Street Preacher I was out wandering around the other day and I saw a street preacher off in the distance. I could hear the sound of his voice, but I couldn’t make out the words he was saying. But the crowd was huge, and even from a distance I could taste the charisma […]
Sliding Into Amnesia
Collective Memory One of the interesting things about any given society at any given time is the idea of collective memory. The bigger a society gets, the bigger its collective memory gets which will allow any technology to be subsequently added to over the generations. However, like any complex systems, there are many […]
Hidden Disruptive Technologies
Excess Brain Power All modern problems can be resolved to what evolutionary psychologists call an instinct mismatch. That our mind body system was calibrated for a world much different than the one in which we live. A corollary to this idea is that we have a significant amount of excess brain capacity. […]
Imaginary Party Games
Book Club People I have a friend who is a very die-hard, old school, book lover. She belongs to a book club and none of them like to use any technology. They only read hardback books, they don’t have smartphones, and they even refuse to read books written after world war II. […]
Invisible Violin Player
Water Boy A few years ago some guy came by selling some water filters. He tried the puppy dog close, which is a pretty good closing technique, as it leverages commitment and consistency, as well as liking. But it does require you present your offer well, and you actually have a product that […]
Doppelganger Apocalypse
Artificial Scarcity A very common and old marketing strategy is to create and manage a level of artificial scarcity just enough to calibrate and maintain the desired purchasing level. For example, a company will be getting ready to release a new product, and advertise like crazy, building up massive demand. Then they purposely […]
Death Cycles
Dog Machine A friend of mine has this automatic dog machine. The dog drops the ball in the machine, the machine waits a random amount of time, and then spits the ball out with a random amount of force. The dog, after dropping the ball in, backs up, gets ready, and catches the […]
Circle Origin Story
Trigonometry is Magic One of the coolest discoveries in mathematics is that of trigonometry. Since cycles are a deep part of the natural world, and trigonometry deals in cycles, its discovery helped humans to understand a lot more than they did previously. It all started by wondering about the mathematical descriptions of the […]
Mental Brain Illusions
What You See Isn’t Real There are a lot of cool optical illusions. They are, of course, based on mismatch between what you see, and what you think you are seeing. Our eyes and our visual cortex need to make a lot of assumptions about what we think we see, and up to […]
Social Proof Frame Strength
Persuasion Experiments There have been a lot of cool experiments done to demonstrate the various triggers of influence that operate outside of our conscious awareness. In a social proof experiment, they had a guy stand on a corner, and stare up into an empty sky, but pretending that he was looking at something incredibly […]
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