Alan Alda is awesome. He starred in M*A*S*H. He guest starred on 30 Rock. Somewhere in between he hosted Scientific American Frontiers. Let’s talk about episode 56. You know the one.
Photo by Peter Thoeny via Flickr
Alda visits Harvard University’s Sleep Lab. He dreams that he flies out of his nose. What does it mean? The Sleep Lab doctor explains it this way, “You were just thinking ‘out-of-body, how am I going to get out of body, help me somebody how can I get out-of-body’ and something in your brains says ‘oh your nose.'”
Whether we are asleep or not, the brain is always trying to connect the dots. That’s its job. (Don Norman has a great example. If a subway platform is empty, you might sort out that a train just left.) If you find a great site or app, the designer likely made it easy for visiting ‘brains’ to connect the dots (from beginning, to the middle, to the end goal).