Robert Kamper's List: Creativity and Constraints

• This suggests that a slightly distracting secondary task may actually improve concentration during the performance of dull tasks that would otherwise cause a mind to wander.

• Professor Barrett said part of the problem was that the US and EU operate in very different ways. 

  "US firms follow the Harvard school of competition: find a market, dominate that market and then use that domination to beat the competition into submission. 

  "US firms come here, speak the same language (especially in Britain), and think they are working in an identical environment. 

  "They're not, because in Europe, that type business model isn't remotely fair." <!-- E BO --> 

• Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music.

• Our findings show that interpersonally coordinated actions are preceded and accompanied by between-brain oscillatory couplings," says Ulman Lindenberger. The results don't show whether this coupling occurs in response to the beat of the metronome and music, and as a result of watching each others' movements and listening to each others' music, or whether the brain synchronization takes place first and causes the coordinated performance. Although individual's brains have been observed getting tuning into music before, this is the first time musicians have been measured jointly in concert.

• The results showed that simply imagining a posture may have effects that are similar to actually assuming the pose.  The participants spent more time searching the display when they imagined themselves holding the monitor, compared to when they imagined themselves with their hands behind their backs. The researchers suggest that the slower rate of searching indicates a more thorough analysis of items closer to the hands. Previous research has shown that we spend more time looking at items close to our hands (items close to us are usually more important than those further away), but this is the first study suggesting that merely imagining something close to our hands will cause us to pay more attention to it.

• brain imaging study designed to find out what goes on in our brain when we look at an aesthetically pleasing piece of art
• An interesting thing happened when the subjects saw a painting that they liked a lot.  Those painting evoked a different response in their brains.  There was a very strong response in multiple areas -- the left medial prefrontal cortex, left substantial nigra, and left hippocampus.  Brain areas that span regions involved in higher order cognitive processing, emotion, and memory.
• Each subject picked different paintings as the most pleasing.  But the responses in the brain were the same.  The same set of regions in the brain responded to the paintings that they liked the best.   This means that it is how the paintings made the subject feel rather than something simple like the colors in the paintings, that drove these response in the brain.

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• Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group 'are' and how they 'ought' to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations.
• So if you really covet creativity, then there's one rule you'd be well advised to follow: go it alone.

• Human-computer interaction is undergoing a revolution, entering a multimodal era that goes beyond, way beyond, the WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers) paradigm. Now European researchers have developed a platform to speed up that revolution.
• We have the technology. So why is our primary human-computer interface (HCI) based on the 35-year-old Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers paradigm? Voice, gestures, touch, haptics, force feedback and many other sensors or effectors exist that promise to simplify and simultaneously enhance human interaction with computers, but we are still stuck with some 100 or so keys, a mouse and sore wrists.
• The EU-funded OpenInterface (OI) project took as its starting point the many interaction devices currently available – touch screens, motion sensors, speech recognisers and many others – and sought to create an open source development framework capable of quickly and simply supporting the design and development of new user interfaces by mixing and matching different types of input device and modality.
• Currently, the framework includes various interaction devices and modalities including the SHAKE, a lab-quality motion sensing device, the Wii remote (Wiimote), the iPhone, Interface-Z captors, different speech recognisers, vision-based finger tracker, and several toolkits including ARToolKit and Phidgets.

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