Time runs differently when you're vacationing in Paris. Sculpture at Gare St-Lazare, Paris. Photo © David McSpadden, via flickr and creative commons‘When I play Candy Land with my five-year-old, time creeps,” she says. “A game lasts only 10 minutes, but it feels like two hours to me.”

My friend is describing her experience of subjective time. The clock in her phone steadily marks the minutes, no matter what she does. Yet while she plays Candy Land— a board game that requires no reading, minimal counting skills, and is popular with young children—her brain measures time in a decidedly Dali-esque way. It perceives each second as stretching and warping around the experience of the game. Compared to the experience of time during the game, she finds time compresses and races before and after playing.

“My daughter finds the 10 minutes flash by like lightening.” More »

Single-serving bags of chips. Photo © m01229, via flickr and Creative Commons

Nature Boy waved a bag of potato chips at me.

“No, thanks. I’m not hungry,” I said.

“But when you see this bag, how do you feel? Do you feel a twinge of guilt? Do you feel nostalgic?”

“Actually, right now, I feel puzzled and exasperated….”

Nature Boy’s household psychological experiment came after he’d read about neuromarketing, a field of study that examines how the sight of certain products triggers specific and not always expected emotional responses deep within people’s brains.

That’s the neuro-part of the field. The marketing part comes when companies use that information to design, package and position products to increase sales….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Checking email. Photo © www.buzzfarmers.com, via flickr and Creative Commons

Photo © www.buzzfarmers.com

When he was younger and had more hair, Nature Boy often marked this time of year by resolving to break annoying habits. These included snacking between meals, spending too much time onscreen, sleeping until the last possible minute before getting up and getting ready for work, and so on.

Year after year, he resolved to get smarter, fitter, faster or just get up.

You could say he was beginning to develop a habit of making resolutions to break bad habits.

Alas, as with so many resolutions made by so many people, a resolution-making habit does little to squelch the habits prompting the resolutions….

 

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

 

Table Setting 74. Photo © Didriks, via Creative Commons and flickr. www.didriks.com

“I’m setting out the small dinner plates,” Nature Boy announced the other evening as we prepared to welcome guests. “It will help pace us through the meal.”

Nature Boy recently assumed responsibility for setting the table for evening meals. With meals round these parts typically being the quick and informal sort, the choice of dinnerware rarely receives much thought.

But the task becomes more complicated when, as with the evening in question, guests are expected, menus encompass multiple courses, and appetites must be managed throughout the evening. Such occasions call upon Nature Boy to tune up his geometry and social-engineering skills. It’s not just a matter of how to seat so many people around a limited dining surface, but (he asserts) incorporating the latest social and neurological science into the effects of the setting—and the setting of the table—on the perception and enjoyment of the food served.

Nature Boy’s efforts at table landscaping have climbed to new intellectual and socially manipulative heights.

The studies Nature Boy called on when he selected smaller plates determined that plate size affects how much food people serve themselves and how much they think they’re eating….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….