Free Reading Material

Number of words – 704 Before widespread literacy, and especially before the advent of sound recording devices, performers traveled from village to village, reciting epic poems thousands of lines long. This tradition still exists in some societies. How do people memorize such voluminous amounts of material? Do some people have huge amounts of knowledge in … Read more

Number of words – 467 With a good deal of fanfare, the French government released the new 10-franc coin (worth a little more than $1.50) on Oct. 22, 1986. The public looked at it, weighed it, and began confusing it so quickly with the half-franc coin (worth only 8 cents) that a crescendo of fury … Read more

Number fo words – 80 Many organize their lives spatially in the world, creating a pile here, a pile there, each indicating some activity to be done, some event in progress. Probably everybody uses such a strategy to some extent. Look around you at the variety of ways people arrange their rooms and desks. Many … Read more

Number of words – 94 Knowledge how—what psychologists call procedural knowledge— is the knowledge that enables a person to be a skilled musician, to return a serve in tennis, or to move the tongue properly when saying the phrase “frightening witches.” Procedural knowledge is difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It … Read more

Number of words – 157 Because behavior can be guided by the combination of internal and external knowledge and constraints, people can minimize the amount of material they must learn, as well as the completeness, precision, accuracy, or depth of the learning. They also can deliberately organize the environment to support behavior. This is how … Read more

Number of words – 167 Fewer than half of the American college students who were given this set of drawings and asked to select the correct image could do so. Pretty bad performance, except that the students, of course, have no difficulty using the money. In normal life, we have to distinguish between the penny … Read more

Number of words – 86 One of my self-imposed rules is, “Don’t criticize unless you can do better.” Try to understand how the faulty design might have occurred: try to determine how it could have been done otherwise. Thinking about the causes and possible fixes to bad design should make you better appreciate good design. … Read more

Number of words – 155 We need to remove the word failure from our vocabulary, replacing it instead with learning experience. To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes. With success, sure, we are pleased, but we often have no idea why we succeeded. With failure, it is … Read more

Number of words – 252 When people have trouble using technology, especially when they perceive (usually incorrectly) that nobody else is having the same problems, they tend to blame themselves. Worse, the more they have trouble, the more helpless they may feel, beliving that they must be technically or mechanically inept. This is just the … Read more

Number of words – 395 People try to find causes for events. They tend to assign a causal relation whenever two things occur in succession. If some unexpected event happens in my home just after I have taken some action, I am apt to conclude that it was caused by that action, even if there … Read more