It’s been pretty dead over hear at Banapana, I realize, but there’s a great reason. Last night I submitted my first ever academic paper to Cognitive Science Society for the 2009 conference. I am very excited about that, but it took a LOT of work and posting to the old blog is one of those things that just has to suffer a little. However, the work on the paper did inspire me to begin to move Banapana in a slightly more technical direction. I feel the need to discuss “minds on media” in more than an anecdotal fashion. So, in the coming weeks I’m going to start discussing some of the psych literature with regard to media’s effects on the human mind (and maybe monkey, dolphin and parrot minds) alongside the usual string of posts that bare some subjective relevance (i.e. in my opinion) to the topic at hand here; namely, what is our media doing to our brains? ¹

So you may be wondering what’s going on here at Banapana since things have been up and down and changing and disappearing. There are two things going on. One, I’ve installed the new version of Wordpress (2.5)–more on that in a minute. The other thing is a general change in the way that this blog is structured. Banapana has always been about the relationship between media and cognitive psychology (though it has wandered from the subject from time to time). So, my aim, with this new Wordpress installation is to really shift things into a tighter focus. Read more…