A pair of capuchin monkeys show very compelling signs of cooperation and a sense of fairness, by working together to solve a problem using tools, and then sharing the reward.

They also show signs of understanding fairness: when unequal rewards are given to one monkey and not another, the monkey receiving the lesser treat would rather go hungry than accept anything less than an equal reward.

From the BBC documentary “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, narrated by the ever brilliant Sir David Attenborough.

For the full 29 minute documentary, “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle,” click here.

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“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so….”Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.” — Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

Thanks to Kathryn for sharing!

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

An excerpt from Chapter Eight of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers.

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.

If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book “The Number Sense,” and as Dehaene explains:

Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ‘si’ and 7 ‘qi’) Their English equivalents—”four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don’t. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don’t reach forty until they’re five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens nine.

“The Asian system is transparent,” says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist, who has done much of the research on Asian-Western differences. “I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it’s sensible. For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.”

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among western children starts in the third and fourth grade, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

Asian children, by contrast, don’t face nearly that same sense of bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.

When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. . .

source

This story is about something called Radical Honesty. It may change your life. (But honestly, we don’t really care.)

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707-2

Is this you? Your phone vibrates and you pull it out of your pocket to check and see if anything interesting caused the vibration. You have a moment of boredom in a store, in a checkout line, while waiting for your spouse to get dressed – so you pull out the phone and run through a checklist of information to peruse – looking to see if anything exciting has occurred in your digital universe be it Twitter, Facebook, or any of a thousand different things people can check on these days. Finally, after prolonged lack of exposure to your smart phone, your overall sense of boredom is heightened. You get fidgety, you get bored quickly, and you feel disconnected and out of touch. Often times you simply don’t know what to do with yourself w/out a laptop or your mobile phone.

If this is you, don’t be ashamed. You’re just like millions of other people who are being conditioned by their “smart” mobile devices. Every time your phone vibrates to alert you of the possibility of something interesting, exciting, or even mundane (but new) – your brain is getting what psychologists call a “Dopamine squirt”. Over time, your brain links the phone vibration, ring, or the “new SMS” tone to a brief release of dopamine. You feel this tiny little rush of excitement that feels like adrenaline every time your phone vibrates, jingles, rings, or otherwise begs for your attention. Since this is dopamine we’re talking about, you actually suffer mild withdrawal symptoms when you are away from your phone or your phone is idle/quiet for a long period of time. You get fidgety, anxious, bored, etc.

Intermittent Reinforcement is another psychological term that is used to refer to the behavior of people tethered to their smart phones. Even if their phone has been programmed to alert them to the arrival of something new and noteworthy, millions of people will pull out their phones and do a quick scan for “new or interesting stuff”. The next time you’re in an airport, or a Starbucks, or any other crowded place (especially one with business people on their lunch break), sit back and do some people watching. Watch how often people pull out their phone, do a scan, then put their phone back. The scary part comes when you see the same person do this 4, 5, 10 times in a row while waiting in line for their coffee, sandwich, or standing on a street corner waiting for the “walk” signal to light up.

Intermittent Reinforcement is the addictive quality of video games and it is affects us at such a core, low level that no matter what kind of person we are – gamer, geek, artsy, whatever – we are still able to be conditioned using this pattern. The people holding these smart phones (I often call them “holsters”, referring to the level to which people have begun delegating all of their primary brain function to the little devices in their hands rather than thinking for themselves) have been conditioned to check their phones periodically for stimulation, to get the little squirt of dopamine. They pull out their phone, ask it “anything new?”, then put their phone back. 10 seconds later, they’ll pull the phone out again, repeat the process, and so on. The dopamine squirts that build up these subtle, low levels of addiction in people are what makes otherwise sane people crave the dopamine squirt even while driving, so they pull the phone out and check messages, send texts, and other horribly dangerous things.

In laboratory studies, rats are conditioned using Intermittent Reinforcement. They go over to a feeding tube, push a button, and sometimes food comes out. Eventually, the rat develops a pattern where it goes back to the feeding tube, pushes the button, and keeps checking over and over again to see if there is food available. Replace the rat’s food with the smartphone user’s news feed, twitter feed, facebook wall, gaming scores, etc.

Obviously some of these are extremes and the degree to which people are addicted to and conditioned by their mobile devices varies from person to person but here’s the scary part: Even if you are not one of the people I’ve described above, then you either know someone who is or you’ve seen someone who is recently.

My point here isn’t get on a high horse and complain about the state of modern technology. No, my point is that awareness of this phenomenon can make you a better application developer. If you’re aware of the patterns of Intermittent Reinforcement and you know how, over time, this can lead to “dopamine squirts” as people use mobile devices, you can design your application in such a way that it fits into this pattern and even takes advantage of it.

If you’re making a game, remember the rat. Give your users a little nugget of food every time they launch the application. Reward them and build the sense of Intermittent Reinforcement. Give them reason to come back to your game over and over again, day after day, to check and see if there is anything new worth doing, new rewards available, new progress to be made, etc. Your users aren’t rats, but like it or not, smartphone users are just as easily conditioned as rats (myself included, so please don’t think I’m being condescending here).

Even if you’re building a stuffy, boring business application, you can still take advantage of Intermittent Reinforcement and give your users dopamine squirts. Give the user a reason to come back to the app, to “check in” and see what’s new and what’s going on. When they do launch your app, give them something satisfying as a reward for having launched the application, something that will make them want to come back for more, no matter how boring the subject matter might be. One man’s insomnia cure is another man’s fetish.

I’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again – the usage patterns for mobile devices are not the same as the ones for apps in a browser, apps run from a laptop, apps used from a desktop, or even apps or games on a game console. Being aware of these patterns, especially how they affect the behavior of their users, will lead to building better applications that better suit the lifestyles of your users.

Source

Many people say George Wald was the greatest lecturer in Harvard’s history. He was certainly the best I’ve heard. Dr. Wald won a Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work on the biochemical basis of colour vision. He and I became friends in the 1970s because we shared a common concern about the misapplication of science, especially during the war in Vietnam. Dr. Wald once captivated me with a story he told:

For close to 150 million years, dinosaurs dominated the planet, and they were impressive. They were huge animals, armed with weapons like spikes on their tails, giant claws, and razor-sharp teeth. They were covered with armour plates. They seemed invincible, and when they roamed the Earth, other creatures fled in terror. But they had a fatal flaw: a tiny brain in relation to their body size. Despite their impressive traits, they disappeared – victims, in part, of their low brain-to-brawn ratio.

About 64 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, a beautiful animal appeared on the plains of Africa. This animal stood upright and walked on two legs, and its skin was free of fur. Unlike the plentiful wildebeest, this animal was rare. It wasn’t as big as a hippo. It wasn’t even as fast as an elephant. It wasn’t as strong as a chimpanzee, and it couldn’t see like an eagle, smell like a dog, or hear like a gazelle.

But those first beautiful humans were endowed with the highest brain-to-brawn ratio ever achieved, and in only 150,000 years, they had spread to every continent on Earth. Humans eventually outnumbered other mammals on the planet. Their high brain-to-brawn ratio served them well as they learned to domesticate plants and animals, and to live in environments as varied as Arctic tundra, deserts, coral atolls, mountain slopes, wetlands, and forests of every kind.

But then they invented guns and cannons and their brain-to-brawn ratio fell. They got into cars, tanks, and planes, and dropped napalm and nuclear bombs. And with each innovation, the brain-to-brawn ratio sank toward that of the dinosaurs.

I love Dr. Wald’s story because it encapsulates much of our dilemma. The human brain was the critical factor that more than compensated for our lack of physical and sensory abilities. We had a vast memory, we were observant and curious, and we were creative. In the past, our innovations such as the needle, bow and arrow, and pottery had huge repercussions but took centuries to evolve into the culture.

Agriculture was the big shift that released us from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers and village dwellers. Then the Industrial Revolution heralded a massive change. In only two centuries, people were able to harness the cheap, portable energy of fossil fuels to create machines of incredible power. In the movie Avatar, the giant robots have no heads, a symbol of what we have become as a species. We have acquired vast technological power but far too little of the brainpower or wisdom needed to use that power well.

Consider this simple example. When New Zealand fishers discovered a fish called orange roughy in deep-sea waters, they thought they had hit a bonanza. Technology to fish the deep sea – radar, sonar, GPS, freezers, giant nets – enabled them to exploit the abundant fish in massive numbers. Despite the fact that these were a new target species about which virtually nothing was known, the animals were taken in vast quantities. It’s called “harvesting” but it was really a “mining” operation. Only years later did we learn these fish live more than a hundred years and grow and mature far more slowly than inshore species.

When was the last time you ate orange roughy? They have been nearly wiped out all around the globe because our technology was too powerful in relation to our knowledge. We didn’t consider our limitations, which should have caused us to be far more cautious and conservative. The technology meant that brain-to-brawn sank toward a level closer to that of the dinosaurs.

Technology can provide great benefits, but unless we learn to use our heads in applying our technologies, we will also go the way of the dinosaurs.

-

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation. Faisal Moola is the director of science at the foundation (www.davidsuzuki.org).

Source

Thanks to Michele for sharing!

Great work, brilliant ideas, extraordinary art requires space.

Time away. Room to process, synthesize, allow connections between seemingly disparate parts to effervesce out of the ether of the mind.

Genius is the offspring of the in-between.

But, increasingly, technology is removing the in-between.

We don’t just walk in contemplation, we walk, talk and type.

We don’t just drive, we drive, talk and every time we stop the car, we check, tap and reply. Red lights, the bain of a life-long quest to get “there,” have now become a sought after opportunity to catch up on any communication that may’ve arrived since the last red-light…5 blocks ago.

But when we fill in all the organic in-betweens with texting, e-mailing, DMing and updating, we unintentionally kill the a critical step in the ideation process—percolation and contemplation—and along with it go creativity, innovation and despite your opposite intention, productivity.

So, why do we do it?

Filling in the in-between, we say, lets us get so much more done. Wrong.

Hyperconnectivity gives us the perception of getting more done, it makes us feel like we’re doing more, because we’re using every free moment of every waking hour.

There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.

Hyperconnectivity requires a massive volume of switchtasking, which destroys true-productivity and efficiency because every time you page through your various modes of connectivity and respond to different prompts, you lose focus. To regain that focus requires a certain amount of time and cognitive effort.

Put another way, there is a ramping cost every time you switch gears, then return.

So when you spiral through every known mode of communication hundreds of times a day, you may be busy as hell, but you damn sure aren’t productive. At least nowhere near the level you could be. You’ve just created the illusion of productivity.

By the way, if you’re wondering if that’s you, here’s an easy test:

Next time someone asks what you did at the end of a day, if you know you were crazy busy but you can’t immediately pin-point a small number of substantially-meaningful accomplishments, critical insights or measurable forward movement…let alone recall any tasks beyond “oh I answered a lot of emails, put out fires and had a bunch of meetings…you’ve very likely fallen into hyperconnected lost-sock land.

All of which begs an even bigger question…

If hyperconnectivity really isn’t about efficiency and productivity, like we claim it is, what is it about?

Two things:

1. An insanely addictive phenomenon called intermittent reinforcement.

Intermittent reinforcement is a behavioral pattern where repeated reinforcement of a behavior over times programs your brain to crave more and more opportunities to express that behavior. It mirrors addiction and, in fact, may well trigger chemical dopamine releases in the brain quite similar to those triggered through chemical addictions.

In the context of mobile notifications, Kevin Hoffman described it beautifully:

Every time your phone vibrates to alert you of the possibility of something interesting, exciting, or even mundane (but new) – your brain is getting what psychologists call a “Dopamine squirt”. Over time, your brain links the phone vibration, ring, or the “new SMS” tone to a brief release of dopamine. You feel this tiny little rush of excitement that feels like adrenaline every time your phone vibrates, jingles, rings, or otherwise begs for your attention. Since this is dopamine we’re talking about, you actually suffer mild withdrawal symptoms when you are away from your phone or your phone is idle/quiet for a long period of time. You get fidgety, anxious, bored, etc.

Intermittent reinforcement annihilates will.

Hyperconnectivity has become one of the purest forms of intermittent reinforcement ever to exist. Which is a bit horrifying, because in addition to pulling us away from activities and relationships we claim to hold dear and degrading “real” productivity, it all but eliminates the opportunities for disconnection that are crucial in the creation of great art, business and life.

But, that’s not all…

2. Enter the Zeigarnik Effect.

I’ve written about this before in the context of chronic non-finishers:

Legend has it, famed Russian and psychologist and researcher, Bluma Zeigarnik, was sitting at a café in Vienna when she noticed that her waiter could remember the details of a large order perfectly until that customer was served. Once served, the order literally vanished from the waiter’s memory.

Through further research, Zeigarnik discovered that people, in general, will remember the details of most any task until it is completed and then, remarkably, forget much of what unfolded. Moreover, once begun, there is an underlying psychological drive to complete the task.

So, between the process of remembering what needs to be done and enduring the constant tug to bring a task to completion, every unfinished task stakes a claim to a small piece of our memory and short-term cognitive abilities.

It stands to reason, then, that the more we begin and the less we finish, the more chronically occupied our minds become. Beyond feeling stressed, frazzled and overwhelmed, this can also lead to impaired thinking, problem-solving and creativity. Not the most pleasant state in the world.

What Zeigarnik also discovered is that once a loop has been opened (a task or conversation begun), we become increasingly compelled to complete it. It creates an urge, a pull, to finish what was started.

How does this relate to hyperconnectivity, productivity and creativity?

Simple. Every time we begin a conversation by text, email, twitter, Facebook or Google+, it’s like we’re opening a new loop. One that, until completed, compels us to want to finish the conversation. To keep checking and responding until the loop has been closed.

Problem is, in a hyperconnected world…the loops never close.

And if they ever do, the space created is instantly filled by countless new loops that overlap and stack like an eternally-thickening linguistic lasagna, consuming the mental juices needed to do great work, create genius, divine solutions and get stuff done.

Along the way, we eviscerate both the downtime needed for insight and the consistent focus needed to accomplish much more than being busy.

Indeed, left unchecked…

Hyperconnectivity has become a form of productivity decimation and intermittent creative destruction.

Its said that the 10:10 position gives the clock or watch a number of benefits:

• The hands not overlapping, so they’re fully and clearly visible and their styling can be admired.

• The arrangement of the hands is symmetrical, which people generally find more pleasant than asymmetry, making the product more appealing to customers.

• The manufacturer’s logo, usually in the center of the face under the 12, is not only visible, but nicely framed by the hands.

• Additional elements on the face (like date windows and secondary dials), usually placed near the 3, 6, or 9, won’t be obscured.

According to the folks at Timex (who set their products at 10:09:36 exactly), the standard setting used to be 8:20, but this made the face look like it was frowning. To make the products look “happier,” the setting was flipped into a smile (occasionally, you’ll still see the 8:20 setting on some clocks or watches where the manufacturer’s logo is at bottom of the face above the 6).

By spellitme.wordpress.com