Month: September 2009

We are more creative when working on other people’s problems (via @sandygautam)

Apparently, we are less creative when trying to solve our own problems. There's this concept of "psychological distance" which partially controls our creativity. And this psychological distance can be created artificially by simply changing the way we thinking about the problem. For example, consider this study where participants were given a problem to solve, and it needed a creative insight (an "Aha" moment):

participants were told that the questions were developed either by a research institute located in California, "around 2,000 miles away" (distant condition), or in Indiana, "2 miles away," (near condition).  In a third, control group no information regarding location was mentioned. As expected, participants in the distant condition solved more problems than participants in the proximal condition and in the control condition. Because the problems seemed farther away, they were easier to solve.

This pair of studies suggests that even minimal cues of psychological distance can make us more creative. Although the geographical origin of the various tasks was completely irrelevant – it shouldn’t have mattered where the questions came from – simply telling subjects that they came from somewhere far away led to more creative thoughts.

There are a number of such tricks that work:

These results build on previous studies which demonstrated that distancing in time – projecting an event into the remote future – and assuming an event to be less likely (that is, distancing on the probability dimension) can also enhance creativity.

Turns out that you can probably do this trick on yourself and make yourself more creative:

In a series of experiments that examined how temporal distance affects performance on various insight and creativity tasks, participants were first asked to imagine their lives a year later (distant future) or the next day (near future), and then to imagine working on a task on that day in the future. Participants who imagined a distant future day solved more insight problems than participants who imagined a near future day.

Read the full article, it has more such juicy tidbits.  (Found via @sandygautam.)

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous

How our brain is hardwired to love twitter, sms, mail updates

Why do we keep checking twitter, almost compulsively? Every refresh that brings a few more items gives us a little high. It's called "seeking", and turns out that rats in the scientists' labs are pretty much the same.

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. They would stick an electrode in a rat's brain and, whenever the rat went to a particular corner of its cage, would give it a small shock and note the reaction. One day they unknowingly inserted the probe in the wrong place, and when Olds tested the rat, it kept returning over and over to the corner where it received the shock. He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

There you go. If you didn't have actual work to do, you would keep hitting refresh on your twitter client until you collapsed. (It's true, isn't it?)

And, apparently, this little corner of the brain is not the pleasure center. The high that you get is not similar to the one you get after eating chocolate or after sex (or both). This is a different high, characterized not by euphoric satisfaction, but rather by excitement of finding something, and craving for more.

It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

 

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

And the best part is this:

Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

Exactly. Describes you perfectly, doesn't it, my dear twitter/rss/email/sms addict?

Read the full article, if you're scientifically, or neuroscientifically inclined.

I found this article via http://twitter.com/sandygautam, someone whose twitter and friendfeed stream you must follow (and refresh compulsively) if you liked this article.

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous

Which of my various twitter accounts should you be following [Warning: self-important post]

I tweet from 5 different twitter accounts, and to help reduce the confusion and allow people to figure out which ones to follow, here is the "Ultimate Guide to Navin Kabra's Twitter Accounts" (soon to be made into a major motion picture):

@ngkabra: This account is used for general interesting information from around the web. Often it is about psychology, economy, funny stuff, India, etc. Most non-techies should follow this one.

@_navin: This is for technology tweets. Programming. Computer Science. Python. Maths and Statistics. Only geeks may venture here.

@ngkx: This is for general conversation. Restaurants I liked. What my kids are up to. Silly remarks. IM replacement. Only likely to be interesting for people who know me personally (and sometimes not interesting to even them!)

@punetech: This is the "official" twitter handle of http://punetech.com. All about technology in Pune – and nothing else. All techies in Pune are required by law to follow this.

@punetechlive: This is for live-tweeting tech events in Pune. During an event we often tweet 20 to 50 times in an hour, and that is too much stuff to foist on to regular readers of @punetech who might not be interested in the event. Live-tweeting of any event from this account is _always_ preceded with a tweet on the main @punetech account announcing that live-tweeting is going to commence. So, particularly discerning readers can start following @punetechlive just for events that they find interesting and unfollow when they are not interested in that event.

Why?

Why all this segregation and complexity?

Basically, because I believe that twittering is not about what I want to say – rather it is about what my followers want to hear. I doubt that the seven hundred people who follow @ngkabra for interesting articles around the web, e.g. the people in Atlanta, or Portland, would really be interested my review of the @grubshup restaurant on Canal Road, Pune. Nor do the doctors and accountants following me have any interest in python debugging techniques.

And, the evidence appears to show that this segregation is working well. A quick analysis of the followers of these different accounts shows that the overlap between the various accounts is rather low, indicating that people are selectively following only some of my accounts.

But maybe I should find out the list of people following all my accounts and give them a prize of some sort!

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous