Author: Susan Weinschenk
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #58 — People See What They Expect To See
During December of 2009, Farid Seif, a businessman from Houston, Texas, boarded a flight in Houston with a loaded handgun in his laptop case. He made it through security without a problem. Farid is not a terrorist. The gun is legal in Texas; he forgot to take it out of his laptop case before his…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #57 — There Are 4 Types Of Creativity
Have you heard someone say, “Oh, John – he’s so creative! I wish I was creative like that.” It makes it sound as if creativity is a natural skill or talent, like the ability to sing or paint. Other times people say “I’m going to a seminar to learn how to be more creative.” That…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #56: People Process Information Best In Story Form
One day, many years ago, when I was early in my career, I found myself in front of a classroom full of people who did not want to be there. Their boss had told them they had to attend the class I was giving. I knew that many, even most, of them thought the class…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #55 – During Sleep You Consolidate Learnings and Memories
Why do people sleep? — Well, not just people, but all kinds of animals sleep. When you think about it, it’s actually quite a strange idea that for 1/4 to 1/3 of each day we go unconscious and are oblivious to the world around us. Scientists for years have wondered and studied what goes on…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #54 — The Average Reading Level In the USA Is Grade 8
If you are a biologist, then the paragraph below might make sense to you: “The regulation of the TCA cycle is largely determined by substrate availability and product inhibition. NADH, a product of all of the deydrogenases in the TCA cycle, with the exception of succinate dehydrogenase, inhibits pyruvate dehydrogenase, isocitrate dehydrogenase, a-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase, while…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #53 — People See Cues About How To Use An Object
You’ve probably had the experience of encountering a door handle that doesn’t work the way it should – for example, it has a handle that looks like you should pull, but in fact you need to push. In the “real” world, objects communicate to you about how you can, and should, interact with them. For…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #52: People Create Mental Models
Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #51 — You React To Colors Based On Your Culture
Many years ago I worked with a client who had created a color map of the different business regions for their business, showing the total revenue for the quarter for each region. Yellow was for the Eastern part of the US, green for the Central, etc. They had used red for the western states. The…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #50 — 9 Percent Of Men And .5% Of Women Are Colorblind
The term color blindness is actually misleading. Most people who are “color blind” are not blind to all colors, but really have a color deficiency that makes it hard for them to see differences between some colors. Different types of color blindness — There are many different kinds of color blindness, but the most common…
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100 Things You Should Know About People: #49 — The Brain Looks For Simple Patterns
What do you see when you look at the x’s below? xx xx xx xx Chances are you will say you see four sets of 2 x’s each. You won’t see them as 8 separate x’s. You interpret the white space, or lack of it, as a pattern. People are great at…
