Sugar as Brain Food

This isn’t great news for dieters, but sometimes sugar can be a good thing. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University, had subjects perform a mentally taxing task – watching a video while being careful to ignore random words scrolling across the bottom of the screen. (Apparently, it takes quite a bit of concentration [...]

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Neuroarchitecture Gets More Attention

My 2005 post, Neuroarchitecture Next Buzzword, was more premature than prescient. In the ensuing years, the idea that neuroscience had anything to offer architects received little public attention. Now, however, the field is again in the public eye. Emily Anthes of Scientific American Mind has written an excellent survey of recent research in the field, [...]

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The Emotional Computer – Part 2

Earlier this month in Mood-Sensing Advertisements, we described research being conducted by Cambridge prof Peter Robinson on an “emotionally aware” computer. While that phrase may imply a degree of emotional sensitivity that won’t arrive for decades, Robinson’s experimental PCs record and analyze facial expressions, matching them to a database of 20 facial movements and 24 [...]

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Mood-Sensing Advertisements

In the last few years, web advertisers have begun to employ behavioral targeting to deliver advertisements to individual users. By keeping track of sites a user has visited, ads viewed, or other behavior, new ads can be delivered that more precisely target the user’s interests. But what if you could sense the mood of the [...]

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