The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain « The Situationist

As I stake out my position on the couch this evening – close enough to reach the pretzels and my beer, but with an optimal view of the TV – it will be nice to imagine that the spectacle about to unfold is a sporting event.It shouldn’t be too hard: after all, there on the screen will be the field, Brian Urlacher stretching out his quads, Peyton Manning tossing a football, referees in their freshly-starched zebra uniforms milling about.Yes, I’ll think to myself, this has all the makings of a football game. How foolish. The Super Bowl isn’t about sports; it’s about making money.And with 90 million or so viewers, there is a lot of money to be made. With CBS charging an estimated $2.6 million for each 30-second advertising spot, it’s no surprise that corporations don’t mess around with guessing what the most effective approach will be for selling their products.They call in the scientists.brain-on-advertising.jpg For the second year in a row, FKF Applied Research has partnered with the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to “measure the effect of many of the Super Bowl ads by using fMRI technology.

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Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness | Video on TED.com

The PersonalBrain - A Knowledge Management Software Tool

There is a plethora of Mindmapping software tools out there but PersonalBrain, using the metaphor of the working brain connecting neurons (in this context - parent thoughts) to a series of child thoughts (thoughts associated with the parent thought) offers a very simple moving functionality that allows the user to move from parent thought to parent thought in the process making connections a static mind map isn't able to do.

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How The Brain Operates Creatively | TopNews

Creativity, something that has been regarded throughout history as instantaneous discovery or divine inspiration can now be measured, and research has found that most people have the ability to sharpen their own creative abilities. For example, University of Sydney researchers created what they call a “thinking cap” that applies electric stimulation to the brain in order to synthetically cultivate creativity.

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Not Enough Time? Try Doing Nothing - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review

t was a beautiful, sunny day in New York City as I rode my bike into Central Park. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, pumping my legs hard to work up speed, excited to join the flow of other cyclists I expected to see on the six-mile loop road.But when I arrived, my mood plummeted. The road was filled with runners in a race while the cyclists were relegated to a single lane. I slowed down, annoyed, as I made my way onto the bike lane. Soon, though, my mood lifted: the cycling wasn't as slow as I had feared. I picked up my pace and got back into a rhythm, feeling my pedal strokes and paying attention to my breath.

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