As many of you know, I’m a student of human nature. I’m amazed at the things we continue to learn about the way in which our brain works. Most amazing is how slowly our brains evolve compared to the incredible pace at which our world is evolving, or shrinking, or whatever your favorite term is for change. We’re essentially using brains that are wired for our hunter-gatherer ancestors of 10,000 years ago in a world that measures things in nanoseconds. The result is a bevy of problems, disorders, mistakes, and misunderstandings. Take the phenomenon of social networking.
People are collecting friends on Facebook and other sites at an amazing rate. I myself have 331 connections on LinkedIn and another 141 on Facebook with very little overlap between the two. That says I have nearly 500 “friends”. Research that began in the 1990s shows that our brains just can’t handle that many friends. We’re limited to about 150 which is about the size of a hunter-gatherer village. The number hasn’t changed in 10,000 years! And Facebook isn’t going to change it. In fact, the average number of friends for a Facebook user is 130. My 141 fits inside the Dunbar Number.
So don’t worry about collecting more than about 150 friends whether they are live or virtual. After that, some of them stop being friends. They drift away, just like those hunter-gatherer villages split into separate clans and went their separate ways.
I love the kinds of studies that researchers manage to get funded. My wife and I joke all the time about the vast amounts of government money that gets spent studying things that are Oh So Very Obvious. Here’s one that fits that category. Science Daily recently reported that people who watch more television are more likely to die from all manner of causes, particularly cardiovascular disease. Now they did go to the bother of quantifying the risk. In fact, every hour of TV per day increases your risk of death by 11 percent.
I grew up as a latch key kid before the phrase was coined, so I’m surely already dead by now. I watch so little television now that I can no longer hold my own in a water cooler conversation because I not only don’t know who the characters that get mentioned are, I’ve never even heard of the shows!
The next study should see if the effects can be reversed by reducing the number of TV hours per day. I could be one of the study participants.
A recent article in Scientific American posits that flattery – even that false, greasy kind of stuff of used car salesmen – has an impact on us that makes us favor the flatterer. In fact, even when the false flattery
itself disgusts us, we still tend to look more favorably upon the flatterer, without knowing exactly why. It’s amazing how often our brain leads us to do things without letting us in on the motivation. I think our environment has advanced faster than our brains can adapt, so a lot of vestigial processes that used to help keep us alive and procreating are now causing us to buy Yugos and Zima instead.
As I examine my experiences around this, I know it to be true. There are people with whom I interact regularly that I know are constantly blowing smoke up my ass, but I still find myself attracted to them and willing to listen to what they have to say. I would never have said that their crap was having a positive impact, but why else would I keep hanging around them? I rationalized it as my way of discovering how thick they’d pile it on.
I belong to a group of business owners who get together monthly to discuss our businesses (and lives) in order to share experiences that might help the others deal with issues in their lives. We have a formal process for presenting issues to the group that includes a statement of how the issue makes you feel. Constantly we debate about the choices of feelings made available to us on our form. Now, I have ammunition to change the form. Psychologists are in total agreement that there are six basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. Of course, there are many contending to be added to that list: avarice, embarrassment, boredom, depression, jealousy, and love. The biggest contenders, according to a recent article in New Scientist, are these five: elevation, interest, gratitude, pride, and confusion.
Most of us can’t distinguish what emotion we’re feeling most of the time anyway, even when dealing with the big six. Imagine trying to determine if you’re feeling gratitude, love, or joy when your husband cleans the kitchen without prompting? It will quickly turn your feeling to one of confusion, don’t you think?
The interesting thing about all of this research is that the researchers are gaining an ability to determine the emotion you’re feeling even if you can’t put a name to it. If they know more about what you’re feeling than you do, then they’re in a position to take advantage of that knowledge. I’m fascinated by the whole thing. Wait! Fascination. Perhaps I’ve found yet another for the contender list.
There has been an ongoing discussion of the User Interface in computing ever since the Graphical User Interface came out of Xerox Parc. The thing that has always amused me is that we seldom hear discussions about User Interfaces with other things. It seems that it isn’t right until people stop talking about it. I’ve always been a proponent of voice being the ultimate UI for a computer, but despite all my hopes, it just doesn’t seem that we’re even close to teaching English to a computer.
Now Microsoft is experimenting with a new kind of interface they call Natal. This interface uses cameras and other sensors to monitor your motions and expressions to determine what you want to do. The initial application of this interface will be in the XBox. If successful, this will make the Wii controller look as antiquated as the joystick. It will also usher in a new way for the application software we use at work and home to interact with us. Outside of gaming, it’s hard to imagine many ways where this interface will be much better than a mouse and keyboard, but people smarter than me will figure that out. I’d like to see something along the Minority Report or Avatar interfaces where I can use hand gestures to move screens and drill down into data. Maybe this will combine with some basic voice recognition to move us farther from the speed limiting qwerty keyboard.
For years I told the story of driving my son home after the last meet of his first Cross Country season. As we drove along, he said to me, “I accomplished my goal for the season.” The statement almost caused me to crash the car since his season had been notably horrible. In fact, my wife and I have always had a rule that our children must complete the season of anything they sign up to do. After seeing Alex’s first Cross Country race, I asked Susie to suspend that rule should he decide he wanted to quit. Watching him run was painful.
After a little prompting, he tells me that his goal was to never walk during a race and to never finish last. (The last part gave meaning to several finish line sprints during the season.) I played the good parent and congratulated him on setting and attaining specific goals for the season and wondered aloud if he’d be running again the next year. “Absolutely!” was his response. I was grateful that we were having the conversation in the car so I didn’t have to make eye contact.
Here’s the problem. That memory was completely fabricated by my mind after hearing Susie tell the story a few times. You see, even though I usually drove him home, it was her, not me, who drove Alex home from his last meet. She had that season goal conversation with him. I found out about it in bed later that night. One evening after hearing me retell this story at a gathering, she pointed out to me that I wasn’t a part of that conversation. The memory faded away almost instantly. She had snatched the foundation right out from under it.
Our brains don’t work like video recorders. We build our memories by combining current experiences with previous experiences. What we remember is greatly influenced by what we pay attention to as we have experiences. After all, I can’t remember you were driving a red car if I didn’t notice that the car was red. A recent Sunday cartoon made me think of the Cross Country story again:
I have always believed in serendipity — that sudden and usually accidental discovery of a connection or benefit. The secret to experiencing serendipity is being open to that possibility. Serendipitous moments occur all the time but most of us miss them because we’re too busy doing what we do to notice them. They are fleeting moments.
How do you recognize more of them? Open yourself to delightful surprises. That’s right. Prepare yourself to be delighted and you’ll find yourself being delighted more often. Many serendipitous events have small long term value, but they provide an incredibly delightful moment in your day. As you become more open to these delightful moments, their impact will grow and you’ll start to have more full fledged “Ah Ha!” moments.
One way to open yourself to delight is to make small variations in the way you do routine things. We’ve all heard the advice to drive to work a different way or at a different time. The changes don’t have to be even that big. This morning I shaved with the other hand. It was incredible! Unless you’re very ambidextrous, shaving with the wrong hand can literally put your neck at risk. You pay a lot more attention to this mundane task. Paying more attention caused me to heighten my senses. I heard the razor more loudly as it scraped across my face. I felt it more closely on my cheek. A routine shave became a sensory experience that was exhilarating. And I didn’t cut myself doing it.
So open up. Let yourself be delighted. Find serendipity in your life.
No, that’s not a fast food chain’s tag line. That’s a conservative estimate of the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth (including the 6.8 billion who walk the planet now), according to Jonathan Gosier. That’s a lot of people! These are the kinds of numbers that are so large that we have trouble conceiving of their actual size. Nonetheless, that’s the conservative estimate. Does that make you feel rather insignificant in the grand scheme? For me, it’s liberating. To paraphrase the Dali Lama, I may not be the best homo sapien, but I’m certainly not the worst one.
I don’t know what happens as the number of people continues to grow, and as more and more of them live out their lives in abject poverty. It makes me understand that the road to happiness has little or nothing to do with money or stuff. I’m coming to believe that the secret to happiness lies in not wanting much…in being content with being oneself.
Recent research by Nicholas Epley explains why it’s not a good idea to have religious discussions with someone who believes something notably different than you. In a recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Epley concludes that religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide when thinking about what God believes. In other words, if they believe it, it must be because God told them to believe it. This explains a lot of the conversations I’ve had over the years with people hellbent on proving that they are on a mission from God when really they are just using God to rationalize something they already wanted to do. It turns out they can be one and the same in many instances.
I use Twine to track information on the Internet. I like it better than other link sharing sites because it sends me a digest of the things that are important to me with enough detail to determine if I want to follow the link or not. The other day, I got one with the title, “Stare at Boobs to Live Longer.” Well, I had to check it out. It led to a story that quoted a German study that concluded that men who stared at women’s boobs for 10 minutes a day could extend their lifespan by 5 years — the equivalent of 30 minutes of exercise each day.
Thankfully, the story ended with a notice that this was completely false. In fact, this rumor has been running around the Internet since 1999 in one form or another. As most of you know, I tend to be skeptical of most things until I’ve had a chance to investigate or play with it personally. Nonetheless, I was ready to believe that the research had been done. I just wanted to know what the error in their study design might have been. I would have quoted this study to others as I went about my day as if it were true. I’ll still probably reference it, just to see how many people take the bait.
This is a relatively unsophisticated farce, yet it has survived online for a decade. The message here is to keep your eyes open when it comes to things you read online. The benefit that professional journalism brings to news reporting is fact checking. Even with thorough checks, professionals sometimes get duped. I’m constantly reminded of my favorite Internet cartoon:
A couple of summers ago, I traveled to northern Indiana to spend half a day training to jump out of an airplane. The jump didn’t last very long but it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had. I probably won’t ever go to the bother of parachuting again just because of the planning involved. The reason my activities include running and cycling is because I can go out my front door and do them with almost no prior planning.
However, crazy as it sounds, I’d love to try out one of these wingsuits. I’m telling you. I looked at birds differently for months after that parachute jump. You can’t imagine how awesome the experience is without having had it. There was no sensation of falling like I expected. And once the chute was open, the sense of being up high didn’t feel the same as looking over the edge of a tall building. It felt like FLYING!
The idea of flying… Let’s just say that one’s high on my list of wished-for super powers. It’s actually number two on the list, right behind psychic mind control.
A recent article on MSNBC talks about the increasing rate of evolution of the human race. Most notably it mentions that our brains are shrinking. In fact, we’re already down about 10 percent from our peak. Scientists speculate that the decrease in brain size has to do with our reliance on others and ability to specialize. How disturbing! If we keep this up, we’ll be like the Goombas from Super Mario Brothers.
I’ve been in business for more than 18 years. We’ve had about 100 employees pass thru the doors of Port-to-Port Consulting, our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing firm. Along the way, we’ve tried many different approaches to recruiting and selecting. We just asked people we knew to recommend people they knew. We placed standard Help Wanted ads in the local paper. We did team interviews, and round robin interviews, and multi-round interviews. We tried personality testing and intelligence testing, and aptitude testing. Role playing? We tried it. About the only thing we haven’t tried is just numbering the applicants and rolling the dice to see who gets the job.
The problem is that every one of these approaches resulted in good hires and bad hires. In my latest iteration, I send the prospective employee a list of questions and ask her to provide short responses. Amazingly, this small request causes almost half of applicants to self-eliminate. Nearly half of those who do bother to return the short answers don’t bother to check their spelling or grammar, including the guy whose cover mentioned how carefully he had checked his “grammer”. This simple request cuts my pool by 75 percent. Those that are left can be further pruned by actually reading their responses. Then it’s back to one of the interviewing techniques with the remainder.
We haven’t found a way to determine before hiring if a person will be right for a job at Port-to-Port, but we are constantly adjusting our approach to enhance the possibility that we get a good pick at the start.
People are collecting friends on Facebook and other sites at an amazing rate. I myself have 331 connections on LinkedIn and another 141 on Facebook with very little overlap between the two. That says I have nearly 500 “friends”. Research that began in the 1990s shows that our brains just can’t handle that many friends. We’re limited to about 150 which is about the size of a hunter-gatherer village. The number hasn’t changed in 10,000 years! And Facebook isn’t going to change it. In fact, the average number of friends for a Facebook user is 130. My 141 fits inside the Dunbar Number.
I love the kinds of studies that researchers manage to get funded. My wife and I joke all the time about the vast amounts of government money that gets spent studying things that are Oh So Very Obvious. Here’s one that fits that category. 
I belong to a group of business owners who get together monthly to discuss our businesses (and lives) in order to share experiences that might help the others deal with issues in their lives. We have a formal process for presenting issues to the group that includes a statement of how the issue makes you feel. Constantly we debate about the choices of feelings made available to us on our form. Now, I have ammunition to change the form. Psychologists are in total agreement that there are six basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. Of course, there are many contending to be added to that list: avarice, embarrassment, boredom, depression, jealousy, and love. The biggest contenders, according to a recent 
I have always believed in serendipity — that sudden and usually accidental discovery of a connection or benefit. The secret to experiencing serendipity is being open to that possibility. Serendipitous moments occur all the time but most of us miss them because we’re too busy doing what we do to notice them. They are fleeting moments.
A couple of summers ago, I traveled to northern Indiana to spend half a day training to jump out of an airplane. The jump didn’t last very long but it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had. I probably won’t ever go to the bother of parachuting again just because of the planning involved. The reason my activities include running and cycling is because I can go out my front door and do them with almost no prior planning.
