January 2008 Entries

This is the second part of my Search Insider Column on how our brains might be adapting to a virtual experience. Here was Part One. By the way, I encourage you to check out the comments on the Search Insider blog - Gord

The Last Homo Universalis

Thomas Young was the last person who knew everything. Or, at least, that’s Andrew Robinson’s claim in his book of the same title. Whether you agree or not, the accomplishments of this 19th century Quaker were certainly impressive. In contradiction to Newton, he proposed the wave theory of light, furthered our understanding of the mechanics of the eye, helped invent Egyptology and decipher the Rosetta stone, created a measure of elasticity in engineering, was an accomplished physician, created a technique for tuning keyboard instruments, compared 400 languages, coined the term Indo-European and still had time to pioneer developments in carpentry and life insurance. Thomas Young was the human Google of his age.

Today, our world is much more complex. There’s too much knowledge to store in just one mind. So, we tend to find other places to keep it for when we need it. Hence the concept of transactive memory, which I touched on last week.

Misty, Watercolored Memories

We have different methods for storing different types of memories. The way we remember our 21st birthday (if we still remember it at all) is different than the way we remember our phone number. Then there’s the way we remember how to ride a bike, or what Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” sounds like.

And some people are better at remembering certain types of things than others. That’s why we’ve adapted to extend our memory capabilities by using transactive memory. We rely on others to store memories that we might need at some point. Our wives remember birthdays. Our kids remember how to program our smart phone. Our co-worker remembers how to run the virus scan on our computer. We don’t have to remember all these things; all we have to remember is who does.

The Transactive Web

But what about computers, and, by extension, the Internet? What about search? Doesn’t this take transactive memory to a level never thought of before? Even the reduced work load of remembering who remembers what is significantly more trouble than just being able to instantly recall information with a well-placed query. We dump the details of our life on a hard drive somewhere, and search for it when we need it. Even if we’re looking for something we didn’t know we needed, like the recipe for haggis (how many of you celebrated Robbie Burns Day last Friday?) we can find it when we needed it. And we don’t have to remember it, because we know it will be there come next Jan. 25.

The Adaptive Brain

And that brings us to the second point I raised last week, that of neurological plasticity. Our brain prunes itself, getting rid of capacities we really don’t need anymore, and strengthening those that we do. This happens to the greatest extent in the first few decades of our lives, but it is a lifelong process. I am forcibly reminded of this when my 14-year-old daughter asks me for help with her algebra homework. At one point in my life, I knew this stuff. But most of those neurons have long since disappeared. To offer any help at all, I have to relearn what I once knew, building new neural pathways.

So, as we have to worry less about remembering certain things, like facts, dates, phone numbers and addresses, will our semantic memory capabilities, the place we store these things, become less exercised and therefore, pruned out of the way? And in its place, will we develop greater skills in navigating online spaces?

It’s really not a question, it’s already happening. We can see the difference in the generational abilities in the online space, or when our kids kick our virtual butts in a Wii showdown. But we’re still in a place where we’re balanced on the cusp between the pre- and post-digital world. We still have a foot in each realm. Let’s fast-forward a generation or two and see which capabilities that seem so essential to us today have disappeared. And which new talents, unfathomable to us today, have taken their place.

Exponential Technological Advances

Now, obviously, this is nothing new. We don’t need to remember how to shoe a horse, and our great-grandfather would be amazed (and possibly aghast) at a trip on a California freeway. Change has always happened, and humans have always adapted. But there’s something different now. Raymond Kurzweil calls it The Law of Accelerating Returns. The need to adapt to leaping technological advance is getting more and more demanding. Technological growth is exponential. At today’s rate, we experience 20,000 years of progress in a century. In the year 2045, Kurzweil believes we’ll hit a point where machines become smarter than humans. Could the human mind, which is amazing in its adaptability, simply be outstripped by technology?

One last thought. If you believe in evolution (as I do) humans have evolved as the preeminent species through a long line of trial and error, with our environment as the ultimate judge of genetic worthiness. The problem is that evolution is a long, slow process. Our evolutionary environment, the one we’ve adapted to excel in, is a hunter-gatherer society several thousand years past. Evolution never equipped us to function in the world we live in, except in one regard. It equipped us with an adaptable mind that allows self-awareness. And even that is inextricably tied to our human nature. The human mind is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately, it doesn’t benefit from Moore’s Law.

That's right. As you're reading this, let me be the first to tell you, you're hopelessly out of touch with the world according to Steve Jobs:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. 40% percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

That fresh from Macworld. The comments came from a quick dismissal of the Amazon Kindle book reader.

I have to admit I don't get the logic of Kindle, but apparently a lot of people do. This article in Ad Age indicates the Kindle has a long waiting list. The same article states that reading of good, old fashioned books, the kind printed on (gasp) paper, seems to be very much alive and well, thank you. I would think that J.K. Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell and dozens of other best selling authors would tend to agree.

I actually carry 5 or 6 books at a time on my PDA, but I have to say, I still love the sensual attraction of a book. I love the heft, the texture, the sound and the smell. Sure, it can be inconvenient carrying them around, when the same bulk and size as one book gives you an entire virtual library. Not to mention the trees that needlessly give their lives so that I might swim upstream against the technological current. But in this case, I'm afraid I'm a hopeless Luddite.

Actually, I've pretty much ignored the TV in the past 6 months and taken up reading again in a big way. And I'm very thankful for it. If anything has to die, please God, let it be reality TV.

Jobs is a smart guy with his finger usually unerringly on the pulse of pop culture, but in this case, I think Steve's out to lunch.

This was also my Search Insider column for Thursday, January 24th. Part Two of this is now posted.

Honey, Where Did I Put the Car Keys?

In 1986, University of Virginia Psychologist Daniel Wegner came up with an interesting theory. He realized that we depend on others to remember some of the things we need to know. This is especially true in couples and families. Some of us are better at remembering phone numbers and birth dates. Some of us are better at remembering how 401Ks and computers work. In couples, the longer we spend together, the more we divvy up the memory workload, depending on our spouse to prop up our spotty memories.

Wegner called this transactive memory. With it, we don't have to remember everything. We just have to remember who knows what. Wegner found this to be true in any small group who spends a lot of time together. The bigger the group, the larger the extended memory capacity.

That's the first concept I want you to think about. Now, let me give you another.

It's the Second Chimp on the Left, the One with the Scar

Babies are born with a capability that you and I don't have. They can recognize and distinguish between faces of different species. For example, if you introduce a 6-month-old baby to six different chimpanzees, then show them pictures of the chimp faces, they'll be able to recognize them and tell them apart. But to us, they will all look like chimpanzees. The same is true of sheep, or lemurs. To us, a sheep is a sheep is a sheep. It seems we lose this ability around 9 months of age, according to Olivier Pascalis at the University of Sheffield.

Why can we no longer tell chimpanzees apart? We're born with this ability because at one point in our evolution it was important. The ability to tell animals apart led to a greater chance of survival. But that's not really true today. Today, in our complex social world, it's much more important to be able to tell human faces apart. So at about 9 months of age, the brain starts to concentrate on that. And, in this case, something has to give. Sorry chimps, but after a while, you'll all look the same to us.

There's one more point I want to share here. Dr. Pascalis found that if parents continued to develop their babies' ability to distinguish between non-human faces by repeating the exercise, the babies retained that skill.

The Pruning of the Young Mind

It's not so much this lost ability I find interesting. It's the underlying reason, the ability for the brain to change itself from birth to maturity. Humans received another gift in the evolutionary lottery, an adaptable mind. The brain you get at birth is not the brain you'll end up with. A 2007 study at Oxford University found that newborn brains have almost 50% more neurons than adult brains. Babies have more raw "brain material" to work with. They get shipped with the full menu of evolutionary options, including the ability to tell monkeys apart.

But over time, in a process known as "pruning," the brain starts to discard options it doesn't use very often. Weak, underutilized neurons, forming neural pathways we never use, get pruned and, in some cases, reconfigured, to make way for pathways that are more commonly used. To go back to our facial recognition example, being able to keep track of all the faces in one's ever increasing circle of friends and family is a huge task. And it's right around 9 months that we start venturing out in the world, meeting more and more people. The timing of this is not coincidental.

Fertilized Neurons

But our brains not only get rid of unused functions. They also nurture commonly used functions. The same Oxford study found that although our neuron inventory decreases, we actually gain significantly in another type of cell -- glials. Glials are the most important brain cell you've probably never heard of. They act as a support system for our neurons, nurturing them and making them more effective. And adults apparently have three times the number of glial cells found in infants.

So, for the next seven days, until my next column, I want you to think about those two concepts: we rely on external sources to extend our memory, and our brains are adaptable, able to rewire themselves to discard capabilities that are no longer important to us, and build capabilities that are more important.

See where I'm going with this? Until next week...

It took Charles Darwin over 20 years to go public with his theory on evolution. His voyages on the HMS Beagle that lead him to his Theory of Natural Selection were over a five year period from 1831 to 1836. But it wasn't until 1859 that his On the Origin of Species was finally published.

Did it take a quarter century for Darwin to finalize the theory? Well, yes and no. The theory was largely defined much earlier, but there were a few vexing exceptions to the elegant concept that Darwin wanted to explain to his own satisfaction first. So he continued to pick away at the theory, and often put the work on the shelf for long periods of time, while he worked on other areas, including a rather intensive study of barnacles, or dealt with his recurring health issues.

But further insight is gained when one examines Darwin's character and the social environment he was in. Darwin was cursed with an extremely developed habit of self deprecation. He constantly questioned his own intellect and status in scientific circles. So, given that the theory he was working on was so potentially controversial, especially in tight laced Victorian England, it was natural (pun fully intentional) that Darwin would fret over its release. He carefully pondered the religious implications.

What made Darwin finally publish? In came down to a race with another biologist, Alfred Wallace, who was also pursuing ideas that were similar, or identical in many cases, to Darwin's long developing theory. Ironically, Wallace choose Darwin as a channel to forward some of his thoughts to a common friend, and Darwin, upon reading Wallace's notes and realizing that 20 plus years of work could be for naught, quickly took a much larger manuscript he had been working on and pared it down to a publishable abstract. Darwin published first. And that made the difference. Chances are, you never heard of Alfred Wallace before this blog post.

The point of this is that the speed of society in Victorian England was much slower than it is today. Publishing can be instantaneous. The need to do something, anything, is greater than ever. If you have something important to say, say it. Don't worry too much about being wrong. There has been an explosion of scientific discovery in many areas in the last few decades, including many areas of psychology and neorology. Some of this acceleration is due to new diagnostic technologies, but I believe a large part of it is due to the compressed timelines of publication. We're putting ideas out there faster than ever, and peer review as well as public review is happening quickly and organically. Darwin's own environment of natural selection has taken an online bent in the form of idealogical evolution.

What this means, in the words of my friend Mike Moran, is that you have to "Do It Wrong Quickly". You have to be prepared to go out on a limb, take chances and be willing to be shot down. But, on the other hand, you just might come up with the next Google, Facebook or Theory of Natural Selection. Ironically, it's a world that Charles Darwin probably wouldn't function very well in.

You might remember a post I did a while back, talking about an experience I had with Alaska Airlines and using it as an example of how to deal with angry customers.

Well, let me tell you what the fall out of the episode was. It's an interesting example of the power of the web.

A week or so after, I had a call from Ray Prentice, the VP of Customer Service at Alaska. It took us awhile to connect, but when we did, we had a great discussion and almost none of it touched on that specific experience. Alaska's regular customer service procedure had rectified the situation to my satisfaction by then and I told Ray that.

Rather, we had a discussion about customer service in general, including many of the points touched on in that blog post. Ray had read the post after someone had forwarded him the link. Then, Ray asked me if I wanted to serve on Alaska's Customer Advisory Panel. After shooting off my mouth, how could I refuse? Besides, I really do like the airline and would love to help them become an even better airline.

The question is, would that have happened without the Internet? I think not.

I have just sorted through over 3500 email newsletters and feed alerts, going back 6months. I throw them all in a folder called "Blog Fodder".

How did I get 6 months behind? Good question.

A Diversion of Attention

As you probably know, my attention recently has been elsewhere, going through books on a number of diverse subjects, but all touching on some central themes: Why we buy, why advertising and our consumer culture seemed to veer wildly offtrack somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, why we recommend certain brands, even evangelically, over others, and why some companies are much more successful than others at recognizing this and taking advantage of it. It's been a fascinating journey that's taken me through about 30 books in the past 6 or 7 months, covering brand strategies, neurology, psychology, sociology, corporate ethics and a handful of other diverse topics.

 My promise to myself has been to average 40 pages read a day and so far I've managed to do it. Some days are harder than others. You can breeze through a Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell book. The pages almost turn themselves. But when you sit down with a book like Gerald Zaltman's How Customers Think or Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, you have to work pretty damn hard to get through your 40 pages a day. My TV watching has gone down the tube, but my timing was pretty good. Thanks to the writer's strike, there's nothing on anyway. Actually, my TV watching has switched to digging through several BBC series on the human body and human mind. It's much better TV than Dancing with the Has Been, Washed Up Semi-Celebrities.

The In Box Shuffle

But back to my sorting through the e-box in-drawer. In those 3500 e-newsletters and alerts, most of which provide links to multiple columns and articles, I wanted to sort out the ones that talked strategically about marketing, including examples of good and bad brand strategies, attempts to really understand consumer behaviors and motivations, musings on the impact of the internet on our consumer society, etc. I was looking for those who were thinking about the big picture stuff. I ended up with about 450 that made the initial cut. Let me put that in perspective. 3500 emails, each with an average of 10 links to articles or features. That's 35,000 potential sources for strategic thinking. And I ended up with about 450. That's a hit ratio of 1.3%

Deep Thinkers

The writers that continually show up with these types of columns? Max Kalehoff, Pete Blackshaw, Joseph Carrabis, Bryan Eisenberg and a handful of others. I've had a chance to talk or share emails with most of these and I know they all share my curiosity of all things human. I think that's the key factor here.

The other 98.7%? Bite size pieces of industry news, quick "7 Things You Must Do to Supercharge Your XXXX Strategy" and "6 Easy Steps to XXXXX" and assorted tidbits. Easily digestible, promising a quick reward and instant gratification. My email inbox was filled with predigested spoonfuls of marketing sugar.

Don't Spoil Your Supper

Now, obviously, there's an appetite for this. And I think that's the problem. As marketers, we're always looking for the quick fixes and the instant tweaks. We've fallen victim to our own messaging. We've retrained our brains to think in 30 second bites. Anything longer than that, and our attention starts to drift. We've become consumers for quick marketing strategies. We have a voracious appetite for what's new, what's hot, what's sexy, forgetting that at the end of the day, people will be people and we still are largely motivated by things that haven't changed much in centuries. Sure, technology has changed dramatically, but everything only works if it can be filtered through our thick skulls.

Why do we do this? Well, again, it comes down to evolution. The human genome has evolved to be inherently lazy. As a species we exert less energy, so we were selected as the winners in the genetic lottery of life. The well rested will survive.

Stop Consuming and Start Thinking

But when it comes to marketing, there's something fundamental happening right now that needs a deeper look than just your typical 7 Steps to Surefire Success. We need to muse longer and ask why more. It was eye opening to me lately when I was in a room full of 400 marketers and I asked them if they had ever heard the word satisficing. One person put up their hand. Satisficing is a key element to understanding consumer decision making. It's not a new concept. It's been around for almost 60 years. Heaven forbid I ask marketers how they think Damasio's somatic marker theory might influence satisficing in consumer decisions.

I'm not saying that there isn't a place for the quick fixes and the 7 Step lists. There is. I just think it shouldn't make up 99% of marketing thinking. As one person who bucked the genetic trend and dared to take a deeper dive, I'm here to tell you it's not easy, it's not quick (probably into the hundreds of hours invested in the last 6 months) but it's worth it.

The quote on the home page of SpaceTime is intriguing:

"I think I've found a product that makes the Google interface look like it was designed by Apple."
Rob Enderle, Enderle Group.

Now, those are two pretty big names to throw around. But you know what? Based on an initial test drive, SpaceTime just might be up to the challenge. This is a paradigm shift in browsing behavior. When I interviewed Jakob Nielsen last summer, he took Ask to task for calling their interface 3D.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.

Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.

Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.

Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step.

My friend Dan Perry has a cool twist on a link bait approach..or hot..depending on your preferences. He's giving away a Google fridge to the one with the best use for it.

So..what would I use it for? Well, considering everyone in Enquiro got a holiday gift and a card from Google except me, I'd accept it as a surrogate token of Larry and Sergey's appreciation of our past business. Hey...Google..who the hell do you think signs the checks you keep receiving from us?

Hey..just kidding. Love you guys. Don't wipe us out of your index or anything.

Back to blogging over the holidays. And to get back in the groove for 2008, an interesting "Whydunnit" that was bouncing around my head and the Enquiro office yesterday.

It started as an example I used in today's "Just Behave" column on Search Engine Land about how the way we interact with our online world might actually be more native to us and how we evolved than reading a book. Online browsing is actually a return to behavior that we're pretty familiar with. We were born to multi-task.

Driving and Selective Perception

The example was to show how we use selective perception to decide what needs the full attention of our conscious mind, and it was about driving, daydreaming and cell phone use. Here's an excerpt:

Here’s another example. Ever drive home on a route you take all the time, either from work or your children’s school, and get home only to realize you didn’t really remember driving there? You’ve driven the route so often that it’s worn a path in your brain and you can do it on autopilot. Meanwhile, your mind wanders in a million different directions, thinking about work, what’s for supper, your next vacation and the marks on your daughter’s report card. But all the time, you’re scanning your environment. If a pedestrian steps in front of you, you slam on the brakes. And you did it faster than you could ever rationally think about it. It’s a hereditary hardwired shortcut, straight to your amygdala, the emergency response center of your brain, bypassing your conscious mind.

By the way, while we’re on the subject of driving, if we’re so good at multitasking, why is talking on a cell phone so dangerous when we’re behind the wheel? It’s not because one of our hands is tied up, as we previously thought. Studies have found that even with hands free devices, we’re four times more likely to be in a car accident when talking on a cell phone. This risk is the same as driving while drunk. And it’s all about reaction time. One study found that if you put a 20 year old behind the wheel talking on a cell phone, their reaction time is the same as a 70 year old not talking on a cell phone.

Here’s the reason. It’s one thing to daydream. That happens in a part of our brain that can be instantaneously turned off, when required, to focus on more urgent matters. Day dreaming is like the brain idling. It doesn’t put too much of a cognitive load on the brain. But a conversation puts a much higher load on the brain. You have to focus your attention on what the other person is saying, and the minute we focus one sense on one stimulus, we lose much of our ability to monitor our environment with that sense.

But it’s more than just the act of listening. Carrying on a conversation requires us to process language, to translate what we’re hearing into concepts, and to take our concepts and translate them back into language. This is one of the most demanding tasks our brain has to do. While carrying on a conversation might not seem like much work, it’s moving our brain from slow idle to 5000 RPMs, firing on all cylinders. Which means there’s less capacity there to process emergency stimuli. In practical terms, we’re talking about a handful of milliseconds, as the brain switches tasks, but that difference can be several car lengths when slamming on the brakes. It’s the difference between a head on collision and a near miss.

Calling on the Phone: Much Worse than Being There

While talking about this with my partner, Bill Barnes, he asked an excellent question. Why does talking on a cell phone while driving seem to be more distracting than talking to someone sitting in the passenger seat? A little sleuthing found a study that seems to indicate this may not be the case. A study done in Spain seems to indicate that the cognitive load is the same. But I think there's more to it than that. I haven't been able to track down research proving my hypothesis yet, but I did find some interesting tidbits about our relationship with the phone, and how we're conditioned to respond to it.

First of all, let's talk about the "phone coma". This is the state many of us go into when we're talking on the phone. We become more oblivious to the outside world. The subconscious scanning of the environment that I was talking about in the Just Behave column seems to drop substantially. When you're talking on the phone, you seem to gaze blindly into space. Think of the people with the Bluetooth headsets in airports, gazing out across the tarmac, lulled into a translike state by the conversation they're engaged in. I think Bill's right. I do think there's a difference between our awareness when we're talking on the phone versus talking in person.

You can Talk the Talk, But Can You Walk the Walk?

It even becomes more difficult to walk and talk on the phone at the same time. Again, take a few minutes to check this out the next time you go to the airport and see someone walking and talking on their headset. They're fine as long as they're going in a straight line and don't have to look for directional cues, such as which gate they're at. But the minute they have to think about where they're going, they either stop and finish their conversation or ask the person on the phone to wait for a minute. We can't navigate and talk at the same time. The cognitive load of both tasks is just too much. We have to pick one or the other.

Part of this has to do with how we convey information. Studies have found that in a face to face conversation, a surprisingly small amount of the meaning is derived from the actual words used. In fact, it's less than 10%. The rest of the message is conveyed through body language and tone of voice. In the case of a phone conversation, at least one of these is missing completely, body language, and even tone of voice is less reliable, because the frequencies of the human voice have been processed and modulated in the transmission over the phone. We're missing at least half of our communication "bandwidth" so we have to pay more attention to get the meaning.

The Difference between "Being" There and "Hearing" There

But even that wouldn't completely explain the difference between an in person conversation in the car and talking on a cell phone. Here is where I think the difference comes, and again, it goes back to the difference between "being" there and "hearing" there. If you and I are sitting in the car and having a conversation, we're both monitoring the same cues, because we're in the same environment. If I'm in the passenger seat, I can immediately stop the conversation when I see your attention is needed elsewhere. Remember where language comes from. It's an evolution of the grooming instinct, our need to relate to others of our species. Idle conversation between humans is the same to us as chimpanzees picking lice from each other's heads. Chimpanzees won't keep grooming if they're being threatened by a lion. More important things are at hand. The same is true for humans. Idle chit chat stops immediately when there's a risk of danger. And we pick up those cues in milliseconds.

But if you're talking on the cell phone, the other person isn't aware of your environmental cues. If a child runs in front of your car, the person on the other end of the phone just keeps talking. And you don't have time to ask them to stop. You have a split second. So your brain is struggling, trying to process the conversation at the same time as your trying to get your brain to turn on the emergency response system. The person on the phone is "cueless", so the distraction is far greater.

Our Pavlovian Response to Ring Tones

And this brings up another point. We have a conditioned response to phones. A phone ringing kicks in neural hardwiring and triggers a Pavlovian response. This explains a number of oddities about our relationship with the phone.

First of all, Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, (a great book, by the way) talks about the fact that we can't seem to ignore a phone ringing. The reason is association. We associate phone calls with news, either about something good or something bad. Either way, we need to know what it is. There is an unknown there that we're programmed to need to solve. A phone ringing takes precedence in our mental queue. It goes to the front of the line by kicking in a number of subconscious neural triggers. Have you every tried to keep doing something while the phone is ringing? It's almost impossible. Even if you manage to ignore the ringing (as when you forget to turn the cell phone off in a public event) the first thing you do is head out to the hall and check your voice mail. It's not quite Pavlov's dog's salivating, but it's pretty close. I'm not sure this understanding will help the next time you're waiting at a counter for service and the person on is tied up on the phone, seemingly ignoring you, but give it a shot.

The persuasive nature of the phone gets even more insidious. Here's an except from an article in the NY Times:

The ear gives unequal weights to certain frequencies, making it particularly sensitive to sounds in the range of 1,000 to 6,000 hertz, scientists say. Babies cry in this range, for example, and the familiar "brrring, brrring" ringtone hits this sweet spot, too. (Simple ringtones are more likely to produce phantom rings than popular music used as a ringtone.)

"Your brain is conditioned to respond to a phone ring just as it is to a baby crying," Mr. Nokes said.

So, not only are we conditioned to respond. Phone manufacturers make it even more irrestible by tricking our brain into the same conditioned response we have when we hear our children crying. So, if we hear our cell phone ring in the car, the brain immediately starts anticipating something of import. The circuits that divert attention away from other activities kick into action, shifting it to the phone call. The physical act of answering the call is only one small part of it. It's all the conditioned responses we have to the phone that are the real culprits in the increase of cell-related car accidents.

Everybody Hates a Telemarketer - even Jerry Seinfeld.

One last riff on the persuasive nature of the phone. One of my favorite moments on Seinfeld was when Jerry got a call from a telemarketer and responded:

"“I'm sorry, I'm a little tied up now. Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later. Oh! You don’t like being called at home? Well, now you know how I feel.”

Why do we hate telemarketer's so much? In fact, we so despise this form of marketing, we've actually legislated against it. Perhaps you've already guessed the answer, based on what I've already talked about. When the "Do Not Call" list was formed, the reasons put forward were, "a waste of our time", "an invasion of our privacy" and "an interruption of family time". While all valid, they're not the real reasons. The same things could be said for almost any form of advertising, including TV ads, and we're certainly not legislating them out of existence. In fact, the amount of time allowed for TV advertising in a typical half hour has increased dramatically over the last 2 decades. No, the reason we hate telemarketers has a much more human root: we feel duped by them.

Telemarketers take advantage of our conditioned responses. When we hear the phone ring, our brain kicks in to prepare us to pay attention, because we've been conditioned to expect it's important. Then, we hear the subtle click of the telerouter and the scripted speech begins. Suddenly, realizing we've been tricked, we're furious. Almost irrationally so. We treat telemarketers in a way we would never treat anyone else. I'm completely guilty of this. I'll hang up on a telemarketer without a second thought, but I'll put up with terrible service at a restaurant and usually not even mention it, even when asked. Why? Because we hate to be made fools of, and subconsciously, when we pick up the phone and hear a telemarketer, our brains are telling us that we're a fool. Which makes us angry. Which causes us to lash out. Flight or fight has kicked in, and fight has won. Still considering a career as a telemarketer? It's a toss of the dice with millions of years of evolution, and you'll come up snake eyes every time.

Oh..and Happy New Year!