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100 More Things #157: TO BE CREATIVE, ENGAGE THE BRAIN’S DEFAULT NETWORK
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…
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5 Things to keep in mind when designing for humans
These are not the only things to think about when designing, but these 5 are some of the most important principles: Remember: the more you know about people the better you design.
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100 More Things #156: CREATIVITY STARTS WITH THE EXECUTIVE ATTENTION NETWORK
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…
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100 More Things #155: EVERYONE CAN BE CREATIVE
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…
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100 More Things #154: PEOPLE CAN FEEL EMPATHY FOR MACHINES
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…
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100 More Things #153: PEOPLE TRUST MACHINES THAT HAVE SOME HUMAN-LIKE CHARACTERISTICS
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…
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100 More Things #152: CELL PHONES NEARBY NEGATIVELY AFFECT PERSON-TO-PERSON COMMUNICATION
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…
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100 More Things #151: DEVICES WITH ALERTS LOWER COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE
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…
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100 More Things #150: WHEN PEOPLE FEEL CONNECTED, THEY WORK HARDER
Gregory Walton is a professor at Stanford who has studied the important effects of belonging on behavior. In one of his experiments, Walton (2012) found that when college students believed they shared a birthday with another student, they were more motivated to complete a task…
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100 More Things #149: OXYTOCIN IS THE BONDING CHEMICAL
Singing and theater are favorite hobbies of mine. At various points in my life I have sung in a choir, played in concert bands, played in a marching band, played and sang in jazz ensembles, and acted and sang in musical theater productions. It’s great…