Alex Kelleher’s Blog

Color affects us all the time - from a red traffic light to the placebo effect of a pill (yellow chalk pills are the most effective antidepressants it seems).  And we all know that the meaning of color varies based on where you are in the world, or in what sort of society or religion.   The recently created  ”Colours in Cultures” chart brings this to life (click on the image to view the original)

So for instance, death is (in their categories)

• Black for categories: western europe/american/japanase and native american
• White for categories: hindu/chinese
• Blue for category: muslim
• Green for category: south american

“Love” is, apparently, either red, green, yellow or blue depending which category you’re looking at, and “intelligence” black, white, pale or dark blue.  So much for color consistency …

It’s also been known for a while now that color isn’t really seen by the eyes, but by the brain.  What that means is, even though the “hardware” of our eyes can differ hugely (by as much as 40x in terms of color receptors), most people will perceive the same type of color as a strong version of red, yellow, etc.  In addition, the brain is adept at handling the differences that lighting and context create – something called “metamerism”, which explains why objects of different color may look the same under different lighting conditions. 

An example of this sort of mind-bending illusion (click to see original) is below: the centre crosses of both objects are actually the same colour:

What this all means is that that the way we comprehend color is more based on society and context, than biology.  Add in geography into the mix, and color isn’t as stable a concept as it might at first seem.  And yet it can influence our driving in milliseconds, the effectiveness of the drugs we take, and ultimately most of the things we do every day, offline and online.

But it’s a deal more complex than red=stop and green=go.

Reading has had a long history, no doubt.  But here’s why I think it’s future may be shorter than its past.   The stages of reading:

Reading = interpreting drawings
Writing in symbols or pictures to communicate messages started some 70,000 years ago they reckon, with the first proven examples about  7,000BC.  An example of such writing from the “Tartaria Tablets“, dating from 5300 BC:

So at that stage reading was about cartoons, pretty much…

Reading = interpreting symbols
Symbols (otherwise called glyphs) that stand for something abstract – like letters, then emerged around 3000BC.  The “Vinca Symbols” are one of the first steps towards what we know today as an alphabet:

Phonetic writing (where characters represent sounds, which in turn represent names for things) then evolved from tablets (oh yes, the iPad of its day) to books to newspapers to magazines.  Through rock to papyrus to paper, from printing press to colour laser.

Reading = text + image + video
But letters aren’t enough.  Reading today means getting informtion from a screen full of text, images and video.  Ebooks aside (more about that in my next post), that’s what the current generation means reading.

NEAR FUTURE: Reading = interacting
Even today’s state-of-the art reading (the internet) is lean-forward and stare, with the occasional click (or finger swipe) to navigate around content.  We like to think of it as interactive, but really its static.  It may be targeted or personalized, but usually barely so. 

For the first step towards truly interactive content, and the next phase of writing and reading, take a look at the Microsoft Courier demo below.  Apart from making Apple’s iHype (iPad) seem like a brick, it feels to me that this is the dawn of Personal.

(http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/dec196af)  This will change reading forever.

Reading = dead?
Let’s not forget reading is just a way of getting information into our brains.

The problems with text (specifically our Roman alphabet) are:

• Too many languages, too much translation effort.  We all travel to much to not share a language
• Text doesn’t  convey tone/intent/emotion/color
• Text is slow to absorb and inefficient
• Spelling is clumsy (like txt spk, which iznt gr8, u no)

 Text, images, audio and video wil merge – into something new.  Something more efficient.  “Reading” will be what slow-minded people of the past did.

Communication will happen in its most efficient possible way (which has always be the case) – likely directly into our brains in a format perfectly suited to our neurons.

Reading, as we know it, will be dead.  Even the written word may fall by the wayside.

At university I did a thesis on how people react to movies (part of which went into a chapter I co-wrote with Julian Friedman for his book How to Make Money Scriptwriting).  Turns out, if we empathise with a character on screen, we mimic what they’re doing with small (undetectable) muscle movements – if they’re running, our legs twitch, etc.

What’s even more fascinating is how we SEE the movie.  When we blink, we lose up to 10% of our viewing time.  So it’s really important that we time those blinks to moments when we won’t miss anything too important happening on the screen.  And that means that in an average movie (or YouTube clip), most of us will blink at the same time.

Synchronized blinking, in short.

A recent study discovered that it’s not always when expected (i.e. a scene break), but at points where something has completed, or the main character is off the screen for a moment.  So the result of a natural moment of low interest, when our brain calculates it can give the eyes a break.

Part of that seems obvious to me (our eyes would dry out if we waited for scene endings), but the fact that almost everyone anticipates the same best place to blink is pretty interesting. 

Watching where people blink could be a pretty strong indicator of interest not just in movies, but in video ads (if we blink when they show the brand, opportunity lost), in top-level sports (especially fast-moving sports like table tennis) in warfare (when do fighter pilots blink?), and so on.

Blinking useful.

Every so often, a story comes a long within the field of psychology which underlines just how far we’ve still got to go. 

In a study at UCLA, subjects were asked to do one of 8 different tasks – from saying whether words rhymed, to counting the number of tones they heard.  So – very different, varied tasks. 

Investigators using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) – the very cutting edge of brain scanning – and then had to guess from the results of the scans which tasks the subjects were doing.

Chance alone would get 1/8 or 12.5% of guesses correct.  They managed 80%.  Pretty good – but let’s just remember that they were looking at tasks that were very (very) distinct.  And they still got it wrong 20% of the time…

How did they do it?  With machine learning math (the same kind of math that we use at Cognitive Match).   And yes, it’s a bit of a good result for this field of technology.  But far from perfect, and very far from mind reading.

Of course, all this means is that fMRI and the way we interpret the results from that technology could be better.  Much better. 

But more importantly – maybe it’s just the wrong thing to do (which is my take on it).  It’s a bit like working out whether the stock market is up, based on satellite weather images.  The brain just doesn’t work based on large areas of electrical activity on a scan.  It’s complex, enmeshed, multi-layered, abstracted and part of a body of integrated biological mechanisms.   And I hope that’s clear.

Building on earlier research, this piece of research suggests something that could be useful in everyday life: people are more likely to comply with requests if you ask them in their right ear.   Clearly the “club/disco” setting they used in the study is an easier one in which to target someone’s right ear than your average business meeting.  But next time you want something, maybe you’ll sit to the left of your boss/supplier/client…

Thanks to http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/06/persuasion-the-right-ear-advantage.php for the heads-up (ears-up).

A thought just occurred to me while was reading about User Centric’s latest eye tracking research on Google vs. Bing.  They discovered that the 3-column design on Bing means more people look at the ads on the right.  (They also found that most users ignored the “flyouts” that happen when you hover over a result at Bing.com – I hate those flyouts so hopefully Bing can be persuaded to drop them…).

I’m right in the middle of reading a lot of diverse stuff on human attention and vision, to try and get some insight into why people respond to visual cues online.  But just this simple analysis of eye movement on Google/Bing did make me think: Why not charge advertisers for looking? 

This may not be as valid for text ads as it is for banner ads (which are often more about branding and awareness).  As an advertiser, currently an impression is an impression is an impression.  But I can see a situation where charges are based on how many people look at an ad, and for how long.   Obviously as a publisher you’d then want to optimise your site so that the maximum number of people look at an ad – which would be a much more subtle (and algorithm-driven) process…

Humans tend to make connections between things, even when those connections don’t exist.  Our brains are constantly trying to rule-build and organise, and often get it wrong.

Today for a while, when a plane passed overhead (they do often where I am), the bulb on my desk lamp dimmed. I, of course, assumed the two events were related.  The fact is, planes passed over every couple of minutes, and the light only dimmed every half hour, and I’ve just now found it’s because I was kicking the cable under the table without knowing it.  They’re unconnected…

That’s what psychologists call an illusory correlation – the false connection of two things, based on data.   (it’s also a tongue-twister).

Sod’s law (Murphy’s Law) is a example – we tend to connect negative events, and ignore positive (or neutral) ones.  How often have you been driving along, only to be confronted at the top of a hill and round a bend with a truck that’s halfway across the road?  “Always happens at the top of a hill and round a bend, typical!” you’ll think.  Obviously, 99% of the time it doesn’t, but we’ll remember the times it does.

So why is this important?  Well, it usually isn’t, because we muddle along anyway.  It can get odd when unexplained events (lights in the sky) are connected with unconfirmed causes (UFOs from outer space).  Or when “there’s no smoke without fire”, which has probably convicted a fair number of innocent people. 

My interest is because at my company, Cognitive Match (of which Favy is now a part) we’re focussed on ways of making REAL connections in observed data.  And equally I guess uncovering the “illusory” ones…

Building, as I am, a companythat delivers user benefit from observing behavior and processing that data, I spend a lot of time looking into the latest research on human/internet behaviour.

The thing is, all this research is obviously very new.  We don’t yet fully understand how daily integration of online affects our brains, and our behaviour.  But more studies are being done, like this one (subs required) in SciAm mind.

The premise is that a new condition is emerging in the “wired” user (and can develop very quickly even in unwired users) - continuous partial attention.  In other words, we are continually partly aware of a lot of different sources of information:  Our blackberry, our Skype IM, the site we’re currently on, the TV in the background, the iPod playlist, and so on.  They all get an even attention as we attempt to balance out the data streams.

This distracted mental state means that everything is in our peripheral attention, and almost nothing gets our undivided attention.  This applies really well to web behavior (I’ve spent a lot of time in a previous position watching people use the web), and is starting to seep out into social behaviour, eating patterns and life in general.  Online, it goes something like this…

Click, glance, read, glance, click, IM, scroll, email, ad, recommendation, skim read, tweet, click, glance…..

Today’s wired human, the article suggests, suffers from this kind of “digital fog”, gets irritated, distracted and socially less active.  Our brains just weren’t built for this.

Well, they will be soon. 

One thing that’s clear about the human brain, is it’s remarkable ability to change itself in response to what’s required of it.  Question is, whether we’re capable of continually partially attending lots of data streams, or we’ll need more and more tools to process them on our behalf, and bring us back to what we’re biologically built for – single-focus attention.

I spend my time working on solutions that tailor to individuals, so it’s fun to take a moment out and see the social situations that we conform in – as true in ‘those days’ as it is most likely true now on Facebook etc:

Thanks to Psylog for the heads-up on that one.