Check out these e-mail addresses: honney.bunny77@hotmail.com, jane.doe@nasa.gov, raddude69@mobileme.com, CmndrSpud@6zap.com. Now, who’s the tech geek, who’s the professional, who’s the cheerleader, and who’s the poseur guy? A German study confirmed what you already know: We can infer a sender’s personality from his or her e-mail address. In the study, a 100-person panel was asked to guess the personalities of 600 people, based on only e-mail addresses. Then researchers compared these guesses with the e-mail owners’ responses on a personality quiz. E-mail addresses significantly outed participants’ neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism, but failed to predict their extraversion. Especially telling were addresses that used numbers, periods, and names other than the sender’s own.
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It’s rather like getting tenure.)
–Daniel C. Dennett,
Consciousness Explained
Eye Hack: Oscillating Face
Be assured, this is a simple, two-dimensional image, conventionally printed. But our mind allows a very limited range of possibilities for the human face, and so repeatedly tells the eyes they must have made a mistake. And you continue to tick and tock back and forth between the “real” interpretation.
