Marketing research involving making choices reveals the brain as a muscle: when depleted it comes less effective. Making choices exhausts what is known as executive resources, and “downstream” decisions are affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Not only does this explain why I always pick plain yogurt in the refrigerator isle, but suggests that if we’ve just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we’ve just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn’t try to make a major decision.
How To Write With Style
“Pity the readers,” advises Kurt Vonnegut, whom he calls “imperfect artists,” struggling to master the difficult task of making sense of thousands of scribbles on the page. This is my favourite bit advice from Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to Write With Style” (originally published in Palm Sunday, 1981) that remains relevant in the networked age: “Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales. This is the bad news.” The good news? We can write about whatever we please.
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The Weird Science of Stock Photography
Advertising deconstructed: Stock photography suppliers must be able to guess which abstract concepts clients want to illustrate, and then have photos and video on hand that resonates. So,what can we glean from the ubiquitous “Everywhere Girl” and mid-ocean oil rig in a storm?
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Shortening the Tail of Scientific Expertise?
Is the web narrowing scientists’ expertise? Sociologist James Evans’ work identifies that as more journals become available online, dramatically fewer articles are being cited in the research papers within them. “Rather than measuring the length of the tail, it seems that modern science is actually focusing on a tiny bit of it.” The reasons for this phenomenon are unclear, but he does suggest that online databases make it less likely now than in the past for researchers to integrate serendipitous gems of discoveries into their research. Perhaps proving the old adage that, an “expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing.”
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The Importance of Being There
Bill Thompson’s thoughtful conclusions on attending a seminar to see Clay Shirky think out loud about social tools, a seminar that he might just as easily have attended online, but one he was driven to attend in person by an ‘inner need’:
What is clear, however, is that the boundaries between the online and offline worlds are blurring as we put our hands through the looking-glass of the screen to shake hands with those on the other side, occasionally pulling them back through into what we still like to call “real life”.
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Cultural Evolution
Paul Ehrlich makes some observations on the daunting task of building a comprehensive theory of cultural change. He dismisses Richard Dawkins’ brave but flawed conjecture about “memes” (gene analogs of cultural inheritance), but does support the contentious notion that natural selection can operate in cultural evolution as well as in genetic evolution, although not likely as a central force. He paints a daunting but hopeful and certainly vital undertaking. “…since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating are the results of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.”
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Dawn of the Picasso Fish
Carl Zimmer gives a typically fascinating account of the evolution of our understanding of how the flatfish came to have two eyes on one side of its head, an evolutionary conundrum that engaged both Charles Darwin and his critics. Darwin argued that the trait evolved over many generations of flatfish; however there was no evidence for this morphological development in the fossil record.The most recent contribution to the story is evolutionary biologist Matt Friedman’s discovery of three examples of transitional forms of flatfish among the dusty fossil collections of Europe. What is most interesting to me is that these fossils were long ago collected and curated, but so clearly satisfy the requirement of a Darwinian intermediate. Matt Friedman explains:
I suppose there is a general perception that museum collections are dusty, static archives, and that everything in them has been carefully studied and precisely identified. But the truth is that they are much more than just long-term storage, because as our interpretive framework matures, we can begin to make sense of specimens that evaded or baffled earlier generations of researchers, or draw new conclusions about materials we mistakenly thought we had figured out ages ago.
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Natalie Angier reports from the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco, including this insight into how smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled: “With a phone number, if you get a new one, a week later you may have forgotten the old one,” Dr. Herz said. “With smells, it’s the other way around. The first association is better than the second.”