Recent Feeds + Reads

A few months ago, McCagg began using his blog and his bracket system to answer a question: What is the best word ever? Not the funniest word or the most erudite word or the most whimsical word … but The Best Word, full stop. What if, you know, the scallawag could eke out a thingamajig that would help him select the least milquetoast morsel from our linguistic smorgasbord?

Today, McCagg has answered his question. The best word ever – according to deep lexicographical research, science, taste, and common sense – is this: diphthong.

How did McCagg decide which words, out of the hundreds of thousands we’ve dreamed up, deserve inclusion? “Hornswoggle” is a given, obviously … but what about the others?

“I read the dictionary,” McCagg says. “And picked out about 20-30 great words for each letter.” He based those selections on a couple of factors. “For me, it has to be something you’ve heard. Something that sounds fun. Something that’s fun to say. Basically, something, should you ever come across it in day to day life, you stop and think, ‘I love that word.’”

So why, in the end, “diphthong? Which is also to ask: Why not “hornswoggle”?

“That was a tough call,” McCagg concedes. But “that silent ‘h’ in diphthong made all the difference.”

I’ve had a brief look at the guy’s blog, and prefer the following words to the eventual winner: ubiquitous, serendipity, quixotic, flummox, ephemeral, and discombobulate.

Also, why wasn’t quintessential even on the candidate list? I better not think too much more about it, otherwise I might end up doing my own “bracket” analysis.

One of the tricks to stay motivated may be, quite literally, music to your ears. ‘Music has received very little attention among sports scholars’ wrote one author in 1993 in the Sociology of Sport Journal. Since then, much has changed.

Music gives you the mental boost

Performing an exercise to the right kind of music makes it feel about 10 % less strenuous (as measured by the RPE rating). This works for the majority of aerobic exercises, and for the majority of people.

However, taken collectively, the research gives some provisos:

• Music should be that which you find motivating. Perhaps unsurprisingly, tunes in keeping with your music preferences have the greatest positive effect (which is measured using the Brunel Music Rating Inventory-2 – and you can find this in this Word document). It also has been shown to improve mood during and after a workout

• Music needs to be medium-fast paced (120bpm or above) to work. Slow tempo music (around 80bpm or less) has no beneficial effect.

• Upping the music tempo during exercise gives a measurable, short-term boost in physical output. Which is why those unbearably hard spin classes switch music between fast and slow.

Music can make you stronger

Motivational music gives significant reduction in heart rate, blood pressure and lactic acid whilst. But the track must have a tune – strip away the melody and the lyrics – and the drum beat alone has no positive effect.

These melody-stimulated effects also have a limit. As work intensity increases, its positive effects diminish. When working at 80% of your absolute maximum or more (or 80% max Heart Rate), no benefit is gained.

Exercising to the rhythm – the most proven method

Sports music research has focused on two different areas: background tunes where the music bears no resemblance to the exercise (‘asynchronous’) and music with a beat that coincides with bodily movements (‘synchronous’).

Any kind of exercise that involves repetitive movements (e.g. cycling, jogging or bench stepping) will benefit from music where the tempo exactly coincides with that movement. Haile Gebreselassie famously smashed the 2000m indoor world record in 1998 whilst listening to Scatman played over loud speakers (although I can’t think of anything worse).

Some recent research has shown that when exercising to synchronous music, there is a 7% decrease in the amount of oxygen the body needs – demonstrating that the body works more efficiently with synchronous music.

But even for non-endurance activities, spending a few minutes listening to music immediately before starting can boost confidence and self-belief. Combining motivational music with positive self-imagery has been shown to improve non-aerobic sports performance such as shooting and weight-lifting.

So, providing you don’t go cycling or jogging on the road with your headphones on (potentially very dangerous), it’s probably worth taking your iPod with your running shoes.

Headlines like “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” or “Is the Internet Making Us Dumber?” quite clearly show that people are concerned about what the Internet is doing to our cognition. Some have speculated that the Internet has become a kind of external hard drive for our brains, eliminating our need to really learn or process information. Others point to the obvious advantages of having more information available to more people than at any other time in history. As our lives become increasingly wired, we are now stepping back to see just how deep down the connections go.

As we currently understand it, our brains operate in two distinct modes of thinking when processing information:

Our heuristic thinking is characterized as a rough and ready approximator relying on basic cues. Being that this style of thought is cognitively less costly, it is our default, applying stereotypes, models, and gut-reactions to the processing of information. Conversely, our systematic thinking is an in-depth look at the evidence where we internalize information and connect it to other ideas.

The trigger to transition between styles in this dual-process cognition is partially dependent on the sufficiency principle. Generally, when making a decision, we weigh how much we know against how much we need to know to make a confident judgment about a topic. If this gap between what we know and what we need to know is small, heuristic-style thinking is more likely. Conversely, if there is a large gap, we need to expend more mental resources to close it, thus encouraging systematic thinking. This Scrooge-like mental calculus determines how much we process the information we are inundated with everyday. And we readily recognize this game of cognitive economy, especially when browsing the web. For example, going through a stuffed RSS feed can be a fairly disengaged experience, with only the topics that are interesting, confusing, or contentious garnering real attention. This “surf or stay” mentality is easily grafted onto the HSM.

The author argues that when it comes to cognition, it is unfair and inappropriate to treat the internet differently from any other mediums:

Where I think many of the “the Internet is making us stupid” claims get it wrong is that these detractions also apply to other mediums. The Internet is young and revolutionary, to be sure, but the brains we explore it with are the same that peruse the sports section or catch up on the Colbert Report. It should stand to reason that our theories of information processing, like the HSM, should then apply to this new medium. Rather than call a change in processing strategies a “dumbing down” of the populous, we should be just as willing to first understand without judgment how we think on the Internet as we do with newspapers and television.

So, the internet is merely the latest in a long line of information sources that have been processed by human brains.

Research into how we process information on the Internet is in its infancy, simultaneously announcing a grand ignorance and inspiring novel ideas. The meticulous plod of science in the Internet age is reminiscent of the tortoise and the hare, yet there seems to be no better way to win the race than to look at digital culture with our emerging tools which investigate cognition. I’d speculate more about how the Internet has changed our information processing strategies, but I have 500+ RSS items to get through…

There are many long-held beliefs about what creativity looks like and who’s actually creative. The sad part about these myths is that they have the power to pilfer a person’s creativity.

1. Myth: Only artists, writers and musicians are creative.

Facts: Artists tend to identify as creative more than other people, said Laura Simms, a career coach for creatives. The same is true for writers and musicians. But that doesn’t mean that creativity is only born out of these trades. […]

“[Creativity is] about solutions and connections and seeing the edge of things. It’s about making things better, smarter, easier,” Simms said. She cited all kinds of creative acts with everything from the Theory of Relativity to reducing the deficit to putting a rover on Mars.

2. Myth: There are two kinds of people: those who are creative and those who are not.

Facts: Everyone is creative. “We are all in possession of a fantastic creativity machine – our human brain,” Carson said. In fact, she said, creativity is our survival tool. If it wasn’t for creativity, we wouldn’t be here, she said. Think of all the different ways our ingenuity has extended and enriched our lives on this planet.

Plus, we perform creative acts all the time – hundreds a day, she said. For instance, “Every time you utter a sentence or use a common item for something other than its original purpose, you are performing a creative act,” she said.

3. Myth: Creativity only depends on the person.

Facts: “Of course, it’s partly about the person – inborn talents, skills and expertise developed through experience, a flexible cognitive style, a willingness to persevere, a tolerance for ambiguity,” according to Teresa M. Amabile, Ph.D, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of The Progress Principle.

But the social environment, including school, home and work, also plays a big role in creativity, she said. It mainly has to do with motivation, she said. “Across all talent levels, people have peaks and valleys in their creative productivity – due, in part, to the supports and constraints operating on them at the time.”

For instance, after analyzing almost 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people from 7 different companies, Amabile and her research team found that people were more creative when: they viewed their work environment in a positive light; they felt they had their boss’s and co-workers’ support; they perceived their projects as challenging; and they had autonomy to complete these projects.