Mindframe

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...

If you've been hired for a job in the last thirty years, chances are you've heard of Myers-Briggs. It's a personality diagnostic tool used by everyone from self-searching college kids to Fortune 500 companies. It's understandable why employers embrace the Myers-Briggs Inventory. If there is a way to figure out ahead of time whether or not you're going to 'fit in,' it could save the company money in the long run, and you might avoid working for a company you don't like. If the test can prove you've got the right stuff, maybe you'll even skip a couple of rungs on your way up the management ladder. Perhaps someday you'll be the one ordering the personality testing of the young upstarts seeking to unseat you from your hard-fought throne. Obviously, when it comes to business, this is all a pretty big deal. If you're like me, you probably believed the Myers-Briggs was supported by some serious clinical evidence. After all, this is a ...

Your smartphone has more computing power than the computer that took Neil Armstrong and crew to the moon. And this is only one of the staggering technological advancements we've made in the last 50 years. Have you ever wondered why technological advancements, a byproduct of the analytical brain, have far outrun our ability to create any kind of significant improvements in our emotional governance? Wars, murder, and mayhem have gone unabated for thousands of years, and yet this week Apple announced the introduction of a new iPhone with fingerprint recognition. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, Mark Twain said something along the lines that any newspaper publisher, regardless of the era, could always bank on headlines like "Trouble in the Middle East" and "Revolution in South America". Twain was uncanny about the consistency of humanity's inability to live and let live. So why have our emotional brains hit a roadblock? Why haven't we wipe...