One marshmallow now, two if you wait

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

Writing about those New Year's resolutions, Jonah Lehrer asks why human will power is so feeble:

Consider this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, a behavioral economist at Stanford University. He recruited several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then, they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Shiv, is that all those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain – they were a 'cognitive load' – making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the conscious mind is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before it becomes impossible for the brain to resist a piece of cake.

What's limited, as Lehrer explains, is not willpower, but attention. Direct it elsewhere and the odds that you will forsake that extra piece of cake go up significantly. Read more about this willpower trick here, and check out that first kid's expression in the video above. He's a gonner.

Wayne

Stunning! Painting Goldfish, layer by layer, in resin

In addition to just being beautifully created, this film posted at the art site Colossal, illustrates how one Japanese artist layers up his work in resin and compares his painting - and he is painting, the Goldfish are not real - to the process of 3-D printing.

Wayne

Are you using the Internet correctly?

Are you using the Internet correctly? The winner of Nicholas Carr's sentence of the week, the suggestion that there is a correct use of the network drew a predictably acerbic response from the author of The Shallows.

The problem of course is that the network is too big to know. Information has always been part of a larger whole, so it's curious to me that anyone might be fooled by the network's enervating presence into believing it can be used this way to produce serendipity or that way to generate bound knowledge. Such claims only make a fool of the claimant. Yes, more than ever, what's knowable may be known. But it's never complete. It's that sort of in these pixelated times that divides today's popular culture between the solemn and the sarcastic, and makes plausible The Onion's claim to be "America's Finest News Source." It's that sort of - my view - that makes artists and conceptualizers more important than ever.

Carr's post is titled "The serendipity machine is low on oil" and brought to mind the commercial here for the Nissan Leaf.

Wayne

Report: Local man finds Wisdom of Crowds making him crazy, turns off computer

Fresh on the heels of the Information Age, quiet and solitude, an "ability sit quietly in a room alone" - Pascal's bar for a healthy mind - have emerged as the contemporary idyll. Hearing its incessant whistling, we now know, for instance, that information can be positively debilitating because far from freeing, choice can be a paradox. In an essay that I keep going back to, William Deresiewicz argues that it's particularly important, and particularly important in this day and age of mediated automata, for leaders to cultivate solitude in order to know their own minds. The always thoughtful On Being recently recently pointed out that its most popular blog posts feature the words "major news events" and "meditation," which makes intuitive sense to me. The one leads straight to the other.

The Joy of Quiet is trending:

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight....

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

If you've been here for a while, you know that I can relate. "Quiet" is not something that I fall into exhausted when all else fails, but a reserve that I go to continually for the energy that a majority of others find in the company of people. That's the basic introvert - extrovert distinction. So I'm not completely surprised that introversion - solitude - quiet - is trending now, having recently become cultural watchwords, if not something of a commodity. Susan Cain's "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking," for example, is pre-ordered on my Kindle. And as the linked piece from Pico Iyer underlines, organizations will now gladly take your money just to leave you alone, which, I have to admit came as something of a surprise. I'll do it for practically nothing.

Wayne

Business metric: Will they touch it?

Fast Company's best innovation essays from 2011 including several thought provoking business reads, including "branding isn't about repeating messages, but of creating patterns" and "creating products for The Lady Gaga Generation."

Luke Williams, a fellow at Frog Design, penned one essay on how to spot markets ripe for disruption, and suggested a couple of ways that are both simple and profound. One method is to patiently observe how customers behave as opposed to asking them what they want, which may be one reason why Intel employs perhaps the most famous corporate anthropologist in the world, Genevieve Bell. As patient observers of culture, anthropologists document the exchange of value in intimate settings.

There a world of difference between looking and seeing; keen observation is the one creative act most accessible to each of us.

The other insight is the importance of touch. In a world suffused with too much data and too few ways to evaluate it, good industrial design has become more important than ever. Apple's willingness, for example, to invest in pleasing and sensual products when everyone assumed that the value in computing was in the operating system, also known as Microsoft software, was a key to the company's resurrection from market afterthought. I'm typing this on a precise notebook milled from a single blog of aluminum, which really pleases the geek and maker in me. Remember those beige boxes?

Williams:

All the Apple designers I’ve met share this awareness of context, which may explain why they’re often sensitive to critical details that their competitors overlook. They examine the context for themselves rather than having it described by someone else. Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, describes his observations of people interacting with Mac computers in an Apple store: 'When people are looking at Macs in stores, they’re drawn to them in a very physical way. They don’t mind moving them around or touching them.' That observation lead him to an important insight: 'You’re seldom intimidated by something that you can feel. If you’re intimidated by an object, you tend not to want to touch it.'

So, for Apple, there was an opportunity to give people a tangible sense of control over the technology by establishing an immediate physical connection between the user and the computer. Think again about the statement 'people are seldom intimidated by something they want to touch.' That’s an insight that wouldn’t have been possible without close, unobtrusive observation of people interacting with technology. To cultivate insights and uncover opportunities, you need to observe the telling moments that reveal what consumers actually feel and do (as opposed to what they say they feel).

Wayne