Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what's going on in the lives of other people - what they're thinking about, what they're doing, what they're looking at - by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online.

Why are online games so addictive? It's mostly the narcotic appeal of 'leveling.'

A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us.

We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines.

The main message of 'Smarter Than You Think' is an attempt to look at the productively new and interesting ways that we have begun to learn about the world, to think about what we found, and to mull it over and argue about it with other people as we use technology.

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.