Category: Boost Brain Power

There you are, sitting in the office, as usual, working away.

Look away from the screen for a moment and what do you see? How tidy is your desk? Is it an open-plan office? Is there a view out of the window? Are there any plants in sight? Did you personally choose the decorations near your desk?

All these factors and more have interesting psychological effects on how people work and how good they feel about it. So here are six tips, based on psychological research, for creating the ideal workspace.

1. Avoid open-plan (if you can)

Open-plan offices are supposed to encourage communication and team-spirit. At least, that’s the theory.

According to a survey which analysed data from 303 US office buildings, there’s some truth to the boost in communication, but no evidence it increases community spirit (Kim & Dear, 2012).

On top of this, the small benefits in communication are massively outweighed by the disadvantages of working in open-plan offices. Most have worked in these and know exactly what they are: noise, distraction and lack of privacy.

Unsurprisingly, people working in private offices are significantly happier with their working environment.

Not that most people have much choice about this either way and I guess many do their best to create their own sense of privacy using headphones, cubicles or hiding under the desk—whatever works.

2. The great messy/tidy desk debate

Does a messy desk help or hinder? Is the untidy desk really a sign of an untidy mind?

Well, research has found that order and disorder in the environment have different psychological consequences.

An experiment (described here) found that messy desks tended to encourage more creativity, while tidy desks encouraged conformity and general good moral behaviour.

So, both messy and untidy desks have their place, depending on the type of outcome you are looking for.

3. Curvy is beautiful

While we can’t use psychology to solve the messy/tidy debate decisively, we can with curvy versus plain old straight.

In a study by Dazkir and Read (2011), participants were shown some stimulated interiors with loads of straight edges and some with loads of curves.

People rated the curvy environments as making them feel more peaceful, calm and relaxed. So, curvy wins.

Just the same effect was found in another experiment which found people more likely to judge curvy spaces in general as more beautiful (Vartanian et al., 2013).

4. Room with a view (or a picture of a view)

Most of us know that a nice walk through nature has a calming effect on the mind. Indeed, there is a study showing that a walk in nature can boost memory by 20%.

But what about bringing a little nature inside the office space?

This has also been tested in a study by Berto (2005), who found that just viewing pictures of natural scenes had a restorative effect on cognitive function.

In fact, the benefits of viewing landscapes likely extend to reducing short-term stress as well as benefiting overall health and well-being (Verlarde & Teit, 2007).

5. Plants

If walks in nature and natural scenes can calm the mind, then surely plants should work as well?

Indeed they do, research by Raaaas et al. (2011) found that after being exposed to an office setting with four indoor plants, people’s attentional capacities were restored in comparison to the control condition, which had no plant-life.

6. Decorate

The lean, clean, efficient office space has been seen as the model environment in which to really get some work done.

But, like the tidy desk enthusiasts, the office minimalists are also taking a kicking in the research.

An experiment by Knight & Haslam (2010) looked at the effects of bare offices as compared with those either decorated by the experimenter or decorated by the people occupying them.

What effects, they wondered, would office decoration have on people’s well-being, their attention to detail, their management of information and so on.

The answer is that decorated offices won out over their bare counterparts. When people were empowered by being allowed to do their own decoration, they produced higher productivity and experienced enhanced well-being.

As one of their participants remarked, echoing, I’m sure, the feelings of many:

“…it’s so nice to come into an office with plants and pictures, it makes a place feel more homely, even a glass box [of an office] like this.”

Image credit: Everjean

You know how it is.

You sit down at your desk, survey your email, think about your to-do list, and feel the dull ache of despair.

How to get started? How to tackle this mountain of work? Some tasks are difficult to start because they’re too amorphous and undefined, others are too boring and others are too big and scary.

And all of this is happening against a background fog of sleep deprivation and the usual everyday anxieties.

Fight back with psychology! Here are six tips based on psychological research that can improve your state of mind and help you do what needs to be done…

1. Use your body

Are you sitting hunched over your desk in an attitude of despair? Remember that your body feeds back to your mind.

If your work needs persistence then cross your arms. If you need power then adopt a power pose with your body open, taking up as much space as possible.

There are many more links that psychologists have found between bodily position and effects on cognition. Have a look through these two lists: one, two. Use those that correspond to the mental state you need.

2. Mental contrast

Say there are three different tasks you could work on, how do you decide where to start?

You can work out what needs doing—and even what’s possible—by running a quick mental contrast.

Full instructions on mental contrasting are here, but briefly it means doing a fast list of pros and cons: you imagine a positive vision of the task finished, then think about the barriers you’ll face, then, crucially, contrast the two together. Without the contrasting this exercise doesn’t work.

After that, research suggests, you’ll either give up on the task, pass it off, decide to do it later…or, if it’s practical, your commitment and energy to complete it will be enhanced.

Mental contrasting can be done quickly and efficiently to get you on your way through that to-do list.

3. Adjust expectations

With task list at hand and body in the right position, it’s time to further adjust the posture of your mind.

If you’re having trouble getting going, then try to overestimate how easy the task will be to complete. A couple of important points though:

• Don’t dwell on the obstacles: there will always be obstacles and they will just put you off in the early stages.
• Don’t fantasise about completing it, psychologically that can be dangerous (see: why expectations beat fantasies).

Instead, briefly think about why the tasks facing you will be easier than you think and how they’ll go smoothly. A sort of positive insouciance is the right expectation to adopt.

4. Creative distance

Many tasks that aren’t necessarily labelled ‘creative’ still require considerable creativity. You may not be painting the Sistine Chapel, but generating new ideas will often make your job easier.

So, use a couple of tips from the psychology of creativity to give you the edge.

One fantastic way of generating new ideas or innovative ways of tackling a problem is by using psychological distance.

Do this by imagining your problem as distant and disconnected from your current location. Also, try projecting yourself forward in time, imagining how it will feel when you look back on it from next month or next year. Promoting psychological distance has been consistently shown to increase creative thinking.

Here are more research-based tips for boosting creativity.

5. Visualise process not outcome

The mind’s eye is powerful. So, like elite performers in sport, music and elsewhere, use the mind’s eye to power yourself forward.

In your mind, see yourself going through the procedures you need to complete the task.

Research on visualisation shows that when tasks are at the start or part-way through, it’s best to stay focused on the process and forget about the outcome.

But, when you are approaching the end, it boosts your motivation to shift your focus to the outcome.

So, in your mind’s eye, stay process focused at the start of a project or day, then switch through to a goal focus as the end comes in sight.

6. The Zeigarnik effect

For those still staring hopelessly at their to-do lists, here’s one last tip: start with something straightforward or low-priority to get the ball rolling.

If you can just get under way with any part of a project, then the rest will tend to follow. Once you’ve made a start, however trivial, you’ll be more powerfully drawn on to the end.

This trick relies on what psychologists call ‘the Zeigarnik effect‘. Check out the article for the full explanation, but essentially it means that we dislike leaving things unfinished that we’ve started.

Take advantage of the mind’s obsession with tying up loose ends by creating a few loose ends of your own.

Image credit: Justyna

You may have thought the case for keeping the mind active over the years was open and shut.

To protect your brain against cognitive decline with age, you should keep it active. It’s common sense isn’t it? Keep doing the Sudoku, reading books, doing crosswords, whatever you can.

People who keep their minds active stay sharper for longer, don’t they?

Indeed they do. But until now scientists had little evidence of what caused what.

Could it be, they wondered, that some people stay mentally active with age because they have an inbuilt genetic advantage. Maybe some of us are just destined to get more befuddled with age and, as a result, the life of the mind naturally fades.

In other words, perhaps there’s no need to bother keeping the mind active because how much your brainpower declines with age is unrelated to how much you use it.

Slowing cognitive decline

Now a new study published in Neurology has weighed in with evidence that, in fact, using your brain may indeed cause it to stay in better shape over the years.

Wilson et al. (2013) collected this evidence by looking at the brains of 294 people who had died and examining them for tell-tale signs of physical decline. They knew how much these people had stimulated their minds as they’d answered questionnaires over the years about how often they’d:

• read books,
• visited libraries,
• written letters,
• and sought out or processed information.

They found that:

“…people who participated in mentally stimulating activities both early and late in life had a slower rate of decline in memory compared to those who did not participate in such activities across their lifetime, after adjusting for differing levels of plaques and tangles in the brain. Mental activity accounted for nearly 15 percent of the difference in decline beyond what is explained by plaques and tangles in the brain.”

So it seems that mental activity really could be a protective factor against mental decline with age:

“The study found that the rate of decline was reduced by 32 percent in people with frequent mental activity in late life, compared to people with average mental activity, while the rate of decline of those with infrequent activity was 48 percent faster than those with average activity.”

This study suggests that keeping mentally active really can protect us from cognitive decline with age. And it’s never too early to start flexing those cognitive muscles.

Image credit: Nathan O’Nions

It’s fascinating to watch the rituals professional athletes go through to cope with the unbelievably weird situation they find themselves in.

They have to perform precise physical actions, demanding great concentration, all with millions of people watching them, both right there, and on TV.

For those who have never played in front of a crowd, it’s like the difference between having a relaxed conversation with a friend and giving a speech to thousands of people, multiplied by ten.

So, anything athletes can do to improve their performance in response to the huge amount of pressure they are under, is worth a try.

Things like deep breathing, going through particular routines and using visualisation can all help, but now there’s a new trick to add to the book.

To test it out, Beckmann et al. (2013) had footballers, Taekwondo practitioners and badminton players try something new when they were under pressure. They were told to squeeze their left hands tight into a fist and hold it for 30 seconds.

What happened was that when they were under pressure and they squeezed their fists, they didn’t choke. Instead of dipping, their performance remained at its usual level.

The researchers explain this boost by saying that squeezing your left fist boosts right-brain activity (the left side of your body is broadly associated with the right-hand-side of the brain). The right brain has, they say, more control over highly practised, automatic, skilled performance, which is what we rely on under pressure.

But perhaps you think you’ve spotted a flaw in the experiment? Maybe the athletes were responding to the suggestion that, if they made a fist, they would play better. If so, this explanation is bunk and it’s all about the power of suggestion.

The researchers, however, tested that out by having the athletes try squeezing their right hand into a fist in stressful moments. When they did this, they tended to choke. So it does seem it’s something about squeezing the left hand.

If you’re still sceptical that such a simple action could prevent choking then I’m with you.

The explanation they provide is not watertight and the experimenters weren’t blinded to the experiment, so perhaps it was all about the power of suggestion after all. Only further research will tell us which.

Still, worth a try isn’t it?

Image credit: Ibai Lemon

“Have successful professionals always been successful? Take Francesca Gino. An Associate Professor at Harvard, she is considered by many to be a superstar.

But things did not always look so bright for her: two years in a row she gave job talks at a number of top 10 schools and universities, but got no offers from those schools. Yet, in 2009, everything suddenly turned up roses; she got offers from Harvard, Wharton, Berkeley, and New York University. What had changed?

Well, clearly she was older and wiser. But she also changed her pre-talk ritual: before each campus talk and interview she sat down and wrote out a reflection of a time in which she had power.” (Lammers et al., 2013)

An inspiring story, certainly, which suggests a simple way to improve your performance in job interviews and probably in other situations where boosting the feeling of power is important.

All you do is sit down beforehand and reflect on a time when you had power. By doing this you are activating your own personal sense of power.

OK, though, but as a scientist I have to be sceptical of anecdotes. This may have worked for Professor Gino, but perhaps she just got better at interviews or her talent was finally recognised. That’s why a new study led by Dutch psychologist, Joris Lammers, is so interesting.

What they did across two experiments was have some people write application letters for an imaginary job and others actually do a 15-minute face-to-face interview (Lammers et al., 2013).

For both the application letter and the interview studies, though, the researchers manipulated how much power they felt:

• Application letter experiment: before they wrote the letter, half the participants wrote about a time when they had power and half about a time when they didn’t.
• Interview experiment: one-third of participants wrote about a time they had high power, one-third low power and the final third didn’t write about anything beforehand.

Here are the results:

• Application letter experiment: people expressed a little more self-confidence when they thought about high-power situations beforehand, compared with lower power situations.
• Interview experiment: in the mock interview, 47% of participants who didn’t write anything in advance were accepted for the ‘job’. This went up to 68% when they wrote about a high power situation and down to only 26% for those who wrote about feeling low in power.

This shows that the exercise of writing about a high-power situation before a job interview can be beneficial. It may also be marginally helpful when writing the interview letter.

The researchers chose the job interview situation partly because there’s something intensely dis-empowering about it. Everything about it—the evaluation, the continuous requirement for self-justification and evidence—seems designed to sap your self-belief.

Most interviewers prefer to see a confident, assertive individual, but the situation tends to make people meek, defensive and subservient. This exercise may help to counteract this problem.

Still, it’s not just in interviews that this exercise is likely to be helpful. Feeling more powerful also makes you feel more confident, more in control and even more optimistic. The list of situations in which that might be useful is endless.

So have a think back to a time when you felt masterful and power up!

Image credit: John ‘K’

It’s surprising how much simple movements of the body can affect the way we think. Using expansive gestures with open limbs makes us feel more powerful, crossing your arms makes you more persistent and lying down can bring more insights (read more here: 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance).

So if moving the body can have these effects, what about the clothes we wear?

We’re all well aware of how dressing up in different ways can make us feel more attractive, sporty or professional, depending on the outfit, but can the clothes you wear actually change cognitive performance or is it just a feeling?

Adam and Galinsky (2012) tested the effect of simply wearing a white lab coat on people’s powers of attention. The idea is that white coats are associated with scientists, who are in turn thought to have close attention to detail.

What they found was that people wearing white coats outperformed those who weren’t. Indeed they made only half as many errors as those wearing their own clothes on the Stroop Test (one way of measuring attention).

The authors dub the effect ‘enclothed cognition’, suggesting that all manner of different clothes probably affect our cognition in many different ways.

This opens the way for all sorts of clothes-based experiments. Is the writer who wears a fedora more creative? Is the psychologist wearing little round glasses and smoking a cigar more insightful. Does a chef’s hat make the resultant food taste better?

From now on I will only be editing articles for PsyBlog while wearing a white coat to help keep the typo count low. Hopefully you will be doing your part by reading PsyBlog in a cap and gown.

Image credit: mars_discovery_district

Language can reveal all kinds of truths about our psychology. Take these expressions:

• He’s the big man on this project.
• We look up to her.
• Lady Gaga is huge.
• He puts her on a pedestal.

It’s not hard to see the strong association here between size and power that’s embedded in the way we talk about the relations between people.

The reason why is almost too obvious to bother stating: larger people quite often do have more power. As children our parents, teachers and all our authority figures are taller than us. In adult life taller people earn higher salaries, are more likely to be in higher status jobs and more likely to end up US president.

And men are taller than women and have historically enjoyed more power.

But does the connection go both ways? Can being powerful also make us feel taller? That’s what Duguid and Goncalo (2012) checked out in this neat study.

Power up

First they measured participants’ actual heights, then paired them up. For each pair, one person was assigned the role of the boss and the other the employee. This was apparently done on the basis of a leadership aptitude test, but actually the results were chucked away and the leadership and employee roles were assigned randomly.

The ‘leader’ was told that they would have complete power during the task and that the employee must accept this. This ensured that one person in each pair felt more powerful.

Afterwards, as part of what they were told was different task, participants filled in another questionnaire. Hidden in this they were asked their height again. So now the experimenters had two measures of height: one before the power manipulation and one after.

Then the experiment was stopped before the promised role-play could be carried out.

An inch taller

The results showed that before the manipulation both groups averaged about 66 inches in height. But after the manipulation, those in the lower-power condition reckoned themselves to be, on average, 65.80 inches tall while those in the high-power condition had apparently grown to 67.01 inches.

A couple of other studies by the same researchers also showed this connection between power and height. When people felt more powerful, they also felt taller.

This shows that the connection between mind and body goes both ways in relation to power. We already know that people who stand in ‘power poses’, feel more powerful (see: 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance), and this study is showing us the connection the other way: that feeling more powerful changes our perception of our own bodies.

Image credit: Uppy C

We tend to think of body language as something that expresses our internal states to the outside world. But it also works the other way around: the position of our body also influences our mind.

As the following psychological research shows, how we move can drive both thoughts and feelings and this can boost performance.

1. Pose for power

If you want to feel more powerful then adopt a powerful posture. Carney et al. (2010) found that when people stood or sat in powerful poses for one minute—those involving open limbs and expansive gestures—they not only felt more powerful but had increased levels of testosterone flooding their systems. Powerful poses take up more space, so spread your body and open up the arms or legs. When you dominate the space, your mind gets the message.

Note: psychologists have since found that ‘power posing’ is probably not a real effect. When others have tried to copy the original study, it has not proved possible to replicate it.

2. Tense up for willpower

Tensing up your muscles can help increase your willpower. In a series of 5 studies Hung and Labroo (2011) found that when people firmed up their muscles they were better able to withstand pain, resist tempting food, take an unpleasant medicine and pay attention to disturbing information. So, if you need to increase your willpower, tense your muscles. It should help.

3. Cross arms for persistence

If you’re stuck on a problem which needs persistence then try crossing your arms. Friedman and Elliot (2008) had participants do just that and found they worked longer at a set of difficult anagrams. In fact about twice as long. Their persistence led to more correct solutions.

4. Lie down for insight

If crossing your arms doesn’t work then try lying down. When Lipnicki and Byrne (2005) had anagram solvers lying down, they solved them faster. Since anagrams are a type of insight problem, lying down may help you reach creative solutions.

5. Nap for performance

While you’re lying down, why not have a nap? Napping is an art-form though. Nap too long and you’ll suffer from sleep inertia: the feeling of being drowsy for an extended period. Nap too little and there’s no point. Where’s the sweet spot?

Brooks & Lack (2005) compared 5, 10, 20 and 30 minute naps to find the best length. For increased cognitive performance, vigour and wakefulness, the best naps were 10 minutes long. Benefits were seen immediately after 10 minute naps but after longer naps it took longer to wake up. Five minute naps only provided half the benefit, but were better than nothing.

6. Gesture for persuasion

The way people’s hands cut through the air while they talk is fascinating. But it’s more than just a by-product of communication. Maricchiolo et al. (2008) found that hand-gestures help increase the power of a persuasive message when compared to no use of gesture. Most effective are gestures which make what you are saying more understandable. For example, when referring to the past, point behind you.

7. And gesture for understanding

Gestures aren’t only helpful for persuading others, they also help us think. In a study of children, Cook et al. (2007) found that children who were encouraged to gesture while learning, retained more of what they learnt. Moving our hands may help us learn; more generally we actually seem to think with our hands.

8. Smile for happiness

The very act of smiling can make you feel happy, whether it’s justified or not. Strack et al. (1988) had participants holding pens in their mouths either so that it activated the muscles responsible for smiling, or not. Those whose smiling muscles were activated rated cartoons as funnier than others whose smiling muscles weren’t activated by the pen in their mouth. So, forcing a smile really does make us see the world in a better light.

9. Mimic to empathise

If you want to get inside someone’s head, you can try copying their behaviour. Those who are good at empathising do it automatically: copying accent, posture, expressions and so on. If you can copy it, you will feel it yourself and then you’ll get a hint of what others are feeling. It’s what actors have known for years: mimicry is a great way of simulating others’ emotional states.

10. Imitate to comprehend

The idea that copying helps us understand others works for thought as well as emotion. In an experiment by Adank (2010), participants found it easier to decipher an unfamiliar accent if they tried to imitate it themselves. Some psychologists go further, claiming that imitating others helps us predict what they are going to do (e.g. Pickering & Garrod, 2007).

Embodied cognition

Many of these studies support a theory about human life (and indeed all life) called ’embodied cognition’. The idea is that we don’t just think with our minds, we also think with our bodies. Our mind isn’t a brain in a jar, it is connected to a body which moves around in an environment.

As life becomes increasingly virtual, played out on screens of varying sizes, we need reminding that the connection between mind and body is two-way. Human intelligence is more than abstract processing power; it’s about the interaction between mind, body and the world around us.

Image credit: Hector