Mind Performance Hacks

Contributors

The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:

• Vaughan Bell has just completed a doctoral course in neuropsychology and is now training as a clinical psychologist. When not trying to figure out what goes wrong with the mind and brain, he writes about human behavior and mental life for magazines, books, journals, and the Web.

• Richard Brzustowicz has worked (in no particular order) as a psychotherapist, consulting librarian (information broker), contract writer and editor, emergency room social worker, teacher of English (in Taiwan and Japan), and minor (hopefully not petty) bureaucrat in the world of research administration. His long-standing interest in the byways of psychology led to his research and writing for George Csicsery's film Hun gry for Monsters (http://www.zalafilms.com/films/hungryformonsters.html), about a family caught up in a storm of ritual abuse accusations.

• James Crook is a software engineer who has worked on satellite operating systems, drug discovery, electrical network monitoring, and inside, above, and below TCP/IP stacks. He has a long-standing and deep interest in the mind.

• Karl Erickson is a writer.

• Meredith Hale is the education program manager at the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art in Tacoma, Washington. When she's not training docents, writing curricula, and teaching folks about glass and contemporary art, she's working on her master's degree in library and information science. Before committing herself to education, she was a local NPR reporter and a TV news producer, researching and writing stories for air. Although she has written many curricula, news broadcasts, articles for museum publications, and children's book reviews, this is her first time contributing to a real-live book.

• Lion Kimbro is famous for writing "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think." He is a Free Software and Free Culture activist, thinker, and programmer. He currently works on wiki and collaboration software.

• Moses Klein's principal passion has been mathematics for as long as he can remember. In 1985, he won a bronze medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO). More recently, he has graded papers for the IMO, taught mathematics at three colleges and universities, and translated two advanced math texts from French into English.

• Mark Purtill has degrees in mathematics from Caltech (BS, 1984) and MIT (PhD, 1990) and taught at the college level for several years. Currently, he is a senior developer at The Software Revolution, Inc. In his spare time, he plays games and draws pictures of pigs (http://pigsand toasters.comicgenesis.com).

• Mark Schnitzius has a degree in computer science, and he has been writing software ever since his father brought home a KIM-1 in 1977. Since then, he has worked at the Kennedy Space Center, the Pentagon, and an on-demand book printing business. He is a six-time winner of the International Obfuscated C Code Competition (http://www.ioccc.org) and currently resides in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and dingo.

• Tom Stafford likes finding things out and writing things down. Several years of doing this in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield resulted in a PhD. Now sometimes he tells people he's a computational cognitive neuroscientist and then talks excitedly about neural networks. Lately he's begun talking excitedly about social networks, too. As well as doing academic research, he has worked as a freelancer, writing and working at the BBC as a documentary researcher. With Matt Webb, he is the author of O'Reilly's Mind Hacks (http://www.mindhacks.com), a book about do-it-at-home demonstrations of how your brain works. He puts things he finds interesting on his web site at http://www.idiolect.org.uk.

• Matt Webb engineers, designs, and works with technology and physical things at Schulze & Webb (http://www.schulzeandwebb.com), for clients and for fun. He is coauthor of O'Reilly's Mind Hacks (http://www.mindhacks.com), a successful cognitive psychology book for a general audience. In the past, he has worked in R&D on social welfare at BBC Radio & Music Interactive on social software, built collaborative online toys, written IM bots, and run a fiction web site (archived at http://iam.upsideclown.com). He keeps his weblog, Interconnected, at http://interconnected.org/home. Matt reads a little too much, likes the word cyberspace, lives in London, and tells his mother he's "in computers."