Month: January 2019

Birth Announcement: Hook Is a New CogSci Apps Invention for Your Cognitive Productivity

 

Hook supplies the missing links in the world’s best OS for productivity, R&D, creativity, blogging, markdown, and learning.

Hook solves the “meta-access problem” that I described in Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. Now that’s process. First write the book that describes (a) the problems, (b) the cognitive science that is pertinent to the problems; and (c) ways of using existing software (hacks) and information to solve the problems. Then develop an app that directly addresses the problem.

Hook is currently in public beta.

Peripatetic Reflections on Why We Walk While We Talk and Think Deeply

Paul Minda, a Canadian cognitive psychologist at University of Western Ontario, asked an interesting question on Twitter

Why do people pace around or engage in unguided, unfocused movement when talking on the phone. Does anyone know the answer?

I will focus mainly on a subset of this question, which is: why do we do this type of thing while highly cognitively engaged (e.g., participating in a cognitively demanding conversation, or lecturing).

I like to first try to answer a question myself (drawing as much as I can on my understanding of prior readings) before delving into others’ answers. So here are some “off the cuff” rambling reflections which expand on a series of my Twitter replies to Paul’s tweet. Keep in mind that I don’t specialize in cognitive embodiment. And the following is not rigorous reasoning. Just some (hopefully relevant) thoughts. But I am interested in all things relevant to cognitive productivity, which this is.

Later I might come back to the issue.

Continue reading Peripatetic Reflections on Why We Walk While We Talk and Think Deeply

Instead of Designing a Reading List for 2019, Why Not Resolve to Do This?

It’s that time of the year again, where people review, make resolutions, set goals and plan for the next year. One of the questions that comes up is planning one’s readings.

This blog post is a slightly adapted (but still unpolished) response to a question on the productivity guild, “How do you handle readling lists?”

The concept of an absolute, global “reading list”, which is what most people have in mind when discussing “reading lists” is counter-productive. Continue reading Instead of Designing a Reading List for 2019, Why Not Resolve to Do This?