Strategic Planning and Face-Blindness. What do You See?

I sometimes have the feeling that I am Face-Blind. I spend so much time walking around and observing everything as part of my job as a strategic planner, yet I often ignore what’s right in front of me — people’s face. I find I’m so concerned with their motivations and cultural context that I miss them – and what they look like. Ask me what they do for fun, how they shop, what car they drive, their personal goals, what they hate and personal tics they might have? No problem. I can go on for hours. But ask me what they looked like after I spent four hours with them in their home and I have no idea. Blonde? Maybe? I never even notice eye color. I look right through their faces…Well this piece by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker is the first I have heard of this condition -prosopagnosia. Now, I don’t have it this bad, but interesting to know that this is an area of study. The recognition of faces depends not only on the ability to parse the visual aspects of the face—its particular features and their over-all configuration—and compare them with others, but also on the ability to summon the memories, experiences, and feelings associated with that face. So next time you see me, forgive me if I don’t remember who you are until we get to chatting…

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_sacks#ixzz11UIvJap1

An App to Replace Drs? It Could be…

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a mobile-phone application that, coupled with a small plastic device held over the screen, can determine users’ eyeglass prescriptions. Now, that’s a useful app. Seems we are moving away from the world of pointless but fun apps to a utilitarian approach. Called NETRA or near-eye tool for refractive assessment, the system asks users to align lines on the phone’s screen while looking through a small plastic cube. Now only if insurance would cover this…

Does insurance cover this?

Did Avatar avoid the Uncanny Valley?

With all of these 3D movies bombarding us, it’s no wonder that animated humans are starting to freak us out a bit. It’s well known that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. Called the Uncanny Valley, the “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a creatures lifelikeness. At least the Navi were blue in Avatar, but when will our technology allow us to clear this valley?

Now you know why dolls and robots freak you out...

Culture influencing natural selection…

Maybe Darwin was right afterall? Or, at least says the NY Times. Apparently “culture was thought to have blunted the rate of human evolution,” but now it is seen in an opposite light. As a cultural strategist, this is apparent to me in  everyday life. You didn’t have to sail on the Beagle to know this…

Many biologists are now seeing the role of culture in a quite different light...

The Optics of Deer Vision

I’ve always noticed that the New York Times has some crazy articles listed under “most emailed.” Well, turns out people love emailing articles about things like the Optics of Deer Vision and Outer Space…I guess it makes them feel smarter.