Over at the AIGA, Liz Stinson on an experience by Errol Morris and Michael Bierut to determine if a font can make us believe something is true:

The toothsome paperback provides an intriguing look into an intuitive but little understood truth: typefaces can have an emotional and psychological impact on us. To appreciators of typography (and Kanye West) this probably sounds like a pretty obvious statement. Of course typography has an impact on our judgement; we’re just not always conscious of its effects. And why shouldn’t it? Typography is but one of countless environmental factors that influence our perception of truth or falsity. Morris, for his part, recently said during an interview: “It’s absurd to think that we would be nudged by one typeface over another, into believing something to be true. Something disturbing about it, I’d go so far to say.”

We judge people by their the tattoos on their bodies, the clothes they wear, and the cars they drive why not the fonts they use?

IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream. “A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described,” he wrote. “In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.”

While there is no disputing the aptness of this metaphor in capturing our subjective experience of the world, recent research has shown that the “stream” of consciousness is, in fact, an illusion. We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as a continuous flow.

—Gregory Hickok shedding new light on how the brain works

—Albert Einstein

via Apartment Therapy

Kevin Ashton is calling bullshit on brainstorming:

Claims about the success of brainstorming rest on easily tested assumptions. One assumption is that groups produce more ideas than individuals. Researchers in Minnesota tested this with scientists and advertising executives from the 3M Company. Half the subjects worked in groups of four. The other half worked alone, and then their results were randomly combined as if they had worked in a group, with duplicate ideas counted only once. In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher quality, too: independent judges assessed the work and found that the individuals produced better ideas than the groups.

Follow-up research tested whether larger groups performed any better. In one study, 168 people were either divided into teams of five, seven, or nine or asked to work individually. The research confirmed that working individually is more productive than working in groups. It also showed that productivity decreases as group size increases. The conclusion: “Group brainstorming, over a wide range of group sizes, inhibits rather than facilitates creative thinking.” The groups produced fewer and worse results because they were more likely to get fixated on one idea and because, despite all exhortations to the contrary, some members felt inhibited and refrained from full participation.

I concur with this based on 15 years in the design and advertising industries.

In brainstorming sesssions—as in life—there’s a couple of winners and a whole lot of losers.

From a great New Yorker piece from 2011 on crowd psychology:

The origins of the term Black Friday are obscure. Some think that it was first used by the police in Philadelphia to describe the snarled traffic and sidewalk hassles that came with the day after Thanksgiving and crowds arriving for the city’s annual Army-Navy game. Others have defined Black Friday as the day that merchants’ balance sheets crossed over into the black. Either way, it is now a de-facto national shopping holiday. On TV, images of people racing through the aisles of stores for sale-priced items, in a sort of American Pamplona, have become as much a part of the day after Thanksgiving as leftovers. Shoppers get discounts, programmers get some lively content for a slow news day, and retailers get free publicity: a good deal for everyone, except for the clerks who have to work that day, breaking up fights among shoppers and cleaning up the mess left behind.

There had been injuries on previous Black Fridays, but no one had ever died before Jdimytai Damour went down in the Valley Stream Wal-Mart. His death, and the “Wal-Mart Stampede” that caused it, was the lead story on news channels across the country that evening, and it provoked a vast outcry of horror. In days of commentary that followed, the crowd was widely vilified. The tone of much of the reaction was captured by a letter writer to the New York Post, who blamed “the animals (you know who you are) who stampeded that poor man at Wal-Mart on Black Friday: You are a perfect example of the depraved decadence of society today.”
To be clear: we are all animals. Rich, poor, black, white, Latino, Chinese, Indian, —every human on every continent is an animal. Whatever humans are orbiting in space are animals too.
We like to think of ourselves as these evolved beings with smartphones and clothing, the smartest creatures on Earth. What we usually don’t bother to acknowledge our animal instincts. Our survival instincts for food and shelter and sleep. The fact that we make many day-to-day decisions in life based on irrational reasons.
Underneath our higher brain lies the lizard brain, the emotional brain we can’t control.
I think it’s reckless for any business to have events without proper understanding of crowd psychology and without implementing proper measures to avoid bullshit like stampedes and looting.

Tim Urban on why Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies (aka, ‘GYPSYs’) are unhappy, whining little bitches:

After graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy’s parents embarked on their careers. As the 70s, 80s, and 90s rolled along, the world entered a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Lucy’s parents did even better than they expected to. This left them feeling gratified and optimistic.

With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy’s parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility. And they weren’t alone. Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.

This left GYPSYs feeling tremendously hopeful about their careers, to the point where their parents’ goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity didn’t really do it for them. A GYPSY-worthy lawn has flowers.
Urban targets Gen Y as people born between the late 70s and mid 90s. I say the behavior he’s describing relates most to the those born in the ’90s (aka, ‘Millenials’). I was born in 1977 and most of the people my age I know locked down careers right before shit got rocky for the kids entering the workforce in the ’00s and ’10s.
Then there’s social media world taunting the GYPSYs:
Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery.
He’s absolutely right. If you’re going use social media, use it in small doses or it’s like having too many beers.

Remember when you would talk to your friend—face-to-face or maybe over the landline telephone—and make plans for the weekend? Then a few days would pass and that weekend you would actually meet your friend where you had agreed to meet? This experience is foreign to a lot of people, particularly Millenials, the first generation to have grown up with cellphones and the Internet since birth.

Generally speaking, Millenials started popping out of their mothers’ uteruses around the time Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in 1991.

To be clear, though, Gen Xers, Gen Yers and Baby Boomers are all just as susceptible to being flaky shits.

Cellphones Make People Flaky as [Shit] via Alex Cornell

At Wired, Nick Stockton on why it’s so hard to catch our own typos:

You have finally finished writing your article. You’ve sweat over your choice of words and agonized about the best way to arrange them to effectively get your point across. You comb for errors, and by the time you publish you are absolutely certain that not a single typo survived. But, the first thing your readers notice isn’t your carefully crafted message, it’s the misspelled word in the fourth sentence.
Why?
The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task,” he said.
If you’ve been following Daily Exhaust for a while, you’ve likely seen many of my typos. I always miss them. Luckily my friend and DE contributor Bryan always spots them like a sharp shooter.
Ironically, I notice I’m usually able to spot my typos after I hit the Publish button and I’m reading my post live on the site. I attribute this to my brain leaving the “conveying meaning” mode (see above quote) and switching into “reading” mode. I’m no longer close to my words.

One ongoing Harvard study indicates that people form more lasting and accurate memories if they believe they’re experiencing something alone. Another indicates that a certain amount of solitude can make a person more capable of empathy towards others. And while no one would dispute that too much isolation early in life can be unhealthy, a certain amount of solitude has been shown to help teenagers improve their moods and earn good grades in school.
—Leon Neyfakh, The power of lonely
Anyone who engages in anything creative–writing, painting, dancing, designing—already knows about the power of solitude. Alone is actually important to everyone.

[…] Although many people continue to equate intelligence with genius, a crucial conclusion from Terman’s study is that having a high IQ is not equivalent to being highly creative. Subsequent studies by other researchers have reinforced Terman’s conclusions, leading to what’s known as the threshold theory, which holds that above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.
—Nancy Andreasen, Secrets of the Creative Brain

People are all up in arms about Google buying Nest and knowing even MORE about you, but don’t forget about Amazon:

Drawing on its massive store of customer data, Amazon plans on shipping you items it thinks you’ll like before you click the purchase button. The company today gained a new patent for “anticipatory shipping,” a system that allows Amazon to send items to shipping hubs in areas where it believes said item will sell well. This new scheme will potentially cut delivery times down, and put the online vendor ahead of its real-world counterparts.
Hey, Amazon, I do want that Rancilio Espresso Machine, but I can’t afford it, so don’t you dare ship it to me.

Drake Baer, for Fast Company, on how the brains of creative people work (via Bombtune):

While most have us have a fair amount of latent inhibition helping us to filter out irrelevant data, creative (and maybe also psychotic) people aren’t quite so ordered, making for what Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson calls cognitive disinhibition. She defines it as “the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival.” In other words, it’s allowing for more info to come in than seems immediately beneficial.

For example:

A person with low latent inhibitions would not only see a yellow desk lamp, they may also think of bananas, Spongebob Squarepants, or Spongebob Squarepants eating a banana, or possibly concoct a whole dissertation in their head about whether or not Spongebob likes to eat bananas, or how he could get them down in the ocean
Weird? Weird like how?
Like screen-printing a poster of George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television?
That’s completely normal.
What?

My brother is cooking up something interesting over at chasing Tremendous:

chasing Tremendous is an initiative founded by Mark Mulvey to celebrate depth of thought, elegant descriptions, and passionate learning, but outside of the walls of academia and with a sexier flame backlighting the pursuit. By recasting historically difficult or tedious concepts, and by discovering hidden connections between dissimilar disciplines or genres, it becomes possible to get turned on by ideas and inspired to engage in more tremendous pursuits. The idea is to avoid mediocrity and thinness of thought in favor of more adventurous topics and experiences with more grit. The potential for intensity must always be high, and the bias must always lean toward action.
He’s younger than me and smarter than me.