On autopilot
Imagine a busy housewife, with impatient kids in tow, walking through the supermarket to find fishcakes and chips (or perhaps noodles and vegetables) for the evening meal. Her mind is focused on the task in hand and finding the right items, along with trying to listen to descriptions of the school day just gone. All of us do many things (arguably most things) in our day via an internal autopilot. Whether it’s brushing our teeth, driving to work, or buying our evening meal, much of our behaviour is learnt and unconscious. Read more »
We are all ‘live wires’
How does the brain make connections? Brain scans show areas of our brain ‘lighting up’ when we make decisions (although beware that more activity doesn’t make the decision more important). But what is really going on? There is a huge amount of activity (electrical and chemical) going on within our brains. Read more »
The growing brain
As we have learnt, the brain didn’t spring into being but emerged over time. The most obvious evidence for the evolution of the brain is its structure. Firstly, our brain is quite large, but not as large as some other animals. However, relative to our body mass, the brain outweighs all our fellow creatures! Interestingly, one of the common threads between those animals with relatively larger brain sizes is that they are all very social animals. Read more »
I can’t think why
After facilitating two fun-packed days on consumer psychology last week, I picked up the latest edition of Newsweek which had a lead article on the very same topic written by Sharon Begley (link below). Sharon Begley focuses on the impact of the ‘Twitterization’ of culture, arguing that our brains are sometimes so overloaded with information that they simply freeze. The story is backed up by neuro-imaging studies of brian activity during decision making, which show that when overwhelmed with information our conscious brains sometimes literally ‘switch off’. More importantly, with too much information, our decisions can make less and less sense. Read more »
“All action is of the mind and the mirror of the mind is the face, its index the eyes.” – Cicero
“The knowledge of good and evil is nothing else by the emotions of pleasure or pain, in so far as we are conscious thereof.” – Baruch Spinoza
The importance of face
In Lie to Me, the central protagonist Cal Lightman (played by Tim Roth) uses facial expressions and body language to uncover the truth behind what other people are saying. The character is informed by the psychologist Paul Ekman, who has spent decades researching the universality of human emotions and developed the Facial Action Coding System which is the basis of Lightman’s investigations using facial ‘microexpressions’ (as well as body language and voice) to unmask the reality behind each situation. Read more »
“The easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self, for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.” – Demosthenes
“Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.” – Jean Jacques Rousseau
‘I would never have missed something like that!’
How many times have we all missed something important (hopefully with no serious consequences)? Too often I hear, ‘Did you see what just happened?’ when I am unaware that anything interesting happened at all! The Invisible Gorilla explains my inattentional blindness as we have written about before, and also explains five other ways in which we all deceive ourselves, with illusions of attention, memory, knowledge, cause and potential. Read more »
“All right, brain. I don’t like you ad you don’t like me – so let’s just do this and I’ll get back to killing you with beer.” - Homer Simpson Read more »
Insight or foresight?
We have written previously about the important role of seeing the future in evaluating the value of insights, and about Prometheus as a role model for foresight with a name and values who embodies the best characteristics of market researchers. So should we replace the word insight with foresight? And apart from insight, what more is needed to inspire truly breakthrough ideas and innovations? Read more »
“Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.” - Cesare Pavese Read more »
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne
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