Dialogic Cinephilia: ENG 102: Concepts, Theories, and Thinkers (Ongoing Archive)

Start here:
Ethical Reasoning
A Guide for Developing Critical Skills for Thinking About the World
Shooting Azimuths

Benton, Michael D. "The Power of Stories." The Ryan Watts Life Coaching Podcast (September 4, 2023) ["Great conversation about the psychology of our personal narratives and beyond. Michael Benton is an associate professor of humanities and film studies at Bluegrass Community and technical College in Lexington, Kentucky. Narrative Psychology focuses on how we perceive the events of our lives through stories. One of the most powerful ways we can experience transformation is by changing our stories. This can be done in many ways."]

Why Does Your Professor Insist You Use a Book in Your Research?

Jagt, Tyler. "My Students Can't Read." The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 2, 2026) ["I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline. So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception. Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit."]

Monday, November 7, 2022

ENG 102: Concepts, Theories, and Thinkers (Ongoing Archive)

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