“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.  Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”  - Herbert Simon

Do you need more information?

How much can information can the world use?  It can certainly create a great deal of information according to a study by Martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California, but the ability to create and even store more and more information is not the same as the ability to understand, synthesise and communicate the information.  I believe this is one of the most important issues we face today, both as content producers and as content consumers with increasing competition for our limited attention.   Read more »

Over the past two weeks we have learnt 12 key insights into what makes us who we are, based on the latest understanding from neuroscience, behavioural economics, psychology, biology and the social sciences.  They can be summarised in three (or perhaps four) key themes, but first let’s review the 12 lessons of human behaviour. Read more »

Context in mind

We have already talked about social bias, and the human tendency to follow the herd as one of the mental shortcuts we all use to guide our decisions more quickly and efficiently.  We have also seen how context is a critical trigger of memory, and how different contexts can lead to very different behaviours even when our basic needs or goals are the same.

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Pulling the trigger

Have you ever had the experience that something was on the ‘tip of your tongue’ but you couldn’t quite remember?  That’s likely because you know the information exists, but you can’t quite find the right connection to trigger its recall.  That’s why such memories sometimes come back later when triggered by a more relevant (but often random) stimulus. Read more »

As we have seen previously, the basis of new memories are new physical connections in the brain.  The more elaborate the connections, the more meaning they have, and the more specific the context, the stronger and more long lasting is the memory. Read more »

Sensory thinking

The senses inform much of our language, as the dominant source of our experiences.  We all use words related to different senses to express ourselves (I can see your point, I hear you, I was touched by a thought), and some theories (eg NLP) claim that we have different preferences for the sensory modalities (I hear what you’re saying vs I see what you’re saying).  Thus, the senses truly help us to create our everyday expressions. Read more »

To perceive is to act

Perception is all about action. What we perceive is not just based on input from our senses, but also based on our expectations in a specific context or situation.  Our senses work very well, but our brain integrates, interpolates and interferes with the information coming from the senses to fit the data to pre-existing models of what it thinks should happen (based on a vast databank of previous experiences).  For example, our brain expects that two towers going up into the sky away from us should converge following the laws of perspective, and when they don’t (as above) this can cause unintended effects in how we perceive the world. Read more »

Making sense of the world

It’s time to get ‘tasty’ and come over all ‘touchy feely’!  The senses are our connection to the outside world, through which we build a store of memories to help us predict and control our futures.  The unique value of the human mind is that it makes our behaviour context sensitive, and the context is determined by what we sense around us. Read more »

In the last post, we saw that humans are susceptible to social bias (or herd mentality).  Our mind does not work by itself alone, but through interactions with other minds in the immediate environment or more remotely through culture and shared values.  Much of what we do is under the influence of others, often without realising, with important implications for marketing and research. Read more »

Home Economicus or Homo Sapiens?

We have seen that the majority of human behaviour is controlled outside consciousness.  This is in contrast to the classical models of economics which assume a model of man as Homo Economicus who is entirely rational, always knows what (s)he wants and is capable of calculating the precise consequences of any action.  We all know that this is nonsense, and recent economic events have once again highlighted the inadequacy of such models both for economics and further afield. Read more »