Brain Candy #88 - Brain Hacks

I'm going to talk more about O'Reilly Media, the company that publishes "Building the Perfect PC." It isn't the first time I've mentioned them in my column: I've mentioned them in #24, #40, #58 and #76. They are a computer and information technology publishing company, a media company, and they also regularly sponsor conferences on technological subjects. Their books are generally excellent - I own many of their titles. O'Reilly is fearless when it comes to topics that are related to technology, publishing books on bioinformatics, the physics of game design, algorithms, health, travel and other topics. They also publish books on how society and technology are interacting. O'Reilly's scope goes far beyond what most other computer book publishers are willing to tackle. O'Reilly publishes a number of book series. One of the more interesting is their "Hacks" series. They use the word "hack" to mean a clever solution to an interesting problem. The "Hacks" books are about making the most of a resource - becoming an expert. I believe that the first title in this series was "Google Hacks," which I mentioned in Brain Candy #76. The intent of this book was to highlight 100 tips, tricks and tools which could be used to better utilize Google. Some of the tips are for beginners, while others are for specialists. As of early November, 2004, there are 35 "Hacks" titles either in print or soon to be released. The topics range broadly across the computer/Internet landscape. There are commercial "Hacks" books for Amazon, eBay, PayPal and TiVo. There are hobbyist "Hacks" books for home theater, digital photography, gaming and online investing. There are computer application "Hacks" books for Excel, Word and Flash. There are hardcore computer type "Hacks" books for Knoppix (a curious CD-based variant of Linux), wireless communications, network security, Windows XP and XML. Most readers of this column might be mildly intrigued by some of these titles. There is a "Hacks" title about to be released by O'Reilly that I think most of us will relate to. The title of this book is "Mind Hacks." The authors, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb, share some of the findings of modern neuroscience and suggest experiments one can perform to investigate these concepts and what they mean to us in terms of cognitive function. As is typical for O'Reilly titles, beta hacks are available online to illustrate what the book is about. You can find them at www.oreilly.com/catalog/mindhks. Hack #11 concerns "Why People Don't Work Like Elevator Buttons," and is a brief but illuminating discussion of how people react to differing levels of stimulus in their environment. Hack #43 is titled "Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games." By the third paragraph, the authors have defined and are discussing such concepts as "attentional blink" and "subitizing" which are key components to visual reaction time. The hack then goes on to describe how video gaming has been observed to improve visual attention. The forward, table of contents, and index of the book are also available online. The table of contents gives the title of all 100 hacks, including such intriguing titles as "Neuropsychology, the 10% Myth, and Why You Use All of Your Brain," "Objects Move, Lighting Shouldn't," "Explore Your Defense Hardware," "Neural Noise Isn't a Bug; It's a Feature," and "Think About Frequencies Rather than Probabilities." I've been intrigued by topics such as these, and expect I'll soon own this book. "Mind Hacks" should be available by mid-December in local bookstores, and perhaps even by the time you read this, although I'm not sure in what section of the bookstore you might find it. If you're interested, you can find out more about the entire "Hacks" series at hacks.oreilly.com.