Mindframe

Thanks to modern jet travel, I am currently high above the American Great Plains, winging my way to Las Vegas tonight to speak at a convention this week.  Las Vegas is one of those cities you either love or hate.  For some, it boasts the sweet scent of winning, and for others it reeks of desperation born from loss. (It should be noted that most of the casinos try to mitigate the smell of desperation with their unrestrained use of industrial strength air fresheners) Clearly, building a gambling mecca in the middle of the desert strains rational thought. But Vegas isn’t about rationality. In a very real sense, it’s just the opposite. For Vegas to survive it needs irrationality, and not just a little. Vegas has 150,481 hotel rooms. The city relies on irrationality to show up from all 50 states and every corner of the globe. To be exact, Vegas is predicated on what neuroscientist Dan Ariely describes as ‘predictable irrationality’. The gambling dens of Vegas may have be...

The 10,000 hour rule helped to make Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers a smashing success. Gladwell got the idea from the work done by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. Ericsson’s research showed it takes roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to be considered a master of any given subject.  From Bill Gates to violinist Itzak Perlman to Michael Jordon, 10,000 hours of focused practice is necessary to reach expert status. But what if you don’t want to be an expert? What if you have no aspirations to play the violin or the Knicks at Madison Square Garden? What if you just want to bang away at an instrument or play a couple of pick-up games without embarrassing yourself with your jumpshot?  Josh Kaufman’s The first 20 hours: how to learn anything fast might be the book for you. Kaufman’s idea is that if you follow the right principles, 20 hours of dedicated practice will get you one step closer to fulfilling your bucket list of thi...

Buyer's remorse is a terrible thing. It occurs when you have the realization that you've bought the wrong thing and now you can't return it. Both as a reality and a metaphor, it extends far beyond the notion of purchasing the latest gadget or gizmo. In China, there are 5000 divorces a day. In 2011, this prompted the government-run post office to advertise that you could post a love letter to your new spouse that wouldn't be sent until seven years after your wedding. The thinking was that if couples stopped and thought about the seriousness of their undertaking, they might put more energy into the marriage. Clearly, this is the Chinese government's attempt to head buyer's remorse off at the pass. Buyer's remorse is but one flaw with the brain's decision-making powers as denoted in Chip and Dan Heath's book, Decisive: How to make better choices in Life and Work . Like the title tells us, the Heath brothers' intention is to outline strategies...

How do you decide on whether to go back to the same restaurant again, buy the same breakfast cereal, or even whether to read this blog one more time? This is the beauty of the memory, which does you the favor of storing neural code from your past to rescue and remind you of the outcome of some past experience. Like a trailer from a movie, your brain replays a snippet or two from a past event to give you context for future decisions. That seems pretty straightforward, except for a couple of minor glitches discovered by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his fellow researchers. In The Paradox of Choice , Barry Schwarz explains their surprising findings. Kahneman’s team has learned that in an effort to both conserve energy and keep you safe, your brain takes more of a Cliff Notes approach to memory than a blow by blow accounting of what actually happened. Our memory summaries seem to be guided by two principles. First, we tend to focus more heavily on the peak ...