MindMup Maps Your Brain in the Browser

If you like to plan and brainstorm by creating mind maps to link together ideas, MindMup is a great browser-based program that helps you get organized with lots of features.

The app is a lot like previously-mentioned Coggle, but it offers a few more features that power users will love. The biggest difference is the ability to augment your nodes with various right-click options. For example, you can attach long notes and images to your nodes, and click through to see them later so you don't have to clutter your map with too much top-level information. I also really enjoy the ability to drag and drop nodes on top of each other to reorder them in the hierarchy. These little touches make the app feel more native, and less like a typical web app.

One much-appreciated feature is the ability to save your maps, either to Google Drive or MindMup's own servers, to edit at a later date. You can also export your maps in various formats, including PDF and HTML, offering you a ton of flexibility when it comes time to act on your data. Granted, not everyone likes using mind maps, but if you do, take MindMup for a spin.

MindMup (Free)

Related Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm, make a plan, or turn ideas into the steps needed to make it real. Thankfully, there are great tools out… Read…

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How Your Brain Perceives Time (And How to Use it to Your Advantage)

We might not be able to create more time when we need it most—like when a deadline is approaching—but we can use the understanding of how we perceive time to our advantage.

For example, author Joshua Foer thinks it might be possible to make it seem like we live longer by inserting more memories between two temporal points. It's not the fountain of youth, but it's an odd brain quirk that makes us feel like we've lived longer. How we perceive time can also affect our satisfaction with decisions, relationships with others, and levels of productivity.

Let's start with why it seems like we never have enough time to meet deadlines.

Think back to your student days—remember those all-nighters? Even if you were a top-notch scholar, you probably pulled at least one or two all-night cram sessions because of what appeared to be bad time management. (I speak from "fond" personal experience.)

Researchers Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross explore what's known as "The Planning Fallacy" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This study shows that subjects had a tendency to focus on optimistic scenarios when they planned, which caused problems when unforeseen circumstances arose. Perhaps one solution is to prime ourselves to be more pessimistic (or "realistic") as we're scoping out timelines. You might not need to plan for the worst case scenario, but you should definitely consider it.

Alternatively, both the study and the community blog Less Wrong suggest adopting a different perspective to time. Rather than looking at the unique features of your project in order to estimate how long it might take, look into the past and see how long it took others to complete a similar projects. That's an accurate indicator of how long it will take you to finish yours.

With that said, not every single task can be compared to a previous one. Professor of cognitive science Douglas Hofstadter humorously coined "Hofstadter's Law." A column in The Guardian explains it best: "Any task you're planning to complete will always take longer than expected—even when Hofstadter's Law is taken into account." It's an inevitable, cyclic property of our minds: no matter how we plan, tasks susceptible to Hofstadter's Law will always take longer than we plan—even if we attempt to account for this delay. So don't be too surprised if that project extends beyond the fallback time you set up.

A study from the University of Belgium showed that we imagine more details about an immediately approaching event than something farther in the future (and also recall more details about recent past events). Therefore, if we focus on the details of a future projection, we can make it feel much closer and more urgent.

A way to curb procrastination early on would be to take a few minutes and simply lay the groundwork for a project. This process naturally starts putting more details in your head, and you can get over the procrastination hump. In other words, just start somewhere. This is why self-development advisors like Tony Robbins suggest making goals extremely concrete and detailed—it emphasizes the urgency of the goal and makes the milestone feel less distant.

"Ask forgiveness, not permission" is a piece of traditional entrepreneurial advice. As bestselling author Tim Ferriss says, "Most people are fast to stop you before you get started, but hesitant to get in the way if you're moving." Experiments support this. This study from the University of Chicago shows that experiment participants were far more upset about bad things that were going to happen, rather than bad things that had already occured. This may be because of our perceived ability to change the future and inability to change the past, as well as our emotional dampening and rationalization of past events. The prospect of an unpleasant event happening in the future feels much worse than the actual event. Our emotions are naturally regulated and become less extreme as the past fades.

If you're planning to make a change, such as presenting a new initiative at work, and you want to minimize the problems and maximize the support, choose to make moves first and ask for "forgiveness" if something goes awry. In any case, taking a step forward in any direction is more conducive to your goals than doing nothing. Again, just start somewhere.

Another study from the University of Chicago observed that people place significantly higher value on the near future than on the near past. Experimenters observed that the emotional impact of a future event increases as it approaches, but once the event has occured, its emotional impact significantly decreases.

The study points out an implication that's significant for successful negotiation: pay later as a buyer, and charge earlier as a seller. This means that, theoretically, you'll be more likely to charge someone less if you, for example, send the bill to your client after you perform a service. Conversely, you'll be more likely to pay less if you negotiate after the service has been performed. Of course, if you're a service provider, you would want to charge upfront to maximize your profit. Don't let yourself succumb to a post-job negotiation (AKA a "lowball").

While we still don't have a DeLorean to hop into, knowing how time changes the way we perceive things can help us to plan and deal with unforeseen circumstances. Simple awareness of these heuristics can make a huge difference in coping, decision making, and understanding why we behave and react in certain ways.

Herbert Lui is exploring the intersection of art and entrepreneurship. He is a writer and specializes in content marketing. You can connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn. He is the author of a guide to building credibility online.

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Image via Kzenon (Shutterstock).

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Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet to Lose Weight

Weight loss is tricky business. Obviously what you eat has a huge impact on your health and body weight. But anyone who has ever tried to modify their diet for the sake of losing weight knows it isn’t so simple.

Most of us understand intuitively that broccoli is healthier than cookies. We can talk about sugar, fat, gluten, and antioxidants all day, but that doesn’t change the fact that cookies taste good and you still want to eat them. Any weight loss plan that simply tells you what to eat and neglects why you make the choices you make is unlikely to help you in the long run.

Nutrition knowledge is important, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. The real secret is understanding your behaviors and motivations at their roots, and using this information to have a meaningful impact on your health. In this sense, good health starts in your brain, not on your plate.

The first thing you need to understand is that we don’t have as much control over our food decisions as most of us assume. We tend to believe that we can call on willpower anytime we wish and use it to order a salad instead of a burger, and if we fail to do so it is our own fault. However, self-control is not something we can simply turn on or off, and as a result the process of decision making––particularly when it comes to food––is much more complex.

Approximately 20 percent of the calories we expend daily are used by our brains. Because brain activity is so costly, things like self-control and decision making cannot be relied on indefinitely. As a result, willpower is a limited resource. Like a muscle, willpower becomes fatigued when exercised too frequently. All the decisions you make throughout the day deplete your willpower, and when you start running out of steam your ability to choose healthy food over more convenient food rapidly diminishes. Ironically, increasing your blood sugar can help restore willpower to some extent. But finding a healthy way to raise blood sugar in a state of depleted willpower can pose quite the dilemma. Tired brains find it much easier to just grab a cookie.

The way our brains cope with the willpower conundrum is to automate as much of our decision making as possible. It does this by creating habits. Habits are specific behaviors that occur in response to a trigger or cue. They are also always associated with some kind of reward, which in turn reinforces and strengthens the trigger. For example, a buzz in your pocket is a cue to reach down, grab your phone, pull it out, and glance at the screen. The information you see causes a bit of dopamine to be released in the reward center of your brain. We humans love novelty, which is why most of us have a reflexive response to checking our mobile devices when we receive a notification. This is how habits are born.

Once established, habits occur automatically without expending any willpower or mental effort. Scientists have estimated that up to 90 percent of our daily food decisions occur as a result of habits. This saves our brain energy for more difficult decisions where habits cannot be used.

For one thing, it shows that willpower is not particularly reliable as a means to achieve lasting weight loss, and we’re better off spending our efforts creating healthy habits.

It also teaches us that any habit we wish to develop needs to impart a meaningful reward in order for it to stick. You can probably guess that some vague promise of future thinness is not sufficient––the reward for any habit needs to be immediate and tangible. This means that in order to achieve long-term weight control you need to find healthy foods you actually enjoy eating, physical activities you like doing, and spend your time making these as convenient and accessible as possible.

Fabulous news, right? Using willpower for restrictive dieting is difficult and incredibly unpleasant. We can all let out a collective sigh of relief that it doesn’t actually work. To achieve true success in health and weight loss, we’re better off quitting diets altogether and focusing on building healthy habits we enjoy. Try starting with something as simple as breakfast. Warm muesli with a splash of almond milk and cinnamon only takes two minutes to prepare and is absolutely delicious. Invest in a pedometer and challenge yourself to reach 10,000 steps a day. Setting and achieving an attainable goal is a very powerful reward, and is one of the reasons so many people love videogames.

Since our brains are easily overwhelmed, don’t try to develop too many habits at once. Work on just two or three habits at a time, and build from there. Habits take anywhere from two weeks to six months to take root, but on average about two months. Start with the easiest ones and work your way up. Once you’ve built enough good habits, your health will take care of itself.

Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You're Serious About Losing Weight | Summer Tomato

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