 All right. Why don't we get started here? How many of you were just at Jim Wyrick's talk next door? And how many of you, if you had the choice, would choose to speak after Jim Wyrick? Damn you, David Black, wherever you are. So anyways, my name is Eric Ivansic, and I offer Ruby and Rails trainings through learnruby.com. And I think as many of the people I've heard speak here and have met here, I have a mix and model of my history. I have a computer science background, but in graduate school, I studied neural models of learning and memory. And as a result, I covered quite a bit of cognitive psychology and even helped co-teach some of the courses on cognitive psychology, so I have a background in that as well. And when I was trying to think of a talk that I could offer, all of you, it occurred to me that I could go in that direction because it was somewhat unique among the Ruby community. So that's where I come from. Now, who is this talk for? Do cognitive psychology actually study Ruby programmers? No, not yet as far as I know. But we know a lot about humans, and of course programmers are humans, and Rubyists are programmers, and so much of the knowledge we have about humans can be applied to Rubyists as well. And there are some things that are a little bit special about Ruby along the ways. I'm going to try and tie those into these themes as well. And I hope to have time to cover all three of these, but I want to cover effectiveness, creativity, and if we have time teaching others. And if I kind of squeeze a little bit in, I think I can cover that as well. How many of you are familiar with the term life hack? Okay, it turns out that that term has never gone a change in meaning over time. Originally it referred to a programmer who had written a set of quick and dirty shell scripts and other utilities that filtered and munched data and processed data into streams and so forth. But it has come to actually mean something a little bit different. Anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack. So some of the things I'm going to be talking about have a life hackish quality to them in that they are not obvious. At least I don't think they're obvious to the most people. So let's start talking in terms of effectiveness. Now there is a condition that you might term mental fatigue and probably many of you have had experience with it. But it's a case where you're easily distracted. You struggle to follow an extended line of thought or reasoning. And you have difficulty in making or carrying out plans, okay? How many of you have had that experience at some point in their life, okay? All of us probably. We're humans. Now the first thing I want to make a distinction of is that mental fatigue is not the same thing as stress. Stress is a reaction to harm or a threat of harm. And it's associated with an increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, sweaty palms, cortisol in your brain and so forth. That's not the topic of my talk here. That stress is not a good reaction. Cortisol is actually a neurotoxin and you want to avoid it as much as possible. So avoid stress, but I'm going to talk about something else which is mental fatigue. And people have known for quite a while that people can become mentally fatigued. But they weren't quite sure what is being fatigued. Is the entire brain being fatigued or is it some small component of the brain? And one of the great insights into this was from an American psychologist named William James who wrote a series of books in the late 1800s. And one of the books he wrote was Psychology of the Briefer Course, which was released in 1892, I believe if I'm not mistaken. And believe it or not, this psychology book is used as a textbook today in some psychology courses. Because the insights are really fantastic and even though it's been more than a century since he wrote these things, they're still applicable today. And one of his insights in this particular book was that there are two basic kinds of attention. The first, what we would call in modern days, fascination. These are exciting events that draw our attention to them or interesting tasks that we draw our attention. There's another kind of attention as well called directed attention. And this is the attention we use to push through difficult or boring tasks to make decisions with a lot of complex considerations and also to work in distracting environments. Excuse me. And in some ways these two kinds of attention are oppositional, at least in some circumstances, in that we use directed attention to kind of minimize or inhibit our fascination of certain things. So if we're in a distracting environment and there's something interesting going on here, we have to get our work done, we will use this directed attention to inhibit that impulse to actually look and see what else is going on in the room. And there are a number of distinctions between these two kinds of attention. Fascination is automatic. It happens in some ways, it has an evolutionary background. Things that were meaningful to our survival and to our well-being are going to be fascinating. Things dealing with violence, death, high emotions, sex and so forth, those are all fascinating. As well as things that we learn which we come to find is fascinating. So for example, if I were to hear somebody whisper behind me, especially if they were whispering my name, it would be hard for me not to start paying attention to that. Directed attention, though, is subject to voluntary control. We can decide what we want to attend to. Fascination is effortless. Directed attention, though, is effortful. It takes effort to actually use it and block the other things out. And the third difference is that where fascination is robust, directed attention is subject to fatigue. That is, the more we use it, the harder it is to employ shortly thereafter. And it's come to be thought of as a resource model where the resource might be some neurotransmitters in the brain, but we have a certain amount of capacity of that resource and as we have demands for it, we use it and the level goes down. When there are times when we're not using it, that can be replenished. The challenge comes is that when we're using a lot of it and we deplete this resource quite a bit, and that makes directed attention hard to use. And that is what we're talking about as directed attentional fatigue. And there is evidence that this is a depletable resource and I want to go through these experiments a little bit quickly. In one, they approach shoppers in a mall and ask me questions about are you making important purchases? Are you giving these to purchase a lot of considerations? They're trying to figure out how intense the decision-making was in their purchases and once they got a sense of that and also how tired they felt, then had them do a lot of math problems. And what they found is that people who had to make a lot of decisions were worse at the math problems and gave up sooner than those who had not made a lot of decisions or more intense decisions. In another experiment, people were either put in a choice or a non-choice category. In the non-choice category, they read through some requirements for a college degree, read through some course listings as what would fulfill the requirements and that's all they had to do. The people in their choice condition, though, also had to decide which courses they would use to fulfill each of the requirements. And then there was a studying pass. They could study for a test that they were told was very predictive of their future success. And from the people who made the choices and they were in the choice condition, gave up earlier on the studying for a test. Again, the process of making all these decisions made it more difficult to actually focus and study. There's also another experiment which is actually kind of funny but I don't want to go into all the detail but people were told they were doing a test on taste and there were two displays of food in the room. One was a stack of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies that were actually baked in the room so this room's smell of chocolate chip cookies also embellished with a few chocolates. The other was a display of radishes and people were split up into two different groups. There's actually a third non-food group altogether and some were told that they had to try to eat at least two cookies and then they would come back and do something else, the experimenters. Others were told that they couldn't eat the cookies. They had to eat the radishes instead, at least two of the radishes, and they would do a test as well. Experimenter comes back and gives them a very difficult test in times how long it takes for them to get up on the test and the people who had to resist the cookies took less time to give up than the people who had to resist the radishes. So again, the ability to resist something seems to be depleting a resource which is used in doing a very difficult task. And so the basic idea here is that what you might call mental fatigue is actually a fatigue of directed attention which is used in these various things. Here is a list of some of the times where you rely on directed attention. Getting through boring and tedious tasks, working despite distractions, maintaining an extended line of thought, analyzing, planning, deciding, problem-solving, thinking carefully, working through difficult, complex or abstract problems, multitasking, millitracking in multiple things, navigating complex social interactions, and it looks like the bottom is cut off here, but that's as inhibiting natural or habitual responses. Think in terms of the modern office. Many of those things are used on a regular basis in the modern office. Now, think in terms of programming. And many of those very same things are used all the time when you're programming. So programmers, I believe, have additional demands on the directed attention as part of their day-to-day activities. And especially when you think about working through difficult, complex or abstract problems, in Ruby, we have a lot of different levels of abstraction that we can go to. We can think in terms of metaclasses, in terms of closures and procs and things like that. So I think the demands for reprogrammers, and at times at least, be a little bit more demanding than programmers in general. So we have these two kinds of attention, and I already mentioned that one interaction between the two is when we're in a distracting environment and directed attention has to inhibit the fascinating stimuli. But another interaction is with people who program and who actually enjoy programming. And I imagine most people here that come to a conference on Ruby actually enjoy programming in Ruby. And in that case, fascinating directed attention can have a very detrimental interaction in that the fascination keeps us programming more and longer, consuming more and more directed attention, making fatigue even more likely. Okay? And the consequences of directed attention fatigue are pretty severe. You're distractible, you have difficulty making, carrying out plans, a disinclination to reflect and think reflectively, a bias towards acting rather than thinking, risky and impulsive action, and mistakes. All right? You don't want part of your aircraft to suffer from directed attentional fatigue. And there are various ways to test how well you're doing on directed attentional fatigue, one of which is the necker cube, which is a two-dimensional stimuli which actually has two different three-dimensional interpretations. And in our mind, we have two representations, one for each one, and those representations compete with each other to see which one is the most active at any given time. So one representation has this as the front face and the other has that as the front face. And basically one of those representations wins the competition and is how we view that particular cube for a while, but eventually it fatigues out and the other one can come up and replace it and you'll see a flip if you look at it long enough. And eventually this one gets fatigued and this one's now recovering and so they'll flip again. They can keep flipping back and forth. And in order to test directional attentional fatigue, what you can do is you can tell somebody try and hold on to your current representation for as long as possible and to resist the flip. All right? And what you do is you have to take a measurement of somebody when they're not fatigued and when they're fatigued, they have a much more difficult time resisting the flip and it'll flip on a more regular basis, so they're trying to keep it from flipping. The gold standard though for testing directional attentional fatigue is called digit span backwards where you're given a set of digits serially, one after the other, and then you're given a ghost signal and told that you have to repeat that sequence backwards. Okay? So let's try it with all of you. Okay? Now you can't write things down or type things and that would be cheating. It's all done in the brain. All right? And we'll do something simple with only three digits here and backwards. Seven, nine, three. Okay? Now normally what you would do is you would go start at three, then you try four and every time they got one right you'd bump up the length of the sequence by one with different digits each time. If they fell at a given length they'd get a second chance at it. If they fell a second time then you know what their limit is at that particular point in time. We're not going to go through the whole sequence though. Let's try it at seven. Okay? Seven is pretty difficult. Okay? You are you. They're not separate from direct intentional fatigue, whoever you are. All right? Generally five, six, you know, if people have a problem at four or five it might indicate some fatigue problems but it's hard to go up six and seven. That's pretty difficult. There's a trick with that. There's a trick? Yeah. Right. So in that way you're undermining the value of the test. Maybe afterwards if we have time you can tell us what the trick is because I'm curious. Now there is a whole set of literature on its tension restoration theory which is what you can possibly do to restore your attention. And the basic premise is that you choose activities and environments that require a little directed attention and promote replenishment of that resource. And the environments which are good at this are environments that are fascinating especially quiet cessation which doesn't kind of, it's not in your face but it's interesting but gives you room to think as well and even resolve certain things. Being away into a different environment is very helpful. Environments that are rich and provide lots to see and lots to do are very helpful. And also compatibility. Environment that requires few challenges or struggles is very helpful. And the one kind of environment which has all of these things in spades is the natural environment. Now of course if you choose your natural environment if you're going to climb a cliff that is not a very compatible environment but walks through the woods or by streams or fishing and things like that are very compatible. And there's a lot of evidence that spending time in these kinds of environments does in fact help. Let me quickly go through a few studies here. One took three groups of people. Those who took urban vacations those who took wilderness vacations and those who took no vacations at all. They were given a proofreading task early on before any of these two went on vacation. The vacations happened and they took another proofreading task after they came back. Those who had no vacations still had two tests at that interval. And they found that all of the vacationers who went to wilderness vacations had a significant improvement on their proofreading capabilities. Another study took participants and randomly assigned them. Half had got to walk in a wilderness or natural setting for a certain amount of time the others had to walk in an urban setting for the same period of time. Prior to taking the walks they each did a task which was very draining on directed attention. And when they came back from their walks they did another proofreading task and those who went on the walk in a natural setting did significantly better than those who took a walk in an urban setting. And perhaps one of the more profound studies was done on breast cancer patients. Now breast cancer patients when they're diagnosed their life changes in a very dramatic way. They have to make decisions about treatment they have to make decisions about whether to keep on working or maybe take some time off. They're worrying about what's going to happen afterwards if the treatment's not successful and so forth. And in fact even those these were by the way were all people who went and had surgery to resolve their breast cancer. Even after they leave the hospital and have a clean bill of health the effects are long lasting. There are typically marital troubles afterwards and they take a long time and some of them never actually return to all their prior activities. Okay? So Bernardine Simpritch speculated that crap they were suffering from directed attentional fatigue. And what she did is she had a control group where she didn't give them do what I'm about to tell you and a research group and the research group had to read through a list of restored activities and they had to sign a contract where they would do one of those activities three times per week for 20 minutes each time. That was what their contract said. They did this for 12 consecutive weeks. And over the 12 weeks they were tested at four different times on directed attentional fatigue. Alright? And here's what she found. First of all all participants show significant attentional deficits right after surgery. But the restorative group rattles to the improvement over 12 weeks in attentional measures. And by the way, most of the patients chose either gardening or walking through a natural setting. That was their... that's what they chose to do. Those in their restorative group went back to work sooner and were more likely to go back to work full time. They were more likely to start new projects like learning a new language or exercising and things of that sort. And it's typically better improvements in their quality of life scores. They realize that these are rather dramatic results where people have been through quite a bit. And think of how minimal the intervention was. 20 minutes three times a week. So that is my bit on effectiveness and the role natural environments can play in being effective and combating directional attentional fatigue. The next area I want to discuss is creativity. And what I mean by creativity is kind of really there's a problem solving. Non-standard solutions or putting together complicated solutions. Maybe rethinking previously made decisions or of course the thinking outside the box. Now before all of this is on the premise that you know the problem space that you're an expert in the problem space. Okay? Nobel laureates. If any of you have the fortune of being a Nobel laureate at some point in your life, especially in the science field one problem you're going to face once you are a Nobel laureate you will receive letters and emails even phone calls from crackpots having their solution to some big problem in your field either decide what you're going to do with all those people whether you're going to ignore them write them back some standard form letter or what. Okay? Or another area where people who don't quite know the full space is there was a while ago when people had their own solution for the spam problem and somebody created a checklist they simply check off and tell them what was wrong with their particular solution that they had not yet considered. So first you have to kind of know the problem space. But assuming you do what can you do to promote creative thought? Now Peter Albow wrote a book called Writing with Power and as you you know there's a standard view of the of the writer especially if you go back about a couple of decades at the typewriter with a waist back at basket near him or her or a couple of papers flowing outside of that waist basket writing can be a very difficult process and Peter Albow analyzed it and he decided and advocates that there are two distinct processes in writing alright? He says writing calls on two skills that are so different that they usually conflict with each other one is creating one is criticizing first write freely he says and uncritically so that you can generate as many words as possible without worrying about whether they're good or not then turn around and adopt a critical frame of mind and thoroughly revise what you have written take what's good throw away what's bad and shape what you have into something that's strong and he claims that you'll discover that the two mentalities needed for these two processes and invented facunity and a tough critical mindfulness flower when they get a chance to operate separately alright? and he uses it as two distinct modes creativity and criticality but I'm going to raise the issue as to possibly whether this is more of a continuum as opposed to two distinct modes of thought which are difficult though to do at the same time and one of my personal interests is how cognition which is thinking and emotion interact and for a long time people thought that cognition and emotion were two distinct realms of thought entirely cognition was rational and that you should avoid emotion and think non-emotionally about things and as time has gone on people have more of a subtle model of how these two things interact I'm going to use the term affect now, effect and affect are often confused effect is typically used as a noun affect as a verb but I'm going to use this bottom form of the word affect which is a noun which means emotion or desire and the reason why is I don't trust myself to use the word emotion each and every time so I'm going to probably use the word affect which means emotion and just realize that I'm meaning emotion when I use that particular term but as far as examples of affect go there's positive affect things like love, happiness, connectedness, humor appetite and there are also examples of negative affect sadness, fear, shame, disgust and hunger and generally positive affect pretty much always is pleasurable and negative affect is painful alright we have the pleasurable emotions and the painful emotions and we want to see how cognition and affect interact and as it turns out cognition can affect how you feel and how you feel can affect how you think alright let's quickly look at that top arrow there how does what you think about affect how you feel one way is that the things you think about have affective codes some things that you think about are pleasurable others are painful okay I'm going to show you a sequence of photos here each of which is designed to elicit an emotional response from you okay so the things you think about can affect the way you feel not only does the stuff you think about affect the way you feel but how you're thinking about them affects the way you feel as well we usually make a distinction between content and process so let me get things set up here so when you're confused when you can't quite get a handle on what you're trying to think about that's painful alright when you're bored that is also painful alright when you're relatively clear about things you kind of know which path you're going to be on that's either neutral to mildly pleasurable when you're actively exploring and you have a few options that you want to check out and you're not quite sure which one is going to be the right one but you feel that you're closing in on a resolution that's pretty pleasurable okay and when you have one of those rare Eureka moments that can be intensely pleasurable okay it's short lived pleasure but it's very intense alright so how you think also affects how you feel but how you feel also affects how you think okay and let's talk about that how does affect influence cognition first of all there's been a lot of experiments in this area and again it's pretty easy to change how people are feeling here are some of the ways that in experiments they've induced participants to feel one way or the other by listening to different kinds of music by watching videos by reading a happier sad story telling or writing down a happy event or a sad event from their own personal history or a positive affect case giving someone an unexpected gift usually has a pretty powerful impact on their positive affect how does positive affect influence how you think okay in some of the experiments they found that people who had positive affect induced used and created categories more inclusively they included more things as part of the category than they might otherwise or especially those people who had negative affect induced there are more likely to rate low prototypic exemplars as being members of the category and a greater likelihood of coming up with unusual word associations positive affect also changes problem solving positive affect have better performance on a task that's generally regarded to require creative ingenuity than people who have negative affect induced also with problem solving when they had pairs of subjects who were put in oppositional negotiating roles if they induced positive affect on them beforehand it reduced the use of contentious tactics they looked for joint benefits and potential solution and the solutions that they found were more integrative they got more aspects into them making them better solutions than those who had negative affect induced as far as decision making goes people who had positive affect induced are less likely they come to the same decisions often that people have negative affect induced but they do so more quickly because they're less likely to review information already reviewed they're more likely to ignore information considered unimportant and they're more likely to eliminate choices that do not meet certain important criteria early on in the process so positive affect has a lot of positive influences on the way you think and because of that there's actually been a movement called the positive psychology movement recently started mostly in about roughly the turn of the century 2000 or thereabouts and then different universities throughout the country they're actually now centers of positive psychology where they study the benefits of being in a positive mood now if you think in terms of adaptation maybe evolution you think well if positive affect has all these benefits why about we would be in a sad mood are there any benefits to there or not because it seems relatively easy for the brain to simply shift to a constant positive mode of thought there must be some benefits to being in a negative mood as well and in fact more recently there have been some studies which has shown that in fact positive moods can help you in certain ways negative affect helps you be more skeptical people were given a set of facts 25 were true 25 were false and they were told which ones were true and which ones were false two weeks later they came back half of them had positive affect induced half of them had negative affect induced the ones who had positive affect induced were more likely to say the things that they were told were false before were true because they use simply the fact that they recognize those items as being as an indicator of true or falseness whereas those who had negative affect induced were more accurate remembering which ones were true and which ones were false there have been studies where people have watched videotapes of people either telling the truth or being deceptive about whether or not they took a movie ticket from a room when no one else was looking yes, take the ticket and lie about it or no, don't take the ticket and lie about it I did a group of people watch videos of those first group of people and they had to detect which ones were lying which ones were telling the truth those who had positive affect induced were less likely to say that anyone was lying and those who had negative affect induced were more likely to say some people were lying and they were more accurate in their determinations as well negative affect helps you resist information people in this case, participants witnessed an altercation in a classroom setting a little while later they were asked questions like do you remember when the woman in the beige jacket pulled something out of her pocket she wasn't wearing a beige jacket but that was designed to give them this information then later on they had either positive or negative affect induced and they were quizzed about what happened in that original event okay those who had positive affect induced were more likely to report that misinformation is being true than those who had negative affect induced and anyway one of the more powerful things is that negative affect makes you more persuasive you write better arguments for things when you have had negative affect induced and this was tested in a variety of ways including people had affect induced wrote arguments on a given issue given to another group of people entirely and they measured how their attitudes changed as a result of reading those different arguments people who had negative affect wrote better arguments so as you can see it's not a clear cut thing it's not always best to be happy not always best to be sad or excited or disgusted or whatever there are reasons to be in both but as far as being creative goes positive affect leads to more creative thought more out of bounds thinking and things of that sort and it goes right back to what Peter Elbow was saying that there are these two modes of thought that he saw them but since affect is a continuum I suspect this is more of a continuum as well but if you want to think creatively being in a happy mood really helps quite a bit in that process and I also wanted to add a little bit about incubation the person who created the first model of the benzene ring I'm not a chemist so I don't know all the details but supposedly he had the image in a dream where he dreamed that a snake was biting its own tail and then he woke up and wrote down all the implications for that as how benzene is structured in the physical level some people actually question whether this is actually a true account or not but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that people in a very relaxed state have been thinking about a problem for a while and the answer often pops into their head so they might be falling asleep or just waking up they might be showering or they might be taking a walk or something like that but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that that's very helpful that you've set the problem up in your mind and then you do something as relaxing as possible and you're more likely to come up with a solution in those cases for the last of my three topics I want to talk a little bit about teaching others since I do that quite a bit and I've thought an awful lot about it and read a lot about that as well and one of the reasons why this is kind of important at least in my mind is back in May there was a discussion on Ruby Talk and somebody said I would like to learn how to program I've never programmed before in my life is Ruby a good language to learn to program with and Eric I think you actually participated in this particular discussion as I recall and most people said yeah Ruby is a great language to start learning in but a few people had oppositional viewpoints and I'm not going to put their names here but someone said learn C first to really get programming to understand what's going on you need to go deep all the way down to C and some even say going down to assembler it doesn't make things easy for you you have to go memory you have to make your own make and move your pointers to access memory you have to link your own binaries and doing all of that makes you a better programmer makes you understand what really is going on behind the scenes okay now I don't doubt that knowing those kinds of things is useful but the question is what do you want to learn first okay he's saying learn C first and again it's cut off here but he ends it with a smiley face you know work hard so you'll benefit from it and he kind of stands off the rough edges with a smiley face somebody else had a very similar view that's exactly what we chose C as the first language for electronic engineering information systems engineering students C is very hard to learn almost everybody comes unstuck on pointers memory allocation and it keeps going on and on but if the original poster wants good foundation in programming C will provide it but Ruby will be gentler and again there's a little smiley face to that and somebody else had a nice kind of over high level view of what the issue was that people were discussing he said that traditionally technical subjects are taught from the bottom up so people prefer a top down approach but it's more of an individual choice well let's see talk a little bit about data and what data kind of leads us to believe which of these three concepts do you think kids are most likely to learn first okay you're probably going to guess dog dog is where kids learn first later on they might learn poodle or mammal but starting in the middle and they learn the more abstract and the more low level concrete concepts later what about in these three cases okay and again probably chair alright and in these hierarchies of issues from the abstract to the more concrete research back in the 1970s a lot of studies in how people categorize things and she found that there's this level called the base level which is where people tend to categorize things first understand things at the first and they go from up and down from there that's kind of the sweet spot and how is it the sweet spot well that's the level where things are most easily grouped by overall shape similarly it's the level the highest level at which we interact with objects similarly we interact with most chairs in the same way we don't interact with all furniture at the same way tables we interact with one way lamps a different way and chairs a third way entirely okay people are most likely to use base level names when having casual discussions base level names often have fewer syllables in the American Sign Language at the base level there are typically single signs for those base level categories and you're more likely to need a combination of signs for more abstract or less abstract things and children learn the base level first so when we think about programming the base level might be things like statements variables, flow of control methods, objects and so forth higher level concepts are things like software architecture algorithmic efficiency code complexity or how beautiful your code is we can also go down to lower levels as well things like memory management, memory layout pointers and linking and so forth but where most programming is at where you can kind of get the most power for the minimal amount of effort is I first focusing on that base level and from there moving up to more abstract concepts and down to more concrete concepts and that in a nice way is why Ruby is such a great language to learn with because you can start learning without having to write a single method you can do put s hello world in Java you have to at the very least create a class and a method within the class that's a static method it's a public static method called main all that stuff which you're going to have to push off as far as describing what all that stuff is used for until they've gotten to more advanced topics so that's why I think Ruby is a great first language and the one last issue I want to discuss and this is because the way people think and the way people program are a little bit different usually in program we think of categories and categories is how I call this refer to what we might call concepts or what we might call classes even but we think of concept as having a nice border some things fit the concept some things don't this is either a dog or it's not a dog it's a tree or it's not a tree and so forth so for example how would you write a conditional in your language of choice say Ruby about whether or not somebody was a bachelor or you just by thinking one of the components of being a bachelor they must be male they can't be a kid they have to be at least a teenager and they can't be married of course because bachelors are people who are not married yet so we're going to play a little game called pick the bachelor and I'm going to show you a picture of two people who millions of people regard very highly they're both deceased now and your job is to pick of these two which is the better bachelor now Pope John Paul II fits the main criteria he's male he's not married he's old enough to be married whereas John F. Kennedy he's male he's old enough to be married but he is married but on the other hand the concept of bachelorhood is not just those things there's a lot of other stuff behind it how somebody acts for example and as you probably all know JFK there are rumors about him and Marilyn Monroe who acted like a bachelor where it's very hard to imagine Pope John Paul II acting in any way like that at all so in a strange sense JFK is the better bachelor of the pair even though he actually violates some of the familiar criteria of what being a bachelor is okay so keep that in mind now imagine you're at a hardware store alright and now imagine a tool okay how many of you imagined a hammer okay usually it's the majority of people imagine a hammer very rarely do people imagine an Allen wrench for example okay why is that well back in I think this was the 70's it could have been earlier than that people working on prototype theory Eleanor Roche was one of them Michael Posner was another but the idea is that categories have things with these hard edge borders in fact categories have a simple tendency which we tend to call the prototype and they also have some extent things that are further away from that prototype which are still considered part of the category but there's also some gray cases as well things that maybe in some cases are part of the category and in some cases are not okay so we've got things that are definitely part of the category and not some gray areas and things that are right on the edge which depending on the context you might say yes or no on so with dogs a goat retriever is very near the prototype it might depend on which dog you had as a kid you get to chow you're a little bit kind of going out there alright and when you get to this dog named Sam that's probably kind of way way way out there Sam is a three time champion at the Sonoma Moran Fair World's Obvious Dog Contest he won three years running in a row and actually passed away and someone else was finally able to claim the title I suspect foul play but anyway alright how about these things are these things dogs or not dogs on the left is actually a cross between a dog and a wolf dog or not cartoon characters which may or may not be dogs so there are some of these edge cases as well when you want to teach somebody these concepts you want to give them a sense of what the tendency is and also the extent of it as well and to do that you give lots of examples even if you never provide them with the bullseye the dead center of that category they will through lots of examples they will actually infer it and if they ever see that thing which is the perfect bullseye they'll say yes that's the one that's near perfect as possible even if they've never seen it before because they've extracted the prototype from all the various examples but the more examples the better so conclusions let's kind of go through these big topics in reverse order when you're teaching new concepts teach at the base level first up or down from there in order to give people a generalizable prototype that is as useful as possible give them as many examples as you can even if you don't hit the prototype exactly they'll infer it from all of the examples automatically for creativity mood, emotion, affect whatever you want to call it is important positive affect helps creativity negative affect will help you with more careful and critical thought and there's also the whole process of incubation if you're working on something hard get all the information into your mind and then do something as relaxing as possible and sometimes that'll help you resolve the issue and as far as effectiveness goes choose your environment first of all as best you can avoid the distracting environments try to minimize multitasking but if you fill out a deficit spend some time in nature or even better try to include nature as a regular part of your day-to-day activities and you'll be better for it and that's everything I'm going to give you all the slides with full citations on the website it's not there yet but in a few days it'll be there if you have any questions feel free to talk to me anywhere else in the conference or send me an email, thank you