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Browse published articles attributed to Tad Waddington, with full-archive search.
Genius William James maintained, “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” People like you and me do not achieve this through mental power, but through knowledge and practice. For example, people could have made gliders hundreds of years earlier ...
Theory That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory? It is not enough to know that a thing works: you should also understand how and why it works. The rules of the road, for example, exist to keep people safe, but it is acceptable to break the rules under certain ...
People do not perceive primarily with their senses, but with their minds. Psychologist Egon Brunswik and others have shown that people often don’t see a thing unless they have some idea of what they are looking for. The reason for this may be biological. In On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins and ...
Read. Recall. Write. Experiments show that the way most of us try to learn new material is inefficient. We read and reread a passage until we think we understand it. Then we are done. In fact, we learn much more effectively if we read, try to recall what we just read, and then write it down or ...
It is roughly accurate to characterize the enterprise of science as explaining how one billiard ball strikes another and how that one ricochets into another, and so on. But when this approach is applied to people, it can fall short, because people are goal-oriented. For example, the philosopher ...
I learned to fly an airplane when I was 18 years old. Everyday I make use of a lesso I learned while practicing instrument flight. I use the lesson even though I’ve not in over 20 years. The lesson is that when you fly by the seat of your pants, by what your senses tell you, you can quickly get ...
The mathematicia Benoit Mandelbrot asked a deceptively simple question: How long is the coast of Britain? The answer depends on how you measure it. You get a much shorter distance if you fly from one end to the other than if you drive a road that follows the island’s contours. The road gives a ...
Is the statement, “There is a Santa Claus” true? This should be easy enough: Define truth and see if the statement fits the definition. It is widely held that a statement is true if and only if there is a one-to-one correspondence between the statement and reality. “The cat is on the mat” is a ...
There is a notion in Japanese that if you are a master of one thing, then you are master of all things. The idea goes back to the thirteenth century where in Rinzai Zen monasteries you sought enlightenment by meditating on koans. A koan is, “a succinct paradoxical statement or question used as ...
When scientists began to study expertise, they first assumed that experts must be smarter or more talented than novices, but they quickly learned that the key difference between experts and novices is not mental power, but knowledge. Cognitive psychologists Michelene Chi, Marshall Farr, and ...
H. L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, straightforward, and wrong.” How do you solve complex problems? Sometimes you can “just do it,” knock down the first domino—which topples the next in a long line of dominoes—and achieve the result you want. More ...
Forgetting follows a pattern. There are steep drop offs in retention after 60 minutes and after 24 hours. Immediately after learning something, you will be able to retrieve a great deal of information. But then you will forget the information rapidly if you do not review it – first within an ...
A traveler meets two bricklayers and asks each what he’s doing. The first mutters, “Working for a buck.” The second proclaims, “Building a school that will educate children for generations.” Both bricklayers are doing the same work, but the work of the second is imbued with more meaning, because ...
Talking to yourself has several benefits. First, it forces you to process information in a different way. Perhaps you have a picture in your head of what you mean; putting it into words can draw your attention to details that you otherwise might overlook. Second, talking to yourself helps you ...
While it is true that there are many tricks for improving memory, it is also true that there are many ways to avoid needing to rely on your memory. • Leave written reminders for yourself in places that you pass throughout the day. A sticky note on your desk phone could help you remember to ...
Planning should help you map your goals so they include not only what you are trying to accomplish, but also the bad things you want to prevent from happening, as well as the existing good things that you want to keep from disappearing. To do this, you must consider the bigger picture. The ...
There are a surprising number of problems that we can solve by not seeking the deeper cause, but by simply treating the symptom. Take procrastination, for example. In some sense you may be putting off doing something because of some Freudian conflict with your parents, but this can be made ...
When studying a variety of subjects or working on a variety of projects, it is more difficult to do similar things right after each other than dissimilar things. Huh? For example, don’t study English then your foreign language then math then science. Instead, study English, then math, then the ...
In Truth and Method, philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer explained how people come to understand texts. This is an ancient problem; philosophers have long known that you can’t fully understand the individual sentences of a text until you understand the whole text—the context in which they occur. At ...
People often study as subject until they can get 100% right on a test of their understanding of the subject. While this is a sensible approach, it turns out that about 10% of the correct answers is composed of guesswork, short-term memory, and information not fully learned. The best approach is ...
Efficiency: Getting things done right. Effectiveness: Getting the right things done. Capital intensive: Requiring lots of money to accomplish. Labor intensive: Requiring lots of work to accomplish. Quality: Not what you put into a thing; what somebody else gets out of it. Emergency: A time ...
Make yourself aware of underlying metaphors in your communication. Metaphors can be very useful when you use them for elaboration of a topic. For example, we often speak about verbal arguments in terms of war metaphors. (Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. ...
You have probably had the experience of not being able to tell somebody a phone number until you dialed it. Or perhaps you have given poor directions to a place you can easily drive to. This happens because we are able to remember procedures and tasks better than specific step-by-step ...
Magicians provide an excellent example of a ‘mistake hierarchy.’ A good card magician knows that many tricks depend on luck and that luck is a fickle friend. So, you tell the audience you’re going to do a trick. Without telling them what kind of trick, you go for the ...
• Believe that you can. When confronted with a seemingly nasty problem or an apparently complex mathematical formula, people often give up without even trying to work on it. Often, however, with just a little effort you can solve such problems. An author wouldn’t put an equation in a book if it ...
The principle is simple enough: Eat a variety of healthy foods, eat less junk, and exercise more. The question isn’t the principle. The question is How? I use Weber’s Law, which states that you can’t detect a difference in stimuli that is less than 10%. Have somebody lift a 50 and a 51 pound ...
Notice how often people distrust their memories, but not their judgment. Psychologists have developed thousands of experiments that demonstrate just how poor we are at making judgments, judgments of any kind – moral, business, even perceptual. You can get people to misjudge the length ...