Mindframe

  Read this shopping list, and then cover it with your hand: Bread Milk Oranges Peanut Butter Yogurt Pickles Turkey Folders Tissue Gum Now, how many of the items can you remember without peeking? Give yourself a moment to recall as many of them as you can. (We’ll wait.) If you left out an item (or several), chances are good it wasn’t the bread or the gum, but rather something in the middle. And if that’s the case, congratulations, you have something in common with 19 th century psychologist and memory pioneer Hermann Ebbinghaus. At the time, the prevailing thought held that memory was impossible to study in any scientific fashion; it was simply too nebulous, too mysterious. Ebbinghaus disagreed. But since every single mind is different, how in the world would he eliminate confounding variables? His imperfect yet deeply elegant solution: to study only a single experimental subject—himself. To collect his data, Ebbinghaus tested his own ability t...

Soundbites, those tiny verbal morsels, are ubiquitous. From billboards to tweets to political slogans, we are awash in them.  Soundbites are the rhetorical currency of the 21 st century. These quick, appealing messages are crack cocaine for the amygdala, the emotional processing center of the brain.  While we might assume that the prefrontal cortex, home of executive control and rational thinking, might overpower or at least subdue this powerful emotional drug. Frequently, it does not. In fact, research shows if a soundbite is repeated often enough, the prefrontal cortex lets go of the steering wheel altogether, allowing the amygdala to slide into the driver’s seat. The message plays directly to your feelings, free of logical scrutiny. This is part of why politicians obsessively repeat their talking points—and why it works. It is a fundamental human brain flaw. Statistically, immigrants commit fewer crimes than the rest of the population. Statistically, you are more...

The inventor of the airplane seatbelt was a man ahead of his time. It's an over-used expression but in this case, it applies: engineer and inventor Sir George Cayley was born in 1773 and died in 1857, before the Wright brothers were even born. If you haven’t visited earth in the last 157 years or so, and/or if you’re an extraterrestrial  who's never boarded a commercial airliner, don’t panic. The use of the seatbelt will be most adequately demonstrated to you. This is for your own safety. You’ll master it in no time. It turns out the simple technology has changed very little since the days of Sir George. Along the same lines, if you’ve been in a coma since 1992 and you’ve just awakened at your work desk from a deep slumber, there are a couple of other things that haven’t changed. The person in the cubicle next to you is 22 years older, but still annoying. The lunchroom still smells like fish, and the half-eaten Twinkie you left on the counter in the beginnings ...

Does your mind tend to wander? Most people believe that their minds wander about 10% of the time. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara put that figure at more like 30%.  When engaged in well-rehearsed tasks like driving a car on a wide-open highway, it’s estimated that mind wandering can be as high as 70%. In her book How to Get People to Do Stuff , behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk makes the important distinction between mind wandering and daydreaming. According to Weinschenk, daydreaming involves an aspect of fantasy, like imagining you’ve been asked to star in the next Hunger Games flick opposite Jennifer Lawrence, or you’ve just won the lottery. Mind wandering occurs when your subconscious brain is engaged in a habituated activity, like driving, and at the same time you’re thinking about some other task or wrestling with some other problem. Doing one thing while your brain focuses on something else might sound an awful lot like multi-tasking. However, the key to mu...

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 ...

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 ...

  Let's talk about diet. 
No, I'm not going to lecture you on your food choices this week. This blog entry is designed to make everybody feel a little crummy (I mean enlightened), regardless of the contents of your fridge. This is a story about what you're feeding to your brain--your information diet, if you will. In The Information Diet: a case for conscious consumption, Clay Johnson likens the explosion of information technoligies to the industrialization of the food business. “Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?” In other words, we consume at the mercy of our confirmation bias.   Johnson’s premise is that, despite the hype, we don’t suffer from information overlo...