On the western edge of the ancient city of Kyoto, Japan, on the slopes of Mount Arashiyama (
Literally "stormy mountain ")
Monkey Park Rock Mountain.
The park has winding paths and beautiful views of Kyoto, but the main attraction is the tribe of about macaques who live there.
The currency of the Rock Mountain is a well-known group, fun, and occasionally cunning.
Like all Macaca members, they combine social abilities and intelligence.
They play with their relatives, look at each other's youth, learn new skills from each other, and even have unique Group habits.
Some people like to take a shower and snowball
Make, wash, fish, or season with sea water.
Rocky Mountain macaques are known for their dental floss and Stone playing.
This makes some scientists think that macaques are a kind of culture, which we traditionally think is a unique human being.
In their natural curiosity and cunning, they are also like people: one second, you look at a person doing something lovely, one second, the bag of food you bought at the gate of the park, his friends are stealing.
From another point of view, they are like human beings.
For all their wisdom, nothing can keep their attention for a long time.
The mountainside gave them a fanatic view of one of the world's most historic cities, but it didn't impress them.
They kept talking and talking about things that didn't matter.
Macaques are living examples of Buddhist concepts about the monkey mind, one of my favorite metaphors of everyday, undisciplined, nervous minds.
As the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa explains, the monkey's mind is crazy: it "jumps and never stays in one place.
It's completely restless.
"The monkey's brain is constantly moving, reflecting a deep unease: the monkey can't sit still because their brain has never stopped.
Similarly, in most cases, the human mind is constantly transmitting consciousness.
Even in a quiet moment, the mind is easy to wander.
Add the constant hum of the electronics, the flash of a new message lands in your room
Box, voice mail ping, after drinking espresso three times, your mind is as manic as a monkey.
Today's infinite and always attracts the hearts of monkeys
Change the buffet of information selection and equipment.
It thrive in overwork, is attracted to shiny and blind things, and does not distinguish between good and bad technologies or choices.
In Buddhist doctrine, the concept of monkey thought appeared --
For thousands of years, the mind and its re-relationship with the world have been studied in depth.
Every religion has the practice of meditation, calling for the quiet of the mind with silence and loneliness.
In an introductory note by John Drury to the Anglican priest and Evensong, he warned believers to "be patient and relaxed enough to give a voice to a long tradition ", "Let our own thoughts and feelings come closer to us than the life that is recognized by the outside world.
Only in this way can people fully enter the "cool and old service order, providing space, framework and clues for our regrets, hopes and gratification.
Catholic monks believe that meditation is the preparation for the mind to accept the wisdom of God;
The busy mind cannot hear the divine voice.
In Buddhism, however, spiritual discipline itself is more of an end than a means to achieve it.
The mind of the day is like the water of the rumbling;
Like a mirror, learn to keep it still
The calm Lake is flat, the Buddhist says, and its reflection will show you everything.
A few miles from Iwata, a robot lab at Kyoto University has a robot controlled by another monkey.
It is incredible that Idoya is not in Japan;
She lives in a neuroscience lab at Duke University and her brain is connected to robots through the Internet.
The lab is headed by neuroscientist Miguel Nicolis, who was born and educated in Brazil to make things more global.
Nicolis has been studying the brain and how it changes when learning to perform functions;
He also developed a specialty in what scientists call the brain --
Computer Interface (BCi)technologies.
You can buy the original brain today.
Wave readers that can control video games, scientists are drawing brain function maps and testing the brain's ability to control complex objects through BCis.
They hope that BCis will eventually be used to transmit brain signals around the damaged nerve to restore physical control in patients with the spine
Cord injury or neurological degeneration
Idoya is the latest in a series of monkeys that Nicolis has worked.
Over the past decade, he and his team have demonstrated that monkey implanted with brain electrodes can operate a joystick or robotic arm with the brain.
Brain scans show some surprising phenomena: neurons in the frontal lobe of the Monkey
Control the part of the animal arm-
When the monkey operated the robot arm, he shot.
In other words, the monkey's brain no longer treats the robot arm as a tool, as something it uses, but it is clearly separate from itself.
The brain repaints the picture of the monkey's body and incorporates the robot's arm into it.
At the Nerve level, the difference between the monkey arm and the robot arm is blurred.
As far as the monkey's brain is concerned, the monkey's arms and the robot's arms are part of the same body.
Nicolelis and his colleagues in Japan have implanted electrodes in the Idoya brain that regulate walking;
They then taught her to walk on a treadmill and looked at how brain neurons fired when she was walking.
She was rewarded with food when she obeyed orders to speed up or slow down.
Then they put a video monitor in front of the treadmill.
However, it is not the view or CNBC that is displayed on the screen, but the live video feed of Idaya CB-1, the human-
Robot size in Kyoto(CB-
1 is a child prodigy in itself.
Equipped with four cameras, a gyro stabilizer and a hand that can hold objects.
It can hold the bat, swing on baseball, and learn manual tasks by imitating humans. )
When Idoya watched the Kyoto robot on the monitor start walking, the electrodes in her brain received signals from neurons that control movement.
These signals are transmitted over the Internet to CB-
After the same signal, she left with her.
The better she controls the robot, the more she gets.
After an hour of walking and chewing cheese, the scientists turned off her treadmill.
The monkey still concentrated on the screen and stopped walking
But she kept the CB.
In the next few minutes, she went on.
Nicolis's team once again demonstrated that the brain of a primate animal can learn to control the robot directly.
In this process, the brain will begin to see the robot as an extension of its own body.
Brain scans show that, whether she is using her own meat, Idoya's brain behaves exactly the same --and-
Fur legs or electronicsand-plastic ones.
As far as her brain is concerned, there is no difference between the two.
The monkeys of Idoya and Iwata represent two different sides of human thinking, two distinct relationships with information technology, and two futures.
The monkey is a non-trained, disciplined response thinking, a thinking that likes to stimulate but does not think.
The electronic monkey represents a mind that will not be overwhelmed by technology, because it no longer experiences the technology it uses as much as it requires conscious effort and attention.
The mixture of deliberate practice, patching and experiment, and neural rewiring, creates an extended thinking in which the brain, body, and tools entangle and work effortlessly.
For a long time, we kept the chattering monkeys in charge of our technology, and then we wondered why things were going to get bad.
We want to be like a robot monkey.
Although there is no electrode and there is not so much hair).
We hope that the same capabilities will be able to use these technologies without considering them as burdens and troubles.
We want our technology to expand our thinking and enhance our ability rather than break our thinking.
This control is within our power.
Rather than being forced into a state of permanent distraction, with all the unhappiness and discontent that this state brings, we can deal with it in a focused, almost effortless way, this helps our ability to focus, innovate and be happy.
I call this a meditation calculation.
The term sounds a bit contradictory.
What is more thought-provoking than today's technology?
An intensive environment may be less conducive to a state of clarity, meditation than interaction with computers, mobile phones, Facebook, and twitter meditation calculations, which is not contributed by technological breakthroughs or scientific discoveries.
You don't buy it. You do it.
It is based on the fusion of new science and philosophy, some very old techniques that manage your attention and mind, and a lot of experience in how people use it (or are used by)
Information Technology.
It shows you how your mind and body interact with the computer and how your attention and creativity are affected by technology.
It gives you the tools to redesign your relationships with devices and the Internet, making them more suitable for you.
This is a commitment that you can build a healthier and more balanced relationship with information technology.
To understand how this happens, let's see what digital life looks like for many of us --
Then what will it look like.
Imagine Monday morning.
You reach out to the bedside table, pick up your smartphone and turn off the alarm clock.
You rub your eyes with one hand and open your phone's email
Mail program with others.
You're not really awake.
You did it automatically.
When the phone is connected to your electronic device, you will see the icon rotatemail server.
There are 19 messages in your room. box.
Most are automatically generated newsletters, coupons, daily deals or social networking sitesmedia updates;
Six colleagues who are earlier than you.
You answer one, start the other, and realize that you don't know what to say, so you turn to the web browser to check the news.
You will finish the message later.
European bankers are arguing over the terms of the latest bailout. . .
Another Nasdaq flash crash happened. . .
Review of a blog post about the suicide of an actor-TV show . . .
You suddenly realized it was twenty minutes. Gotta get up.
On the train to work, you look out of the window and see a driver holding his mobile phone and steering wheel, just like he used his mobile phone to navigate, another person turned with one hand, text with another hand.
This makes it very cautious to drive when talking with a mobile phone.
You think the police should issue more tickets to distracted drivers, but as more cruisers are equipped with laptops, more police are also starting to get distracted.
As it turns out, work is one of them: these colleagues need numbers, and these colleagues need your feedback;
Can you help with this? Explain the options and talk to this person. It's one thing when there's a lot of input pointing to a target, but this multitasking is completely another thing.
You are used to being interrupted constantly, but today, even your interruption will be interrupted.
It's hard to say no, and it's hard to get back to the task.
After each break, it will take you a few minutes to remember what you are doing, gather your thoughts and start over.
You are finally ready to print your work by late afternoon.
An error message appears when you click print: You need to update the printer driver.
When you click OK, a minute goes by and then there is a message: the latest driver is not compatible with the old version of the operating system.
You or your it department also need an update.
After half an hour, you restart your computer and finally print out your work.
This experience is frustrating but not at all rare.
According to the Harris Interactive Poll 2010 (
Sponsored by technology giant Intel)
Computer users spend an average of £ 40.
Three minutes a day-
An hour a Friday, eleven days a year.
Wait for the computer to start, close, load the software, open the file, connect to the Internet.
On the way to see friends after work drinking, you pass by people who focus on their mobile phones and it's hard for them to get their attention off the screen.
You feel like your phone is buzzing in your pants pocket, but there is no phone there when you reach out to answer the phone.
You checked your other pockets and were worried that you had lost it.
The last time it happened, you felt that part of your brain had been shut down.
But it's a false alarm: it's in your jacket.
While drinking, you and your friends will receive text messages occasionally.
When you look at the phone every time, the communication will flow and deviate, and when you start typing, almost complete an idea.
The message from an old predecessor was particularly strange: it was all garbled, and it was midnight in that time zone.
"I have heard of this situation," said your friend . " She did not raise her head from her mobile phone.
"She might be sleeping --texting.
"Like sleepwalking"type-type-type—“except you” —type-type-type —
"Text people, you know.
"It makes sense that some of us will start texting while sleeping.
After all, information technology and the Internet have penetrated into our daily lives.
According to the International Telecom Union, in 2010, there were 0. 64 billion households and one home.
4 billion people, at least one computer at home;
0. 525 billion of the households and 0. 9 billion people went online.
There are about 90 million Americans in the United States.
80% of the United StatesS. total)
There are personal computers and Internet access, of which nearly half have two or more computers in their homes;
70 million has games such as Wii, PlayStation or Xbox;
45 million households share 96 million smartphones;
7 million of people have tablets.
60% of households have three InternetEnabled device;
Five in a quarter.
You send and receive an average of 110 messages during the day.
You check your phone.
Visit Facebook four times, five times, and spend at least half an hour enjoying things and sending messages to friends.
Like most people, your smartphone is smarter than your phone: every time you spend an hour talking to a person, you spend five hours surfing the internet, checking emails
Email, SMS, Twitter and social networks.
Nielsen and the Pew Research Center found that Americans surf the Internet for an average of 60 hours a month and 720 hours a year.
This is equivalent to 90 8-
One hour a year.
20 days for social networking, 38 days for browsing news sites, YouTube, blogs and more, and 32 days for e-commercemail.
If keeping your online life feels like a job, maybe that's because it is.
The increase in the number of digital devices we have and the increase in the time we spend on these devices does not mark a shift in the number.
This is also qualitative.
Whether we like it or not, digital technology and services are intertwined with our daily lives.
As one engineer at silicon Valley said, "computers used to be part of my daily life.
Now they are part of my day.
She is a senior user of Google and facebook, and she even feels the change;
Like many of us, she realizes that information technology plays a bigger role in the casual and necessary things we do to maintain our family, family and social life.
People who spend the whole day with computers used to be called hackers.
Today is all of us.
Digital Life can be great, but it also has a price.
Keeping up with everything everyone shares will become unstoppable
It is not only the quantity of the material, but also the obligation to remain above the material.
These are your friends. or “friends”)
If you don't keep looking at what they share, you may miss something.
Small buzz from new text messages or emails
The Mail is fine, but also disappointed when you click refresh, nothing.
Sometimes the problem is bigger.
When everyone wants your attention and the world, it's important to stay focused --
And your friends.
It's hard to keep throwing distractions at you.
At work, it's easy to get one thing, then another, and then it's hard to finish the task you started.
Recent surveys and field studies have found that most workers have only three to fifteen minutes of uninterrupted work per day, and they spend at least one hour a day --
Five weeks a year.
Take care of distractions and start working again.
Every little thing you respond to makes you feel urgent and gives you the feeling of being busy, although you secretly suspect that all distractions and overlaps will make you less productive.
But overloading is an honor when everyone looks always busy;
Working hard is the new normal.
Multitasking makes you feel like you're working even if it's going to backfire.
The organization paid the price for the long-term distraction of employees.
In a 1996 global manager survey,
They believe that constant distraction and information overload can affect the quality of their lives.
Recent studies estimate the cost of information overload in 2010. S.
Businesses wasted about 28 billion hours and $1 trillion, compared to $14 in gross domestic product this year. 6 trilxadlion.
Average workers spend half an hour a day to troubleshoot equipment or deal with network problems.
In a year, we lost fifteen working days by computer problems.
Constant buzz, need to keep up with never before
Putting an end to the rush of information, the efforts to allocate and spread time and attention are becoming less and less, beginning to cause their losses.
Concentration becomes more and more difficult when you really need it.
You get to the bottom of a page and don't always remember what you just read.
Not only are it difficult for you to get back to the task that started an hour ago, but you have to try to remember what that task is.
You forgot about the mental shopping list.
At home, sometimes you go to a room to do something and when you get there you forget what you want to do.
Now let's imagine a different Monday. Monday morning.
You reach out to the bedside table, pick up your smartphone and turn off the alarm clock.
You haven't checked your mail or online news yet.
When you check the mail first, after months of mood assessment, you know you'll have a better day if you wait.
Also, you just want to take a little more time offline.
Late Saturday night, after installing the coffee machine, you mute your phone and put your laptop and tablet in the desk drawer.
You have six days a week.
Now you and some friends do something similar on Sunday.
Sometimes you go hiking or cooking;
Some of them rediscovered knitting and painting.
It was occupied by baking and reading this Sunday.
Spent hours in the market, measured and mixed, and you have enough coffee cake for you to spend the remaining eight hours --hundred-
A novel recently written by a writer broke out from a literary scene in Brooklyn.
When you check the mail on your phone, you open the program and put the phone screen on-
When you get the fee, on the table.
This is a small act of resistance: I will find you when I choose, you mean.
There's not much in your room.
Box after thirty
Six hours later: you have closed all notifications, you have canceled the subscription for all notifications in addition to the most useful newsletters, and there is a set of active filters that will be non-essential mail from
Before you see it.
At work, you need to stay calm regardless of the urgent needs of your colleagues.
Yes, the response is important, but the crazy request is high.
First of all, you have work to do.
So you turn off your phone and start a program that stops you from surfing the Internet.
You haven't had any outside distractions for two hours and no chance of selfdistraction: e-
Email, Facebook, Pinterest, amazon, your colleague-
They all have to wait.
If a colleague needs something, they know where you are, but by getting people to put a little effort into it to get your attention, you filter out the time that wants you but doesn't really need you
Now you have a task that you think is a bit like a game: generate so many words, write so much code, or browse through so many accounts.
After a while, your mind is at a low ebb.
You feel a bit like a jazz drummer: fully engaged, but in the beat, instead of wasting an action.
After two hours, you re-open everything.
It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you focus on a goal.
It usually still involves multitasking, but this multitasking is focused on one point, not the one that leads you in a different direction.
In the evening, you give yourself half an hour to see what your friends do on Facebook and twitter.
Occasionally, you will delete your friends list.
Your schedule is not that chaotic as you are more careful with the people you are focusing on.
In real life, your circle of friends is shrinking and expanding, and the time you can invest in people is changing.
You write less information and sign in less often, and you try to post some great content and ideas.
Your purpose is not to attract people's attention, nor to accumulate more followers.
Online is to connect meaningfully with people, is to save your attention and respect your friend's thoughts, not to spend time or engage with the media for your own sake.
More generally, you will use it with as much care as you can.
You observe what you do, see how different practices affect your productivity and mood, and then take better practices and give up outdated practices.
But when things go well, you can turn off the mental camera and feel like a device goes from a tool to an extension of yourself and is completely absorbed at this moment.
Related to technology in this way and using technology
In other words, practice thinking about computing --
Four principles need to be understood and applied.
First of all, we have a very deep relationship with information technology, which expresses the unique ability of human beings.
Sometimes technology seems to turn us all into a terrible soulless person.
Machine robots like Borg and Terminator.
But as Andy Clark, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh, said, we are really "born --
"Always seek to expand our physical and cognitive abilities through technology.
In fact, it is better not to think of the mind as something that is limited to the brain or even the body;
It is useful to think that you have "expanded thinking (
Using the terms of Clark and David Chalmers)
Consists of overlapping parts that connect the brain, the senses, the body and the object.
I believe that today's information technology is causing us pain, not because they replace our normal cognitive abilities that have been flexible and mobile, but because they are often poorly designed and not well used;
They're like limbs that we can't control.
The second important idea is that the world is becoming more distracting.
There are solutions that allow the extended mind to be re-controlled.
As tropical forests, work and life become more fanatic, meditation spaces are rapidly disappearing, and modern technology poses challenges to one's ability to concentrate, which may be unique.
But humans always have to deal with distractions and lack of attention.
For thousands of years, they have been working on techniques to effectively solve these problems.
In Asia, Buddhism and Tanjong meditation, Zen in Japan, son and yoga in South Korea have all evolved to tame the mind of distracted, chatty, undisciplined monkeys.
Neuroscientists, psychologists, and therapists have observed that meditation exercises have a great impact on the brain;
They can improve their physical abilities and help deal with a range of psychological problems.
Meditation exercises offer more than just a way to control the monkey's brain or suppress forced multitasking.
They can also be adjusted to allow you to regain control of your extended thinking.
The third important idea is that it is necessary to think about technology.
In order to understand how your extended thinking develops and works, you must carefully observe how you interact with it and how you see it.
Our interaction with information technology
With the extension of our thinking,
Affected by various factors: the design of the device and interface, the way and the environment in which we use the device, and our mental models about interaction and ourselves.
These models often make untested assumptions about how information technology works and how we work, which are harmful to us.
The fourth idea is that you can redesign your extended thinking.
Understand extended thinking, better grasp how to choose and use technology, be familiar with meditation practice, and let you find a more calm and purposeful way to use information technology.
It can help you to exert your extended thinking stronger and strengthen it more thoughtfully.
By understanding how all these components are combined together, you can think through technology --
In the process, you regain the ability to respond to challenges, think deeply and create.
Thinking about computing is more than just a philosophical question.
This is theory and practice.
This is a thousand small methods guided by four principles, pay attention to habits.
Guide to checking emailmail in non-
Distract yourself
Use the rules of Twitter and Facebook to encourage thoughtfulness and kindness.
Holding method-
Actual holding-
Smartphones can reduce your attention.
Observe and experiment with the techniques of your technical practice.
Ways to restore focus.
Information technology is so pervasive, a large part of work and family, so deeply embedded in modern life, it's hard to know where to push it back first.
A good choice is to start with a lot of meditation practice. With breathing.
From "Distraction Addiction" by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.
Copyright 2013, Little, Brown and Co.
The books of aquite.
All rights reserved.