Mindframe

Want to radically ramp up your creativity? In his new book The Medici Effect , Frans Johansson believes he can help you. If you're a fan of the Renaissance, you are probably familiar with the House of Medici. This powerful political dynasty bankrolled generations of thinkers, poets, philosophers, sculptors, painters, architects, and scientists. It is no exaggeration to say that in the 15th century, the Medicis were a driving force behind making Florence, well, Florence. We still enjoy their legacy; Medici sponsorships enabled the work of heavy hitters like Galileo and Botticelli, as well as Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo  and  Da Vinci. (The artists, not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Although that would be an amazing show...) According to Johansson, the Medici genius was creating conditions that fostered the intersection of diverse disciplines. This co-mingling ultimately led to extraordinary leaps in innovation. Johansson argues you can create your own ...

You know the sweet satisfaction when you suddenly have an epiphany? I'm talking about that "Aha!" moment when the circuits suddenly connect and, seemingly out of nowhere, you are struck with an insight. Today, using fMRI technology, neuroscientists can watch the revelation unfold on a cellular level. Neurons begin to cluster and activity speeds up, eventually giving way to burst of energy not unlike a mini fireworks show. All this can be witnessed by the fMRI technician about eight seconds before the subject is aware of their impending moment of truth. So how does this all work? First, it’s important to differentiate between an actual Eureka moment and a more mundane retrieval of information from your hippocampus, that general purpose library of memories. Insights are not merely rediscovering misplaced data, like suddenly remembering where your car keys are. They are combinations or reinterpretations of information, creating something entirely different or new....

As you stand in the check-out line this holiday season, you may find yourself wondering why two minutes in a loud, crowded store can feel like an hour, or why an hour of relaxing with a good book can flit by in what feels like seconds. Why are we so bad as a species at tracking lengths of time? In neuroscience, the prevailing strategy for understanding the "why" of any brain behavior is to think of it in terms of evolutionary advantage. What was life like back when humans were just starting to become humans? A lot of seemingly negative or unhelpful traits make sense in this context. There is a school of thought that the species might have benefited from some members of the tribe having ADHD, for instance. A dose of extra alertness or hyperactivity might hobble a desk worker, but it can be a godsend if you're hunting antelope. So why are our internal clocks so terrible? To a people consumed by foraging, hunting, and gathering, the passing of 90 seconds or an hour wa...

There was a time, and it was not so long ago, that conventional wisdom said if you were born into nobility, you possessed a set of superior traits that automatically qualified you for governance. Got royal parents? Congratulations, you've won the leadership lottery. There was just one problem: the system often produced people uniquely unqualified to rule. Consider Charles II of Spain. He came from a line of the Spanish Hapsburgs so intermarried that one ancestor appears on his family tree in 14 separate places. Charles took the throne in 1665 despite a host of physical and mental disabilities—he couldn't chew, drooled frequently, was never really educated, and at one point it's rumored he ordered his deceased family members dug up so he could look at them. Consider King George IV of England, famous for his extravagant spending, love of leisure—and utterly selfish, irresponsible behavior. Consider the many kings and queens who were handed the reigns to their count...

Do you suffer from Systems Blindness? You almost certainly do. The problem is that your brain’s hardwiring is designed primarily to keep you alive. Which is fair. But as a result, we specialize in snap-second judgments. Our living strategy is largely built on using association to connect causes and effects, which in turn drives our decision-making. See a school bully in action and we go out of our way to avoid him. Watch a fellow office worker grown lean through jogging and we might be tempted to hit the pavement ourselves in the morning. In short, we observe, draw inferences and plot our course. This strategy has served humanity well; after all, there are over 7 billion of us on the planet. Individually, we are amazing at making day-to-day decisions that afford us a certain amount of comfort. But what happens when our comfort is besieged by a huge, unnervingly complicated system like weather or traffic? Here is where Daniel Goleman in his new book Focus: The Hidden Driver of ...

When you contemplate your life, wondering what it means to be alive, it’s unlikely the first thing that came to mind was ‘office work.’ And yet arguably the life you lead at your desk inhabits a great deal of mental real estate. The sheer number of hours typically spent at work guarantees that the office and all it entails is fundamental in understanding and explaining the big picture of your life. Work may or not bring out the best of us, depending on our tasks and whether we are able to get into flow as defined by Csikszentmihalyi. But observation suggests there is one constant in human behavior you can expect to see wherever you find a shantytown of office cubicles. The idea was coined by Allie Brosh, of Hyperbole and a Half fame. In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Brosh explained how she started her now-famous internet comic when she was supposed to be studying for finals: “I'm laterally productive. I will do productive things, but never the thing that I'm s...

"Are you smarter than a mouse?" This was one of the intriguing topics presented at this week's Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, on research done by J.F. Gysner, M. Manglani, N. Escalona, R. Hamilton, M. Taylor, J. Paffman, E. Johnson, and L.A. Gabel, all based out of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. If you are a lab mouse, then you are undoubtedly familiar with mazes. Specifically, you’ve probably logged some time in a Hebb-Williams maze. For decades, it’s been the go-to research model: a spacial-visual maze that centers on twelve standard problems, which differ based on the learning/memory task researchers have assigned to you and your rodent buddies. But the Hebb-Williams maze is not solely reserved for our tiny rodent friends. Its friendly confines have also been used to test the mettle of ‘rats, cats, rabbits, ferrets, mice, and monkeys.’ The Lafayette College team had a few questions on their minds. Would it alter test results to u...

What might the Greek philosopher and Jack-of-all-trades Aristotle think of the latest findings in neuroscience? How would his notion of what it means to be a good public speaker stack up against the bevy of brain biases Daniel Kahneman outlines in prospect theory? In On Rhetoric , Aristotle outlines three key concepts in building a convincing speech. The speaker must demonstrate: Ethos: character, trustworthiness, credibility Logos: logic, facts, figures or some process Pathos: emotion, true feelings, a sense of connection Your ethos can be broadly defined as your reputation or honor. Unfortunately, if your listeners don’t already know you, they are less likely to give you the time of day. When famed violinist Joshua Bell played an incognito recital in the Washington subway system, virtually nobody stopped to listen. Without context, Bell's playing was swallowed up in the chaos of the daily commute. Our sense of importance is often driven more by context than actual valu...

When you think of brainwashing, the name Patty Hearst might come to mind. Daughter of the late newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst, in 1974, the then nineteen-year-old was kidnapped by a fringe terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Several months later, she resurfaced, calling herself Tania and wielding a gun for the SLA during an attempted bank robbery. In September 1975, the local police and the FBI apprehended Hearst in an apartment in San Francisco, along with another SLA member. That January, she was tried for her involvement in the robbery. The Hearst family's legal team claimed Patty had been operating under a "classic case" of Stockholm Syndrome. They argued that after weeks of rape, torment, and imprisonment in a closet, she could no longer withstand an SLA indoctrinement. The prosecution argued that she had willfully decided to aid the SLA, given some circumstantial evidence and her refusal to name names or turn anyone else in. The jury ...

If you run up a long steep incline, it doesn’t take very long before you burn through the energy stored in your muscles and find your legs turning to rubber.  We learn this at a relatively early age, and as a result, some of us make it a habit to avoid running up steep inclines. What you might not realize is that this exhaustion, this depletion of fuel, happens in the exact same way when you exert yourself mentally. Your brain, like your muscles, runs on glucose. Give your brain a mental workout and your ability to focus, or demonstrate what we call ‘will power’, is spent as well. This was proven out in a well-known experiment done by psychology Professor Roy Baumeister and his team at Florida State University. They conducted a test where people where randomly assigned to eat either radishes or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. The radish eaters were instructed to resist eating the cookies. In this case, the noble radish eaters were able to exert enough will power to a...

Your eyes are far more than your windows to the outside world. They are the movie cameras that project information to the cerebral cortex, the brain's hardworking visual processor. In absolute silence and utter darkness, the information is translated inside your skull at amazing speeds. It's a complex operation: in a split second, shadows, movement, and shape are first separated and then knit back together again by a workforce of millions of neurons. In the final stage, the subconscious brain must decide just how much of the imagery it will make available to your conscious mind. The brain only has a limited processing capacity, so these edits are an essential element to the process. Since the revisions happen outside of your awareness, the concious brain is forced to play the part of moviegoer rather than director. How does your subconscious decide what to keep and what to leave on the metaphorical cutting room floor? Scientists are still in the dark (couldn't resi...

Let’s start at the location where every single sale begins. I’m talking, of course, about a customer’s brain. Inside each customer’s skull is enough neural pathways to go around the moon and then circle the earth 6 times. It is this web of myriad connections that will decide whether to or not to make the purchase. And that decision, the one that has enormous implications for you and me, our families, the economy, and virtually everyone else on the planet, begins its journey in the future. Whenever someone decides to purchase a product, they begin the journey with a kind of thought experiment, imagining how their life will be with their new acquisition. This can take the form of a vague notion (‘Wouldn’t be nice to have a new pair of running shoes?’) or it might be a little more concrete (‘I want Chuck Conner All-Stars in bright orange with white laces, size 10 1/2’). It is the job of a salesperson to usher these movies in our heads into reality, which often means helping to ...

All of the information that comes to your brain arrives through your senses. Sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing are conduits to the perfectly dark and silent world inside your skull where the most powerful processing machine in the world resides. And yet, for example, we know that we see only a billionth of what is front of us. Even honey bees and snakes see a spectrum of light far beyond what we can detect. The animal kingdom is rich with creatures that have adapted to see, hear, feel, smell and taste far beyond our meager human abilities. Bats can hear insects flying from 15 to 20 feet away, and polar bears can sniff out a seal through three feet of ice. The entire world of our perception is what scientists call our umwelt , and ours is quite limited. I might have conceptual knowledge of the X-ray that pulses through my body every time I go through security at an airport, but I can’t register it in any meaningful way, and the same is true of radio waves, magnetic field...

You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo...