Things You Cannot Unsee (And What That Says About Your Brain) We're going to rewire your brain. Are you ready? I want to show you something simple your mind can do, which illustrates a fascinating emerging theory about how the brain works. First, look at this logo of the World Cup this year. The idea of the emblem is obvious: This is an illustration of a trophy with an abstract soccer ball on top. Now consider this tweet from copywriter Holly Brockwell, which got 2,400 thousand retweets: "CANNOT UNSEE: the Brazil 2014 logo has been criticised for 'looking like a facepalm.'" You know, a facepalm: With this new cue—to see the logo as a facepalm—the yellow part becomes an arm with its hand pressed into a green head. People report this kind of thing all the time, and they use this same phrase: cannot unsee. But usually the image hasn't changed; only what we think about it has. I couldn't find anyone who studies the really specific cannot-unsee phenomenon that I'm talking about here. See it yet? It's a dalmatian, camouflaged. What do you see? 1. 2. 3.
How to Use Deep Work to Kill Distractions and Boost Productivity Deep work, as defined by author and professor Cal Newport in his best selling book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, is a concept born out of the difficulty many people have today in handling distractions caused by the boom in digital communications. These distractions prevent us from focusing on work that matters and contributes towards us feeling overwhelmed and overworked every day, yet at the same time, leaving us feeling we are not doing work that really matters. We are reacting rather than being proactive. Deep work prevents us from reacting by scheduling time for focused work where we turn off all our notifications and devices for an hour or two and sit down in a quiet place, undisturbed, to focus on work that matters. It works, and it is something I have been using for years when I need to get a book finished or I have an important project to complete. How Deep Work Helps You Refocus There are many benefits of deep work. Unimportant Distractions Are Gone
Why every face you draw looks a little Neandertal Let’s try an experiment: Draw a face. Nothing fancy, just an oval with eyes, nose, mouth, some hair. What you’ve produced probably looks like a cartoon Neandertal. Just about everyone tends to draw faces with the eyes too high on the head, resulting in a low forehead and a rather cretinous look. It’s not just a matter of artistic talent. In reality, your eyes are right about in the middle of your head, measured vertically. “Even in painting courses, people start with exactly this bias,” Carbon says. In an experiment, people drew the eyes unnaturally high (average shown in red) when trying to draw faces from memory (top row). C.C. So Carbon and his colleague Benedikt Emanuel Wirth, both at University of Bamberg, started by asking people to draw a face in a blank box. Sadly, they only did a little better by copying. Finally, Carbon and Wirth looked at depictions of faces in research papers by three well-known researchers who study face recognition.
Clever Goal setting achieves I’m going to tell you the secrets on how to start taking action on your dreams. When you decide to turn thoughts into action, there are specific, actionable steps you can take to move forward. The first thing I want you to do is think back to when you were a child. Our childhood selves hold many of the secrets to realizing our real life dreams. By taking the following steps, you’ll do some playing and storytelling to reveal your dreams and start making them come true. 1. Your life story is unique and has brought you here today. Finding out what our future lives and dream lives might look like can be done effectively through the eyes of our childhood selves. Can you remember what you loved to do most as a child? You can use the instincts, passions, and skills you had as a child to fuel your progress toward your adult dreams. What we call getting into our flow state as an adult is what came naturally to us as children. 2. This step also involves building motivation for the steps to come. 3.
How to live longer: Find your purpose in life - Science - News According to the researchers, their results suggest that creating a purpose for yourself could promote healthy ageing throughout adulthood. “Our findings point to the fact that finding a direction for life, and setting overarching goals for what you want to achieve can help you actually live longer, regardless of when you find your purpose,” says lead researcher Dr Patrick Hill of Carleton University in Canada. Purposefulness has previously been found to be one of the strongest predictors of longevity, but this is the first study in which this effect has been isolated from other psychological and social influences on lifespan. It is also the first to include younger age groups. Having a sense of purpose was consistently linked to longer life across all age categories, leading Dr Hill to believe that “the earlier someone comes to a direction for life, the earlier these protective effects may be able to occur."
7 Most Important Cognitive Skills for Fast and Successful Learning One of the biggest problems with the traditional education model is it works on the premise that one size fits all. As we now know, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work well in a universal education system as we all possess different cognitive skills. At the basic level, there are 4 learning types: visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic, and each of us are dominant in one or more of these types. Visual learners learn better in an environment where there are a lot of visual stimuli. However, on top of these basic learning types, there are also cognitive skills related to the way our brains process information. Understanding where we are strong and where we lack skills helps us improve what and how we learn. One of the advantages we have over our ancestors is the almost limitless access we have to free education. However, with those almost limitless possibilities, you will not learn anything effectively unless you know and understand what kind of learner you are. 1. 2. 3.
Body Language of the Hands “Among all species, our human hands are unique -- not only in what they can accomplish, but also in how they communicate. Human hands can paint the Sistine Chapel, pluck a guitar, maneuver surgical instruments, chisel a David, forge steel, and write poetry. They can grasp, scratch, poke, punch, feel, sense, evaluate, hold and mold the world around us. Our hands are extremely expressive; they can sign for the deaf, help tell a story, or reveal our innermost thoughts.” (“ What Every Body is Saying , ” Harper Collins) No other species has appendages with such a remarkable range of capabilities. And yet if you asked most people about the nonverbals ( body language ) of the hands, they would be hard pressed to tell you all the things the hands reveal. It is interesting that our brain gives a disproportionate amount of attention to the fingers, and hands, as compared to the rest of the body. Our human need to see hands is so important you can try a simple experiment. .
A System for Remembering What you Read One year I read 161 books cover-to-cover. And that doesn’t include the ones that I started to read and put down. In the process, I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. Here’s some of what I’ve learned that works for non-fiction books: Learn How to Read a Book.Deciding not to read the book is OK. One thing that most people don’t appreciate enough is that what you read makes a huge difference in how well you remember things. We fail to remember a lot of the stuff we read because it’s not building on any existing knowledge. A better approach is to build a latticework of mental models. If you’re looking to acquire worldly wisdom, time is your best filter.
Just Twenty-Five Pages a Day I love bookshelves. I love the physical act of having the books up there on the shelves to be looked at, admired, remembered. When I was younger, I really enjoyed the library, and I still do. But I learned over time that for me to own a book — intellectually — I needed to own the damn book. I needed to have it close by for reference. I needed to be able to write in it and take it down off the shelf and put it back on the shelf and take it down off the shelf and put it back on the — you get it. So I went about building my Anti-library, and today, even after giving away hundreds of books, my shelves are stocked. Reading Big Books Looking at my shelves recently, I saw a book I’d wanted to read for the longest time, and in fact had started over the summer, stopping after about 150 pages to move on to more “immediate” reads. It was The Power Broker, by Robert Caro. It’s awesomely well written, not a slog in any sense of the word, but even great books take time just due to sheer volume.
How a Decision Journal Changed the Way I make Decisions (Template Included) Decision journals are an easy way to improve your ability to make decisions over time. In this article we’ll cover: Ok, let’s dig in. Your Product is Decisions In most organizations today, your product is decisions. Bosses would be the easy solution to helping you improve. Even if we can’t get our boss to help us make better decisions we can take things into our own hands. Go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. A decision journal helps you collect accurate and honest feedback on what you were thinking at the time you made the decision. The key to understanding the limits to our knowledge (see circle of competence) is to check the results of our decisions against what we thought was going to happen and why we thought it was going to happen. I’ll give you the spoiler right now. Our minds revise history to preserve our view of ourselves. What is a Decision Journal? The act of writing in itself helps you. A Decision Journal Template
People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more By guest blogger Tom Stafford We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is better than everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the only correct opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, you are that person. No psychologist would be surprised that people who are convinced their beliefs are superior think they are better informed than others, but this fact leads to a follow on question: are people actually better informed on the topics for which they are convinced their opinion is superior? This is what Michael Hall and Kaitlin Raimi set out to check in a series of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The researchers distinguish “belief superiority” from “belief confidence” (thinking your opinion is correct). As well as simple background knowledge, the researchers were also interested in how people with belief superiority sought out new information relevant to that belief. Overall the research presents a mixed picture. Like this:
Neuroscientists discover a molecular mechanism that allows memories to form When the brain forms a memory of a new experience, neurons called engram cells encode the details of the memory and are later reactivated whenever we recall it. A new MIT study reveals that this process is controlled by large-scale remodeling of cells' chromatin. This remodeling, which allows specific genes involved in storing memories to become more active, takes place in multiple stages spread out over several days. Changes to the density and arrangement of chromatin, a highly compressed structure consisting of DNA and proteins called histones, can control how active specific genes are within a given cell. "This paper is the first to really reveal this very mysterious process of how different waves of genes become activated, and what is the epigenetic mechanism underlying these different waves of gene expression," says Li-Huei Tsai, the director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the senior author of the study. Epigenomic control Primed for expression
The Minimalistic Gmail Cheat Sheet 79,178views 72faves 72shares Did you know that you can browse through gmail without using the mouse much? This is a cheat sheet that provides you with an in depth view of gmail shortcuts, the description of what they do, and a il... lustration of where the results appear in your monitor. Did you work on this visual? Get a Quote 79,178views 72faves 72shares Did you know that you can browse through gmail without using the mouse much? Did you work on this visual? Get a Quote 79,178views 72faves 72shares Did you know that you can browse through gmail without using the mouse much? Did you work on this visual? Get a Quote