When you think of creativity what do you imagine? There are a lot of examples to choose from, like cooking up a new take on a traditional dish, working with a team to reason through a difficult business problem, writing short stories, trouble-shooting an engineering problem that had everyone else stumped, or coming up with […]
It is rare that we can do two things at once—if someone asks you to rub your stomach and pat your head, odds are that you’ll rub your head. A better strategy for a lot of different cognitive tasks is to switch between them. Switching typically comes at a cost, however. Switching can even negatively […]
Statistical graphs are so ubiquitous and part of our daily work that we may forget how powerful they are. Since their invention by William Playfair a little over 200 years ago, graphs have become indispensable tools not just in science and business, but also in politics. Indeed, one of Playfair’s contributions was to draw attention […]
Think of any movie scene. Was the scene that came to mind a pleasant one? Something funny or romantic? Or more harrowing? When I did this exercise, a scene from the horror film, The Ring, came to mind before a scene from the comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That is, for me, a negative scene came to mind […]
Cogito ergo sum. This famous utterance by René Descartes translates into “I think, therefore I am.” Thinking is what ostensibly makes us human—quite literally so because homo sapiens means “wise man”. But do we really think (much)? If we are so wise, how come fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook during the U.S. presidential […]
Imagine a world in which Einstein crafted his general theory of relativity – discovering and codifying the laws that govern light, space, and time – then went about his life, never publishing, and never telling another person. It may seem obvious, but scientific knowledge, in order to influence the generation of future scientific knowledge or […]
There are some tasks that require cognitive processes that are habitual, automatic, and to some degree effortless, such as seeing a word and automatically reading it or seeing two numbers and automatically processing their magnitudes (e.g., seeing 5 and 3 and perceiving 5 to be greater). There are other tasks that require cognitive processes that […]
The last few weeks, I’ve been very busy with the logistics of organizing a mid-size conference that will be held this summer. Some of the decisions, like the city and the approximate timing, have been made for me, but I’ve had to choose between competing hotels, make a schedule with talks, workshops, symposia, keynotes, breaks, […]
Roadie folklore has it that there are some towns in rural Texas or Saskatchewan that are so small, you miss them if you blink too long while cruising down some highway to nowhere. This is unlikely to be actually true, although figuratively speaking, I can think of a few rural towns in Western Australia that […]
In some parts of New York state, it recently snowed 18 inches (~45 centimeters) following a major winter storm. With every hour, the snow piled higher and higher – but some of the increments in accumulation, especially toward the beginning, felt bigger, while others took longer to notice. You might even have the feeling that […]