psychology

I'm busy reading The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely (and really enjoying it).  In one of the chapters he reflects on work and meaning.  Can human beings find satisfaction and be engaged in work that pays well, but offers no meaning?

He unpacks two "types" of meaning:

"m"eaning - a feeling of being challenged by whatever our work is, and completing it to our own satisfaction vs

"M"eaning - a hope that someone else, potentially a significant someone, will find value in what we've done.  Maybe a hope that sometime, the wider world out there would benefit in some way from what we've done.

This is fascinating!  One of the first things I remember hearing Dave Snowden speak about is how people make decisions.  According to cognitive science we only have a very small percentage of what's in our visual range in sharp focus at any given time.  We see through a series of spot observations and fill in the rest based on past experience.  This often leads us to physically not see things that don't fit our expectations or patterns.  I remember when I first heard this I started wondering what I'm NOT seeing!  How much of reality am I missing?

This video illustrates this theory perfectly.  In essence over 70% of the people in the experiment completely miss seeing a change that should be perfectly obvious.

I came across an excerpt from a book by Dr Kevin Leman called What your childhood memories say about you. He tells some funny stories of his own childhood, mostly to make a case that if you examine your collection of childhood memories, you'll discover themes that reveal what he calls your private logic, a term coined by psychologist Alfred Adler.

­I've heard it said often: "This year has just flown by!" This statement is also sometimes followed by: "It feels like time itself is speeding up!"

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As I've grown older I've been plagued by similar feelings and perceptions. In a twisted way, it has confirmed the correlation between the increase in ones age and the perception that time moves as a quicker pace.

I recently discovered that there is a field of psychology that focuses on the perception of time. While driving back from a client, there was a pscyhologist on a talk show who spoke in some detail about the psychology of time perception. Having spent some time studying the discipline, I had never come across the application t­o time perception. I first asked myself if time is even percieved? Is it not just experienced in the same manner by everyone? The name of the field implies that we experience an absolute as relative. Anyway, moving on ...