IBM's new email app learns your habits to help get things done

Email can be overwhelming, especially at work; it can take a while to get back to an important conversation or project. IBM clearly knows how bad that deluge can be, though, since its new Verse email client is built to eliminate as much clutter as possible. The app learns your habits and puts the highest-priority people and tasks at the top level. You'll know if a key team member emailed you during lunch, or that you have a meeting in 10 minutes. Verse also puts a much heavier emphasis on collaboration and search. It's easier to find a particular file, message or topic, and there will even be a future option to get answers from a Watson thinking supercomputer -- you may get insights without having to speak to a colleague across the hall.

It's quite clever at first glance, although you may have to wait a while to give it a spin; a Verse beta on the desktop will be available this month, but only to a handful of IBM's customers and partners. You'll have to wait until the first quarter of 2015 to get a version built for individual use. It'll be "freemium" (free with paid add-ons) when it does reach the public, however, and there are promises of apps for Android and iOS to make sure you're productive while on the road.

SOURCE: IBM (1), (2)

ORIGINAL: Engadget

by Jon Fingas | @jonfingas

November 18th 2014

How to Harness Your Brain's Dopamine Supply and Increase Motivation

ORIGINAL: Life Hacker

How to Harness Your Brain's Dopamine Supply and Increase Motivation

I spent an hour on this opening paragraph. The hour wasn't time well spent, mind you. Sure, I was working—writing, deleting, fiddling with words here and there—but my paragraph-per-hour pace was more the byproduct of a stubborn lack of motivation than of indecisiveness.


To trace the source of motivation, let's begin in the brain where neurotransmitters spark chemical messages to keep us alert and on task. One specific neurotransmitter that plays a role in motivation is dopamine.

Dopamine's chemical signal gets passed from one neuron to the next, interacting with various receptors inside the synapse between the two neurons. This simple arrangement becomes much more complicated when you multiply the effect through the entire brain. Consider: there are different types of receptors, neurons, and pathways that neurotransmitters can take. Things get complicated fast.

For motivation specifically, it matters which pathway dopamine takes. The mesolimbic pathway, which originates in the middle of the brain and branches to various places like the cerebral cortex, is the most important reward pathway in the brain.

One of the mesolimbic's stops is the nucleus accumbens. Increased dopamine in the nucleus accumbens signals feedback for predicting rewards. Your brain recognizes that something important—good or bad—is about to happen, thus triggering motivation to do something.

But Wait, I Thought Dopamine Was All About Pleasure

Common knowledge is with you on this one. The dopamine-pleasure connection has been curated by scores of different studies and media reports. The pleasure reputation is well-earned because it's true. Dopamine is the brain's pleasure chemical.

But stopping there would be missing the complete story. Pleasure is just the tip of the dopamine iceberg. Dopamine's impact on the body is felt in many different areas, including

• motivation, 
• memory, 
• behavior and cognition, 
• attention, 
• sleep, 
• mood, 
• learning, and oh yeah, 
• pleasurable reward. 

You hear about dopamine and pleasure because of its sticky associations with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. The media refers to dopamine in scare stories about addiction (some for good reason, some not). Pleasure and all its dangerous slippery slopes is a sexier topic than attention, cognition, and motivation.

Studies of dopamine began with pleasure until researchers began noticing peculiar phenomena. They saw spikes in dopamine during moments of high stress. Dopamine rose in the case of soldiers with PTSD who heard gunfire. Stress and gunfire are not pleasurable phenomena, yet there dopamine was. What gives? It was clear that dopamine went beyond mere pleasure, and it turns out dopamine's true effect may be motivation. Dopamine performs its task before we obtain rewards, meaning that its real job is to encourage us to act and motivate us to achieve or avoid something bad.

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Studies confirm the motivation-dopamine link in a number of interesting ways. Behaviorial neuroscientist John Salamone confirmed the link in an animal study on rats who were given the choice of one pile of food or another pile of food twice the size but behind a small fence. The rats with lowered levels of dopamine almost always took the easy way out, choosing the small pile instead of jumping the fence for greater reward.

In another study, a team of Vanderbilt scientists mapped the brains of "go-getters" and "slackers" and found that those willing to work hard for rewards had higher dopamine levels in the striatum and prefrontal cortex—two areas known to impact motivation and reward. Among slackers, dopamine was present in the anterior insula, an area of the brain that is involved in emotion and risk perception.

As Salamone explains, "Low levels of dopamine make people and other animals less likely to work for things, so it has more to do with motivation and cost/benefit analyses than pleasure itself."

Can Motivation Be Hacked?
All this information's well and good, but what happens when I'm sitting at my computer for an hour, writing an impossible opening paragraph and fighting the unbearable urge to do anything but? Am I a slacker who's genetically disposed to low dopamine and lack of motivation?

Not necessarily. The brain can be trained to feed off of bursts of dopamine sparked by rewarding experiences. You create the dopamine environment, and the brain does the rest. One way to achieve this is by setting incremental goals, according to neurologist Judy Willis. In essence, what you are doing is rewiring the brain to attach a dopamine response to the task you want as a reward. Allow yourself to experience frequent positive feedback as you progress through a series of goals. Dopamine will flow as a result of your brain's positive reinforcement every time you complete a step and meet a challenge.

Another way to look at the dopamine-motivation angle is to revisit the study mentioned above about go-getters and slackers. You'll notice that dopamine was present in both types of participants, and you'll remember that dopamine engages a vast set of reactions in the body. Dopamine is involved in both ends of the motivation spectrum, both in lighting a fire to persevere and in waving the white flag. Through this lens, motivation becomes less about increasing dopamine, and more about digging deep and being diligent. It should be a marriage of both.

Dopamine has a biological connection to our motivation to achieve. If there's anything we can do to increase the flow of dopamine like reinforcing positive feedback through incremental progress, embrace it. Along with this, we must include effort. Sometimes, the cure for low motivation may simply be old-school determination and perseverance, sticking with doing things even when we don't want to.

Where to Go from Here
It took me an hour to write my opening paragraph, and it took me five minutes to write this one. The difference is more dopamine, released to my brain as I met incremental goals along the way and received positive feedback from a blank document filling with words. Understanding where motivation comes from makes it easier to recognize what you need to do when it's missing.1

The next time you lack for motivation, try this: Break your indomitable task into smaller goals, and trust that dopamine will build up as you achieve your way through to the end. Should trouble or distraction interfere, push through with focused determination and deliberation.2

The Science of Motivation: Your Brain on Dopamine | iDoneThis

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I spent five minutes in email, ten minutes on Twitter, and fifteen minutes doing who-knows-what on Tumblr. Just kidding, I know exactly what I was doing: looking at dog pictures. Sound familiar? Motivation is a tricky thing to corral. Tricky, but not impossible.

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How the Food You Eat Makes You More (or Less) Productive

ORIGINAL: Life Hacker

Leo Widrich

There are tons of cliché wisdoms about nutrition: Eat at least five servings of fruit every day. Drink plenty of water. Eat three separate meals. Do this, do that, that's "healthy." What's true? Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich explores the science behind what we eat and how it affects the brain's performance.

Every seven years, the body will change completely. This means that each and every one of your cells will have been renewed and exchanged for another one that your body has produced. I am always amazed by this. Science suggests that this gives us a unique chance to change and erase any mistakes we've made in the past. How? Through a focus on the food we eat. Fortunately we don't have to wait seven years. Day-to-day changes in our diet can have a massive impact on our productivity. Something like this:

"Adequate nutrition can raise your productivity levels by 20 percent on average." -WHO

How food interacts with your brain

One of the most fascinating things about eating is how various ingredients enter the brain through your blood stream. The elements that make it through to power your brain will help you to either focus or lose focus.

Most of what we eat will be broken down to one thing: Glucose. Glucose is our fuel, keeping our brains awake and alert. So at all times, we have a certain glucose level in our blood (kind of like gasoline in a car).

The most important part here is that we are in full control of how we release glucose to our blood and our brains. Certain foods release glucose quickly, while others do so more slowly, yet sustainably. Researcher Leigh Gibson found this to be optimal:

"The brain works best with about 25 grams of glucose circulating in the blood stream—about the amount found in a banana."

The way you can get those 25 grams of glucose into your blood stream is pretty easy. You can eat a donut. You can eat a small bowl of oats. There is virtually no difference in the very short term for your brain activity.

Over the stretch of a normal 8-hour day however, the differences are spectacular. After eating the donut, we will release glucose into our blood very quickly. We will have about 20 minutes of alertness. Then our glucose level will drop rapidly, leaving us unfocused and easy to distract. It's like putting the foot down on the gas pedal until you've used all your fuel.

The oats, on the other hand, release their sugar as glucose much slower. This means we will have a steady glucose level, better focus, and higher attention levels. Another important factor are your Leptin levels. Leptin will signal to your brain how full you are. If you are now guessing that a donut won't signal your brain to be full for a long time, while oats will, well, you are right.

What we are also measuring here as the difference between a donut and a bowl of oats is called your "glycemic index," coined by the Franklin Institute:

"Foods with a low glycemic index number gradually release glucose into your bloodstream. This gradual release helps minimize blood sugar swings and optimizes brainpower and mental focus."

In fact, the lowest glycemic index of all comes from soy, at only 18, and the highest comes with white rice, at 88. [Check out more from Lifehacker on how eating affects your brain.]

What really matters with eating: when, where, and who you're with

That's funny. We're going through all this stuff about blood streams and brain fueling only to find out it doesn't actually matter?

Rest assured, it still matters, yet the context of when, where, and with whom we eat has an equally powerful impact on our eating activities, and hence, our creativity.

Let's start with the "when." The most important part here is that you make sure you are never hungry. To put this better: Hungry judges give harsher sentences.

For our case, being hungry or skipping breakfast can ruin several hours of your productivity until you get your first bite. Let's take a look at this study:

All the children in a class were told to skip breakfast one morning, and then, by random assignment, half of the children were given a good breakfast at school. The others got nothing. During the first part of the morning, the children who got breakfast learned more and misbehaved less (as judged by monitors who didn't know which children had eaten). Then, after all the students were given a healthy snack in the middle of the morning, the differences disappeared as if by magic.

Eric Barker, one of the best productivity bloggers out there, put it like this: "Across the board, yeah, food puts you in a better mood. To be more exact, research has shown that two cheeseburgers = one orgasm."

Using context to control your eating is one of the most important aspects. If you are like me, you always end up eating portions that are too big, which makes me overly full at lunch and very tired a few hours afterwards.

One of the best proven techniques here is to eat from a smaller plate. Why? Because Delboeuf told us so a long time ago with his illusion experiment of thinking the right circle looks bigger:

The portion on the smaller plate will always fill you up more. This can make the difference of an hour of productivity gained each day, simply by reducing the size of your plate and being less full. Joining the small plate movement is definitely something worth trying.

Another aspect comes in regarding the people you are with as Barker points out: "Eating with overweight friends? You'll eat more. Is your waitress overweight? You'll eat more. Are you a woman eating with a man? You'll eat less. Wide variety of food? You'll eat more."

Three most important aspects to get the most out of eating food

It's time to get our hands dirty. I think we've got a basic understanding of how food determines our daily output. But what are the best ways to act on this information?

Reorganize the positioning of food stored in your cupboard: One of the most interesting aspects about eating is that we are extremely likely to eat what is in close sight. In fact, famous researcher Brian Wansink mentions that, "You are three times more likely to eat the first thing you see in your cupboard than the fifth thing you see." Make sure you organize your food in way that brain powering foods get more exposure. It's an incredible trick to start eating better food that will give you more daily alertness.

Learn to graze: From the first section in this post, we've learned that the brain needs very specific portions of food. Too much will give you a spike that rapidly declines. Too little won't bring your brain up to speed. A great way to go about it, I've found, is to make your three daily meals a bit smaller (potentially by making the plates smaller), and then add two very specific, healthy snacks in between meals to keep your brain plugging away at full speed. This way you don't have to change your core habits too much, yet can still fuel up your brain efficiently.

These foods will give your brain the most power: Here is a great list of brain powering foods that you can eat, especially for snacking. The WHO particularly emphasizes the following: dark chocolate, nuts, seeds, and fish.

Some further brain powering foods are the following: blueberries, raw carrots, whole grains, and avocado.

Quick last fact: What you eat will also decide your grandchildren's productivity

As a last quick tip, here is something that blew my mind. Yes, what you eat will affect your productivity today. But even more so, it will determine the productivity of your children and grandchildren's productivity. "Evidence indicates that what you eat can affect your grandchildren's brain molecules and synapses," Gómez-Pinilla said. What you eat can, according to Gomez-Pinilla, rewire your genes, and the more you strengthen the synaptic connections, the better your kids and their kids will perform.

Note: We wrote yesterday about the food organization tricks Leo mentions above. Check out that post here.

The science behind how your productivity is chosen by what you eat | Buffer

Leo Widrich is the co-founder of Buffer, a smarter way to share on Twitter and Facebook. Leo writes more posts on efficiency and customer happiness over on the Buffer blog. Hit him up on Twitter @LeoWid anytime; he is a super nice guy.

Image by Yuganov Konstantin (Shutterstock).

How to Get the Most Out of Google Chrome

ORIGINAL: Gizmodo

Paul Miller - MaximumPC

OCT 7, 2012

Let's face it, the light-and-fast Google Chrome browser is the only way to surf the web-no question. But whether you're new to the browser or an old veteran, we've got some tricks to improve your mileage. Our Google Chrome Optimization Guide will show you which Google Chrome extensions to download and ways to tweak settings you didn't even know were there.

Take a Shortcut

Before we dive in to Chrome's many hidden gems, let's start with some basics (run before you walk, as they say). Just like in Windows, shortcuts can save you a ton of time in Chrome, as well as having to constantly reach for the mouse to perform menial tasks such as opening new tabs. Memorize these handy shortcuts and you'll be well on your way to mastering Chrome:

• Ctrl+N: Opens a new window.
• Ctrl+T: Opens a new tab.
• Ctrl+Shift+N: Opens a new window in incognito mode so you can, uh, shop birthday gifts on the sly. Yeah, that's what this is used for, right?
• Ctrl+Shift+T: Resurrects the last tab you just sent to the graveyard. You can reopen the last 10 tabs you closed.
• Alt+F or Alt+E: Opens the Chrome menu.
• Ctrl+Shift+B: Toggles the bookmarks bar on and off.
• Ctrl+H: Opens the History page.
• Ctrl+J: Opens the Downloads page.
• Shift+Esc: Opens Chrome's Task Manager, so you can see which tabs are using the most resources, potentially slowing down performance.

These are just some of the many, many Window keyboard, Google Chrome feature, address bar, webpage, and text shortcuts available in Chrome. If you spend a few minutes each day learning a couple of new shortcuts, it won't be long until you've committed them all to memory.

Now, onto the fun stuff...

Enable Chrome's Gold Icon

Vinyl decals won't make your Honda Civic go any faster than it's already capable of going, and by that same token, replacing Chrome's icon with the hidden Gold version doesn't offer anything other than an aesthetic change. Be that as it may, it's super easy to add a little bling:

• Right-click Google Chrome's shortcut and select Properties
• Select the Shortcut tab and click Change Icon...
• Choose the Gold icon and press OK, then Apply the change

After you swap the icon, sit back and languish in the jealousy of your co-workers!

Get Freaky with Favicons!

One reason to use Chrome is because it offers a clean and clutter-free interface, a fact that's not lost on competing browser makers who've attempted to emulate the look and feel of Chrome. Even still, there's room for improvement. One way to simplify Chrome's interface even further is to only use Favicons in the bookmarks bar.

First, make sure the bookmarks bar is enabled. If it isn't, press Ctrl+Shift+B to toggle it on, or press the Menu button denoted by three lines in the upper right-hand corner (previously the Wrench icon), expand the Bookmarks option, and select Show bookmarks bar.

Now that you can see the Bookmarks bar, go through your bookmarks and delete the text of existing ones, and do the same when adding a new bookmark. What you'll be left with is a bunch of Favicons, which not only looks cleaner, but it saves space too. Pretty neat, isn't it?

Home Sweet Homepages

Why settle for a single homepage when you can own two, three, or even a dozen? Or more! We're creatures of habit, and if you're like us, you have a selection of websites you visit every time you fire up your browser. In Chrome, it's easy to configure multiple homepages. Just go to Menu > Settings and select the 'Open a specific page or set of pages' radio button. Click the Set pages hyperlink and start typing in your go-to websites.

Fool Your Friends with Fake Edits

It's not nice to prank your friends and family, but it can be hilarious, not to mention incredibly easy in Google Chrome. Let's say you want to convince your co-worker that AMD just purchased Intel for a mere $35 million (as if!). Load up a reliable website for tech news, like MaximumPC.com, right-click an article's headline, and select Inspect Element. This will bring up a developer console in the lower portion of the browser where you can edit the webpage locally. Change the headline, and if you want to go all out, do the same for the thumbnail image and even the article text. Close out the developer console and all that's left is a fake news story on a legitimate website!

Of course, there are practical uses for the developer console that don't include pranking your buddies. It's a neat way to inspect various web code and analyze HTML parse errors to ensure a clean website.

Command Chrome Like a Boss

Google Chrome is a constant work in progress, and often times the developers will disable certain functions that might not be ready for prime time for one reason or another. If you want to see what they are, and even enable them, type Chrome://flags in the address bar (Omnibar) and hit Enter. Bear in mind that they've all been disabled for a reason, and enabling one could break your browser.

Another one of our favorite commands is Chrome://memory, which shows not only how much memory Chrome is consuming, but also other browsers running on your system.

There are lots of other commands to play around with. Type Chrome://about to see a list of them.

Experiment on Canary and Leave Chrome Alone

If you're not feeling adventurous enough to tweak your stable Chrome build but still want to experiment, what you need is Canary. What's Canary, you ask? It's the nightly build of Chrome intended for developers, so you may run into buggy behavior on occasion, but the neat thing is Canary can run alongside Chrome at the same time. Changes you make to the Canary browser have no effect on Chrome, and vice versa.

Split the Browser Window

The advent of tabbed browsing changed everything, but sometimes you may want to see two webpages side-by-side. You can do that by dragging and splitting a tab from the main browser window so that it runs in a separate window, but you can also split Chrome into a dual-view mode with a bit of JavaScript magic.

Chrome Split View

Click the above hyperlink and type in the two webpages you want to view side-by-side in a single, neat window. It's an easy way to compare prices between two online vendors, search results from two different engines, or keep track of different sports, among other uses.

Create a Separate Account for Little Billy

It wasn't all that long ago when creating separate profiles for multiple Chrome users was slightly complicated and involved mucking around Windows folders, copying contents, and performing other tasks. These days it's as simple as going into Settings and clicking the Add new user button under the Users section.

Creating a separate Chrome account is a handy way to keep little Billy's browser settings separate from yours, and also allows you both to sync your Google account on the same PC. What it doesn't do is secure your data from prying eyes, so view this more of a convenience than a security setting.

To switch between multiple users, click the icon in the upper left-hand corner and select the appropriate profile. Alternately, you can press Ctrl+Shift+M to switch between accounts.

Extensions, Extensions, Extensions

Still the best way to customize Chrome to your liking is with Extensions, and long gone are the days when this was a reason to cling to Firefox. Chrome's extensions have grown in number and functionality, and there are plenty of good ones out there. Some of our favorites include:

• Awesome New Tab Page: Do you know who's awesome? You are, and that's why you need Awesome New Tab Page. In a word, it's 'awesome'. Yes, it looks a little like Metro, or whatever Microsoft is calling the funky UI in Windows 8 these days, but instead of dominating your desktop, it simply spices up Chrome with a highly customizable interface that displays a series of widgets and links.
• Buffer: Are you addicted to Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Reddiit, or Hacker News? Then for the love of all that is holy, do your followers a favor and install Buffer, which will spread your flood of tweets and messages out over time. It's an easy way to stay social, and also the courteous thing to do.
• Too Many Tabs: There's no shame in being a tab-aholic, nor is there in admitting you need help. That's exactly what Too Many Tabs does — it helps you sort through your bazillion open tabs and find the one you're looking for.
• Print Friendly & PDF: If you print out a lot of webpages, this is a must-have extension. It allows you to strip out unnecessary items, like ads and other content and wasted space that takes up paper or ink.
• Pacman: In the old days of computing, you slacked off by playing Minesweeper or Solitaire. Maybe you remember playing SkiFree. There are better time wasters out there, and one of them is Pacman. which is available to play right in your Chrome browser with those familiar sounds that used to cost a quarter to hear.