Do coffee and cigarettes make you smarter?
s. Via Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons: You already know that your morning cup(s) of coffee make(s) you a better person: more alert, more outgoing, increasingly optimistic, better looking, better smelling, nicer, etc. But did you know that coffee actually makes you smarter? It does, really. But only for a short period of time, and when you come down, you’re dumber than you were before taking that first sip (unless you drink more…
1 min read
Does doodling actually increase your ability to pay attention?
ve posted before about the positives and negatives of daydreaming. Looks like doodling may increase your ability to pay attention when your mind is tempted to wander: Via The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You): Now, we know that mind-wandering can hamper memory performance on such tests. Does doodling offer some protection against this? The results of Andrade’s study: doodlers recalled 29 percent more information than nondoodlers did. Precisely…
1 min read
Why do we daydream? Is it good for us?
u spend up to 8 minutes of every hour daydreaming. Your mind will probably wander for 13% of the time it takes you to read this post. Some of us spend 30-40% of our time daydreaming. Via The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You): Do you remember what the previous paragraph was about? It’s OK, I’m not offended. Chances are that your mind will wander for up to eight…
3 minutes
How can you stop wasting so much time on the internet?
t more sleep. Cheating yourself on sleep reduces willpower and it's this same store of self-control that helps us resist all those bad behaviors like aimless web-surfing. Via BPS Occupational Digest: Researchers have previously argued that sleep is a means of recharging our regulatory resources, and these studies confirm that less sleep does indeed make us prey to counterproductive activities like cyberloafing. Join over 140,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: 10 things you need to…
1 min read
How can you figure out what your real long term goals are?
sualize your funeral and consider what you would want friends to describe as your legacy. Via Richard Wiseman's excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute: Asking people to spend just a minute imagining a close friend standing up at their funeral and reflecting on their personal and professional legacy helps them to identify their long-term goals and assess the degree to which they are progressing toward making those goals a reality. Join over 200,000 readers. Get a free…
1 min read
Is a Rocky training montage what you need to improve performance?
inking about what you have to do to prepare for a challenge was more likely to lead to success than imagining the victory. Via PsyBlog: Outcome and process have been put head-to-head experimentally by Pham and Taylor (1999) who had students either visualise their ultimate goal of doing well in an exam or the steps they would take to reach that goal, i.e. studying. The results were clear-cut. Participants who visualised themselves reading and gaining the required skills and knowledge,…
1 min read
2 Proven Tricks For Focusing Your Mind And Increasing Performance
sitive self-talk and positive mental imagery: Self-leadership theory can be described as the 'process of influencing oneself' as opposed to the influence of leaders over followers (Manz, 1983, 1986). We focus on and develop a model for a particular aspect of self-leadership - thought self-leadership emphasizing two primary elements, self-talk and mental imagery. The major thrust of this model is that employees can influence or lead themselves by utilizing specific cognitive strategies that focus on individual self-dialogue and mental imagery.…
3 minutes
Do you need a “to-do” list or a “not-to-do” list?
m Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, makes an interesting suggestion -- you may need to worry less about your to-do list and focus on a "stop doing" list: Rochelle's lesson came back to me a number of years later while puzzling over the research data on 11 companies that turned themselves from mediocrity to excellence, from good to great. In cataloguing the key steps that ignited the transformations, my research…
2 minutes
