Cognitively Potent Software Is Mightier than the Pen in the Hands of Able, Motivated Knowledge Builders: Response to Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014)

Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer recently published a peer reviewed article in Psychological Science provocatively titled “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking”.[1] Their claim would herald a significant discovery if it were true. For there are many important reasons to believe using a laptop, at least in certain ways, can increase cognitive productivity: Delving, assessing, comprehending, understanding, knowledge building, retention, learning, mastery and even mental development (deep learning). We need not retreat to the to lab refute their titular conclusion. This post, I believe, does the trick.

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Things I Learned From My Dad — Reflections and Gratitude on Father’s Day

This one is dedicated to my dad for father’s day.

This being Father’s Day and me being well into my 40’s, the time is right to develop a conjecture about some of the influences my father has had on me. I’ve put this in conjectural terms because there is no way to tease out with any certainty the various causes of one’s current state: genetics (too oft underestimated), parents, siblings, the media, society, teachers, role models, friends, and ultimately our own selves. Furthermore, our own state is largely also conjectural — a “self-concept”.

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Response to Tom Monahan’s “If I Were 22: Embrace Your Ignorance”

While differing widely in the little bits we know, or rather guess, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal. (Karl Popper).

Tom Monahan (Chairman and CEO at CEB) published an interesting article on LinkedIn yesterday: “If I Were 22: Embrace Your Ignorance”. He admitted that he graduated from Harvard feeling that he was “master of not only my own nascent trade, but pretty much anything else under the sun”. I.e., overconfident about his knowledge and abilities. Looking back, he would embrace his own ignorance, be a curator of good questions, and ask questions of more people. Good advice!

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Working with a Great Graphic Designer: A Case Study of Extended Cognitive Productivity

To extend our own effectiveness, it is, of course, not sufficient to study. We often need to turn to experts. Often, they are consultants. Success here is partly a matter of finding the right person. It equally is a matter of being an excellent client.
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Sleep Onset, The Cognitive Shuffle and Productivity: Our Presentation at the 2014 SFU Learning Together Conference

Sheryl Guloy and I will be giving a presentation on the cognitive shuffle and cognitive productivity on Friday May 9 at the SFU Learning Together 2014 Conference. That’s an annual conference put on by the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University.

The title of our presentation is:

Decreasing sleep-onset latency for better cognitive performance in faculty and students: Super-somnolent mentation and the new “cognitive shuffle” technique compared with monotonous imagery training.

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Cognitive Productivity and Clinical Psychology

I’ve released a substantial update to Cognitive Productivity today. The changes are summarized on the release notes page.

The main change here is that I have renamed and completely rewritten Chapter 15, Meta-effectiveness framework and clinical psychology.

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Announcing mySleepButton – The First Sleep App Based on Cognitive Science (Serial Diverse Imagining, The Cognitive Shuffle and Super-Somnolent Mentation)

I’m delighted to announce that CogSci Apps Corp. has just released mySleepButton on the Apple App Store. It’s the first sleep app based on cognitive science.

It uses a radically different approach to sleep from all the other apps on the market.

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News: CogZest Spins Off CogSci Apps Corp. to Develop and Market Its Software Portfolio

I’m very happy to announce that CogZest has given birth to a new venture, CogSci Apps Corp..

In a nutshell

The short of it is that On Feb 27, 2014, I closed a deal in which I transferred CogZest’s software/ intellectual property portfolio to CogSci Apps Corp.™ in exchange for shares in the new privately held company.

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Release Notes for Cognitive Productivity Book

Ever since I published the first revision of Cognitive Productivity in June 2013, I have been making private notes of changes I make to this book. Now that the book is complete, I’ve concluded I really should publish release notes on my website for as many revisions of the book as possible. It’s not that I anticipate many revisions. At this point, I’m just handling errata and making minor changes in preparation for Amazon and iBookstore versions of the book (which incidentally might get a different title).

Why release notes for a Leanpub book?

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Call for Papers: Workshop on Computational Modeling of Cognition-Emotion Interactions: Relevance to Mechanisms of Affective Disorders and Therapeutic Action

On July 23, at the CogSci 2014 conference in Quebec City, there will be a workshop on “Computational Modeling of Cognition-Emotion Interactions: Relevance to Mechanisms of Affective Disorders and Therapeutic Action”. I am on the workshop’s panel committee, with a great set of researchers. I will also be submitting a paper.

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