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 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 so if we wanted to map this on here, we would say that involuntary attention is more like system one and directed attention is more like system two.

You have it correct.

And maybe I'll spend a moment on this because I think it's really, really important.

So there's actually this idea that –

there was this peripheral hypothesis.

The problem that talking on a cell phone and driving have to do with actually physically holding the phone and maybe only having one arm to do the driving, or is it attentional?

That it really doesn't have to do with holding the phone.

It has to do with where your attention is directed.

And it turns out it has nothing to do with holding the phone.

And it has everything to do with attention.

And one of the examples that I like to give, especially when I'm teaching, is, you know,

we've kind of all had that sensation, you know, maybe, and it's not good, but driving on the highway and you might not remember what, you know, scenery was around you for the last couple of minutes driving on the highway because your attention is somewhere else.

You might be mind wandering, even though the light from the road and from the environment is all hitting your retina, right?

So all those signals are,

are getting to the retina, the brain is not attending to it.

So that's the difference between what people call as overt attention and covert attention.

So where your eyes are moving is the overt attention, but covert attention is actually really what you're paying attention to internally.

And so what's the problem with the cell phone is that

your covert attention is directed to the phone call which means you're paying less attention to the road and that's really dangerous and that's like two you know if you're driving in an unfamiliar place typically you turn down the radio right because you want all of your attention to be driving and the problem with the cell phone the person on the other end doesn't know they don't know what conditions you're in if you've got a friend in the passenger seat you tell them to shut up

when you're in hard road conditions, but that doesn't happen to cell phones.

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