Hello all.
I saw an interesting article in current Scientific American Mind by Sendhi Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir titled Freeing up Intelligence. It is adapted from their upcoming book Scarcity: Why having too little means so much.
To sum it all up in a media friendly soundbyte: A fixation (anticipation) on unmet needs like money, time, food can take over our attention and not let us focus on other things. Intelligence and impulse control diminishes, alongside other mental faculties which they have named "bandwidth".
Sadly, I don't have the time to copy & paste the article here (if that's even allowed?), but I think the article would make for good reading for the sott.net audience (as well as a plug for EE for a way to conserve your mental bandwidth.) The book I don't know about, because I haven't read it yet -But to comment on that would be in the books section of the forum.
Check it out if you can and see what you think.
I saw an interesting article in current Scientific American Mind by Sendhi Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir titled Freeing up Intelligence. It is adapted from their upcoming book Scarcity: Why having too little means so much.
To sum it all up in a media friendly soundbyte: A fixation (anticipation) on unmet needs like money, time, food can take over our attention and not let us focus on other things. Intelligence and impulse control diminishes, alongside other mental faculties which they have named "bandwidth".
Sadly, I don't have the time to copy & paste the article here (if that's even allowed?), but I think the article would make for good reading for the sott.net audience (as well as a plug for EE for a way to conserve your mental bandwidth.) The book I don't know about, because I haven't read it yet -But to comment on that would be in the books section of the forum.
Check it out if you can and see what you think.
