Reading contributes more to human excellence than any other form of knowledge acquisition. Reading comes so naturally to experts that they don’t tend to think much about the process. Yet reading is one of the most sophisticated mental activities.
Continue reading Are we Doomed to Read with Information Technology?
Author: Luc P. Beaudoin
Head of CogZest.
Author of Cognitive Productivity books.
Co-founder of CogSci Apps Corp.
Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science & of Education, Simon Fraser University.
Why, Where, and What I Write.
See About Me for more information.
Psychology of the Base: Why Do Some Canadians Still Support the Harper Government?
I believe that all the important problems of war and peace, exploitation and brotherhood, hatred and love, sickness and health, misunderstanding and understanding, the happiness and unhappiness of mankind will yield only to a better understanding of human nature. […]
Psychology should be more humanistic, more concerned with the problems of humanity, and less with the problems of the guild.
A. H. Maslow. Toward a humanistic psychology
There will be a general federal election in Canada On Monday, October 19th. The international press and even the leading conservative Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, have been extremely critical of our prime minister, Stephen Harper. According to polls, the vast majority of Canadians want to replace this government. But because of our “first past the post” electoral system, the Harper Conservatives might still be returned to power.
Given the glut of well publicized facts about the Harper Tory record, and given the viability of the Liberal Party and New Democratic Party (NDP), it is difficult for me to fathom how Canadians, some of them our esteemed friends, would still support the Harper Conservative government.
Continue reading Psychology of the Base: Why Do Some Canadians Still Support the Harper Government?
Is This Information Sufficiently Helpful?
In Cognitive Productivity I described several illusions and biases that interfere with our ability to leverage knowledge resources. The first set of illusions is to over-estimate or underestimate the “helpfulness” of a knowledge resources.
Illusions of Helpfulness of Information
Selecting the right resource to process is critical to the development of effectiveness. Continue reading Is This Information Sufficiently Helpful?
Romantic Love (Limerence): A Workshop on Emotion
I’ve begun to offer a pair of workshops on emotion that focus primarily on romantic love, technically known as “limerence”. The first workshop is designed primarily to enhance participants’ understanding of their emotions, whereas the second is focused on “relating to” their emotions. This post is about the first workshop.
Why Understand Limerence (Romantic Love)?
So what does limerence have to do with cognitive productivity? As I argued at length in Cognitive Productivity, to learn effectively we must not merely develop dry, cognitive mechanisms and representations (the substrate of memory, skills, etc.). Otherwise, we will at most develop an “inert” storehouse of knowledge, as Alfred Whitehead put it. We must rather change ourselves affectively: develop inclinations, feelings, desires and tendencies to apply what we’ve learned. To this end, it helps to understand emotions.
Furthemore, emotions generally, and limerence in particular, can directly promote productivity and creativity. (Beethoven’s may have been fueled by his unrequited love. There are countless similar examples. Compare the reference to The Mating Mind below.) Emotions can also, of course, destroy our ability to focus.
Continue reading Romantic Love (Limerence): A Workshop on Emotion
Papers3 for iPhone and iPad is Now Free: Delve On!
Our favourite reference management software, Papers3, is now free for iPhone and iPad.. (Papers is mentioned 16 times in Cognitive Productivity.)
Continue reading Papers3 for iPhone and iPad is Now Free: Delve On!
The Value of TextExpander Snippet Conventions: Web Addresses, Citations, Bibliographical References, Markdown and More
Smile Software’s TextExpander is the productivity app I use the most. It allows one to define and expand abbreviations for frequently used content (text and images). For example, suppose you frequently need to refer to me in text. You might create a snippet whose abbreviation is “@luc” (without the quotes) and whose target content is “Luc P. Beaudoin“. (See the section on name abbreviations.) That’s particularly handy for long or foreign names. (Mine is a French name).
TextExpander provides statistics that quantify its benefits. From the screenshot below you can see that I’ve expanded nearly 212,000 snippets, saving me 2.8M characters. Continue reading The Value of TextExpander Snippet Conventions: Web Addresses, Citations, Bibliographical References, Markdown and More
On the Speed of Accommodating to Potent Ideas: Using one of Ron Burnett’s Knowledge Gems as an Example
A quick note about the speed and some characteristics of mental change in adults, using an example from Ron Burnett. Accommodation can happen quickly when the right conditions are in place.[1] Accommodation is the crown jewels of mental development, including many important forms of learning and knowledge building. It is what happens to your mind as it grasps a new concept, theory or set of concepts and can now see the world in a new way, in its terms. In Cognitive Productivity, I likened this to acquiring a new perceptual modality.
Most previous thinkers on the subject emphasized the purely “cognitive” aspects of accommodation. What strikes me however are the affective dimensions of many forms of accommodation. I.e., in accommodation one doesn’t simply perceive and think differently, but one’s value system changes. Information is now pertinent that didn’t use to be pertinent. Information gets internally connected in a valenced fashion in one’s mind/brain. One of my most important theoretical and practical concerns is to understand accommodation.
Tea, Zen, Creativity and Taking Mental Notes with the Method of Loci
Sexual selection is the professional, at sifting between genes.
Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind
Have you ever had this awkward experience at a conference cocktail party: a rosy new acquaintance asks you about the morning’s keynote, which you attended with no capture device but yourself? So you couldn’t recall anything about the lecture to convey to your interested, appealing conversant.
This post discusses the problem of taking mental notes. As more than an example, I will use a lecture on Zen and Creativity that my date and I recently attended on July 30. Continue reading Tea, Zen, Creativity and Taking Mental Notes with the Method of Loci
Jon Stewart Skewered Stephen Harper on the Daily Show: Illustrating Cognitive Productivity with Twisted Canadian Politics
The Globe & Mail published an article yesterday morning by Lawrence Martin called “We need Jon Stewart to set Canada straight“. He wrote “Too bad [Stewart didn’t cover Harper]. Imagine the fun he could have lampooning this place?”
As it happens, on June 3, 2015 I sent Comedy Central an email urging them to cover Mr. Harper and to invite Mr. Mulcair or Mr. J. Trudeau to The Daily Show.
Well, it can be said that Jon Stewart did cover the Conservative Government of Canada —in his own way.
More on Accessing PDFs Managed by Papers 3 for Mac
In my previous blog post, I talked about the 2-second file access rule in relation to an excellent reference management app, Papers 3 for Mac. This rule (which I explained in Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective) states that you need to be able, 8 times out of 10, to access a knowledge resource (typically a PDF or a meta-doc) within 2 seconds. That normally means without using your mouse. I noted in that post that if you enable Papers 3 syncing, it’s hard to satisfy that constraint.
I encourage researchers to consider using Papers 3. So this blog post briefly explains the file name issue and proposes a solution.
Continue reading More on Accessing PDFs Managed by Papers 3 for Mac