BrainCandy English

Dopamine, which is considered a happiness hormone, can influence our mood. But we often intuitively misunderstand the mechanisms that can lead to dopamine release. Neurologist Andrew Huberman recently published a detailed explanation of how we can more reliably get dopamine releases. In this exciting BrainCandy, I show you what I consider to be the most important insight from his explanations. And...

My last BrainCandy on egalitarian behaviour among hunter-gatherers was thematically polarising, as egalitarian behaviour developed mainly among men, while at the same time children and women were hierarchically less privileged. In exchange, today as a counterbalance, the extremely entertaining book by British Lucy Cooke, a renowned zoologist, who dedicates herself to male-dominated zoological scie...

Human beings are chronically conflicted animals. A few months ago I read a long newsletter by the psychologist Rob Henderson that touched me deeply. Anthropology is not normally my hobby. But the parallels to today's political discussions motivated me to share the main points with the tribe of BrainCandy listeners. It explains why Homo Sapiens has lived most of the time in an egalitarian and m...

Brand consultant Richard Shotton is back with another masterclass in behavioural economics. In "The Illusion of Choice: 16½ Psychological Biases That Influence What We Buy", he reveals an irrational tendency in our behaviour in real-life contexts in each of the eighteen entertaining chapters. Especially with his many examples, he makes learning very entertaining. In the BrainCandy I give...

A few weeks ago, the long-awaited new book by marketing professor Jenni Romaniuk was finally available: Better Brand Health. Already a bestseller with great international interest. In this BrainCandy, I have summarised the most important findings for me in a short and crisp way. And the topic fits particularly well into BrainCandy because Romaniuk's findings focus on how the brain stores brand...

What could be more exciting than human mate-seeking behaviour? I recently read a lengthy paper by psychologist Rob Henderson. He looked at the effects of different contexts on the behaviour of the sexes when looking for a partner. We like to assume that our behaviour is guided primarily by our inner standards. It is fascinating to understand how strongly our environment, our contexts influence our...

Three years of Corona are now behind us. And the question arises, what has this done to us? What has changed in us? And how will this influence our behaviour in the future? A recent interview with Bamberg psychology professor Carbon motivated me to look into this topic again. After all, we want to understand to what extent we should respond to the Corona experience in our brand strategies. Just th...

What is a New Year's Eve without fireworks and a New Year without good resolutions? Unfortunately, new resolutions are only easy to imagine. Most of them almost certainly fail when it comes to putting them into practice. All you have to do is follow James Clear's brain-friendly tips from BrainCandy 63. Or you can choose a completely different approach: the Last Year Review by author and lifestyle...

After years of the pandemic, the now galloping inflation, the terrible war in the East, we should all be longing for more feelings of happiness in our everyday lives. A podcast by the neurologist Huberman, who deals with the latest findings of happiness research and recommends tools with which we can consciously increase our sense of happiness, comes at just the right time. I'll summarise his key...

Are you still trying to manage time? The New York Times bestseller '4000 Weeks' concludes that with the leading time management systems we try to squeeze far too much into our time. In the process, we lose sight of what is really really important to us. The author, Oliver Burkeman, wittily and entertainingly demonstrates how we should better counter the pressure for efficiency. And thus make more...

Our intelligence declines much sooner than we ourselves can perceive. Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks takes no prisoners in his new bestseller. It almost hurts at first to deal with his many examples. When you have to realise that even Nobel Prize winners don't usualy make any great discoveries after their fiftieth birthday. But - his book is also a self-help book and it is very worthwhile to r...

Negotiations get on your nerves?  With a quite clever method you get the maximum for you AND your negotiating partner - fairly and comprehensibly. Who doesn't know them: Tough, laborious negotiations in which no common denominator can be found and each side insists on its position. Barry Nalebuff suggests a different, amazingly simple method: Define the profit pie and share it fairly. Actuall...

When the proverbial bear is roaring around you - how do you manage to reliably increase your own focus and concentration? Science helps with up-to-date tips. I have prepared my notes from a long podcast by neurologist Huberman for you here. Have fun trying them out.  And one more piece of information on my own behalf. I'm going on holiday for a few weeks in the next few days. I have asked my...

Some time ago, Rob Henderson came to my attention. Henderson is a doctoral student in psychology at Cambridge and studied psychology at Yale before that. He runs a very good blog on Substack. Most of it as premium content. A promising young scientist. Henderson has a very unusual CV and develops exciting ideas. Like the insight of Luxury Beliefs. Luxury Beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer s...

What does it do to us when we are caught incessantly by disaster headlines? A respected journalist explains to us how she herself deals with this problem and what journalism could do to report on the disasters on the one hand, but at the same time better value people as processors of news. Exciting insights with good recommendations for our mental health. Enjoy reading and empathise. Link to the o...

Was macht es mit uns, wenn wir unablässig von Katastrophenschlagzeilen erwischt werden? Eine angesehene Redakteurin erklärt uns, wie sie selbst mit diesem Problem umgeht und was der Journalismus tun könnte, um einerseits über die Katastrophen zu berichten, aber gleichzeitig den Menschen als Nachrichtenverarbeiter besser wertzuschätzen. Spannende Einsichten mit guten Empfehlungen für unsere mentale...

Today I serve my listeners a harder nut to crack. It is obvious to more and more citizens that the republic urgently needs to transform itself. This is also being addressed. But well intended is not yet well done. I experience that the linearity bias, which makes evolutionary sense, is likely to lead us straight into massive problems. The 10 minutes of listening time are well invested in being abl...

One of the most experienced and successful marketing bloggers in the world, Bob Hoffman, just delighted me with one of his latest essays. He took on the topic of what role brands really play in consumers' lives and how people actually make most purchasing decisions.  It follows, for him, that fame must be the central goal of advertising for brand success. Bob knocked down wide open doors with...

We hear a lot about the anger of the vaccinated over the unvaccinated. It occurred to me only a few months ago that we are dealing with an ingroup versus outgroup phenomenon. Namely, a very powerful positional 'war' that is preventing a fruitful synthesis process. I hope this is really my last BrainCandy on Corona, but it is worthwhile once again to shed some behavioral scientific light on this ca...

Cancel Culture is a relatively new phenomenon. Notoriously, the major social networks delete content that is harmful to society on the one hand, but also too often prevent valuable scientific discourse in the process. Simply because they contradict the current prevailing opinion. A few months ago, my attention was drawn to the Substack platform. According to their own statement, the place for grea...

With 'Nudge' one of the most important books in behavioral science has been re-published and extended by important topics. The result is a book that is well worth reading. And a new buzzword that will certainly enter the management language: Sludge. You can never know enough about human behavior - and especially about how to get people to make better decisions for themselves. Learn more in this sh...

Recently, I was able to listen to a powerful lecture by Prof. Dr. Maren Urner on 3Sat a German TV station. She researches media psychology at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne. Prof. Urner explains in a comprehensible way why we all have a far too negative image of the world. It's all about the information overload of the media, which encounters an evolutionarily outdated processing sy...

It's relatively easy to get budgets for short-term marketing campaigns. But how do you argue if you want to build your brand in the long term? The internationally renowned marketing expert, Mark Ritson, has tackled the question and put together a really good, tried and tested guide. I have summarised it for you and added a very recent example that also shows how important brand building is for the...

The famous psychologist, Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author Daniel Kahneman has just published his latest work. Together with professors Sibony and Sunstein (Nudge), he takes care of an important human decision-making error. This time it's not about the downright entertaining biases, i.e. the automatic thinking errors / rules of thumb that explain non-rational behaviour, but about a hither...

Internationally known marketing expert, Mark Ritson, recently published his crowd-sourced Top 10 Marketing Bullshit list. On the one hand, it's great fun - if only some of it wasn't real crap and can actually prevent marketing from working successfully. In his list, it actually caught not only brands, but also thinking models we're all familiar with that can lead to dead ends with momentum. And ye...