LISNews: Librarian News

I just finished reading a New York Times article entitled “Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally” that came out a few days ago. Librarians certainly talk about how information is organized and how it can be accessed, and so I thought this article relates well in talking about how the brain (our ultimate end user) perceives information. It is part of an psychological field called embodied cognition.

Notable quote:

“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

We talk about how information is presented all the time, but this brings it to a whole new level. Should we be designing the user experience with these types of body cues in mind? Does this have a viable use in the library at all?