September Pundit 2

Jennifer Senior
"Our Brains Aren’t Designed to Handle the Trump Era"
Published February 19, 2019
Article

In this article Jennifer Senior discusses the intersection between our brains' evolution and the age of internet multitasking. She argues that our brains were never meant to take in so much information at once. Since we began as hunter-gatherers, with no social media or internet whatsoever, we didn't need to process half of the amount of information and news as we do now, surrounded by cellphones, TVs, computers, and other sources of information. And because Donald Trump is a very controversial and twitter-fluent president, he usually makes the news multiple times in a day, whether he sent out a tweet, fired a staff member, or made a foreign policy decision. Senior's support comes in a form that appeals to the reader's sense of logic- percentages, numbers, and scientific studies. She cites multiple researchers and scientists regarding the human mind, overstimulation, and biology. Senior makes a compelling argument through this essay about just how much the mind can take.

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 15, 2019 at 3:33 PM

    Comments on article were not available.

    Ms. Senior, I find the connection between social media/the internet today and how our brains were designed very interesting. I wonder if this is related to the decrease in people's attention spans due to internet usage and phone checking.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Grace SSeptember 15, 2019 at 5:05 PM

    This is a very interesting article. Could it be possible that our brains have evolved to better process information since the hunter-gatherer stage? As we become more internet-based, it would interesting to compare brain scans from less multi-task orientated generations to ours.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousSeptember 15, 2019 at 7:31 PM

    I feel like this article is true in my experience. I saw a video somewhere that confirmed humans are not meant to multitask, but a small percentage of us can do so successfully. The rest of us face decreasing the quality of all the tasks we are switching between because in reality, we are switching between tasks very quickly. I like how you backed up your analysis claims with evidence. I also like how the article ties the wide topic of humans as hunter gatherers to our current president as well.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

October pundit 3

Ross Douthat "Elizabeth Warren's Health Care Albatross" The New York Times Nov. 2 2019 In this column, Ross Douthat begins by discussing the dangers of political parties becoming ideological. He supports this claim by pulling examples from the 2020 election and the 2012 election. Douthat then brings Elizabeth Warren into the mix by claiming that her single payer healthcare plan is just as unrealistic as Republicans' dreams of a flat tax. Towards the beginning of the column, Douthat makes the bold claim that part of the reason Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election is because she did not run on as much of a centrist platform as her husband did, making Trump look like the more moderate candidate. Aside from this claim being strangely placed, Douthat does not offer any evidence to back it up.
Read more

nov/dec pundit 2

Charles M. Blow "Trump's Black College Spectacle" The New York Times Oct. 27, 2019 Charles Blow examines Trump's history with criminal justice reform after he is awarded the Bipartisan Justice Award by the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center. The Justice Center is a group of black activists who organized the 2019 Second Step Presidential Forum at Benedict College in South Carolina. The group gave Trump its Bipartisan Justice Award for his signing of the First Step Act, which allowed for the release of a few nonviolent federal inmates. Blow introduces his bigger purpose by bringing up Trump's unfortunate record regarding the intersections of people of color and criminal justice. Blow supports his claim that Trump is the enemy of progressive criminal justice reform with solid evidence. He brings up how Trump advocated for New York to adopt the death penalty in response to the Central Park Five. He supports the Stop-and-Frisk program in New York City after a feder...
Read more