Month: September 2011
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The Evolutionary History of the Brain
The development of the human brain is intricately linked with almost every moment of our evolution from sea-dwelling animals to advanced, social primates. That is the the overwhelming theme from New Scientist‘s brief history of the brain. The engaging article ends with a look at the continued evolution of the human brain (“the visual cortex has…
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Our Amazing Senses
As neuroscientist Bradley Voytek points out, “we’re used to thinking of our senses as being pretty shite”, and this is mostly thanks to the plethora of animals that can see, hear, smell and taste far better than we can. “We can’t see as well as eagles, we can’t hear as well as bats, and we…
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How Sounds and Words Affect Taste
Background noises greatly affect how we taste food. I wrote about this earlier in the year — pointing out that this is the probable cause of bland in-flight meals — but how else can background noise affect our perception of taste, and can our non-gustatory senses affect how we taste, too? To test this, molecular…
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Hard-to-Read Fonts Improve Learning
Much has been written on the positive aspects of cognitive fluency (in terms of typography, accents, and almost everything else), but a recent study (pdf, doi) suggests that the opposite (cognitive disfluency) could lead to better learning. The theory is that harder-to-process material requires “deeper processing” and that this deeper processing leads to superior memory performance. Earlier…
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Marketing Lessons for Startups
When Ilya Lichtenstein offered free marketing advice to startups (as a way of thanking the Hacker News community) he received over 150 requests and set to work. Certain patterns started to emerge in his advice, and so he decided to produced a three-post ‘startup marketing lessons learnt’ series (parts two and three). There’s some fantastic…
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A Primer on Behaviour Change
Three necessary elements must be present for a behaviour to occur: Motivation, Ability, Trigger — and understanding this is fundamental to understanding how to change behaviour. That’s according to B.J. Fogg and his team at the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab, as described by their Behaviour Model. To make behaviour change easier the team identified the…
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Guest Posts (2) – Thanks
Last week my friend Andrew Smith looked after the site and published three posts worthy of your time: Learning storytelling from a Sitcom writer — a longer piece that perfectly dissects the story-writing process A first hand account of foreclosure How not to screw up your career I’m now back home and free from jet lag,…
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How not to screw up your career
Starting a career is daunting. Office politics, poor management and unchallenging work are issues that many of us will have to navigate in our jobs. Ryan Holiday‘s advice to young careerists is cynical and pragmatic. The point isnât just to prove that youâre capable, but also that youâre sane. In fact, if you had to…
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A first hand account of foreclosure
A recent reddit thread about questionable jobs revealed an real-estate worker willing to talk about his experiences foreclosing on homes. He expanded his experiences into a longer post that is eloquent, emotionally charged and revealing about the lasting impact of the global financial crisis. [T]hey can get angry and defensive, tell me that they were never…
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Learning storytelling from a Sitcom writer
What is a story? How can you tell better stories? There is a wealth of knowledge and research into story telling, story structure and techniques for enhancing narrative. The classic text is The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but this tome has been is criticised for being dense and academic. Syd Field‘s book Screenplay has influenced…