a map in my own mind

As an AD/HD coach, lots of my clients have trouble making decisions. So finding ways to make it easier has become pretty fascinating to me. I came across this article in News@Nature about a recent study done at the University of Amsterdam on people shopping for bigger ticket items.

Published online February 16, 2006, author Helen Pearson reports “ Studies say you should list the pros and cons, then sleep on it. … The best way to make a tough decision is to put your feet up and think about something else.”

The article goes on:

For the simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for the more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science1.

My teachers have been telling me since grade school days that I don’t use enough of my brain. It seems like a brain can only hold so much information on its front page, so to speak. So it’s comforting for me to know that the parts of my brain I’m not using right now are off doing something that I’ll be able to use later.

If you’d like to know more about what I know about making decisions, you can buy a recording of a teleclass I gave called Decision Making: Can’t You Just Make Up Your Mind? It’s part of a series of audio classes in the library at www.addclasses.com

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Thanks.

In the Jan. 26, 2006 online issue of Discovery News, the article Dollars Reveal How Flu Could Spread outlined a pretty interesting fact about the spread of this year’s dreaded Avian Flu.

Flu pandemics generally spread slowly in the past. But now people travel farther and more often. So it made sense this year to fear that the Avian Flu might spread around the globe seemingly in an instant.

But that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

Here’s what some German physicists are suggesting based on what they learned from the Where’s George website’s tracking of the movement of U.S. dollars.

They found that the banknotes mainly dispersed in a series of random steps over small distances, with occasional long hops, and there were long waiting times between displacements.

What emerges to replace the one-size-fits-all model is the belief that human movement, despite all its apparent randomness, can be mathematically predictable if important local parameters are factored in.

I love it when math is the answer… or at least part of it. And it is nice to be reminded that everything bad in the world won’t blow up tomorrow!

The study appears in Nature, the British weekly science journal.