Mindframe

  Previously, we’ve talked about how enlarged pupils can signify attention or arousal. If someone’s pupils dilate when you talk to them, conventional wisdom went, that means they’re very interested in what you have to say. It’s been speculated that this is why restaurants go in for mood lighting: the low light helps create the illusion that your dining companion is riveted, and thus increases the odds you’ll stay long enough to linger over that slice of cheesecake or extra glass of wine. However, it’s not so simple as looking into your date’s eyeball and reading their mind. In a 2017 study , researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf found that enlarged pupils can also be a sign of indecision. Here’s how they support this conclusion: in a recent study, 27 subjects sat in a dark room in front of a computer screen, which displayed a series of problems. In each sequence, the participant had to make a judgement about dots ...

Imagine that, on the second morning of a business trip, you go to unzip your suitcase, only to realize you forgot to pack any pants. With just a few hours before a big presentation, you duck into the closest mall, for a shopping trip with a firm deadline. You step into a promising store, and with the help of a sales clerk, you quickly narrow the pool of potential pants to just two options. Pair A is stylish and flattering, but they’re pushing your emergency pants replacement budget at $70. Pair B won’t turn any heads, but they fit fine, and they’re on sale for $20. ‘Is it worth it to splurge on a pair of pants I’ll only need to wear once?’ you ask yourself, frowning in the dressing room mirror. ‘The cheaper ones will get the job done, and it’s not like I don’t have nice pants at home.’ Just then, the clerk knocks on the door. “Hey,” she says, “As long as you’re trying on slacks, we just got a new shipment in, and I think we’ve got your size.” She passes you a new pair of p...

Decision making: it’s what humans do.  Estimates are that the average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. Of those daily decisions, 226 involve food choice.  The fact that you’re reading this suggests that, for the most part, your decisions have allowed you to stay above room temperature, and live your life. Still: are you the kind of person who tends to make good decisions? How well have you navigated through the maze of everyday choice? Can you point to at least a couple of dead ends from your past? In all honesty, if you had the chance, how many do-overs would you take? Given that our brains tend to remember our successes while confining our mistakes to the outer reaches of our minds, many of us probably think our decision-making is pretty good. The truth might not be so comforting.  After all, there’s a reason Las Vegas can support over 62,000 hotel rooms on the strip alone. According to PBS, $6 billion are lost every year in Vegas. Gambling aside...

Last time you pulled up to a gas pump, you had to make a choice. That choice consisted of 87% with ethanol, Regular, or Premium. It’s a choice you’ve made thousands of times. In fact, far beyond the gas pump, you’re asked to make that very same kind of “good, better, best” decision over and over again, whether you’re picking airplane seats or breakfast cereal. It seems to make sense: in a fast-changing world where the options seem to multiply every day, there is something comforting about “good, better, best” as an easy navigation tool. Your brain adapted so well to this strategy, it’s likely you don’t even think about it. It’s just another heuristic, just another way the brain conserves energy by employing a rule of thumb that spares you from thinking too hard. Why not bring it into the cereal aisle? Marketers hit upon this tactic years ago. It seems like a hugely successful move for anyone who wants to take advantage of the brain’s natural tendency towards fuel conservation, o...

Decision making: there are countless books about it because, lets face it, decisions are at the epicenter of what we humans do. Make the wrong choice and it can kill you, or at least cause a lot of sweat and tears. One major crossroads for many involves mate selection. Some knock it out of the park—we’ve all seen the heartwarming stories of couples still in love after 50 years—and then there are the marriages that crumble after a few months, or even days. So what can we learn from the long-term lovebirds? What’s their secret? How did they find each other? When you first meet someone, what are the telltale signs to look for and, perhaps more importantly, to avoid? It’s classic advice column fodder, and people make a tidy living doling out their strategies for selection. But at the crucial moment, how much strategy is really involved? In his book Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman shares an unlikely experiment done in New Mexico. Scienti...

A number of years ago I had the amazing good fortune to meet the legendary blues piano man Cornbread Harris. Though severely hampered by arthritis, this 86-year-old phenom still makes his living playing some of the most soulful music you’ll ever hear. Although he didn’t—and still doesn’t—teach piano, I managed to talk him into giving me a few lessons. As you might expect, I ended up learning far more from Cornbread than just piano music.  Once I showed up at his house on a particularly bone-chilling Minnesota winter afternoon, knocked on his door and waited. And waited. And waited. After what seemed like an eternity, Cornbread finally opened the door. I rushed inside only to find Cornbread clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. He summed it up thusly: “Hey, I can either open the door or put on my pants, I can’t do both.” What Cornbread had articulated was a perfect example of binary selection. One of the reasons it’s so hard sometimes to order off a menu or pick a...

Allegedly, this year Noah has knocked out Michael as the most popular baby boy name in the US. Perhaps among the names least likely to make a comeback any day soon is Otis. And yet we owe some debt of gratitude to at least one Otis. Although he didn’t invent the elevator, in 1853 Elisha Graves Otis hit upon an equally key innovation: the elevator brake. The technology to make an elevator—a box on a rope on a pulley—had existed for centuries. The technology to make an elevator that didn’t carry with it the distinct risk of sending innocent people careening towards their deaths, however—this was an exciting new development made possible by the ability to stop quickly and gently. This in turn made early skyscrapers more feasible, and less deadly. Otis’s rather unglamorous creation literally shaped the American skyline. It also shaped this article; the popularization of elevators also led to the popularization of elevator-based metaphor. Let’s look at skill acquisition. Canadian...

Taraxacum is not some newly found dinosaur. It is the scientific name for the pesky weed commonly called the dandelion. The dandelion industry is a billion dollar business—not growing them, eradicating them. This despite the fact that they are rich in vitamins, A, B, C, D and important minerals like zinc, potassium and iron. If that weren’t enough, a dandelion plant yields a beautiful bright yellow flower. Despite the battle waged by the chemical conglomerates, each spring the dandelion sprouts up defiantly, sunny little weedy disposition intact, as if to say, “I’m still here!” Which, of course, brings us to the weed in your brain commonly called procrastination. We all grow it. It’s estimated that 20% of us are habitual hardcore procrastinators. Procrastination can be broadly defined as putting off until tomorrow what you know you should be doing today. Countless books on time management give you instructions that usually include the following: Make a difficult task A1 on ...

“Oh, the thigh bone’s connected to the leg bone and the leg bone’s connected to the…” You probably learned some version of this  classic spiritual “Dry Bones” in grade school. It’s a clever way to teach basic skeletal anatomy. Author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson was actually referring to the prophesy in Ezekiel 37:1-14, but for our secular purposes, the point is that all of your bones connect to create a structure that serves as the functional foundation for everything you do. Chiropractors build their entire livelihood on this vary concept. You throw your back out of joint and it effects your lifting power in a dramatic way. It’s amazing how the simple act of reaching for a bag of groceries in your trunk can compromise your skeletal system and jeopardize your ability to live a normal life for weeks afterwards. Like the skeletal system, we tend to think about diet, exercise and sleep as three separate systems, each vital to the success of the body. But there is an...

Have you ever wondered why some people—and maybe we’re talking about you—are so adamant about some things? It might be a political position or your thoughts on diet and exercise, music, drunk drivers, tuna fish—the list goes on. And if you were asked what informed your particular stance, answers might include your spiritual faith, personal life experience, and/or what you’ve learned from others through a wide variety of sources. Your belief system is subjective, and like your fingerprints, unique to you. As far as storage and access go, you hold the keys. But although the system is subjective, what’s less subjective is the architecture it’s built on, according to many neuroscientists. The thought is that the brain attaches emotional meaning to some events, in the form of memory markers. The outrage that accompanies your feelings of hearing about a hit-and-run drunk driver on the 10 o’clock news helps to both inform your opinion and store it in your memory for recall later. C...

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” So said Mark Twain, printer, steamboat pilot, journalist, failed miner, entrepreneur, abolitionist, lecturer and supreme humorist. Twain is perhaps the greatest American storyteller and writer ever produced by the fifty states. Whether attacking kings, hypocrites, or the literary offenses of Fenimore Cooper , Twain was famous for his razor-sharp wit and his allergy to BS. Yet that same man drove himself into bankruptcy, ignoring the council of his most trusted pals in favor of pouring his fortune into a series of disastrous inventions. He once invested the equivalent of 8 million dollars in the Paige typesetting machine, a marvel of engineering that dazzled crowds but also constantly broke and was obsolete by about 1884. So why did a man renowned for not suffering fools pour his fortune into one fool’s errand after another? Could it be that Twain, like the rest of us, was seduced by a “magic bul...

Last week’s blog dealt with the inherent threat in complex systems, specifically your Grandmother, (or really, anybody’s Grandma) and corporations in general. This week, we’ll take a look at how not to get caught up on the sticky side of complex systems. A quick review: we’re using the word “complex” to describe systems where the relationships between parts are so multidimensional and tangled that you can’t use reductionist thinking to understand them. The reason for this is two-fold. First, in complex systems, cause and effect loops are tough to recognize because they can happen very slowly. Normally, we can observe the results of a given action in real time. In a complex system, the change can take hours, days, weeks or even months to register. When your grandma ingests multiple medications, the chemicals may need a while to build up in her system before anyone can detect a serious problem. The second problem? A complex system has so many connections that you can’t always ...

Imagine your grandma just celebrated her 85th birthday. She's beginning to forget things, but her doctor has reassured you that since, if given enough time, she can eventually pull the information through, it's probably not Alzheimer's. You take some comfort in a recent study that suggests memory retrieval problems might not necessarily be the deterioration of synaptic connections, but more of a space issue. Think of Grandma's hippocampus like a library that, over time, has run out of shelving for the books. As they begin to pile up on the floor, the librarian can still find that edition of Twain's Huckleberry Finn you're after, but it takes a a little more time to scour all the nooks and crannies of the library to locate it. The same might be true for the hippocampus, the memory library. In any event, modern medicine has been good to Grandma. The old family general practitioner has been replaced by a whole bevy of doctors who specialize in any number ...