Great, how am I supposed to remember all of this?
You don’t have to. But you can start by remembering these four giant problems our brains have evolved to deal with over the last few million years (and maybe bookmark this page if you want to occasionally reference it for the exact bias you’re looking for):

1. Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.
2. Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.
3. Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.
4. This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.

"Deloitte explains cognitive technology as a product of "the field of artificial intelligence" and says that cognitive technologies "are able to perform tasks that only humans used to be able to do. Examples of cognitive technologies include computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, speech recognition and robotics."

Applications of cognitive technology reside in three main categories:

1. Product applications: Use the technology in a product or service to make it more effective and valuable to the customer.

2. Process applications: Use the technology to automate or improve operational workflow.

3. Insight applications: Specifically advanced analytical capabilities are used to uncover insights for improvement or development.

Many startups have taken to marketing automation platforms which are powered by cognitive technology on a very light scale. At the same time, advanced marketers are starting to use cognitive technology in their marketing campaigns, with the aim of creating delightful customer experiences and increasing revenue."

Digital marketers, accustomed to using software that helps them think about marketing, are now transitioning to a time when software will do much of the thinking. It’s called cognitive marketing, and research firm IDC expects that half of all companies will use this emerging generation of computer intelligence for their marketing and sales efforts by 2020.

IDC Research Manager Gerry Murray predicts that just a year from now, the current group of several dozen applications employing cognitive computing will become “hundreds.” Such applications, he told me, utilize “processes akin to the human brain, [by] taking signals and drawing conclusions.”

The converging drivers — massive computing power, massive amounts of data and a booming population of connected devices and sensors — are of course instrumental in delivering this new kind of marketing. Equally important is the ability to deliver cloud-based services, as most marketing services do these days — except that the cloud occupant here may well be IBM’s Watson supercomputer, or an equivalent, communicating through an API to the operational platform, also in the cloud.