Cognitive Design

Our brain consumes 20-30% of our total energy (25% of glucose, 20% oxygen). It burns energy 10 times faster per unit of tissue than any other part of the body. Energy plays a big role in brain function and cognitive performance.   The makeup of this energy is complex. There is brain glucose, a number of neurotransmitters, adrenaline and more psychological components such as feeling of mental fatigue and the ability to do cognitive work.  As designers we need to be concerned with how the features and functions of an artifact impact all aspects of mental energy.  So I am always on the lookout for new scientific studies that provide insight into how to leverage mental energy with design.

A good example is recent work at the University of Pennsylvania, nicely summarized by EurekaAlert!, that provides some evidence against the glucose depletion theory of self-control. To quote:

“Kurzban’s new analysis is consistent with the neuroscience literature, which strongly implies that the marginal difference in glucose consumption by the brain from five minutes of performing a “self-control” task is unlikely in the extreme to be of any significant size. Further, research on exercise shows that burning calories through physical activity, which really does consume substantial amounts of glucose, in fact shows the reverse pattern from what the model would predict: People who have recently exercised and burned glucose are better, not worse, on the sorts of tasks used in the self-control literature.”

This means that designs aimed at boosting blood sugar levels to improve self-control may not work.   It also suggest that using activity or exercise may work (likely due to the production of mental energy via neurotransmitters or increased in self-efficacy and other psychological effects).  

In general this implies that cognitive designs need to go beyond the biological effects of sugar to emphasize the production of natural brain drugs (neurotransmitters) and mental states that correlated to the psychological ability to do mental work (e.g. meaning).

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 11:49 am and is filed under Behavior Change, Technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.