BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.
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Overfocusing and Immersion
The point of optical illusions like “Duck-Rabbit” and “Young Woman or Old Woman” isn’t that one of the options is correct. Instead, the point is that both are right even if you have to toggle back and forth, taking turns, to see each separately. I have yet to find a good term to describe this…
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Anti-Vaxxers and the Arts of Persuasion
People decide with their hearts and then later justify those decisions with their heads. Once you accept this, then how you approach communications changes because all communication is about persuasion in one way or another. Learning simply to ask the question, “where is the heart in this?” can be powerful, although it can also be…
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Secret Stories: Microsoft, Activision, Spotify, Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Facebook
When a big business story hits I try to ask myself, “what else is going on?” When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, for example, the obvious story was that the ecommerce giant wanted to tap into the nearly $800B annual U.S. grocery business. Less obvious was that by buying Whole Foods Amazon also acquired…
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My 2021 (and 2020!) in Books
This is the eighth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. So why didn’t I post a list…
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Micro-post: Why I miss “Glee”
The last episode of Glee aired in March of 2015, more than six years ago. I still miss it even though the suds-to-singing ratio got out of whack in the final seasons, so I didn’t watch regularly. Despite the high school soap opera—or maybe because there’s no escape from high school until graduation for most…
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The Nature of Human Thought: “Stop Trying to Make ‘Fetch’ Happen.”
One of the enduring mysteries of everyday cognitive life is why some things pop into our minds. Today’s example for me happened while I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Out of nowhere the line, “Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen” from the classic movie Mean Girls came to…
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Amazon’s Secret Strategy with its new Department Stores
Amazon never does things for only the obvious reasons, which makes me wonder what the company is up to with its latest retail foray: department stores. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported: The new retail spaces will be around 30,000 square feet, smaller than most department stores, which typically occupy about 100,000 square feet,…