Learn to Think in Color

What Do People Pay For but Rarely Use? People routinely continue paying for services they rarely use because the original purchase reflects an optimistic plan for the future, automatic renewal makes inaction easy, and canceling can feel like giving up on the goal the purchase represented. The gym membership is perhaps the clearest example. Someone joins in January with a plan to exercise several times each week, but attendance gradually falls. Eventually, weeks pass without a visit while the monthly payment continues exactly as scheduled. The same pattern appears with streaming subscriptions, online courses, productivity software, professional memberships, and other recurring services. The reason is not always that people simply forget. Many of these expenses survive because buying, using, and canceling involve different psychological decisions. Gym Memberships Reveal the Difference Between Intention and Behavior Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier examined membership c...

What’s Happening When You Have a Brain Fart? A brain fart often happens when information becomes temporarily inaccessible rather than disappearing entirely from memory. Understanding the difference helps explain why names vanish, doorways disrupt intentions, and trying harder can sometimes make remembering more difficult. Everyone recognizes the experience. You enter another room and immediately forget what you intended to do. You see a familiar face and cannot retrieve the name. You begin explaining something and suddenly realize the thought you were following has disappeared. These moments feel similar because something that was mentally available has become inaccessible. The mechanisms behind them, however, can be quite different. Memory Is Not Simply Storage It is tempting to imagine memory as a filing cabinet. Information goes in, remains stored, and later gets pulled back out from the same location. Human memory is more complicated. Retrieval depends on associations, context, att...

When Will Construction Begin on the Moon’s First Permanent Shelter? The current best estimate is 2032–2035, with lunar infrastructure beginning to arrive earlier. Construction of the Moon’s first permanent human shelter will most likely begin between 2032 and 2035 . That is our 2026 baseline forecast for the point when a lunar habitat intended to become a permanent residence starts coming together with the systems needed to support it. The infrastructure should arrive earlier. NASA now describes 2029–2032 as a period for building out power, communications, cargo transportation, logistics and other systems needed for long-term lunar operations. Beginning in 2032, the agency plans to move into a phase focused on living and working on the Moon, including assembly of a permanent lunar outpost. A year ago, our baseline forecast was later: 2035–2037 . So what changed? What Counts as Permanent Lunar Construction? This forecast is not based on the next rover, antenna or short-duration astrona...

Why Do People Try New Things? People try new things because unfamiliar experiences can reveal information about the world, available opportunities, and themselves that familiar routines cannot provide. Familiarity is valuable because it reduces uncertainty. We know how a regular commute works, which meals we enjoy, how an established job operates, and what to expect from people and places we know well. Repeating successful choices saves time and protects us from having to relearn everything each time we act. That advantage has a limit. Familiar choices continue giving us information about familiar options, but they tell us very little about alternatives we have never tested. Exploration becomes valuable when learning about those alternatives matters enough to justify some uncertainty. Curiosity Makes Missing Information Matter Curiosity often begins when we realize something important is missing from our understanding. A completely unfamiliar subject may not attract much attention beca...

How Can You Best Hedge Your Bets? The best hedge limits the consequences of being wrong without eliminating the opportunity to benefit from being right. Important decisions almost always involve uncertainty. Careers change, businesses fail, technologies evolve, markets move, and customers behave differently from what forecasts predict. More information can improve a decision, but information rarely turns a consequential choice into certainty. That means effective risk management cannot simply consist of waiting until nothing can go wrong. A useful hedge changes the consequences of uncertainty while still allowing enough commitment for success to remain possible. Hedging Does Not Mean Avoiding Risk In finance, hedging involves taking a position that offsets some of the risk associated with another position. A farmer may agree in advance to sell a crop at a fixed price, reducing exposure to a price decline while sacrificing some upside if prices later rise. The farmer has not eliminated ...

What Do Your Communication Preferences Say About You? What your preference for texting, calling, email, or face-to-face conversations reveals about your expectations, relationships, and willingness to adapt. Someone sends you a text. You call them back. They wonder why you couldn't just answer the message. You wonder why they would rather exchange six texts than have a two-minute conversation. Neither person is trying to be difficult. They simply have different expectations about how communication should work. The way we communicate reflects how we manage attention, time, uncertainty, and relationships. Some people prefer texting because they value flexibility. Others prefer phone calls because they want immediate feedback. Email provides structure, while face-to-face conversation adds visual cues and shared attention. But our reaction when someone communicates differently from us reveals something more important than the method we prefer. Why Do People Prefer Different Communicati...