Jeremy Gershfeld is listening

Why is Trader Joe's so successful?

2012-01-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

This is from Los Angeles magazine:
Enchanted Aisles - Features - Los Angeles magazine

Its about the secretive ownership of Trader Joe's and why it is so successful. In a nutshell:

Joe Coulombe’s (original owner) singular gift to consumers was to evaluate groceries as a museum director would art. More than anything else, this distinction sets Trader Joe’s apart.

Fear is the greatest destroyer of attention

2011-12-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

In Judith Warner's follow-up to Perfect Madness, called We've got Issues, Edward M. Hallowell is quoted about ADT (Attention deficit trait).

ADT is caused at base by overload, by having impossible amounts of work to do and being haunted by the awful sense of the impossibility of getting it done. Fear is the greatest destroyer of attention, because emotion is the on/off switch for executive functioning.

It is interesting in observing attention deficit symptoms, that executive functioning is not solely the responsibility of the prefontal cortex. Fear is limbic.

Japanese firms shop abroad: Armed with a strong yen | The Economist

2011-12-17T06:13:00.000-08:00

Japanese firms shop abroad: Armed with a strong yen | The Economist
When old people retire, they tend to live off their savings. They supply capital to younger, sprightlier, cash-strapped folk, who put it to work and pay dividends or interest to the retirees. That is, roughly speaking, what Asia’s aging archipelago is starting to do.

Physical postures of dominance and the endocrine system

2011-11-10T15:56:00.001-08:00

More on Harvard Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy's research about snap judgements and physical posture:

Cuddy's research has demonstrated that different physical postures are directly linked to the endocrine system showing the links between stances, gestures, and hormones.

Recently, she has begun to study nonverbal cues that drive perceptions of competence, which relate directly to one’s position in the social pecking order: a star athlete, for example, enjoys far higher status than a journeyman. “Dominance and power are highly correlated with perceived competence,” she says, “and people make inferences of competence based on how dominant someone appears.”
“In all animal species, postures that are expansive, open, and take up more space are associated with high power and dominance,” she says. “Postures that are contractive—limbs touching torso, protecting the vital organs, taking up minimal space—are associated with low power, being at the bottom of the hierarchy. Any animal you can think of, when it’s prey, makes itself as small as possible.”
In primates, these postures also correlate with testosterone and cortisol levels. Expansive, high-power postures mean (in both sexes) high testosterone, a hormone that animal and human studies connect with dominance and power, and low levels of cortisol (the “stress” hormone), while the inverse holds for contractive, low-power postures. “Those endocrine profiles are associated with disease resistance,” Cuddy says. “Low testosterone and high cortisol make you very vulnerable to diseases, so you’re more likely to be picked off by whatever comes through. At the top, you’re more disease-resistant.”
Until recently, primatologists believed that those who inherited high-power neuroendocrine profiles became the dominant creatures in their groups, the so-called alpha males or females. “But it turns out that those hormone levels change when you take on the dominant role,” Cuddy explains. “If an alpha is killed and another primate has to take over that position, his or her testosterone and cortisol levels will change in just a few days. Likewise, if you get pushed to the bottom, your hormone profile shifts. It’s both cause and effect. It’s possible that slight innate differences in neuroendocrine profiles are greatly exaggerated by role assignment.”
In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, Cuddy, Dana R. Carney, and Andy J. Yap (both of Columbia) report how they measured hormone levels of 42 male and female research subjects, placed the subjects in two high-power or low-power poses for a minute per pose, then re-measured their hormone levels 17 minutes later. They also offered subjects a chance to gamble, rolling a die to double a $2 stake. The results were astonishing: a mere two minutes in high- or low-power poses caused testosterone to rise and cortisol to decrease—or the reverse. Those in high-power stances were also more likely to gamble, enacting a trait (risk taking) associated with dominant individuals; they also reported feeling more powerful. “If you get this effect in two minutes, imagine what you get sitting in the CEO’s chair for a year,” Cuddy says.

Judging Competence

2011-11-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a Profile of social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School from Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2010

Her work is about how a person's physical posture gives immediate social cues for others to judge.
Our first impressions register far too quickly for any nuanced weighing of data: “Within less than a second, using facial features, people make what are called ‘spontaneous trait inferences.'"

That's just interpreting body language, one might say?

She also writes about the warmth/competence dichotomy. People will be quick to judge someone as warm and forgive their perceived incompetence; however if they are judged to be lacking in warmth, they better be competent, or will be written off. Cuddy also describes how we want other people to be warm, but we want to be competent.

Warmth is not only perceived first, but accounts for more of someone’s overall evaluation than competence. The warm/cold assessment amounts to a reading of the other’s intentions, positive or negative.

Competence is assayed next: how capable is someone of carrying out those intentions? “If it’s an enemy who’s competent,” Cuddy explains, “we probably want to be vigilant.” Surprisingly, in their self-perceptions, individuals value competence over warmth. “We want other people to be warm, but we want to be competent,” she says. “We’d rather have people respect us than like us.” (Cuddy thinks this human tendency represents a mistaken judgment: “Social connections will take you farther than respect.”)

There’s an interesting asymmetry. Many acts can indicate competence: scoring well on a College Board exam (SAT), for example, or knowing how to handle a sailboat, or deftly navigating through a software application. Demonstrating a single positive-competent behavior tends to broaden into a wider aura of competence: someone with a high SAT score, for example, will be viewed as generally competent. In contrast, a single negative-competent behavior—not knowing how to sail, for example—does not generalize into a perception of overall incompetence: it will simply be dismissed as, say, an unlearned skill. “Positive competence is weighted more heavily than negative competence,” Cuddy summarizes.

With warmth, the inverse applies. Someone who does something nice, like helping an elderly pedestrian across an intersection, is not necessarily seen as a generally nice person. But a single instance of negative-warmth behavior—kicking a dog, say—is likely to irredeemably categorize the perpetrator as a cold person.

In other words, people feel that a single positive-competent, or negative-warmth, act reveals character. “You can purposely present yourself as warm—you can control that,” Cuddy explains. “But we feel that competence can’t be faked. So positive competence is seen as more diagnostic. On the other hand, being a jerk—well, we’re not very forgiving of people who act that way.”

“People tend to see warmth and competence as inversely related. If there’s a surplus of one trait, they infer a deficit of the other.” In a business context, she says, this means that “The more competent you are, the less nice you must be. And vice versa: Someone who comes across as really nice must not be too smart.” This pattern is the opposite of the halo effect: a plus on one dimension demands a minus on the other. The unconscious logic might be: If she were really competent, she wouldn’t need to be so nice; and conversely, the highly competent person doesn’t have to be nice—and may even have reached the top by stepping on others."

Why Do Some People Learn Faster? (from Wired.com)

2011-11-10T15:26:00.000-08:00

Why Do Some People Learn Faster? | Wired Science | Wired.com
Jonah Lehrer discovers a paper about why people learn faster from their feedback. It has something to do with the anterior cingulate cortex of the limbic region of our brain.

A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?

The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroenchephalography, or EEG. The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up.

The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

In this new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less than half a second. More specifically, the scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mindset, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.

The Lost Secret of Running - Video Library - The New York Times

2011-11-09T08:09:00.000-08:00

This is the way to run without injuring yourself. Think barefoot and super efficient African distance runner.
Here's a link to the article:
The Lost Secret of Running - Video Library - The New York Times

Developing curiosity

2011-11-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

Tristan Harris, the founder of Apture, a company whose technology makes it "frictionless to access information on the web without leaving the page," posted these thoughts accompanied by an interesting slide about curiosity as a system which feeds on itself.

½ of knowledge = exposure and awareness

Awareness creates familiarity

We gravitate towards things that are familiar

How Symphonies Grew Strong Audiences By Killing The Myth Of The Average Consumer | Fast Company

2011-10-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

I saw this on Fast Company online. It is a vexing problem facing classical symphony orchestras: How to bring in and maintain audiences.
How Symphonies Grew Strong Audiences By Killing The Myth Of The Average Consumer | Fast Company

The article points out:
A pro bono third-party study by Oliver Wyman (Audience Growth Initiative) found that on average, symphonies lost 55% of their customers each year; churn among first-time concert-goers was 91%! The study also confirmed that the solution to churn was to move beyond "averages" and to begin looking at the wide variations between starkly different customer groups.

What was the thing keeping newcomers from returning? Was it the stunning and sublime music? No. It was the parking!
The symphonies compiled a list of 78 attributes of the classical music experience, from the architecture of the hall to the service at the bar to the availability of information on the Internet. Using online surveys and other techniques, the list was whittled down to 16 factors with the greatest impact on attendance.
Horns and strings! It turns out the quality of the orchestra, magnificence of the hall, and virtuosity of the conductor were not particularly important attributes. What was? Drum roll! The most powerful "driver of revisitation" was parking! As with other orchestras, veteran members of the core BSO audience had figured out where to park, but trialists identified it as a huge hassle--so they didn't come back. The so-called "Churn Report" showed that classical music itself was not the problem with declining audiences. The problem was the overall customer experience, and customer expectations were quite different for each group.
The moral of the story for symphony orchestra directors: De-averaging customers requires research and analysis, the type of quantitative and qualitative research that non cultural institutions must do to find and keep their customers.

The Divergent Fortunes of Saab and Volvo - NYTimes.com

2011-10-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

Saab is having its last gasp. Even its museum pieces from the original product are being used as collateral.

The Divergent Fortunes of Saab and Volvo - NYTimes.com

Kohler’s Numi Is Everything One Wants in a Toilet, and a Lot More - NYTimes.com

2011-10-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

Industrial design in the bathroom is still important! It does not so much say “toilet” as much as “giant building block from Lego: the Marcel Breuer Collection.”

Kohler’s Numi Is Everything One Wants in a Toilet, and a Lot More - NYTimes.com

NYT answers the question: Why would anyone want a high-tech, $6,400 toilet?

It is possible to acclimate to such luxury. Anyone who has ever owned a car with a backup camera or heated seats knows what this means. Features that initially seem unnecessary can become something you cannot do without, even in a bathroom.

The most striking feature of the Numi is what you don’t get: any visible levers or buttons. All the Numi controls are handled through a touch screen remote control that is somewhat larger than an iPod Touch. That remote controls flushing, cleaning, drying, music, heating and other settings and preferences; combinations of preferences can be stored in user profiles for different family members. When not in use, the remote docks in a magnetic charging cradle that can be mounted on the wall. There are backup buttons at the rear of the toilet just in case the remote is not working.

Steve Jobs: Imitated, Never Duplicated - NYTimes.com

2011-10-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs: Imitated, Never Duplicated - NYTimes.com

David Pogue of the New York Times ode to Steve Jobs:

The story of Steve Jobs boils down to this: Don’t go with the flow.

Mr. Jobs is gone. Everyone who knew him feels that sorrow. But the ripples of that loss will widen in the days, weeks and years to come: to the people in the industries he changed. To his hundreds of millions of customers. And to the billions of people touched more indirectly by the greater changes that Steve Jobs brought about, even if they’re unaware of it.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement address to the graduating students at Stanford. He told them the secret that defined him in every action, every decision, every creation of his tragically unfinished life:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Clear direction removes problems of inertia

2011-10-11T08:59:00.001-07:00

As a parent, teacher and collaborator, I am often confronted with the problem of how to get started, on the way towards getting things done. I need this project done, get this homework done. Why don't we ask the question, how do we get started? Often the barriers to getting started (in no particular order) are:

Lack of direction of what to do
No over arching vision for the project
Poor organization of the elements to do
Emotional block to starting because of repeated experiences from all of the above.

Sometimes this is created because the instructions (if the project is dictated externally) are not clear. You have to figure out what is wanted. This relates to these possibilities:

Poor organization.
Lack of understanding what the vision for project is.
Poor communication to what the project is and what is requested from the completion of the project.

Many times this inertia is easily overcome with good vision; communicated in an organized and relaxed manner, with clear expectations.
If the the project is self directed, start with a clear vision and move forward with good organization.

Now, if my kids would only use these directions when doing their homework!

William Ury: The walk from “no” to “yes”

2011-10-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

Neurotrophic Factors in Spark

2011-10-06T16:15:00.001-07:00

I was looking through Dr. John Ratey's book, Spark, recently. The book offers Ratey's thoughts on how exercise can alleviate some mental ailments such as ADHD, depression, anxiety etc.

Here are the highlights which intrigued me:

Ratey talks about a prominent brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which builds and maintains the cell circuitry. This is different than a neurotransmitter, which only carries out signaling.

Ratey writes that copious aerobic exercise stimulates the BDNF.

Another area which I was more familiar with is about long term potentiation:
When the brain is called on to take in information, the demand naturally causes activity between neurons. The more activity, the stronger the attraction becomes, and the easier it is for the signal to fire and make the connection. The initial activity marshals existing stores of glutamate in the axon to be sent across the synapse and reconfigures receptors on the receiving side to accept the signal. The voltage on the receiving side of the synapse becomes stronger in its resting state, thereby attracting the glutamate signal like a magnet. If the firing continues, genes inside the neuron's cell nucleus are turned on to produce more building materials for the synapses, and it is this bolstering of the infrastructure that allows the new information to stick as a memory.

I've written in this blog about the how repeated potentiation process produces more myelin, which insulates the connections making the firing synapses work more efficiently.

More from Spark:
A neuron is like a tree that instead of leaves has synapses along its dendritic branches; eventually new branches sprout, providing more synapses to further solidify the connections. These changes are a form of cellular adaptation called synaptic plasticity, which is where BDNF takes center stage. Researchers found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing the same growth required for learning. BDNF also binds to receptors at the synapse, unleashing the flow of ions to increase the voltage and immediately improve the signal strength. Inside the cell, BDNF activates genes that call for the production of more BDNF as well as serotonin and proteins that build up the synapses. BDNF directs traffic and engineers the roads as well. Overall it improves the functions of neurons, encourages their growth, and strengthens and protects them against the natural process of cell death.

Harnessing the creative personality in the information age

2011-09-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Creativity about how deeply creative people are able to search for and digest large amounts of information within different domains to serve their curiosity on subjects of interest to them. Such people seem to have a gift for quickly weeding out extraneous information in this pursuit. When they find something they see as relevant to their curiosity on a given subject, it seems to feed a developing gestalt in their minds, conscious or otherwise, leading to a brand new idea or organization of ideas.

It strikes me that this type of person is especially useful in our age of overwhelming information. We have access to everything, but it may seem to only bog us down. It would be helpful to harness these information seekers, organizers, and meaning makers.

The question is how. Maybe just ask them?

Andrew Zuckerman: Curiosity and Rigor are the Secret to Creativity | Brain Pickings

2011-09-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

Andrew Zuckerman: Curiosity and Rigor are the Secret to Creativity | Brain Pickings

This blog has posted many thoughts on how we attempt the duality of skill development with the divergent creative thinking. Here's Andrew Zuckerman's take.

Heat players discuss their relationship

2011-05-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

LeBron James and Dwyane Wade discussing their relationship? In their championship quest, they understand their relationship involves more than being best "friends." As I mentioned in the previous post about Jose Mourinho, when the pressure is on, emotions swirl. Productive feedback must remain essential to the relationship. This means paying attention in each relationship to how every person emotionally reacts to a situation. This calibration is essential to the working relationship. It seems as if LeBron and Dwyane are aware of this:

From ESPN.com

"It's not a bed of roses with me and [Wade] and [Chris Bosh]. We get on each other if we feel like they're not doing they're job," James said. "We feel like it is constructive criticism that we need to have for one another to have a productive team. Anytime you have new teammates, it doesn't matter if you're friends or not, you have to realize certain people react to certain situations.

Earlier this season in Chicago, Wade didn't stay home and attempted to help James on defense against Derrick Rose. Wade's man, Luol Deng, hit the game-winning 3-pointer as a result. James was furious at Wade and let him know at the time.

When the situation arose again, the Heat successfully defended a similar play as James forced Andre Iguodala into a miss, with Wade staying at home on his man. Wade said he'd learned from the situation against the Bulls and didn't want to get another "scalding look" from James.

"There's been times where he's gotten on me for something and vice versa," Wade said.

"If I make a mistake and he calls me out on it ... I might say you're right. Sometimes I won't agree with him and I'll say, 'I don't agree,' and we'll move on. We'll come back later and we'll discuss it. We're not always patting each other on the back. Our job is to get the best out of each other so when we see an opportunity to do that, we have to be leaders and step up and do that."

What's So Special About Jose Mourinho?

2011-05-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

In light of the Champions league soccer match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona...

This is a headline taken from Grant Wahl's exposé about the famed soccer (er...futból) coach in a recent Sports Illustrated.

Wahl writes:
He hasn't lost a league game at home in nine years and is eyeing an unprecedented third Champions League title with a third team. Real Madrid's maestro may be the best coach in any sport, anywhere.

Mourinho is Portugese, and is fluent in 5 languages. He uses all his languages (and language) to communicate with each player in their mother tongue, developing a tremendous trust with each relationship. He makes use of these relationships as the foundation for implementing his team strategy.

He is quoted about the importance of these relationships:

A football coach who only understands football is not a great coach, says Mourinho. We have to be good in other things. I never forget: My players are men. Men with different personalities, different cultures. To deal with this is very important in building a team.

How important is the interpersonal cohesion? When emotions fly, (as they do in any pressurized situation) the players feel that the coach has their back, because he has taken the time to know each one.

The interpersonal is integrated with a strategic structure based on tactical awareness: Mourinho makes sure that each player has an acute tactical sense to take advantage of every opportunity. In soccer, he believes that these opportunities happen in transitions. If each player possesses this awareness and communicates well with their teammates, these transitions, become even bigger opportunities.

The decisive moments in most games, he argues, are transitions, the instants when teams spring from defense to attack (and vice versa) after a change of possession, when opponents can be off-balance. "These are periods of three or four seconds," he says. "If the players are of high quality, the game sometimes is nonstop. You must have a great balance. That's why I believe in having players with the tactical culture to analyze the game. All of them have to think the same thing at the same time.

A Mourinho coached team:

Feels understood by the coach, and is willing to commit to his strategy.
Possesses tactical awareness to take advantage of opportunities in transition.
Wins practically all their games (FC Barcelona excepted).

Tension between familiarity and mystery

2011-02-04T15:01:00.000-08:00

On May 26, 1996, Mariana Cook visited Barack and Michelle Obama in Hyde Park as part of a photography project on couples in America.

Before he was Senator or President, Obama knew of the innate tension between contradictory notions which fuels growth in a relationship:

It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

Is there a connection from this notion to the contraction of skill and creativity? Perhaps it is the lack of reductivism in both?

Beef-tongue hash with black truffles

2011-01-07T11:09:00.000-08:00

I just practically ate this story in the NYT about Hash.

When I saw the duck egg exquisitely balanced on top of the beef tongue hash, well, let's just say I was diverted from my banal Friday existence.

Here’s a preview:

At his modest restaurant Stove, on an equally modest block of Astoria, Queens, Mr. Cass makes a hash that many consider the best in New York, a title that he wears lightly. It’s simple, he says: two kinds of boiled potatoes, diced and mashed. Caramelized onions, present in two forms: sliced, and ground. House-corned beef, purpose-made for the dish. The whole of it mixed together on Saturday night, ready for Sunday morning’s brunch rush. “Season it up and let it sit, that’s the only secret,” he said. The final cooking step is turning the meat and potatoes and onions together in the pan (or on a griddle), pressing down to make the edges of everything crisp up. The ingredients must be jumbled together — made a hash of. If the ingredients are coerced into tidy separate circles, well, that’s not hash. (Chefliness can go too far).

The article goes on to mention that it is the Chicago restaurant (Longman & Eagle) where the chef makes the above pictured beef-tongue hash with black truffles.

Read further at your own risk:

Longman & Eagle in Chicago, which GQ’s restaurant critic, Alan Richman, termed a “neo-flophouse,” serves an elegant, tidy appetizer of beef tongue and black truffle hash. It is made with tiny diced potatoes cooked in duck fat, and topped with a duck egg. In lieu of onions, shallots are roasted overnight at low heat, bathed in clarified butter.
“Hash may be a flophouse dish,” acknowledged the restaurant’s chef, Jared Wentworth. “But hey, this is the only flophouse in the world with a Michelin star.”

I am salivating in silence...

Maxing out an NBA player's sensory system

2011-01-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

I spent a week in Sanibel, FL at the end of 2010 and checked out a beach read from the library. My book of note, The Art of a Beautiful Game, by the SI writer, Chris Ballard was reviewed in the NYT in comparison to my favorite sports blogger, Bill Simmons, and his book about basketball. I was intrigued. This book was less a paean to the game compared with Simmons' book, and more of a journalist's exploration into what makes today's NBA player tick. 3/5 was really interesting. He writes about Kobe Bryant's competitiveness, Steve Kerr’s jump shot, LeBron James' body, which was all very fun. The most intriguing parts were how a specialized field of trainers have emerged to teach the skills ostensibly taught in high school and college, before AAU traveling teams and 1 year/ skipped college stays. One of these private trainers, Idan Ravin uses specific exercises to overload the sensory system to teach court awareness during pressurized game situations. Instead of dribbling one basketball through a series of drills, he has players dribble two, while simultaneously performing another distracting task. This teaches their minds/bodies to prepare for the sensory overload of a real game in which the competition is fierce and 20 thousand people in an arena screaming at them. Another trainer, Chip Engelland, teaches how to shoot (including illuminating interviews with Kerr and Ray Allen) focusing on process over outcome. A foul shot was analyzed by deconstructing shooting form, and then practicing a process to enact, so that one doesn’t over think the shot. The idea is that once good form is achieved, any stray thought while shooting is the equivalent of the yip in a golf putt. You practice how not to think. One theme that was consistent with all the great players (read: most skilled) is the need to practice relentlessly with maximum effort, and maximum focus of intention. Extrapolating from my blog post about a distractible person in a good mood being being most likely to find a loose connection which begets creative thought, it explains quite well why it is so rare to come across a person who possesses both the very pinnacle of skill combined with the pinnacle of creativity. My observations of basketball players and classical musicians confirm this. To improve both skill and creativity, you have to understand the inherent contradiction of achieving in these different realms. In the next few days, I'll try connecting this contradiction to my query about the competitive vs. the curious in terms of motivation.

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm

2010-12-31T13:43:00.000-08:00

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm from NYTimes.com,
describes the emerging offshoot of management consulting that is based on teaching innovation.
Yes, this is my industry. Its an interesting piece worth reading, most ominously, that the management consulting giants are watching, and looking to absorb this segment.
One thing going for the innovation consultants, is that smaller seems to be better. When a larger organization tries to teach this, something gets lost in translation.

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com

2010-12-30T17:32:00.000-08:00

A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com

Very interesting piece (by Jonah Lehrer again) about why cities are so attractive. Not urban sprawl cities, but places where people bump into each other on foot. Lehrer writes about Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, who has turned his analysis towards understanding cities. West makes an interesting point questioning our growth model for capitalism, something I want to explore on this blog in 2011.

The idea is that the culture of a city makes people more efficient, by the constant interactions. Another reason for the urban jungle's success is demonstrated by a comparison to the life cycle of a successful corporation:

West proposes that:
“When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea, and then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”
The danger, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.
The impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is: They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”

A good mood enhances creativity

2010-12-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

I saw a piece in the NYT about insight thinking:

Insight as defined by: the leaps of understanding that seem to come out of the blue, without the incremental drudgery of analysis.

I've always believed that insightful thinking occurs when a dissonance is presented in one's thoughts, and an intrinsic motivation fuels a move towards resolution. But not too much motivation apparently, or your thinking tightens up, like a golfer getting the yips. Hence, the expression, "let me sleep on it."

I'm always interested in discovering conditions which add to fertile thought, either individually or in groups. Is it time to confirm the state of play as one of them? When we are relaxed enough to consider ideas that may not at first seem to be likely solutions (thinking out of the box) parts of our brain (anterior cingulate cortex) organize the far-fetched connection into innovative solutions.

I always tell my students (and kids) to relax and concentrate. Here's more evidence supporting that statement!

The Times reports that:

researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

This and other recent research suggest that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the dopamine-reward rush of finding a solution. The very idea of doing a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle typically shifts the brain into an open, playful state that is itself a pleasing escape.

And that escape is all the more tantalizing for being incomplete. Unlike the cryptic social and professional mazes of real life, puzzles are reassuringly soluble; but like any serious problem, they require more than mere intellect to crack.

“It’s imagination, it’s inference, it’s guessing; and much of it is happening subconsciously,” said Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of “The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life.”

“It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos."

Yet the “Aha!” moment of seeing a solution is only one step along a pathway. In a series of recent studies, Dr. Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, have imaged people’s brains as they prepare to tackle a puzzle but before they’ve seen it. Those whose brains show a particular signature of preparatory activity, one that is strongly correlated with positive moods, turn out to be more likely to solve the puzzles with sudden insight than with trial and error (the clues can be solved either way).

This signature includes strong activation in a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex. Previous research has found that cells in this area are active when people widen or narrow their attention — say, when they filter out distractions to concentrate on a difficult task, like listening for a voice in a noisy room. In this case of insight puzzle-solving, the brain seems to widen its attention, in effect making itself more open to distraction, to weaker connections..

“At this point we have strong circumstantial evidence that this resting state predicts how you solve problems later on,” Dr. Kounios said, “and that it may in fact vary by individual.”

The punch line is that a good joke can move the brain toward just this kind of state. In their humor study, Dr. Beeman and Dr. Subramaniam had college students solve word-association puzzles after watching a short video of a stand-up routine by Robin Williams. The students solved more of the puzzles over all, and significantly more by sudden insight, compared with when they’d seen a scary or boring video beforehand.

This diffuse brain state is not only an intellectual one, open to looser connections between words and concepts. In a study published last year, researchers at the University of Toronto found that the visual areas in people in positive moods picked up more background detail, even when they were instructed to block out distracting information during a computer task.

The findings fit with dozens of experiments linking positive moods to better creative problem-solving. “The implication is that positive mood engages this broad, diffuse attentional state that is both perceptual and visual,” said Dr. Anderson. “You’re not only thinking more broadly, you’re literally seeing more. The two systems are working in parallel.”