hex bases all of its work on a detailed research and often initiates original research projects which are always conducted in partnership with fun and clever people.

Here are some projects, more will be announced here soon.

Early in 2010, I was going through my old business files when I noticed something intriguing. I had recently read a stack of old books on Cold Reading, a set of cunning techniques used for centuries by fortune tellers and fairground psychics and as I sat reading through reports on markets and businesses by various consultancies, think tanks, market analysts, futurologists, and business gurus I saw signs of these old psychological techniques showing through.

Now I didn’t think that the writers were necessarily using Cold Reading deliberately – many people who believe themselves to be genuinely psychic use the techniques subconsciously – but the signs were definitely there. It occurred to me that much of the original psychological research into how Cold Reading works with individual people could be repeated with organizations and businesses. I contacted a friend at a US University who specializes in large-scale research projects and we devised a series of experiments to test how organizations would respond to Cold Reading. Would they be fooled by our Cold Business techniques?

This research is ongoing and is, for obvious reasons, still under wraps but I can report that it has involved over 500 companies in the US and Europe to date and that they have proven to be very vulnerable to the Cold Business techniques we devised. Despite the fact that we did no true analysis of the companies involved they believed our report to be, on average, 85% accurate. Large companies have proved more susceptible than small companies and we are looking into why this may be.

Based on this ongoing research we are creating tools for weeding out the common deceptions that mislead companies into believing that spurious analysis is relevant and important for their business.

I’ve had an interest in how memory works since I was told that the reason I always had to be narrator in the I school nativity play was that I had a very good memory.

As a performer I have used a number of traditional memory acts and found some of the skills I developed helped me as a student at University. Later, when I began teaching at Universities, I passed the skills on to my students.

Many of the old memory systems have fallen out of favor because it is believed, quite rightly, that it is better for a student to understand something than to simply learn it by rote. You won’t find anyone who agrees more strongly with this than me, and much of my work with Metaphorical Modeling is based on this belief, but there is a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Some of the traditional systems do more than encourage rote learning, instead they help to build a framework for remembering different thing in different ways and for weaving our memories together in a way that increases our ability to remember and recall. Even more importantly they provide methods for bringing memories and thoughts together in such a way that original ideas are sparked. They are not just tools for remembering they are tools for thinking.

The increase in the use of Brain Training games over the last 5 years meant that I worked on some University-based research into their effectiveness (they aren’t very effective unfortunately) and on some development pitches for TV and Radio shows based on their use. I began to combine the effective modern methods of memory training that I found with the traditional methods used by mnemonists and other memory artists. This combination is what I teach in my Sticky Brain Seminars.

Then, in 2007, I was diagnosed with CFS/ME and it took me some time to recover and to manage the effects of the illness. One of the symptoms is know as fibrofog, a fuzziness of the brain that affects cognitive abilities including focus, visualization, and memory. I found this symptom particularly infuriating but I found that practicing the memory methods helped me to recover more quickly than expected.

I’ve shared some of the techniques with other CFS/ME sufferers and they have reported some benefits. Next I’d like to conduct trials that test the application of the techniques more broadly and rigorously. This research is in its early stages and I’m looking for opinions, guidance and advice from experts so please feel free to contact me if you have experience in this area.