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 ...

You are not you. By that, I mean that the idea of Self -- the single arbitrator of decisions and sole captain of your wants and desires -- appears to be a construct of the brain. And part of that construct is the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Sometimes, it becomes clear that a person's personal narrative is pretty different from who they really are. Like your friend who claims to be an avid runner but perhaps hasn’t run in weeks, months or even years. Or your office mate who claims to be ‘easygoing’ and then spends coffee breaks rearranging all the swizzle sticks to point in the same direction, and sorting and stacking the sugar packets by date of manufacture. For some, the reality gap is a narrow one. For others, it's more like the Grand Canyon. And that's where things get interesting. When the gap gets big, the sheer energy necessary to maintain the canard can be stupefying. And perhaps hoping to protect our own myths from exposure, many cho...

On a nuts-and-bolts level, what's happening in your brain when you think? This is one of the hottest topics in neuroscience. Understanding it is considered the mother lode for many brain researchers. Although we have yet to completely unlock the mystery, we have begun to get a glimpse into the brain's architecture. The brain is composed of billions of neurons, which are essentially microscopic chemical connectors. Neurons operate similarly to the wiring in your home; they are switches that extend power to a whole host of electrical gadgetry. When excited, neurons send messages back and forth by temporarily hooking up with each other across minute gaps known as synapses. Into these synapses, the neuron attempting to communicate (presynaptic neuron) sends a message to the receiving neuron (postsynaptic neuron) by releasing a chemical called a neurotransmitter. The receiver neuron bridges the gap using proteins known as receptors, and grabs up the neurot...

How do we measure intelligence? The ancient Chinese had some of the first tests designed to evaluate a person's smarts: a game called tangram and another game called jiulianhuan . You can still play them today, if you're a fan of puzzles or humility. In 1905, Alfred Binet, Victor Henri and Theodore Simon needed a way to assess mental retardation in school children. They created their own system, the not-very-cleverly-named Binet-Simon test. This eventually morphed into the Intelligence Quotient test, more commonly known as the I.Q. test. It analyzes your applied knowledge of math, as well as verbal and spatial recognition skills. At the end of the test, you get a number between 1 and 200. This number tells us how smart you are, or so conventional wisdom went. Most of us hummed along happily with this notion until Howard Gardner showed up in 1983 with his ground-breaking book Frame of Mind . In his book, Gardner argued that the standard I.Q. test doesn't give u...