communication

Inspired in Theories of Communication class by reference to an experiment (performed by one Festinger) which shows that performing a behavior has more effect on one's thoughts/feelings about the behavior than do logic, culture, preconcieved notions, etc, I went back and found this link:
Researcher V.S. Ramachandran - has been doing lots of interesting things which I happened to run across (i think he must be friends with Gladwell) regarding understanding self, such as using mirrors to cure phantom-limbs. His site: http://cbc.ucsd.edu/ramabio.html

The radiolab page where I first heard about it: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/03/04

This, as well as the experiment by Festinger, seem to bolster the theory described by John Searle as ephiphenomenalism (which he claimed in one of his books that no philosopher had ever taken seriously), wherein mental states are byproducts of physical processes and don't have any physical repercussions - except perhaps to inhibit actions. The wikipedia article on epiphenomenalism takes the neuroscience a little deeper, but the implication for design/persuasion is clear with just this:
1. frame a goal for a user in terms of avoiding some behavior (not necessarily negative - if the goal is to begin eating more fruit, the designer aims to avoid fixating on the desirability of steak, bread, chips, ... including everything that would fill the user's belly EXCEPT fruit.) As Chuck would put it, 'make it easier to do than to avoid the behavior'.
2. Bring the avoided activity into awareness in the time window where it's up for action but not yet committed to (such as browsing the fridge, headed toward checkout at the supermarket)
3. Distract the user from the avoided behavior (stress, fear, and physical noise are reliable but expensive; music and beauty work as long as there is social order; fascinating puzzles or information work with fewer people but are far cheaper to implement at scale).

This also relates to the work of Humberto Maturana on the evolution of communication at the cellular level.

evolution of hyperlinks

browsing through wikipedia, I wondered who adds all those links down towards the bottom of the page... they're generally pretty thorough, perhaps too much so as they often lead me down an hour's worth of tangential-path exploration during my research. But they're not as interesting or inspiring as Amazon's recommendation engine. Why not have dynamically defined links, based on the frequency with which a user, organization, or other entity uses two pages (and possibly make a hierarchical (info architecture)structure for the wiki based on the groups thereof, calculated through something resembling the matrix clustering method?)?
Disregarding for now the admirable complexity and sophistication of Amazon's suggestion engine(s), this idea essentially suggests making the recommendation method of finding info and experiences mundane, and then merging it with the existing model of 'menus'.