Blog

Will Wearables Become Useful For Market Research?

2 min read
Market researchers have a long history of using biometric measurements, such as heart rate and skin conductance, to get moment-by-moment readings of how consumers respond to things like TV ads and other commercial messages. However one of the downsides to this is the expense of bringing consumers into testing locations…
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The 7 Main Benefits of Neuromarketing Research

3 min read
Why go to the extra trouble, expensive and complexity of conducting Neuromarketing research? Why not just using one of the traditional marketing research methods like surveys or focus groups? I’ve been working in the Neuromarketing industry for around 15 years now and I’ve conducted hundreds of studies across all sectors…
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The grid, the fractal and the blot

4 min read
We are used to thinking in words, and how they can help us think, but don’t we also think in images? Don’t images act as important metaphors for the various ideas we come across in our daily lives? Can’t they both extend and constrain the range of thoughts we can…
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Some Reflections on Google Glass

9 min read
Google Glass is a pair of spectacles with computer displays built into the lenses, and a tiny video camera built into the bridge. I’m sure Google would love the public to adopt them, en masse, as the new way of interacting with the Internet, as it would enable them to…
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The post-PC era

3 min read
Ever since personal computers appeared in the late 1970s, the trend has been towards greater personalisation and ease of use. To begin with, the innovations were slow to come. The graphical user interface, first popularised by apple, then Microsoft (with windows), and then the development of laptops, were the main…
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A new perspective on solving problems

3 min read
I’ve been reading a very good book called ‘The Soutions Focus’ by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow. Its basically a business book, but based around ideas from a form of therapy called solution-focused brief therapy. The basic idea is that of not trying to analyse a problem but instead…
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Review of the Amazon Kindle

4 min read
I love books, I read lots of them and tend to buy even more of them  (a disparity that is resulting in an ever increasing backlog of unread books!). There are physical aspects to books that I love. They are pleasing to hold, and they feel natural to hold and…
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Review of ‘transcendent man’ (2011)

5 min read
Transcendent man begins with a shot of travelling through space, stars wizzing past, heading towards a bright light. A voice-over begins to meditate on our mortality and how our acceptance of it is really just a form of denial. Death, claims the voice, represents a profound loss of not just…
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How to experience lucid dreaming

12 min read
“The Tibetan Buddhists who have been practising the yoga of the dream state for 1000 years claim that you can change dream content in any imaginable way: that if it’s single you can make it multiple, if it’s hot you can make it cold, small, large and so on. They believe that it’s…
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Five quick ways to survive information overload

3 min read
Five quick ways to survive information overload It’s become a modern cliché, but we truly are suffering from information overload these days. Never before have we had to process, keep track of and make sense of so much data. Equally, we are faced with more sources of distraction than ever…
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The ancient arts of memory improvement

9 min read
“The main course was just being served in the massive, ancient Greek hall when the expansive ceiling collapsed, crushing every one of the many guests in their seats. Not a single attendee survived, except for the poet Simonides, who had left the room just before the tragedy. In the days…
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The history of magic and the mind

4 min read
Magic is undoubtedly an ancient art. The earliest reported magic trick (the ‘cup and balls’ trick) is almost 5,000 years old (2,700 BC) by Dedi in ancient Egypt. The same trick was performed over 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome. The cup and ball trick has been used for centuries…
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