by Franklin Wordsmith | Sep 28, 2021 | Leadership, Neuroscience
Why This Leads Us to Make Bad—or No—Decisions You walk into a restaurant, looking forward to a good meal. Your server hands you a menu the size of the Bible. You stare at pages of options, and your eyes glaze over. There’s too much information, and you’re having...
by Franklin Wordsmith | Feb 27, 2020 | Leadership
How Our Brains Deal with Uncertainty I believe we all have an inner actuary. This is the part of our brains that evaluates risk: in things we’ve done before and in others we’ve never tried. Its job is to keep us safe. If the risk profile of what we’re considering is...
by Franklin Wordsmith | Jan 21, 2020 | Neuroscience
How the Sunk Cost Fallacy Wastes Your Time, Money and Happiness This is another of those times when your brain is designed to shoot you in the foot. Let’s say you bought stock in a company. You were excited about its prospects. Then the price went down. And...
by Franklin Wordsmith | Sep 27, 2017 | Neuroscience
When we were kids, my older brother Mark used to tease me. If an adult would compliment me on being able to remember things, he’d say, “Her memory is so good that she remembers things that never happened!”I’d always bristle at that insult. It turns out he probably was...
by Franklin Wordsmith | Jun 20, 2017 | Culture, Neuroscience
In the original cast of Star Trek, Mr. Spock was my hero.Instead of getting mired in the messy world of emotions, he rose above it. (Although I often noticed how hard his human shipmates worked to shake him out of this.)It turns out he would have made a lousy...
