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Mind Writing

The hidden science of making words work

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Rob Ashton Rob Ashton

Why we miss our biggest mistakes

Take heart if you’ve ever missed an embarrassing typo. Given the science of how we read, it’s a miracle we ever spot them at all.

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Rob Ashton Rob Ashton

Mind reading for beginners

We develop the ability to see things from someone else’s point of view in early childhood. Yet typing on screen may leave us less able to use it as adults.

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Rob Ashton Rob Ashton

They’re listening to their tune, not yours

The inner monologue is the background music to our moods, generating emotions that drive our choices most of the time. You haven’t a hope of influencing someone’s decision without first changing what they’re saying to themselves. And logic won’t cut it.

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Rob Ashton Rob Ashton

Why we need information hygiene too [original research]

More people are turning to the media to reduce uncertainty. But new research suggests this could be doing us more harm than good. Our study of the world’s largest database of online news media has revealed a huge spike in the use of highly emotive words in headlines over the last five months.

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Rob Ashton Rob Ashton

The communication secrets that put a man on the moon

Fifty years ago today, three men were sitting on top of a missile, hurtling up into the inky void, travelling the 240,000 miles (384,400 kilometres) to the moon. The Saturn V rocket propelling them had contained almost 2,000 tonnes of fuel when it left the launchpad in Florida just three days earlier

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Rob Ashton Rob Ashton

How Trump’s tweets and speech pattern hypnotise his followers

This is not a political blog and I’m not a political expert, so I won’t offer an opinion on Donald Trump’s suitability for the role of US president. But what I will offer is what I believe is one major reason he’s still in the Oval Office and evidently still popular with many people – something that certainly puzzles many commentators.

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