Marc Berman

speaker

637 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Marc Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

And people sometimes ask me, well, Mark, what about sitting in a dark room?

And my answer to that is, you know, no, in part for a number of reasons.

So one, most people don't like sitting in dark rooms that they find it boring or and boredom is fatiguing.

And again, it's back to this idea that this isn't just a completely passive process.

This isn't just like sleep.

This is sort of an active process of engaging maybe a different kind of attention, like involuntary attention or a different kind of attentional process that can actually refill that directed attention bucket.

I think that that is compatible because, again, there's nothing in attention restoration theory that says it has to be nature.

It only has to meet these criteria of not placing a lot of demands on directed attention and having softly fascinating involuntary or softly fascinating stimulation to activate involuntary attention.

So if these little video games do that for you, that's good.

However, I would say, you know, the video games that.

our kids are playing out there are much different and much more engrossing.

And I think that's a different kind and that actually is more harshly fascinating.

And we maybe we'll get there in this podcast, but a lot of these new technologies, I would say are very harshly fascinating.

They're designed to keep your attention and not let go.

And they're addictive.

And most addictions are not, you know, really good for cognitive functioning.

Yes, yes, I would say.

Yeah.

And sometimes I get this wrong, but I think system one is sort of the sort of more heuristic kind of thinking.

The easier kind of thinking in system two is more of the arduous kind of thinking.

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