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Here's a wonderfully insightful article, explaining that positive and negative affect condition the mind to approach challenges in different ways. Consequently, pretty things can be more usable.

Steven Johnson on software that works well with his mind: in NY Times Book Review and his own weblog.

David Weinberger points to a brilliant del.icio.us site integration hack by Matt Biddulph made with a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey. I wonder if it would make sense for sites to leave dedicated spaces for client-side DHTML extensions… <div id="__extendme__"/> anyone?

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Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them?

Fascinating.

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From a comment by Hanan Cohen on David Weinberger's blog, what looks to be an interesting interview about an important application of cognitive science to user interface design.

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Cognitive injustice?

Human brains and minds appear to be inherently capable of at least two quite different kinds of processes and reasoning, The first kind, the one we have come to regard as normal, is predominantly linear and logical. The second process is more non-linear. It is often labeled "sloppy," disorganized, and is considered by many as slow to learn. In school it does appear to be inefficient when compared to the linear. It is called learning disabled, and specifically often diagnosed as dyslexia, dyscalculia, and attention deficit disorder.

Despite being a computer programmer, I identify very strongly with the non-linear mode of thinking. I can't say I've had great difficulty in school, but my learning style feels most laborious when I need to understand or memorize sequences or complex logic. In particular, I am absolutely terrible at memorizing things. On the other hand, my associative memory is excellent— given any stimulus, I can recall or derive dozens of related facts quickly. I am fairly good at trivia, but I can't for the life of me produce a list of things I need to do today off the top of my head.

Luckily I have, over time, developed tools and techniques that help me to some degree to overcome this. For example, I take fairly organized notes, and when I do have to understand something linear— such as complicated conditional logic in a program I am working on— I often make use of diagrams such as flow charts and other visualizations. I write copiously— explanatory writing is a sort of bridge between precise, linear order and associative, redundant teaching.

The whole process is still quite compellingly summarized by Gregor: serendipity is my drug, tunnel vision my antidote.

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