Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2011–2021years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Now Habit - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination...
Mind Hacks: Tips and Tricks for Using Your Brain - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Hacks-Tricks-Using-Brain/dp/059...
Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Performance-Hacks-Tools-Overclo...
- This reminds me of a book I read a few years ago - Mind Hacks [1]. It discussed all kinds of interesting mechanisms that our brains use to fool us into thinking that we are always aware of our environment.
In the eye chapter, there was an interesting side-effect of the saccade movement - the "broken watch". This is when your brain fools you into thinking that the picture you see after a saccade has been the same during the movement itself. When you look at your watch and your timing is just right, you will be left with the impression that the seconds arm stays fixed for longer than it should.
I highly recommend the book - it really demonstrates our inner-machinery.
- Music for airports was recommended in one of the Oreilly Mind Hacks books (which i don't hvae in front of me)
- If you try the experiment yourself—and you can do it right now, just by holding out your own arm, and deciding at some point to flex your wrist—you’ll become aware that it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision.
One book, Mind Hacks, iirc tangentially described that and experimented on a reader’s consciousness. The core idea was that a brain (mind) is not an instantly accessible state, but a continuous process of collecting all reactions into an observable picture, like stock exchange protocols (anyone who has programmed them will understand). E.g. everyone lives a little “in the past”, because what you see is what really was few moments ago, all the time. And it’s not just a neuron-neuron latency. Mind is an asynchronous process with many parts “getting in sync” retroactively, sometimes for a good reason, e.g. if audio and vision or tactility are out of sync, your mind allows up to 80ms of delay before raising that “obviously out-of-sync” flag. And in general, a large part of what you “perceive” is just a funny reconstruction. So, returning to:
it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision
That’s because your “present” may lag or skip ahead for a large amount of “frames” and there is no common #clk for a reference. Also, mind may completely omit reporting the decision process to itself, cause there is no existential profit for doing that. As someone who suffers from panic attacks, I can tell you that it’s damn hard to isolate and revisit specific thoughts and feelings that may have provoked that condition few moments ago. I only learn that slowly because it’s a part of a therapy, and otherwise it is completely imperceptible.
Tl;dr: perception and mind-related expectations in these experiments may be too naive.
- Our brains are hard-wired to assume light comes from above, and 3D "pop out" from shading even means we can identify the shapes faster. More info and references in this section from Mind Hacks (I was a co-author):
#20 Fool Yourself into Seeing 3D -https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=K6bjvFUcedgC&pg=PA57&dq=...
(It briefly mentions Susan Kare's work who designed the first 3D buttons in Windows 3.0 -- 1990!)
There's another effect going on here which is visual affordances: not only does the button "pop out" but we immediately see it as something we can push. That's from the psychologist James Gibson in 1977.
There are a ton of cognitive quirks that are useful to know when designing interfaces. The pop-out effect is one of my favourites.
- +1 for "Being Geek" - great read.
Anyone read either "Mind Hacks" or "Performance Mind Hacks?" Wondering if they're interesting/useful.
