In memoriam and just for kicks.
![theatlantic:
Choosing Our Own Adventures, Then and Now
If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure, probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us in a way that normal books did not. At key plot points, the reader got to make decisions that actually changed the course of the story. For example: “If you make a hasty retreat to your car, [upon being attacked by a bunch of monkeys] turn to page 29.” Alternatively, “If you decide that the chimpanzees are not as dangerous as they look and rush to give aid to the man, turn to page 3.” Many of us simply could not choose, or chose both, and so we read them twice, or thrice, or we simply read all of the endings, or we read the whole book with our fingers placed at various points so we could backtrack and try again if things didn’t go as hoped. For a lot of us, growing up as we did in our early-computer existences (remember Atari?), this was our first dose of “interactivity.”
That doesn’t mean that the era of the Choose Your Own Adventure has ended, even if it is some 30 years (egad) after the original series began.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m46pyq1dXZ1qcokc4o1_500.png)
Choosing Our Own Adventures, Then and Now
If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure, probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us in a way that normal books did not. At key plot points, the reader got to make decisions that actually changed the course of the story. For example: “If you make a hasty retreat to your car, [upon being attacked by a bunch of monkeys] turn to page 29.” Alternatively, “If you decide that the chimpanzees are not as dangerous as they look and rush to give aid to the man, turn to page 3.” Many of us simply could not choose, or chose both, and so we read them twice, or thrice, or we simply read all of the endings, or we read the whole book with our fingers placed at various points so we could backtrack and try again if things didn’t go as hoped. For a lot of us, growing up as we did in our early-computer existences (remember Atari?), this was our first dose of “interactivity.”
That doesn’t mean that the era of the Choose Your Own Adventure has ended, even if it is some 30 years (egad) after the original series began.
Is Electricity the New Smart Drug?
Right now Adderall is in short supply, which, according to some reports, is making it harder for pharmacists to fill prescriptions, driving up black-market prices on campuses, and perhaps forcing some students to rely on their native brainpower to write essays on religious symbolism in Billy Budd.
But take heart, unjuiced undergrads—there may be a solution on the way, albeit one that sounds dubious, even dangerous, at first. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS), and it involves running a weak electrical current through your brain. While tDCS has been around for decades, in the last couple of years it’s been getting a lot of attention, thanks to research suggesting that it speeds up learning for certain kinds of tasks.
Talk about a bright idea.
