Brain Hacking News
Tristan Harris holds his iPhone in the air, so the whole crowd of educators, technologists, doctors, and researchers before him can see the virtual wasteland of his iPhone's home screen. Gone are the cluttered, candy-colored icons that a busy brain sees as digital snacks.
The Center for Humane Technology is a world-class team of former tech insiders and CEOs who are advancing thoughtful solutions to change the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organizational structures driving how technology hijacks our brains.
Sometimes our smart phones are our friends, sometimes they seem like our lovers, and sometimes they're our dope dealers. And no one, in the past 12 months at least, has done more than Tristan Harris to explain the complexity of this relationship.
Plenty of people around the world got new gadgets Friday, but one in Eastern Tennessee stands out. Summit, a new supercomputer unveiled at Oak Ridge National Lab is, unofficially for now, the most powerful calculating machine on the planet. It was designed in part to scale up the artificial intelligence techniques that power some of the recent tricks in your smartphone.
Tristan Harris If, like an ever-growing majority of people in the U.S., you own a smartphone, you might have the sense that apps in the age of the pocket-sized computer are designed to keep your attention as long as possible. You might not have the sense that they're manipulating you one tap, swipe, or notification at a time.
The brain surgery lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. In the afternoon, after the anesthesia had worn off, the neurosurgeon came in, removed his wire-frame glasses, and held them up for his bandaged patient to examine.
It's been about 15-minutes since you've checked your smartphone. Do your fingers itch to pick it up? You try to resist, but pangs of anxiousness gnaw at you until finally, you give in and check your favorite apps. It's not just you.
Tristan co-founded Apture in 2007, after stopping out of Stanford's Masters Computer Science program. He is rated
16
in Inc. Magazine's Top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30. A Mayfield Fellow with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in entrepreneurship, Tristan's career spans the open content world of Wikia and the user interface engineering world of Apple.Time Well Spent is a nonprofit organization which seeks to reverse what they call the "digital attention crisis", caused by technology companies designing mobile devices and social media features in order to capture as much attention as possible, regardless of their impact on users' quality of life.