Shame such interesting science inspires such dystopian machinations.
"People synchronize their bodies when absorbed in attention." --> "How can schools use this to make sure students are paying attention?"
Please don't.
Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
(Text copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067951 . Neat that googling for the quote brought me right back to HN.)
Or, "How can teachers better understand what engages students and what doesn't engage them?"
That said, a good storyteller or teacher knows if they are engaging their audience (or failing to) and can adjust for better engagement. Bad ones don't know this, or even if they do, don't necessarily know what to do about it.
Privacy may play a useful role here in directing us toward the good futures rather than the bad. For example, maybe schools are allowed to use heart rate attention monitors, but the data must be aggregated and anonimized. It's okay for Mrs. Smith to learn that 74% of her X (where X is greater than 50) students pay attention when she speaks and this puts her at Y percentile of teachers across the country in her subject. It's not okay for her to know the attentiveness of individual students.
Of course, in reality I have zero hope that this would be used in a positive way.
As someone who was diagnosed with ADD in 1988, this point is very poignant. Society largely tends to ignore and downplay the fact that everyone's experience is subjectively different and that not everyone has the same "brain wiring".
But I do wonder if they go that direction because they're interested in corporate funding for their research and that could be a way to get it.
We clap along together to the beat of songs, and the physical movement causes our heartbeat to change and therefore synchronise. Sharing that experience is a good thing!
When walking around the local supermarket, I noticed that everyone was walking in-step. Then I took off my headphones, and noticed that they were following the beat of the piped music in the background. It was much easier to navigate the store without conflict or bumping into people, because we had that shared clock signal.
Could background music, or even something more simple like a ticking clock, make people more synchronised with each other? I think it could be a good thing.
It could be used as a way to detect when your audience loses attention and needs a break.