Seapegasus Blog

All | Hacks | Java Mobility | Mac | Misc | NetBeans | NetBeans_de
« NetBeans Evandalists... | Main | Poor Man's Space... »
20060801 Tuesday August 01, 2006

Mind Hacks (they work)

Recently, I tried this 'Mind Hack' that lets you see better in the dark: I was fetching a drink from the fridge at night, and you know the problem: The moment you switch on the light (or the fridge does), your eyes adapt to it. When you go back and try to find your way through the dark, you are virtually blind.

Here comes the Hack: When you switch on the lights, you keep one eye closed. Then you fetch your drink or whatever it was. Then, when you walk back through the dark, you close the eye that's adapted to the light, and use the other one that's still adapted to darkness. I was too tired to find a mirror to see whether the eyes looked any different in that state. o_O But well, it worked! Fascinating.

Then yesterday, I was trying to remember a few things for today, so I tried a visual mnemonic: I pictured myself in the situation where I should remember something. For example, right after logging on to Linux, I should chmod u+x .xsession because I forgot to do that when I created the file. [No I don't know why I wake up in the middle of the night thinking "I need to chmod .xsession!", but hey, if it helps getting my system set up, I'm not complaining.] Okay, perfect, I managed to remember that one today pretty well.

But before logging on, when I switched on my computer... there was something else... I clearly remembered that I wanted to use the time it takes for booting to prepare something... I think in the kitchen... But what? Not tea... Well so much about that visual mnemonic crap! :-/

Alright, I thought, scratch that, and started working. I checked my mail and read some stuff. So, a while later, I am still reading stuff and I come across a line that says something about visual web development. — Suddenly I think "I wanted to put the juice I brought into the fridge!" That was it! But what reminded me? I remembered it exactly when reading the word visual .... :-o So that visual crap does work! Just in unexpected ways.

Posted by seapegasus ( Aug 01 2006, 04:56:32 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [1]


Comments:

I tried the hack with the eyes recently. Well, I guess it was already too early in the morning, so there was too much light coming in through the windows, but apart from that it worked pretty well...

Well, except for the fact that my centre of balance apparently doesn't like it when it can't see squat with one eye even though it's open. I felt kinda queasy for a while after I was back in bed ... :-(

Posted by Uli on August 25, 2006 at 08:43 PM CEST #

Post a Comment:

Comments are closed for this entry.

Calendar

Content

Search

Links

RSS Feeds

Recent...