Over at the Atlantic, Derek Thompson gives us a short philosophical history of personal music and explains how working with headphones hurts our productivity (via SlashDot):

To visit a modern office place is to walk into a room with a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of younger workers listen to music on their headphones, and the vast majority thinks it makes us better at our jobs. In survey after survey, we report with confidence that music makes us happier, better at concentrating, and more productive.

Science says we’re full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” one report dryly concluded.

From my experience, he’s absolutely right – at least as it pertains to any work involving critical or creative thinking.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I find it helpful to have music or a podcast on when I’m doing any sort of production-level work. This kind of work doesn’t require heavy mental lifting.

How quickly you can switch your perception to see each can say a lot about how creative you are.

Over at Wired Science, Jonah Lehrer looks into how we identify good ideas:

I’ve always been fascinated by the failures of genius. Consider Bob Dylan. How did the same songwriter who produced Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde also conclude that Down in the Groove was worthy of release? Or what about Steve Jobs: what did he possibly see in the hockey puck mouse? How could Bono not realize that Spiderman was a disaster? And why have so many of my favorite novelists produced so many middling works?

A big part seems to lie in letting your ideas marinate in your head for a while to give you some distance and perspective.

At this point I’ve read and seen enough about the Winklevii to last me a few lifetimes, but this article in Vanity Fair was (another) interesting look into their minds.
Like why they won’t let up:

In my opinion, it’s all about how much pain you can make the other guy feel,” said Dan Walsh, another Olympic rower, when asked to explain the lure of a sport that offers neither fame nor fortune, and why two highly advantaged individuals would spend their 20s pursuing it–the Winklevosses were then weeks away from their 30th birthday. “It’s about trying to break him.”

And the power of this new strategy is that it requires only modest success to get the Winklevosses what they want, which is not control of Facebook, but rather to cause Mark Zuckerberg pain measurable in pride and money, and through this pain to avenge their own ideal selves by asserting their will over his.

Stefan Sagmeister tells us the 7 rules to being a happy designer (the title of this post is #4).
via Analogue

It’s pretty awesome watching an adult put a marshmallow in front of a kid and telling he/she they can eat it now, or wait and get two marshmallows. It’s apparently based on the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment of 1972 which focused on deferred gratification.
via magalomania

You know how exciting it is to tell a friend about your new idea for a product/business/invention?
Turns out, it’s better to keep your mouth shut:

Unfortunately the mind sometimes has a nasty habit of sabotaging our best attempts to control ourselves. Recent research by Gollwitzer et al. (2010) suggests that, in fact, making our goals public can have precisely the opposite effect from what we intend.
Across three experiments the link between making goals public and actually working towards them was tested. What they found in every study was that when participants had shared their goal with someone else, instead of increasing their commitment, it reduced it.

Seems the best way to approach your goals is to just do them.

Over at GQ, Julieanne Smolinski has some advice on how nerds can avoid ‘creeping out’ the opposite sex.

Yes. Nerds are sexy. Yes. We get it. Yes.

Nerd girls are hot. Nerd men are hot. People with cassette fetishes and basement museums now get book deals and “This American Life” episodes instead of swirlies. The word has gone from opprobrium to come-on to something that might be proudly proclaimed via provocatively shrunken spaghetti strap top.

She’s using the wrong word. She means geek, not nerd.
Both geeks and nerds share the enthusiasm trait.
Where geeks and nerds differ is in their social skills. Geeks have them, nerds to do not.
But back to enthusiasm. Julieanne has a problem with too much of it:

The problem here is being too into something. It’s weird! It’s important not to display too much of your -philia to somebody you’re hoping to attract. I know a lot of girls who would find a deep and abiding love for protopunk sexy, but if you can say things like, “Richard Hell is a Libra” then I’m going to suggest you don’t. Be an enthusiast, not an obsessive. (If obsession lies between love and madness, then let us say that enthusiasm lies between “obsession” and “love.” Between obsession and madness? Fan fiction.)

Humans have a problem with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a gateway drug to passion which in turn leads to fanaticism and fanaticism is a bad word. Someone who’s really believes in their religion? A religious fanatic. Some who loves Apple products (yes, self, I’m looking at you) – they’re a Apple fanatic or Apple fanboi.
For me? I’d rather be fanatical about something, than somewhat/sorta/kinda into things. I don’t want to be ok with my job. I don’t want to think my wife is alright. There’s nothing worse than being someone who loves a particular music genre who encounters someone who has no feelings about music.
The most successful people in the world are fanatical about the thing that made them rich. The fanatics can also be the most dangerous people in the world (Philly Eagles fans? Red Sox fans? you guys are fucking dangerous assholes), so while the object of obsession can be dangerous or destructive, fanaticism and passion, in and of themselves are not negative traits.
Never be afraid of having too much passion about something.
It’s ok to turn the dial up to 11.

Steven Johnson talks about moving from New York to San Francisco:

But the other reason for the move, in truth, is that I’ve come to think that this kind of change is intrinsically good in itself, wherever you happen to move. An old friend who did a similar westward migration a few years ago told me that the great thing about moving is that the changed context helps you understand yourself and your family more deeply: you get to see all the things that you really loved about your old home–and the things that always bothered you without you fully recognizing it. Like a good control study in a science experiment, the contrast allows you to see what really matters. Changing the background scenery helps you see the foreground more clearly.

via Noah Brier

I never knew this, but the term “thinking outside the box” came from the puzzle below (which I did years ago). The goal is to connect all nine dots with just 4 straight lines:

Spoiler alert: you have to think outside the box to solve this.
via PysBlog: The Creative Power of Thinking Outside Yourself

Ben Brooks on breaking the monotony in life:

I am prone to falling prey to habits, just the same as everyone else. When I catch myself stuck in a habit — stuck in a routine — I pull myself back into the interesting world of spontaneous. I buy a shirt or a pair of pants that don’t blend with the rest of my clothes — that don’t fit the preconceived image of me that I store locked away in my brain. Most importantly, to me and to my life, I change up the routes I drive.

NYTimes: A New Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Hit Lyrics

Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

“Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,” Dr. DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent the results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.

Meetings make us dumber, study shows (via Slashdot.org)
from the article:

The researchers speculate that when a group of people receives information, the inclination is to discuss it. The more times one option is said aloud, the harder it is for individuals to recall other options, explained Krishnan, associate professor of marketing at Indiana University.

This is interesting because it confirms something a creative director I know recently told me regarding brainstorming sessions she holds for project kick-offs. She said 2 things normally happen in every brainstorm:
a) A few solid ideas come from the same few people every time
OR
b) She goes into the meeting knowing what ideas she wants to use already
This is an unfortunate situation. The MSNBC article suggests , “Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others.” This reminds me of Google’s famous “twenty percent” policy (via Google Jobs):

Google engineers all have “20 percent time” in which they’re free to pursue projects they’re passionate about. This freedom has already produced Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut – products which might otherwise have taken an entire start-up to launch.

I still think it’s important to involve a variety of people on projects because great ideas can truly come from anywhere and anyone – maybe the key is not putting everyone in a room together.