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Adam Alter, Ph.D.
Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business
Irresistible: Designing for Behavioral Addiction
Facebook has 1.5 billion users; Instagram users upload sixty million new photos every day. Twenty million people count and monitor every step with Fitbit. Two-thirds of all adults suffer from sleep deprivation, 95% use an electronic device that emits light in the hour before bed, and 60% of adults (ages 18-64) keep their phones next to them while they sleep. Some of the world’s greatest technocrats have the strictest limits on technology for their children. In 2010, when Steve Jobs, a low-tech parent, was asked if his kids loved the iPad, he replied, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” He knew the lure of his beautiful, tactile, absorbing, brilliant invention.
Technology designers are extremely skilled at creating interactive environments for consumers. The colors, fonts, and sounds are tested and polished and refined countless times, and the feel of the product, what it’s like in your hand or on your body, is key. Technology is intentionally designed to deeply engage its user. Is it any wonder that our attention span is evaporating?
Upcoming Events
The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America
Jeffrey Rosen
President and CEO of the National Constitution Center and Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School
David Blight, Ph.D.
Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
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The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains
Pria Anand, MD
Assistant Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine
Anupam B. Jena, MD, Ph.D.
Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and host of the "Freakonomics, MD" podcast
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Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ph.D.
Neuroscientist, writer, and founder of Ness Labs
Susan Dominus
Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine
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