Mindframe

Creativity as a whole is a hard thing to concretely study. However, a slightly easier question than "where does creativity come from?" is "how do epiphanies work?" Those sudden flashes of new ideas happen when your brain connects up associations that don't normally go together, like bacon and popcorn. The process starts when your more rational, top-down conscious thinking system struggles with a question it can't seem to solve. With possibilities exhausted, you start to lose focus, and as a result, your attention shifts. At this point, your executive control system bows out and the problem gets dumped into the more reflexive, impulsive, emotional brain. Your brain is designed in such a way that when you stop actively working the problem, your unconscious systems help out by taking over, continuing the associative matching exercise. It's like an architect who, out of ideas, kicks a problem down to the site foreman, saying, "See what your ...

Irrational behavior is commonplace in sports. Michael Jordan wore his "lucky" University of North Carolina practice shorts under his Chicago Bulls shorts every season, believing that extra layer of shorts made the difference between winning and losing. Tennis ace Serena Williams is rumored to have worn the same unwashed pair of "lucky" socks 162 matches in a row . And the list goes on and on. Are professional sports stars somehow more superstitious than the rest of us? The answer is no. And it's not just humans: famed psychologist B.F. Skinner once reported that pigeons seem to behave superstitiously , too. Although we can, of course, never know for sure what birds are thinking, Skinner observed patterns of strange behavior, like a bird twirling in a circle prior to feeding. He posited that the bird had somehow associated the act of twirling with the act of getting fed. We are all twirlers to some extent. We can trace our irrational behaviors, both col...

Even if you from time to time think about your neurons, those little chemical-electrical switches that dictate your mental and physical activity, you probably don't give much thought to your transposons. And yet transposons don't just play a crucial role in neural application; in a very real sense, they define who you are. A transposon is a fragment of DNA that inserts itself into another cell. Research suggests that about half our DNA sequence is made up of these fragments, these interlopers. In the cells of, say, your lungs, heart, or kidneys, transposons have no real effect. They don't behave like viruses, which sneak into cells and multiply like crazy. They're more like very mellow hitchhikers: once they've found their way in, they're usually content to fall asleep and enjoy the ride. The exception is the brain. Once transposons get inside neurons, they can alter the very nature of the cell. It's like a troupe of improv actors that show up unexp...

Last year, Americans used and discarded about 50 billion plastic water bottles. The recycling rate on those bottles is about 23%, meaning that roughly 38 billion plastic water bottles were dumped into landfills or ended up as general litter. In the face of this growing problem, Elkay Corporation, a U.S company best-known for drinking fountains, developed the EZH2O fountain, which doubled as a water bottle filling station. This allows people to reuse their own refillable bottles, thus cutting down on waste. As a savvy company, Elkay saw an opportunity to make money and be a little greener at the same time. The big question their engineers had was, will people actually change their habits and take advantage of the eco-friendly option? When the engineers finished their filling station design, they decided to add a counter to show consumers how many bottles were being saved with each use. Once the full expense of research and development are factored in, it's not uncomm...

What is fear made of? In his book Self Comes to Mind , Antonio Demasio describes emotions as complex, largely automated neural programs of action. He writes that emotions can be triggered by real-time events, events of the past, or images related to events. They tap into various brain regions, including the areas concerning language, movement, and reasoning. This in turn sets off a chain of chemical reactions. Certain kinds of emotions tend to activate specific brain regions, producing a kind of lock and key effect. For instance, situations involving fear unlock the amygdala and triggers additional chemicals associated with fear. Our perceptions of those internal changes are what we call feelings. (When two regions are affected at the same time, it can create a composite or mixed emotion, such as bittersweetness or nostalgia.) Feelings are the body’s readout of what’s happening internally, combined with your moment-by-moment state of mind. As Damasio says, “Feelings are the co...

There was a moment during the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 when, after months of deprivation, hardship, and arduous climbing, they finally scaled the eastern face of the Continental Divide. Standing exhausted on that peak, they hoped to gaze down on gentle meadows and the gateway to the sea, but instead they saw…more mountains. It was mountains as far as the eye could see. In some ways, modern biology has followed the same trajectory: in the 70's we believed we were within striking distance of the cure for cancer, steps away from enlightenment about our own internal processes. Now we know it's a much bigger expedition than we ever anticipated. When it comes to understanding the body, the complexity we face is mind-boggling, a thick and tangled web of feedback loops and inner dependencies. Take, for example, the human gut. For years, it's been relegated to the back bench of physiological study. Recently, we've begun to see that the digestive tract is, in f...

We Americans are proudly and hugely into our conveniences. We buy pre-washed lettuce and pre-cut chicken pieces because it's more convenient than washing our own vegetables or slicing up our own birds. We use our remotes because it's more convenient than getting up to change the channel. We navigate the drive-thru at Starbucks because it's more convenient than actually walking into a coffee shop. And we email the person in the cubicle next to us because who has the time for a conversation these days? Entire technologies are built around the idea of convenience. Since our GIs returned from the rather massive inconvenience of fighting World War Two, we've been obsessed in sparing ourselves extra toil wherever possible. Remember TV dinners? In minutes, you could enjoy nicely diced chicken parts with presorted peas and carrots and a little peach cobbler on the side. Usually at least one of those things was still crunchy with ice on the inside, but who could complain? I...