Tricking Your Brain To a Better Life
Have you ever wondered what makes the difference between a virtuoso like Ray Charles and the guy putting in his piano set at your local...
The Secret to Good Communication: It's All About the BIC
You may not know the name of Hungarian journalist László József Bíró, but if you’ve ever written a shopping list or jotted down a quick...
The Peak End Rule, or, The Secret to a Winning Colonoscopy
When we consider ourselves as individuals, we tend to think in terms of a single entity with agency. In essence, I take on information...
What Dreams are Made of (or at Least, the Why)
Whatever happened to Sigmund Freud? Of course, the answer is that he died, but not before taking modern science down a fifty-year rabbit...
How to Not Eat a Marshmallow (Willpower Part Two)
In last week’s post, we learned how Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow test demonstrated that preschoolers with a willpower strategy...
The Marshmallow Connection: What Determines Success?
Although he didn’t realize it then, when Walter Mischel and his team turned their attention to preschoolers at the Bing Nursery School on...
Zen and the Art of Riffing
Q: What did the Zen master say to the hotdog vendor? A: “Make me one with everything...” Central to the premise of this old joke is the...
The Smoking Monkey Memo
The inventor of the airplane seatbelt was a man ahead of his time. It's an over-used expression but in this case, it applies: engineer...
Stereotype Threat, or, Secret Messages and You
One of the most disorienting ideas in Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is just how susceptible...
Why Your Mindset Might be Throwing You Curveballs
Are you wired for success? And by “success”, I’m not necessarily talking about monetary reward. In her paper “The Mindset of a Champion”,...
