Tag Archives: theory
The Hidden Power of Smiling
Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling, and reveals some surprising results. Did you know your smile can be a predictor of how long you’ll live — and that a simple smile has a measurable effect on your overall well-being?
Prepare to flex a few facial muscles as you learn more about this evolutionarily contagious behavior.
Amazingly large bags, twice their eighty-pound weight. Some of the women carry babies in slings around front. A good adult picker can harvest over two hundred pounds of cherries and earn $8 a day, more than twice the Guatemalan minimum daily wage.
What is creativity really?
From a scientific perspective, creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between pre-existing ideas in your brain. These connections are controlled by neurotransmitters like adenosine, which alerts your brain when you’re running out of energy and reacts.
This got me wondering about coffee and beer and which one would actually help me be more creative and get work done. Hopefully, this will help you decide when it’s best to have that triple shot espresso or ice cold brew.
[quote text_size=”big”]
Adenosine is kind of like your brain’s battery status monitor.
[/quote]
From a scientific perspective, creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between pre-existing ideas in your brain. These connections are controlled by neurotransmitters like adenosine, which alerts your brain when you’re running out of energy and reacts.
Your brain on coffee
Every coffee drinker is familiar with the feelings after drinking a fresh cup of java. I know after I’ve had a latte or espresso, I feel more focused. If I’m having a conversation with someone, words seem to flow without pauses, ums, or ahs.
© Ann Nevreva
If you decide to drink coffee or beer while you’re working, stick to no more than 2 drinks per sitting and try not to do this more than once or twice per week to prevent dependency. Coffee and beer shouldn’t be thought of as magic bullets for creativity.
Be Grateful.
It’s really simple. What is one thing today you are really grateful for? What is another? If you can list 3 things a day, you’ll see you have much more going for you than you thought. Soon your list will get so long you’ll be beaming with energy.
- Coffee and beer shouldn’t be thought of as magic bullets for creativity.
- They are ways to create chemical changes that occur naturally in your body.
- Quality sleep, a healthy diet, and allowing yourself to take breaks.
We are all human as well and humans are not perfect creatures. When you learn to accept yourself, true happiness quickly arises.
Flow Is the Secret to Happiness
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Nothing that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.”
People who struggle to work remotely often bemoan the lack of in-person collaboration jumping from this tool to that tech in an effort to recreate the magic that only happens when we’re all in the same room. There are definitely advantages to face time, but too often it seems like facial expressions and waving arms are substituted for clear thought and courtesy.
Unless your query concerns inflammable materials currently engulfed in said flames you’ve likely wasted their time – in fact, you may have even wasted your own.
Little Fisher © Mark Bridger
One of my favorite side-effects of working remotely is the way slow-time communication forces you to stop and think before you speak. When I have a question for one of our programmers, for example, here’s a bit of what goes through my head:
The basic idea is this: you try to minimize the things that are bad, and maximize those that are good.
The next time you have a question for a coworker, try writing it out as if they were 1000 miles and 3 time zones away – even if they’re sitting right next to you. You might surprise yourself with the answer.
Design: Seeing Without Thinking
Visual perception and pattern detection for designers. What your audience immediately sees without conciously thinking much about it and how to design for it.
This is a very visual theme, merging pictures and text seamlessly, featuring a grid based, patchwork portfolio section and page that tempts your visitors. This goes much deeper in thinking.
What jumps out?
Some designers might think I’m referencing the Call to Action, and that’s true, but that’s the low-hanging fruit. This goes much deeper.
There’s some interesting science behind this question of what jumps out. When you apply this science to your work, it can boost the results and satisfaction your designs deliver. This is a phenomenon that occurs in the brain’s low-level visual system. Simply, preattentive Processing describes a limited set of visual cues the brain can rapidly process, what jumps out in your audience’s mind.
Color and info layering
In our scenario, we are mapping census data to show how similar geographic areas compare to each other in terms of population, income, race, or education level
Of course, the most inspired ideas come from the magical space in time between falling asleep and sleeping (if only I could remember them!). The idea should be strong enough to push you to action.
Give the Idea an Inspiration Shower
The seed needs to be soaked in an inspiration shower (patent pending). I hunt the interwebs for cool UI patterns and archive them in a massive PhotoShop file. For example, when working on YouTube TV I grabbed hundreds of examples of future UI from futurists like Jayse Hansen and Neil Huxley.
Designing and developing anything of consequence is incredibly challenging.
Sketching for me is the result of landing on a solution in my mind. I dont sketch to solve the problem, I sketch to describe the solution I see in my mind.
I don’t stop sketching until I transfer the whole system from my mind to paper. I have to understand the big picture of the product first and how every piece fits together. I tend to sketch out little UI patterns like how I would handle large numbers, dates and long titles, trying to solve potential UI issues before I get working on mocks.
Ship and Evaluate
Shipping is the ultimate test of your designs success. Successful design is design that converts. There are only three metrics that truly matter:
- How many users?
- How much time do they spend on site?
- How much revenue do you generate?
Data doesn’t lie. What you build and ship either increases these conversion metrics or decreases them.
The True Power of The Performing Arts
Arts administrator and live-theater fan Ben Cameron looks at the state of the live arts — asking: How can the magic of live theater, live music, live dance compete with the always-on Internet? In his talk, he offers a bold look forward.
In this stunning slideshow, celebrated nature photographer Frans Lanting presents The LIFE Project, a poetic collection of photographs that tell the story of our planet, from its eruptive beginnings to its present diversity.
Amazingly large bags, twice their eighty-pound weight. Some of the women carry babies in slings around front. A good adult picker can harvest over two hundred pounds of cherries and earn $8 a day, more than twice the Guatemalan minimum daily wage.
What is creativity really?
From a scientific perspective, creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between pre-existing ideas in your brain. These connections are controlled by neurotransmitters like adenosine, which alerts your brain when you’re running out of energy and reacts.
This got me wondering about coffee and beer and which one would actually help me be more creative and get work done. Hopefully, this will help you decide when it’s best to have that triple shot espresso or ice cold brew.
[quote text_size=”big”]
Adenosine is kind of like your brain’s battery status monitor.
[/quote]
From a scientific perspective, creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between pre-existing ideas in your brain. These connections are controlled by neurotransmitters like adenosine, which alerts your brain when you’re running out of energy and reacts.
Your brain on coffee
Every coffee drinker is familiar with the feelings after drinking a fresh cup of java. I know after I’ve had a latte or espresso, I feel more focused. If I’m having a conversation with someone, words seem to flow without pauses, ums, or ahs.
Down Time © Mark Bridger
If you decide to drink coffee or beer while you’re working, stick to no more than 2 drinks per sitting and try not to do this more than once or twice per week to prevent dependency. Coffee and beer shouldn’t be thought of as magic bullets for creativity.
Be Grateful.
It’s really simple. What is one thing today you are really grateful for? What is another? If you can list 3 things a day, you’ll see you have much more going for you than you thought. Soon your list will get so long you’ll be beaming with energy.
- Coffee and beer shouldn’t be thought of as magic bullets for creativity.
- They are ways to create chemical changes that occur naturally in your body.
- Quality sleep, a healthy diet, and allowing yourself to take breaks.
We are all human as well and humans are not perfect creatures. When you learn to accept yourself, true happiness quickly arises.
