, PDF readers, ebook readers and multimedia players. These applications, however, are designed mainly for the masses who are content to “surf”. Higher education students, in contrast, need to delve deeply into complex knowledge.
Continue reading Going Back to School with a Productive Mindset