A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
Author: Cordelia Fine
Genre: Popular Science
Interesting, well-written and entertaining book about the peculiarities of the brain we walk around with, and how it influences our judgments and our actions.
Posted in Books
The Book of Illusions
Author: Paul Auster
Genre: Fiction
I actually don’t like Paul Auster’s books too much. Acclaimed literary wunderkind or not, I generally find his writing overly artificial (this impression based on having read the New York Trilogy and The Music of Chance, which may be too small a sample to judge him). Frankly speaking, in these books, I feel that he sometimes drops the ball in the quest to produce intellectual writing.
However, I really liked The Book of Illusions
Posted in Books
Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre: Fiction
A melancholically tinged coming-of-age story with a dark twist, Never Let Me Go
Ishiguro has also written The Remains of the Day
Posted in Books
Did you ever talk to your television? Have you ever given your computer a good angry whack because it didn’t behave? Fear not. You are not alone.
In general, people treat media like computers and televisions as if they were dealing with other people, not dumb electronic devices. This is because media are complex enough in their behaviour and appearance to active the brain’s mental models for dealing with people. When people talk to their television, it is because their brains basically go “Hmm – that box over there looks like a human, and talks like a human. It must be human.” And so we talk to it.
Of course, on a higher level, we ‘know’ that the television can’t hear us, but this knowledge is surprisingly often absent when you look at how people actually behave. For instance, two social scientists found that people are polite towards their computers.
In essence, they asked people to perform a task using a computer, and were afterwards asked to evaluate how the computer was to work with. Interestingly, if people did this evaluation on the same computer as the one they just worked on, their replies were significantly more positive than the control group, who was asked to fill out the evaluation on a different computer, standing right next to the first one. That is, people are polite towards computers.
And it is not because the people they tested were country hicks from some remote and media-ignorant village. They also tested tech-savvy people who dealt with computers every day, and surprisingly, the effect was more pronounced for this group. In effect, this ‘politeness’ is similar to the automatic politeness we show if someone comes up to us after giving a speech and asks, ‘So, how did I do?’. Face to face with the speaker, most people are more polite than they would be, were they asked by a third person.
The learning point is this: media are complex enough to activate the brain’s mental models for dealing with people – or, as the experimenters put it, ‘new media engage old brains’. This obviously has enormous significance for the way we should design media products so that they become more user-friendly.
The experiment is taken from the book The Media Equation, written by Reeves & Nass, which is filled with similar stories on how our hard-wired brain affects our behavior (see my review here).
Posted in Fragments of knowledge
The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places
Authors: Byron Reeves & Clifford Nass
Genre: Academic
Readability: Good
Two researchers, Reeves & Nass, did an interesting thing: they took a number of established theories from the social sciences and tested them on computers. Or rather, they tested them on people who dealt with computers, televisions, and other types of media.
Their finding was consistent: people generally treat media as if they were other people. For instance, they found that people are polite towards their computers.
More generally, The Media Equation
Posted in Books
