cognitive-science on S Anand

Memorable explanations

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 13:58:58 +0800

Our brains remember some things better. Explaining that way makes it stick.

Here are the eight things, most important first, that help you:

Structure explanations memorably:

Face. You remember faces before facts. So cast characters: “Imagine you’re a courier carrying a packet.” Prefer archetypes to real names — less baggage, more imagination.
Place. You’re reading down a list now — and the top feels more important. That’s spatial wiring. Turn any concept into a map. Use higher, deeper, nearer, inside, …
Tale. You read #1 and #2 first because they came first. Your brain built a cause from that sequence. Time creates cause for free. “Because” makes anything believable.
Scale. “Two feet tall” lands instantly. “60 cm” forces you to convert. Your brain doesn’t measure — it compares. Give it reference objects, not just numbers.

Deliver explanations memorably:

Touch. Face. Place. Tale. Scale. Each is a thing you can “grasp” or “hold” in your head. We learn literally by grasping. Make abstractions touchable.
Feel. Everyone ignores you because you forget these eight. Did that sting? That’s loss framing. Fear, surprise, and reward are memorable.
Chunk. There are 8 items here - already past our ~4 chunk working memory limit. We’ve chunked them into two logical sets of four.
Beat. Face, Place, Tale, Scale. Touch, Feel, Chunk, Beat. Two groups of four. Say them aloud — the rhythm is already doing the remembering for you.

PS: The Claude conversation that lead to this post is my favorite prompting example.

The first prompt asked the question “Our brains are wired to understand some things well…”
- … and for multiple options “Create a comprehensive list…”
- … fact-checked “… based on research evidence”
- … with expert framing: “But I’m a novice - what would an expert check that beginners would miss? Think about that, ask, and answer those too.”
The second prompt uses LLM review. “I asked Gemini to review your work. What does proven science agree with and disagree with on Gemini’s response?”
- … with expert framing: “focusing on patterns that an expert in this field recognize that beginners would miss”
The remaining prompts asksfor a rewrite: “Here’s my shorter version. Rewrite it with the same succinctness”, but with meta-cognition:
- “but applying the same 8 principles of cognitive anchoring to this text itself!”
- “rename them to rhyme better”
- “Re-apply the principles and suggest an improved version.

I also converted this into a SKILL.md

Change blindness

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 12:00:00 +0000

A cool psychology experiment. A student asks someone for directions. People carrying a door pass between them. Students switch. They check if the person giving directions has noticed that it’s a different person. Many people don’t notice the switch.

Negative people bad for your brain

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Angry or negative people can be bad for your brain.

Cognitive daily

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Cognitive daily.

Are rich kids more troubled than poor kids?
How do we decide what we’re seeing?
What else are we doing when we watch a movie?
What are we doing when we watch a movie? etc.

Final Frontier of Science

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000

We are the final frontier. The Guardian asks leading scientists what they think will be the next revolution in science. (It’s almost a trend, spawning books like The Next Fifty Years.)

First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren’t special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection. Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. So what’s next? What will be the fourth revolution?

‘We will invent our successors’ – Seth Shostak
‘We will understand the human mind’ – John Sulston
‘The existence of parallel universes’ – Michio Kaku
‘We will change our genetic makeup’ – Norbert Gleicher
‘We will find out if we are alone’ – Colin Pillinger
‘Humans become a collective intelligence’ – John Barrow
‘We’ll understand thoughts and feelings’ – Steven Pinker
‘The end of the individual’ – Susan Greenfield
‘What if God lives in a part of our brain?’ – Nancy Rothwell
‘What it means to be a person’ – V S Ramachandran
‘Conscious machines’ – Igor Aleksander
‘Higher dimensions’ – Lisa Randall
‘Humans are less miraculous than we thought’ – Stephen Wolfram

Brain scan technology

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 12:00:00 +0000

What we can do with brain scans today.

The Brain and Turing Machines

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 12:00:00 +0000

Excellent kuro5hin article on the brain and Turing machines. While on brains, kuro5hin also talks about geniuses.

Machiavellian Intelligence

Sat, 21 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

The Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis says that the brain evolved more for its social purpose, than for finding food and things like that. Incidentally, Google’s collection on evolution is as comprehensive as ever.