Live from Congility: The biological imperative for intelligent content

The biological imperative for intelligent content: Why nature says we should give content more agility, by Noz Urbina

The problem: Constant change. How can we keep up?

This session will move us from reactive to empathetic and proactive.

• Newton had to create new words
• He was describing things never before described
• Digital communication is forcing us to change the way we describe the world
• We’re talking about things we’ve never done before

Information and the mind

• We make sense of things that don’t immediately mean anything
• Even babies can see a shape chasing another and begin rooting for the victor – they immediately make sense of what they see
• An illusion: when your internal semantic model doesn’t match the outside world
• Our models and processing (clearly) aren’t perfect

Sense vs. sense

• Thinking System 1
  • Fast and effortless (semantic memory)
  • “In the zone”
  • Non-rational
• Thinking System 2
  • Thinking “consciously”
  • Words and numbers
• Often we can do both
• Trying to do both at once sometimes is tough though
  • Walking + doing math = people will stop doing one!
  • It’s a system of prioritization (usually prioritizing System 1)
  • When we search for an address, we turn down the music (reduce the cognitive load)
• Memory trumps experience
  • “The remembering self is a storyteller” -Daniel Kahneman
  • The ending is remembered more strongly than the middle

There is a ladder of understanding

• The ladder of understanding:
  • Experience – I see Jerry, we get drunk, I feel bad the next day
  • Memory – I remember this
  • Pattern – It happens regularly, I notice a pattern
  • Categories – I categorize this as “bad idea”
  • Models – It becomes a model of “spending time with Jerry is a bad idea”
  • Identity – I begin thinking “Jerry’s a jerk”
• The farther up the ladder, the harder it is to recover
  • One bad experience is easy to overwrite
  • A bad identify takes a TON of experiences to overwrite
  • This is why racism exists – it’s also why branding (GOOD branding) is important
• Social media mimics the brain
  • The brain rewards with dopamine when we understand things, to make us more susceptible to learning new things
  • Social media rewards with likes and related things you might like to mimic this

Your creators and customers will internalize your models

• Onboarding can make use of how the brain rewards learning new tasks
• System 1 in the brain looks for models and structure
• Semantic content fits into this perfectly – it gives us the models and structure we’re looking for
  • Simplified model of a complex reality
• The brain also tried to remove information that doesn’t fit the current belief system
  • System 2 is what works hard to get new information in
  • This is why we need to create content for both System 1 (that aligns) and System 2 (to think deeper)
• So we need to
  • Give users the semantic models they need
  • Use semantic markup in content
  • Measure user memory of whole journeys
  • Experience is a means to the memory afterwords