Tag Archives: psychology

In the Future, Dreams Will Be in High-Definition

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Image by aye_shamus via Flickr: i sleep in black and white, but i dream in color

I’ve often wondered exactly how films and television affect the way we dream. Growing up, I remember hearing that most people dreamed in black and white. This was something that made no sense to me. My dreams were in colour. All of my friends dreams were in colour. It was only adults who claimed to have dreams in black and white, and there was something very sad about the idea that as we aged it was possible that the colour would be drained out of even our dreams.

As I got older, though, and continued to dream in colour, I suspected that people who dreamed in black and white did so because they were used to black and white television and films. Dreams, after all, are like movies in our heads. This has always been the case for me, at least. Dreams even tend to use devices like close-up, slow motion, and change of perspective that are common in film, but totally foreign to our everyday experience with vision. It seemed reasonable to me that the brain was borrowing from these media to make our dreams, so if someone thought of films as being in black and white, they would dream in black and white, but if they thought of films as being in colour, their dreams would be in colour as well.

A new study from Ewa Murzyn, a post-grad student at the University of Dundee seems to have verified exactly that. People who grew up with black and white television dream in black and white, those who didn’t mostly don’t. Now I want more in-depth studies about how the media primes our dreams. Do people who never watch scary movies have scary dreams? What about the correlation between pornography viewing and sex dreams? Do people who play a lot first-person shooters have murderous dreams? Is there any way we can find out what dreams were like in the golden age of radio?

One thing I’m fairly certain of is that my son will grow up having dreams in beautiful colour and high-definition. That’s a lovely thought.

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The Psychology of Comfortable Air Travel

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The Singapore Airlines Suites

Robert N. Charette at IEEE Spectrum has a terrific interview with James Boyd, Singapore Airlines’ vice president of public relations for the Americas, about the thinking and psychology that goes into the design of Singapore Airlines’ customer experience.

Below are some of the highlights.

On the In-flight entertainment system:

In-flight entertainment is not just about providing you with music and movies; it also fits into the psychology of how we create a satisfied passenger. This is a business where consumers who are used to having a tremendous amount of control in their lives have to give up most of that sense of control.

Airlines tell you when you have to come to the airport, when you can board, when the aircraft is going to leave, how long it’s going to be aloft, and when you can get out of your seat, and that creates an enormous amount of stress for passengers. From a psychological perspective, we use the IFE system as a means of providing almost the illusion of control for the passenger.

If you can start, stop, pause, and rewind from a broad slate of options, it gives you something very specific to do. More important than that, it gives you a way to exercise control over your environment. We find that that is a really critical tool for helping to create a more satisfied passenger.

On the sommelier service:

The primary benefit of the wine program and the sommelier training our cabin crew go through is in creating a credible point of interaction between the passengers and the crew. You can have a discussion about the wine, we can set up a little impromptu tasting for you, or our cabin crew can speak intelligently from an educated perspective about what it is that they’re pouring and why this might be a better selection for the meal you selected from the menu.

So those few moments of credible, appropriate interaction between the cabin crew and the passenger are basically built around the “prop” of wine. Obviously, it’s important that we serve quality wine, because it supports the brand, et cetera, but in the same way that the entertainment system helps create a satisfied passenger by giving them control over their experience, the wine program creates that point of interaction that makes people feel that they have been looked after in a credible way.

In contrast, my understanding is that at Air Canada, they use an in-depth psychlogical study to determine exactly how rude and incompetent they can be before customers snap, then they back off from that line just a little bit.

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