[da_grift_shift]

>Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.

It also helps companies like Moonbug Entertainment (Candle Media) understand how to build better Distractatrons.

    It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

    “It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/cocomelon-chil...

What a world.

[aswegs8]

I know a technology like that was used ~20 years ago for ADHD. EEG feedback, as soon as the kid looks away or zones out, the movie stops playing.

[hahajk]

Sounds like they took a cue from Sesame Street:

> p8: "A child watching television under normal conditions is subject to frequent interruptions and distractions. The TV must vie for his attention. In order to simulate this condition, we decided to program distractions into the laboratory situation... Slides could be used to fill the slide tray and they could be projected automatically, at regular intervals, onto a screen similar to that of the television set. The carousel projector allows the viewer to choose three exposure times. The 7.45 second interval proved most satisfactory with the preschool children.

THE FIRST YEAR OF SESAME STREET: THE FORMATIVE RESEARCH https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED047822.pdf

[inigyou]

And nowadays we think of Sesame Street as wholesome compared to today's content. They may have optimised attention but they were delivering positive-value content. That's not the case any more.

[PaulHoule]

I recently rewatched the movie Looker which was vastly ahead of its time in 1981

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker

the same year as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, featuring computer generated characters, brainwashing television commercials, a light pulse gun that causes absence seizures, gun battles inside a plastic surgery clinic and an AR simulation environment, a sadistic computer, a physician who doubles as an action hero, and James Coburn giving a lecture explaining the enemy's evil plans in the opposite role that he played in the (excellent) The President's Analyst.

This time I was not so dazzled and saw it for as atrocious everyone else things it is. The minions of "Digital Matrix, Inc." manage several assassinations with the light-pulse L.O.O.K.E.R. gun but when they use real firearms they outdo Vader's stormtroopers by shooting each other. (Want to see the scene where somebody from E.Y. tells them to stick to the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun) The bad guys explain the penultimate secret to the protagonist early on but the ultimate secret is revealed in the L.O.O.K.E.R. lab which doesn't feel like a lab at all but rather a rather good room in a theme park experience where you're supposed to uncover the secret. (Contrast that to the lab Doug Trumbull outfitted in the Brainstorms movie a few years later which is packed with real surplus equipment... I've been to that lab!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlWxXqH8vA

[x______________]

> ...the Distractatron

I can see it now.. The Distractatrons: a new chapter of protagonists in Transformers! The modern equivalent of evil in this day and age of ADHD and low attention span!