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In Your Brain at Work, David Rock explains his ARIA model of insight (here demontrated by detective Holmes).
Some of the keys; - relax your mind - continue to scan for strategies and patterns, avoiding details - keep the 'problem to be solved' very simply articulated in your mind.

I picked up 'The Art of Seduction' recently. It offers a fresh and provocative perspective for marketers in this age of social engagement. Here's a few juicy tips from a section entitled Stirring Interest and Desire.

After thumbing through a Kindle sample of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, I visited Woofstock, a dog lover's paradise held in downtown Toronto. It was a wonderful study in pet lover culture, and I couldn't resist creating a few persona sketches from the event.

I just read an interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and loved this particular insight about confidence.
"Confidence is certainly mental, but it's not a mindset in the sense that it's always present. Confidence is a situational expectation – an expectation of a positive outcome. And that expectation leads to all kinds of investments in making that outcome come true."
It explains the success of uber con man Frank Abagnale Jr., as chronicled in the film Catch Me if you Can. The authors of the Invisible Gorilla point to his brash confidence as the key to his effectiveness.
After being caught and jailed, Abagnale was eventually hired by the FBI; even incarceration didn't extinguish his 'applied' confidence.

The Invisible Gorilla explores the idea of flashbulb memories; recollections that tend to remain mentally accessible for longer due to how they were initially 'captured'. The image below outlines a few of the requisite conditions, based on one of America's most flashbulbed collective memories.
As communicators, we can leverage the brain's tendency to record (more positive) memories through this phenomenon, if we're prepared to fuel-inject excitement, drama and relevancy into our branded experiences.

The past decade of my career, as Marv from Sin City.

During my morning run, I watched a sparrow become increasingly frustrated by its uncooperative breakfast.
The scene reminded me of the challenge of feedback loops in systems, as discussed by Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems.
The difficulty of feedback lags and subsequent overshoot adjustments was beautifully demonstrated in this graceful dance. The pattern went on for so long that they flew out of my field of vision.

In the Invisible Gorilla, authors Simons and Chabris leverage their now famous study on 'inattentional blindness' to remind us to be wary of our intuition.
The study hinges on a video in which two teams are playing basketball, one dressed in black, the other in white. The viewer is asked to count the passes made by the black clad team. While this is happening, a student dressed in a gorilla suit walks through the game.
50% of people doing the test do not see the gorilla.
The authors prove that we often don't perceive what we see.
This leads me to believe that a huge portion of our marketing goes unnoticed, even when it's in plain view, as our consumers continue to be hyper-distracted in an always-on culture.

Dale Carnegie who literally wrote the book on personal influence, instructed readers to pause between chapters to impliment the learnings. Continuing the idea thread from my previous post, I believe there is no better way to read an 'actionable' book.