The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table: Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work. Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
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From the history of how coffee changed the world, early foreign and American coffee-making devices, 1922:
1—English adaptation of French boiler. 2—English coffee biggin. 3—Improved Rumford percolator. 4—Jones’s exterior-tube percolator. 5—Parker’s steam-fountain coffee maker. 6—Platow’s filterer. 7—Brain’s Vacuum, or pneumatic filter. 8—Beart’s percolator. 9—American coffee biggin. 10—cloth-bag drip pot. 11—Vienna coffee pot. 12—Le Brun’s cafetière. 13—Reversible Potsdam cafetière. 14, 15—Gen. Hutchinson’s percolator and urn. 16—Etruscan biggin.
It is in our nature to need stories. … Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories. They are a key way in which our ruly culture configures our nature.
Jag Bhalla considers the evolutionary basis of storytelling. Also see The Storytelling Animal and complement with Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories.
What the Internet is doing to our brains – a charming animation based on Nicholas Carr’s rather reductionist, techno-dystopian book The Shallows. For a more dimensional look at how digital culture is affecting cognition, see this.
When the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.
Dan Pink on the surprising science of what motivates us.
Joe Hanson examines the sciences of what it is about music that makes us feel all those feelings. Pair with 7 essential books about music, emotion, and the brain.
Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature, it’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.
Here we equate the performance impairment caused by fatigue with that due to alcohol intoxication, and show that moderate levels of fatigue produce higher levels of impairment than the proscribed level of alcohol intoxication.
Take it from the scientists: Not getting proper sleep is akin to walking around drunk. Learn what actually happens while you sleep and why it matters, the essential science of your internal clock, and how dreams mediate negative emotions.
As a wise woman once wrote, “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac.”
I’m not against religion in the sense that I feel I can’t tolerate it, but I think written into the rubric of religion is the certainty of its own truth. And since there are 6,000 religions currently on the face of the earth, they can’t all be right. And only the secular spirit can guarantee those freedoms and it’s the secular spirit that they contest.
Ian McEwan, found in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.
Also see science vs. scripture and the difference between curiosity and wonder, 50 famous academics on science vs. religion, and why the very lack of certainty is what drives science forward.
They estimated fatigue-related productivity losses cost employers $1,967 per employee per year.
[…]
One of the first offices in the US to embrace an open napping culture was Yarde Metals. In 1995 company founder, Craig Yarde, noticed that his workers were snoozing at their desks. Rather than penalize them, he stuck a couch in a dark room and let them take 40 winks when they needed to recharge. Since then others have adopted the trend and created napping spaces in their offices. Google has become somewhat of a poster child for office napping after installing futuristic chairs in its offices.
How much nap rooms improve productivity across a company is tricky to measure. Researchers have made the case that the cost to the employer of a 20-minute nap is worth the rejuvenated work that results.
Research on sleep and work. Thomas Edison was famous for favoring naps and having napping cots scattered throughout his property and lab.
Researchers from John Moores University in the UK tested the effects of afternoon napping on sleep-deprived people. The subjects napped for half an hour just after lunch and then researchers measured their alertness. There have been numerous studies into the effects of power napping, but this one measured heart rates and reflexes as opposed to surveying participants. As per their hypothesis, alertness was significantly higher compared to the non-nappers.
Naps work – just ask Thomas Edison.
Also see what happens while you sleep and how it affects your every waking moment.
In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives. The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol. Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.
The counterintuitive psychology of productivity. Pair with the science of productivity, animated.
The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.
Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
Research confirms that, counterintuitively, relaxing makes you more productive. Of course, Thomas Edison knew that sleep is the key to success.
Artwork by Golden Cosmos
A Boy and His Atom – to explore the limits of filmmaking, IBM scientists create the world’s smallest movie, made by moving actual atoms frame by frame with IBM’s scanning tunneling microscope.
How far we’ve come in the half-century since Disney’s Our Friend the Atom.
