Distracted Subjects PDF Download

Author: Carol Thomas Neely
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801489242
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
'Distracted Subjects' offers a feminist analysis of early modern madness. Carol Neely reveals the mobility & heterogeneity of discourses of 'distraction', the most common term for the condition in late 16th & early 17th century England.

Author: James M. Lang
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541699815
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Keeping students focused can be difficult in a world filled with distractions—which is why a renowned educator created a scientific solution to one of every teacher's biggest problems. Why is it so hard to get students to pay attention? Conventional wisdom blames iPhones, insisting that access to technology has ruined students' ability to focus. The logical response is to ban electronics in class. But acclaimed educator James M. Lang argues that this solution obscures a deeper problem: how we teach is often at odds with how students learn. Classrooms are designed to force students into long periods of intense focus, but emerging science reveals that the brain is wired for distraction. We learn best when able to actively seek and synthesize new information. In Distracted, Lang rethinks the practice of teaching, revealing how educators can structure their classrooms less as distraction-free zones and more as environments where they can actively cultivate their students' attention. Brimming with ideas and grounded in new research, Distracted offers an innovative plan for the most important lesson of all: how to learn.

Author: Jennifer J. Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108982484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
This Element attends to attention drawn away. That the Globe is a 'distracted' space is a sentiment common to both Hamlet's original audience and attendees at the reconstructed theatre on London's Bankside. But what role does distraction play in this modern performance space? What do attitudes to 'distraction' reveal about how this theatre space asks and invites us to pay attention? Drawing on scholarly research, artist experience, and audience behaviour, This Distracted Globe considers the disruptive, affective, phenomenological, and generative potential of distraction in contemporary performance at the Globe.

Author: Adam Gazzaley
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262034948
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Why our brains aren't built for media multitasking, and how we can learn to live with technology in a more balanced way. "Brilliant and practical, just what we need in these techno-human times."—Jack Kornfield, author of The Wise Heart Most of us will freely admit that we are obsessed with our devices. We pride ourselves on our ability to multitask—read work email, reply to a text, check Facebook, watch a video clip. Talk on the phone, send a text, drive a car. Enjoy family dinner with a glowing smartphone next to our plates. We can do it all, 24/7! Never mind the errors in the email, the near-miss on the road, and the unheard conversation at the table. In The Distracted Mind, Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen—a neuroscientist and a psychologist—explain why our brains aren't built for multitasking, and suggest better ways to live in a high-tech world without giving up our modern technology. The authors explain that our brains are limited in their ability to pay attention. We don't really multitask but rather switch rapidly between tasks. Distractions and interruptions, often technology-related—referred to by the authors as “interference”—collide with our goal-setting abilities. We want to finish this paper/spreadsheet/sentence, but our phone signals an incoming message and we drop everything. Even without an alert, we decide that we “must” check in on social media immediately. Gazzaley and Rosen offer practical strategies, backed by science, to fight distraction. We can change our brains with meditation, video games, and physical exercise; we can change our behavior by planning our accessibility and recognizing our anxiety about being out of touch even briefly. They don't suggest that we give up our devices, but that we use them in a more balanced way.

Author: Susanna Paasonen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262045672
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
A new approach to understanding the culture of ubiquitous connectivity, arguing that our dependence on networked infrastructure does not equal addiction. In this book, Susanna Paasonen takes on a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade: that we are addicted to devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, that drive us to boredom, with detrimental effect on our capacities to focus, relate, remember, and be. Paasonen argues instead that network connectivity is a matter of infrastructure and necessary for the operations of the everyday. Dependencies on it do not equal addiction but speak to the networks within which our agency can take shape.

Author: Toney Allman
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
ISBN: 1420512331
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
According to a Triple-A poll, 94 percent of teen drivers understand the dangers of texting while driving. The U.S. Department of Transportation states that in 2014, 3,179 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents involving distracted drivers. This important volume focuses on the issue of distracted driving. The book describes exactly what distracted driving is and how to prevent it. It provides several anecdotes describing various distracted driving behavior.

Author: Carol Thomas Neely
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In the first book to provide a feminist analysis of early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely reveals the mobility and heterogeneity of discourses of "distraction," the most common term for the condition in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Distracted Subjects shows how changing ideas of madness that circulated through medical, dramatic, and political texts transformed and gendered subjectivities. Supernatural causation is denied, new diagnoses appear, and stage representations proliferate. Drama sometimes leads and sometimes follows other cultural discourses—or forges its own prophetic figures of distraction. The Spanish Tragedy first links madness to masculine tragic self-representation, and Hamlet invents a language to dramatize feminine somatic illness. Innovative women's melancholy is theorized in medical and witchcraft treatises and then elaborated in the extended portrait of the Jailer's Daughter's distraction in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Lovesickness, newly diagnosed in women, demands novel cures, and allows expressions of transgressive sexual desire in treatises and in plays such as As You Like It. The rituals of possession and exorcism, intensely debated off stage, are mocked and exploited on stage in reiterated comic scenes of confinement that madden men to enhance women's power. Neely's final chapter provides a startling challenge to the critically alluring analogy between Bedlam and the early modern stage by documenting that Bethlem hospital offered care, not spectacle, whereas stage Bedlamites served metatheatrical and prophylactic, not mimetic, ends. An epilogue places this particular historical moment within the longer history of madness and shows how our own attitudes toward distraction are haunted by those earlier debates and representations.

Author: Maggie Jackson
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615920005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This is an important book...a harrowing documentation of our modern world's descent into fragmentation, self alienation, and emptiness-brought on, to a large extent, by communication technologies that distract us, dislocate us, and destroy our inner lives.--Alan Lightman, author of the bestselling Einstein's Dreams and National Book Award finalist The Diagnosis and MIT professorThis fascinating book on America's collective ADD is a wake-up call to all of us to take back our lives, turn off the technology, and focus on paying attention to what makes us human and fulfilled.--Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School Professor and author of America the Principled and ConfidenceWe have oceans of information at our disposal, yet we increasingly seek knowledge in online headlines glimpsed on the run. We are networked as never before, but we connect with friends and family via e-mail and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled and interrupted a dozen times. Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment.In this new world, something crucial is missing: attention-the key to recapturing our ability to connect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with a mobile, multitasking, virtual world. How did we get to the point where we keep one eye on our Blackberry and one eye on our spouse-in bed? We can contact millions of people worldwide, so why is it hard to schedule a simple family supper? Most importantly, what can we do about it? Distracted vividly shows how day by day, our hyper-mobile, cyber-centric, interrupted lives erode our capacity for deep focus and awareness. The implications for a healthy society are stark.Attention is the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Jackson makes it clear that if we squander our powers of attention, our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline. And yet we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our skills of focus and perception, the keys to judgment, memory, morality, and happiness. Jackson reveals the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of attention in a world of speed and overload. She offers us a wake-up call, and reasons for hope.Distracted is an original exposé of the multifaceted nature of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of postmodern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society. More than ever, we cannot afford to let distraction become the marker of our time.Maggie Jackson (New York, NY) is an award-winning author and journalist who writes the popular Balancing Acts column in the Boston Globe. Her work also has appeared in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, among other national publications. Her acclaimed first book, What's Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, examined the loss of home as a refuge.

Author: Yves Rossetti
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027299927
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Analysis and dissociation have proved to be useful tools to understand the basic functions of the brain and the mind, which therefore have been decomposed to a multitude of ever smaller subsystems and pieces by most scientific approaches. However, the understanding of complex functions such as consciousness will not succeed without a more global consideration of the ways the mind-brain works. This implies that synthesis rather than analysis should be applied to the brain. The present book offers a collection of contributions ranging from sensory and motor cognitive neuroscience to mood management and thought, which all focus on the dissociation between conscious (explicit) and nonconscious (implicit) processing in different cognitive situations. The contributions in this book clearly demonstrate that conscious and nonconscious processes typically interact in complex ways. The central message of this collection of papers is: In order to understand how the brain operates as one integrated whole that generates cognition and behaviour, we need to reassemble the brain and mind and put all the conscious and nonconscious pieces back together again. (Series B)

Author: Justin Thomas McDaniel
Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
ISBN: 9789813251502
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A collection of essays engaging with Buddhism in Thailand and the virtues of distraction and variety within the materialist turn in studies of religion. In Thailand, Buddhism is deeply integrated into national institutions and ideologies, making it tempting to think of Buddhism in Thailand as a textual, institutional, cultural, and conceptual whole. At the same time, religious expression in the country reflects anything but a single order. Often gaudy, cacophonous, variegated, and jumbled, diversity and apparent contradiction abound. A more open engagement with Buddhism in Thailand requires a willingness to be distracted, to step away from received hierarchies and follow the intriguing detail in the ornate design, the odd textual reference, and to prefer "thin description" over a search for meaning. Justin McDaniel's well-known book-length writings in Buddhist and Theravada studies cannot be fully understood without taking into account his shorter writings, what he calls his wayward distractions. Collected together for the first time, these essays cover subjects ranging from ornamental art to marriage and emotion, the role of Hinduism, neglected gender and ethnic diversity, Buddhist inflections in contemporary art practice, and the boundaries between the living, dead, and undead. These writings will be of importance to students of Theravada and Thailand, of religion in Southeast Asia and more generally, of the materialist turn in studies of religion.