Author: Susan Weinschenk

You’ve learned about the positive effect that daydreaming has on creativity. The same is true for sleep, but it works on the brain in a different way than daydreaming. Boost Your Creativity By At Least 33 Percent If I told you that there’s a way to boost your creativity by at least 33 percent and…

Now that you know about the three brain networks that are involved in the creative process, there’s some related research to be aware of. Some of this research focuses on daydreaming. Daydreaming refers to the thoughts and images people have when their attention turns inward—when they’re in default network mode. Most scientists today use the…

We’ve all had the experience: you’re trying to solve a problem or come up with a new idea. You’ve been sitting at your desk, or discussing it in meetings, but you haven’t come up with a solution or the right idea. Then you step away—go for a walk, go to lunch, do some housework, or…

You’re at work, it’s after lunch, and you realize you’re sitting at your desk, staring into space, and not thinking about anything in particular. Your brain is, relatively speaking, at rest. Your mind is wandering. What would your brain activity show at this moment?The default network engages when you’re not doing anything in particular. You…

You may associate creativity with being loose and free. You may imagine a painter having no plan and throwing paint at a canvas to see what happens. You may imagine a composer sitting at a piano and letting his hands wander up and down the keys to just hear what sounds might come out. Exploring…

Creativity isn’t a trait that some people have and others don’t. Before I explain why that’s true, let me first define what I mean by creativity. If 100 people looked at the same abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, many of them might say, “Oh, that artist is really creative,” but not everyone. If 100 people…

People’s interactions with machines are moving beyond anthropomorphism and trust. People are now encountering situations in which they’re developing social relationships with machines and robots. Kate Darling is a research specialist at the MIT Media Lab. She conducts research with a dinosaur toy called Pleo that looks like a baby dinosaur. Darling has people interact…

How do you design interactions between people and machines when the machines are now doing tasks that humans used to do? What do people expect from these machines, and how do people react to their design? Anthropomorphism And Trust Adam Waytz, Joy Heafner, and Nicholas Epley (2014) wanted to know if giving machines more human-like…

Imagine that you’re sitting in a restaurant with a friend and he takes his smartphone out of his pocket, turns off the sound, and puts it off to the side, face down, on the table. He doesn’t touch it all through the meal you have together. He doesn’t look at it, text with it, or…

There’s a lot of research about how talking or texting on a cell phone is distracting and leads to lower performance on cognitive (thinking) tasks, but research by Bill Thornton (2014) shows that people don’t even have to be using the cell phone for it to have an effect. Just having the cell phone nearby…