The Passionate Brain

What do “usability’ “passion” and “brains” have to do with each other? That answer and more are explored in a great post on Creating Passionate Users blog post “Angry/Negative People Can be Bad for Your Brain.

The trio who write this blog introduce so many concepts (in the post above and the majority of their posts) that my head is SPINNING. Among these: the “kool aid point”; the “asymptotic twitter curve”; the “high res user experience” and more.

Could be I’m finally losing my edge in the knowledge base of psychology research, but this blog gives me hope that I can catch up. The “Passionate Users” blog is focusing on Usability, Marketing and the effects of Passion on such; but my take on the topics are more like: “psychology, brain science, research, cutting edge marketing theory” etc. etc.

Love it!

These are the Good Old Days

AGING, OPENNESS AND PERSONALITY

At what age does thinking become “painful”? I don’t remember the experience of pain when learning new things as a child, but it sure is harder now. The metaphor typically used to describe this is that patterns are literally carved in our brains, like channels that grow ever deep, until it is too late to go a different route. “Stuck in our ways” is the expression we use.

An article published in Psychology Today in 2003 stated that according to Berkeley Professors Srivastava and John, “Personality is not set in stone by age 30…but continues to change throughout one’s lifetime. Five major personality traits — conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion — continue to evolve as people age.”
This would appear to be hopeful news, however, note they said “continues to change” not “continues to improve”. Specifically, the change in the trait of openness is for the worse, finding “a gradual decline in openness as subjects aged”.
This metaphor (of channels carved into the brain) surfaces again in discussions about depression. In Listening to Prozac I was frightened into believing that every bout of depression made the channel deeper and that taking an anti-depressant would actually prevent this from happening. It was over a year later that I learned this was a metaphor not based on biology or brain research.

Yet we all know (without reading a psychology article) that older people seem to get set in their ways, more resistant to change, aren’t exactly open to learning about “new-fangled” things.

TANGENT: I find it ever fascinating that there is this human tendency to believe the music they loved as an adolescent was the only good true music and that contemporary music is crap.

TANGENT: Anyone who uses a word to mean “the latest” takes a risk that that word will expire when a new “latest” comes out. Thus phrases like “the new-new thing” which is apparently newer than just plain old “new”. Music history of this century falls into this trap, where “classic rock” was used to mean enduring, at one moment mapping to the music of the 50’s but then switching to the 60’s, the 50’s became “Oldies”, The 70’s were “today’s music” which now are “classics”. Making the 50’s “Nostalgia” and the 60’s & 70’s “classics”, but now the 00’s are “today’s music” and now what? And how did “Adult Contemporary” come to be synonymous with “not rap music”? and “Modern Adult Contemporary” to mean “regular adult contemporary plus “alternative” rock”. What will be the alternative of alternative? New alternative?

TANGENT: This brings me back to Tom Wolffe’s “The Painted Word” discussion of the art world again. Modern (late 1900’s to the 1970’s), Post Modern (presumably after the 70’s), and the art of today “Contemporary”. I don’t think anybody had the nerve to risk “Post-Contemporary”