Mindframe

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 ...