From PhysOrg- Science / Physics/ Tech / Nano / News:

In work to be published in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, Professors Gavan Fitzsimons and Tanya Chartrand of Duke, and Gráinne Fitzsimons of Waterloo, found that even the briefest exposure to well-known brands can cause people to behave in ways that mirror those brands’ traits.

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“Each of us is exposed to thousands of brand images every day, most of which are not related to paid advertising,” said Gavan Fitzsimons. “We assume that incidental brand exposures do not affect us, but our work demonstrates that even fleeting glimpses of logos can affect us quite dramatically.”

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Why don’t we prime the mind for any ability we want to encourage? Decide in advance what skills and abilities you want to encourage during the learning experience, and strive to populate the learning environment with anything that can call them up.

You know that feeling when you’re “in flow?” Athletes call “being in the zone;” those moments when you’re so in the moment that you forget time?

Mihail Csikszentmihalyi originally studied this effect in Flow; studying high-level athletes and emergency responders such as doctors, firefighters, etc. He described the conditions which tend to favor flow-state.

As it turns out, the most addictive online games follow the same secret recipe (see the highly entertaining What makes games fun? by Sebastian Deterding or Zachary Burt’s great behavioral science explanation.)

Could you use this for your teams at work? Could you get your team as addicted to successfully completing your goals as they’d be to Farmville?

Here were some of the original Flow principles; let’s see what we could apply; drawing on the presentations of both Deterding and Burt.)

To be turned into a flow activity; make goals and projects specific and measurable:

People generally don’t like uncertainty, ambiguity, and vague, undefined boundaries. Clarity and certainty feels a whole lot better. They want to know where they’re heading, how they’re going to get there, and how fast they’re progressing.

- Where they’re heading and how they’re going to get there: To quote Burt, “People need steps. What creates the feeling of overwhelm isn’t the amount of stuff to accomplish per se; but this ambiguous amorphous monstrous blob.” So chunk projects down into steps that seem easily manageable– the classic approach to avoiding both overwhelm and procrastination.

- How fast they’re progressing: People want to know where they stand, with regards to end-goal completion; and compared to others. We all tend towards social comparison. As pack animals, it’s good to know where we are in the pecking order so we know how much we can demand. Otherwise, we risk asking for too much and being denied, or too little and thus obtaining less than we could have.

Ideally, make this progression visually clear; the more visual the better. As Deterding points out, online games do a great job of showing us with appealing graphics where we stand at all times; whether it be in terms of accomplishments (points or weapons gained) or in terms of ranking (player ranking list). From my perspective, the reason graphs, charts, and storyboard work so well is that language, if you think of it, is relatively recent for us humans.

Another Flow recommendation was for the activity’s level of difficulty to be well-matched to the person’s level of skill. In games, the designers can orchestrate steps so that challenges get increasingly difficult as the player gains skill. You can’t always control that in business (or in life). But perhaps you can schedule smaller, easier chunks early on to create momentum and early wins.

Early wins are critical– and in fact, constant, encouraging positive feedback throughout the progress– remember that behavioral conditioning is one of the most powerful tools you have to mold people’s behavior (or your own!). Ideally, there should always be a clear reward for the completion of the very next goal; which should seems very attainable, right around the corner. And if you want to create urgency throughout the process, just add deadlines to each chunk.

With all this being said, there’s a danger to flow. Peter Cheeseman (a former NASA senior research scientist), maintains that you’ve got to extract yourself regularly to do the “meta analysis.” Are you working on the right problem? Most people don’t stop to evaluate that– and it’s easy to get caught in the high of making progress. “You otherwise run the risk of being smart people working on a stupid problem. “

What if charisma could be taught? That’s the Google Tech Talk I gave June 1st. No, the video won’t be available for the outside world. Sorry.
But if you wish you’d been there, here’s a keynote which will give you a condensed, highlights of the first segment.

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Most of us assume that charisma is something you’re either born with, or not. But science is proving otherwise.  What makes people charismatic, and which aspects of charisma can indeed be learned? This talk will present the highlights of a few compelling studies, as well as practical tools for everyday application.

Call it the “dog and pony show.”

Call it the most grueling three weeks of your life.

Call it what you will – the Roadshow may be the single most defining moment of your company’s history. 

If it’s successful, it leads to an IPO price that has you shooting champagne corks through the cubicle aisles at the office.

If it’s not successful, it could lead to a lackluster performance on opening day, and a management team and board left scratching their heads (and reaching for the nearest bottle of something strong).

With many feeling hopeful for 2011 IPOs, now’s the time to be plotting and planning so your team is in a position to make a lasting impression on the investment ecosystem.

Another great insight from Dr. Ali Binazir: don’t underestimate the influence of your mental diet on your daily life. Says Benazir “The influence of the info we allow casually to enter our psyche is real and substantial.”
He describes a simple but dramatic “priming” experiment devised by psychologist John Bargh; in which subjects were asked to make sentences out of a list of words as quickly as possible. Certain participants were given a list containing the words “old,” “grey,” “wrinkle,” “bingo” and “Florida”. What was really being measured was the time it took for subjects to leave the testing room and get to the front door of the building after completing the test.

Believe it or not, those who’d had the “old” words in their quizzes were about 30% slower-moving than those who didn’t. Simply reading certain words “aged” them, albeit temporarily.

The reverse experiment was organized by Ellen Langer of Harvard, who gathered a group of elderly patients in a nursing-home like environment; but surrounded them with the decor, clothing, and music of their twenties. The researchers went so far as to pipe in the radio programs & TV shows from that time; and the magazines all around were from that era. Even the fridge was stocked with long-discontinued foods.
In the ensuing weeks, physical exams showed tighter skin, better eyesight, less joint pain, increased muscle strength and even higher bone density than before and compared to the control group.

As Benazir cautions: if elements of ourselves as fundamental as bone density and eyesight are affected by what we see, hear, and thus what we think; can you imagine what it’s likely to be doing within our minds? The New York Times has a fascinating “who’s minding the mind?” article with more startling experiments.
Some mental food is health food. Some mental food is junk food. Pay close attention what you’re pouring into your mind.

Here’s a nifty little app that actually increases focus; concentration; and high-quality productivity. Freedom locks you away from the internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom frees you from distractions, allowing you time to focus, write, analyze, create.

Freedom enforces freedom; you’ll need to reboot if you want to get back online while Freedom’s running. The hassle of rebooting means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll enjoy enhanced productivity. Freedom does one thing and it does it exceedingly well: It helps you get work done.

And they’ve really thought this through: it gives you get a respite from the influx. But you can still send outgoing mail, which means if you suddenly remember one important thing you need to send out, you can.

It’s been a blessing for me  in terms of carving out good, solid chunks of focused work; without the possibility of temptation to go look at anything else.

Considering the very high cost of partial attention, this can be a great boost to your quality-work-output.

Barry Schwartz’ brilliant Paradox of Choice gave a very vivid description of how multiple choice affects us humans. Essentially, an overload of choice is just plain bad for us.


Most of us have within a “maximizer”, who is constantly searching for the best possible option of all those available.

Yes, you do make slightly better choices, on average, than if you had picked the first option that satisfied your “basic acceptability criteria”. But the cost is high: both the time you spend evaluating options; and the strain of finding the absolute best one. What’s more, studies show that you’ll end up less satisfied with the choice you made on the end; too often wondering if it really was the best option after all. not to mention that if a “new best one” comes on the market after you’ve made your choice, your entire decision is invalidated.

So… how to combat the maximizer? You could try to force-change your mindset; deciding that from now on, “good enough is enough.” but change is hard, especially for such a deep-seated mind-set. It’s often easier to limit choices. But the maximizer hates narrowing options.

Here, the “happiness studies” can be a great help: Tlime and time again, studies show that doing something altruistic gives you the highest payoff, .

So use that as a guide; as a best-choice-aid. Reassure your maximizer that by using altruism as best-choice-guide, it IS getting the best option every time in terms of payoff.

Having recently returned from a ten day silent meditation retreat, I was struck by the amount of noise we seem to crave. It’s already so noisy inside our own heads– thoughts, images, snatches of songs. And then we pour in yet more stimuli, with the background noise of television, or radio, and wonder why we can’t get to inner stillness…

Reading The Happiness Hypothesis recently, I was struck by one of the research’s conclusions. Essentially, our conscious, rational, verbal mind is what we depend on to explain things and find reasons for things– whether they be external phenomena or internal thoughts & feelings. The problem is that it’s so keen on doing its job that it will keep on doing so even when it has absolutely no grounds to stand on. Essentially, rather than answer “I don’t know”, it’ll start making things up.

Imagine you’re feeling slightly irritable, or a bit blue & low. This could be triggered by any number of slight biochemical changes, with causes ranging from what you ate that morning; to a slight itch you’re not consciously aware of; or a past experience your brain associates to a certain song. In fact, let’s take this last example.

Let’s say a song comes on the radio which your mind subconsciously linked to a past heartbreak, romantic failure, disappointment. You don’t consciously realize the song is playing; but the feelings well up. You come to realize that you’re feeling blue, low, failed. You ask yourself why that is. Your verbal processor (which some experts have now come to call the “confabulator” because of its mythomaniacal tendencies) will search for the source of that feeling (What could be making me feel this way? there must be a reason–Let’s see, what have I failed at recently?)

And of course, it will find plenty of things it can beat you up about. And even if it finds no obvious, immediate reasons, it will start going back further in time making things up out of thin air. But it will do so with such aplomb, with such certainty, that you will come to feel they are solidly true. Which will, of course, make the feeling even worse. And the cycle goes on.

This process is vividly described and explained in The Mindful Way Through Depression, one of the most brilliant works in this field, and a must-read for anyone with either a history of blues, or who wants to help someone through them.

It was also a key finding of the research on women & happiness “women who think too much”– that those who ruminated more were significantly less happy; and that knowing how to distract yourself from those ruminations & snap out of a downward spiral was key.

So what do you do? Well, often, if no immediate cause jumps out at you, if there’s nothing obivous to fix, ignore it. Rather than dig until it gets really bad, put it on the shelf. Either the cause will emerge, or the feeling itself will pass.

The classic example revolves around junk food: if you’d like to snack healthier, a negative default setting would be for to have lots of junk food available around the house — making the path of least resistance to snack on that. A positive default setting would be to have no junk food in the house; so you have to go out to get it; and instead, to have lots of healthy food around; encouraging the behavior you want.

What other day-to-day behaviors of yours could you apply this to?
Once you’ve ascertained the default settings are in your favor, here’s how to step up the game: train yourself the way you would a wild animal.

We’re hardwired to shy away from pain; and move towards pleasure. Our brain works by association, linking on a visceral level emotional and physiological reactions to pain- or pleasure- producing events.

The original demonstration of association comes from the work of Nobel-prize-winning Dr. Ivan Pavlov; who rang a bell every time he fed a group of dogs. Pretty soon, all he’d need to do was ring the bell, and the dogs would start drooling.