Your Mind: a Mixed Bag
by Miki Saxon
I’m not Santa, but I do have a mixed bag of gifts for you today.
First off is an update on your brain. If you are looking for ways to juice creative thinking on your team try making them laugh before the brainstorming session.
In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.
How cool is that?
Speaking of brains and innovation, what do you think it would take to turn around a 153 year old icon of intellectualism in what is supposed to be a dying industry? That’s exactly what you’ll learn in the story about the revival of The Atlantic.
Getting there took a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue.
“We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic…”
Here’s one more bit of brain stimulation, especially if you love the written word. Have you ever wondered how often a certain word or phrase was used in writing? Google’s new data base can tell you. And just think what that answer tells you abut the culture of the times.
The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear,… It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.
Today wouldn’t be complete without one feel-good story and what better in these days of growing religious intolerance than a story showing that it doesn’t have to be that way.
…here is a story to keep your spirits high — a story of cooperation between Jews and Christians, between people named Seinfeld and Samberg and people named Morgan and Lohan. A story of celebrities putting ethnic differences aside to raise money for charity.
By making fun of — or is that gently teasing? — Jews.
If you love Jeopardy and American ingenuity here’s something to fall in love with next Valentine’s Day; be sure to put it on your calendar, so you don’t forget.
I.B.M. and the producers of “Jeopardy” will announce on Tuesday that the computer, “Watson,” will face the two most successful players in “Jeopardy” history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in three episodes that will be broadcast Feb. 14-16, 2011.
Last, and maybe least, is a story that draws parallels between your everyday life and zombies.
It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive. … Zombies are just so easy to kill. … A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.
Enjoy!
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/
