• It does seem like coffee makes you smarter, even in small doses. There are several methodological issues however. The main problem is that if you are a coffee user, your brain without caffeine might be negatively impacted due to a withdrawal effect, hence giving you the illusion that caffeine helps. However, it seems that heavy coffee users still outperform before they drink coffee!
• A moderate amount of white noise, such as leaving your radio play a non-utilized frequency at a very low volume, may improve your cognitive ability by increasing your dopamine levels. So if you can’t seem to focus, leaving your office for a coffee place may help. However, it you can concentrate, then white noise may decrease your already-good performance.
• Background music may improve cognitive performance. It seems listening to classical music may makes you smarter. However, a comparison between vocal music, instrumental music, and no music settings showed that on some tasks, no music was always better. A recent paper argues that we cannot trust many studies conducted on human beings, and that we should focus on what happens with animals. I would say that quiet instrumental music might have an effect similar to white noise, and thus, it may mostly help those who have trouble focusing.
• Carbohydrates may have a positive or negative impact on your cognitive ability: eating sugary stuff is probably not useful. However, if you feel tensed, protein-poor and carbohydrate-rich food may help you regain control.
• Alcohol is probably not a good idea.

Disclaimer: this is not meant to be a scientific survey. However, if you disagree with my survey, please do add a comment!

Disclaimer 2: I drink a lot of coffee. I almost certainly reach a point where it impacts negatively my performance because I get too tensed to focus. However, I find it preferable to boredom.

It is easy to think that the big deal these days has to do with multimedia (YouTube) or social networks (Facebook), but the written word is changing too! As someone who writes for a living, I am fascinated by how writing has changed drastically in recent years. Of course, the Web has changed the way we write in an obvious way: it has become less of a formal activity and more of a social one. However, even formal writing, such as the production of research papers, has changed a lot. We are in the middle of a revolution.

• Documents are not standalone objects. Documents are commonly hyperlinked, and when they are not, it is increasingly easy to browse through the documents that reference it or through the documents referenced by it. PageRank is just one example of how links between documents are becoming as important as the documents themselves. I no longer read scientific papers on their own: I always read them as part of a stream of papers in a given area. The fact that I can download in about 5 minutes a dozen of papers on the same topic, makes a big difference. I very frequently look up the Web pages of the researchers I read, just to see what they worked on beside the paper I read. Most blog posts do not stand on their own: they are part of a worldwide exchange. Also, papers are no longer static objects: several times a year, I will write to an author I read and get feedback from him.
• Transparency matters. As it becomes easier than ever to make information available, it becomes less acceptable to keep relevant matters secret or to lie. Bloggers are famous for sharing openly: lying on your blog is dangerous because so many people can check your facts. Increasingly, researchers are asked to make source code and data available. You can no longer write for a small community: people outside your little group are likely to stumble on your work as well.
• Countries and organizations do not write, people do. A journal that accepted one of our papers objected yesterday that, in the reference section, we omitted the location of the publishers and where conference were held. But I do not care about where the results first appeared! They also asked us which organization was behind each of the proceedings paper we cited: I do not care! Several years ago, I was asked if, as a researcher, I had international collaborations. The question does not even make sense to me.
• Metadata is more about selling than about describing. Many people still write abstracts as if they had to summarize their work. But I can grab your paper in about 2 minutes and read its introduction in 5 minutes. We no longer mail order science papers. So the abstract should tell me why I need to read your paper. The same hold true for blog posts: your title is not there to describe the blog post, but to tell us why we should care.

• Work on projects you love doing, even if only part of the time. You can only be as smart as you are motivated. I will never be a smart electrician.
• Reading and learning are important, but people learn by doing, by tinkering.
• Carry a notebook or an iPad, and use it to record ideas as they come to you. Periodically sort through your ideas.
• Get in the habit of doubting everything. Especially things that appear obvious. Is an umbrella the best way to stay dry under the rain? Do you really die if you stop eating altogether?
• Teach others what you want to learn. For example, if you want to understand advanced physics, start a blog on quantum mechanics.
• This is probably the most important point: hang around with smart people. If you live among monkeys, you might have a good life, but you won’t be smarter than a monkey. Happily, you can easily hang around with smart people wherever you live thanks to the Internet. This is important because if you hang around with people who do great work, you will be motivated by emulation: nobody likes to feel like a loser among his peers.
• Push yourself: try daring projects and learn to fail. Be ambitious! Do not waste your time with things you know how to do well. Go beyond. Aim as high as you can, while trying to stay on track.
• Context is important when solving problems. I found that offices are nearly the worst place to work for me. I have done some of my best work at home. Sometimes, a coffee place can be a decent alternative office (presumably because of the white noise effect). Sometimes, using a pen is better than a keyboard. Sometimes, working with a laptop in your bed is better than working on a desk. Change, try new contexts!
• Set time aside to think, write, read in a quiet place.
• Come back to important projects regularly. Do not get lost in the small stuff.
• Urgency is an important factor. Somehow, being too happy about what you achieved can slow you down. This suggests that you should be critical of your own work, and that you should not underestimate your competitors. Of course, you need to stay motivated, so do not overestimate your competitors or underestimate your own work either!
• You will not cure cancer in one day. You will not become a pro golfer in a week. You can only solve big problems by dividing them up in small chunks. Always stay focus on the next small step. Do not stare mindlessly at the big picture.

Be physically smart:

• Omega-3 is good for you and might make you smarter. Eating fish seems like a good idea.
• When you are tensed, eat carbs (bread, cookies). Do not make things worse by drinking coffee.
• Too much coffee tends to get your mind to speed up and you lose focus easily. You end up getting many things done, but you no longer have time for thinking about the hard problems.
• When you need energy, eat proteins (cheese, meat, beans). Coffee alone will only help you temporarily, it does not get you through a lot of hard work.
• Drink a lot of water: after all, your brain is mostly water.
• Sleep a decent amount. Some people claim sleep-deprivation allows them to get more done, and it might be true, and I do not know of any evidence that sleep-deprivation hurts your brain, but being sleepy does slow you down and tends to get you to work on routine problems.
• Taking long walks (at least 20 minutes) out in a quiet park, thinking about some deep issues, tend to set me up for good work for the rest of the day.

For further reading and scientific evidence, read my posts Physical factors making your smarter: white noise, carbohydrates, music, alcohol, and coffee? and Thinking intelligence is innate makes you stupid.

References.

• David Dobbs, How to be a genius, New Scientist, 2006.
• Geoff Colvin, Why talent is overrated, Fortune, 2008.
• Brian Martin, Research productivity: some paths less travelled, Australian Universities’ Review, vol. 51, no. 1, February 2009.

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I had two important meetings today. One of them was with my good friend Harold Boley (of RuleML fame) and another well know professor. The other meeting was with an infamous professor who shall remain nameless.

What is most amazing about these meetings is that they happened in my kitchen, using Skype and the builtin webcam of my MacBook. And these meetings were efficient, to the point, content-rich, and pleasant. Moreover they were inexpensive. And I don’t mean financially. They required almost no time to prepare. They required no room, no building. They did not require any staff.

Of course, the bandwidth is not quite the same as a live meeting, but this can be a good thing: I do not care to smell your pheromones nor do I insist on seeing the details of your body posture. Moreover, the bandwidth is increasing at a crazy rate.

What does this mean for our future? It means that institutions are no longer required to get the system running. No vice-president, no staff. It means you can run the world from your kitchen. Or at least, get some research done.

See also my post Big schools are no longer giving researchers an edge?

There is a nice article in Forbes which basically says that directed research is pretty much useless. Directed research is what happens when you tell researchers what they must work on, because you predict that it is what is important. The article is based on a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Here are two great quotes from the article:

Trial-and-error has error in it; and most top-down traditional rational and academic environments do not like the fallibility of “error” and the embarrassment of not quite knowing where they’re going.

(Some years ago, I drafted a funding application where I carefully outlined what could go wrong. I was told that this was suicidal.)

It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing.

This being said, I am not sure I agree with the Black swan theory. I need to think about it.

However, in research as in most businesses, it is quite clear that the willingness to take risks is an ingredient for success. As for myself, the main reason I take risks is that it is more fun. If I know I will succeed ahead of time, why bother doing the work? So that even if I never come up with a significant unexpected discovery, taking risks is still a very valid strategy.

See also my posts My research process and That’s why I tinker.

Source: Stephen Downes.