The Real Job of New Year’s Resolutions

Does anybody make New Year’s resolutions any more? Did anybody ever make New Year’s resolutions? Did anybody ever seriously intend to keep New Year’s resolutions? Why do we keep hearing about New Year’s resolutions?

I can answer that last question. It is because we keep following the news in the New Year’s season. I like to imagine the News Desk. A place where news is generated on slow news days. Or, for the end of the year, slow news seasons. After all, you need some copy to keep the denture ads separated from the laxative ads. So the News Desk creates news when there are no reporters around to develop stories. You get things like “The Top Ten Resolutions of 2006.”

Does anybody seriously intend to keep New Year’s resolutions? More wandering in the wonderful world of words. We don’t care what just anybody intends. I care what I intend. You care what you intend. We care what certain other people intend. And we don’t care about ever, or 2006. We care about here, now, in this moment.

Remarkably, psychologists can give a reasonably clear and simple answer to the question of what a person intends at the moment. As usual, the answer starts with a question: “What are your plans?” If a person genuinely intends, the person will have concrete and credible plans. If there are no plans, there is no intent. Wishes, maybe, but no intent.

There is a trick about planning. You can’t really plan not to do something. Since resolutions a generally about what is wrong with somebody, they are often about stopping that bad habit. That keeps resolutions safely in the world of words. You can easily talk about stopping a habit.

But try on that image. You are about to do something and suddenly you stop. Freeze frame! This works in movies and videos. In the real world of events, however, things go on, something happens. What do you want to change? What will you do instead? That, of course, is what takes planning. And planning takes effort. Personally, I’ve just resolved to stick to talking about resolutions. Not much effort there. After all, I had to breath, anyway.

Time travel with your brain

People saw pictures and later tried to recall what they had seen… the study showed that the participants' brain state gradually aligned with their brain state from when they first studied the pictures. The study was conducted by Dr. Kenneth Norman and reported in the Dec. 23 issue of Science… participants studied images in three categories -- celebrity faces, famous locations and common objects -- and then attempted to recall the images. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captured the participants' brain activity patterns as they studied the images. The researchers then trained a computer program to distinguish between the patterns of brain activity associated with studying faces, locations or objects.

The fMRI later tracked participants' brain activity as they recalled the images to see how well it matched the patterns associated with the initial viewing of the images. … patterns of brain activity for specific categories, such as faces, started to emerge approximately five seconds before subjects recalled items from that category -- suggesting that participants were bringing to mind the general properties of the images in order to cue for specific details. Science Daily
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This is excellent research. But first, here is a line I cut from the report. “This supports the theory that memory retrieval is a form of mental time travel.” Good for a laugh. At least for those who understand the difference between a scientific theory and a reporter’s metaphor.

What the research showed was that the people were using different brain modules to store the different kinds of images. Prior evidence suggested that these kinds of images would be store in different modules. The researchers were confirming the conclusion and demonstrating that fMRI and the pattern analysis could distinguish among the modules.

They were also demonstrating that retrieval from memory is based on activating the same modules that were active in storage. Just as with a computer. You write something to disk; you go back to the same address to retrieve it. But this research demonstrated that fMRI could observe the read and write operation in the brain.

The study reinforces what psychologists have long known about memory. If you want to remember something that you have learned, use your imagination to go back to the time and place when you learned it. Use your imagination to look around that place for cues.

(If you are going to do this on a TV show, you bring in an actor who is supposed to be a hypnotist. The actor goes through impressive rituals and says what I just said in the previous paragraph. The other actor, who is trying to remember, follows the instructions and comes up with an amazing recall. The hypnotist is mainly a dramatic device to present mental activity on TV. If you don’t have a hypnotist, just imagine one. This may not work as well as on TV, but that’s because they have a better script.)

The study also reinforces what psychologists have said about cueing a future memory. Imagine when and where you are going to recall the memory. Imagine what you will see, hear, and do just before you need the memory.

If you like, you can imagine that you are powering up the brain modules that you need for the time, the place, and the job. Or you can imagine that these brain jobs are mental time travel. A visit to the future may be just what you need to get ready.

Your brain modules at work

People with chronic pain were able to influence the pain by controlling activity in one of the pain centers of the brain. With new technology called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or rtfMRI, researchers arranged for the people to watch "live" action images of an area of the brain responsible for processing pain. They used various mental strategies in a (successful) effort to influence the activity in that area and to alter their perception of the pain.

"We believe these subjects and patients really learned to control their brain and, through that, their pain," said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, assistant professor of anesthesia and co-author of the study to be published in the Dec. 12 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mackey said extensive controls were used in the study to make sure the results reflected a direct correlation between brain imaging and pain control. He warns that much more work is needed before the procedure can be used clinically.
Science Daily
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Earlier work had identified the particular region of the brain as important in processing pain. What this research showed is that “mental strategies” can influence this processing and thus the perception of pain. The research did not show that any particular “mental strategies” were generally effective. The people were apparently using the information about brain activity to tailor strategies to suit their needs. So this study will not provide any legitimate basis for people to market books and tapes that offer “mental strategies” to cure whatever ails you.

But there are more general implications for understanding brain modules. When people think of mental experiences as materializing from nothing, they may reasonable suppose that nothing can be done to influence them. But, as this study illustrates, mental experiences correspond to particular parts of the brain. Like muscles, those brain parts can warn up, get tired, operate without your attention, and change with practice. Unlike muscles, you can’t see them operate. You do see them operate in your mental experience, but you may not recognize their work.

Like muscles, you brain modules will do a reasonably good job with no special attention. And, like muscles, you can get somewhat better use out of them with a little special attention. You can think of that special attention as your collection of “mental strategies.”

How would you gather that collection of mental strategies? How do you know what to eat? You watch what other people eat. You notice their reactions. You smell it. You taste it. If you like it, you eat it. If you don’t like it you try something else. The Thinkerer has a starter set of strategies in the Tools venue. Free. Some of them are quick and easy. A brain buffet. Ready for sampling. Think of it as a “mental strategy” for exploring what works for your brain modules.

Happy success

Review of Research Challenges Assumption That Success Makes People Happy (Science Daily)
From a review of 225 studies in the current issue of Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), lead author Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., of the University of California, Riverside found that chronically happy people are in general more successful across many life domains than less happy people and their happiness is in large part a consequence of their positive emotions rather than vice versa.
When people feel happy, they tend to feel confident, optimistic, and energetic…

Does success cause happiness? Or does happiness cause success? Well, you couldn’t get a publication out of the discovery that succeeding makes a person happy. You can get one out of a demonstration that being happy tends to make for success. My reaction: 225 studies (over 200,000 subjects), and not a word that tells me what to do here in this moment.

Of course, if I am happy, this news would make me feel confident, optimistic, and energetic. That should make me happy. But then, I was already happy, so I didn’t need this news.

And if I am not happy, this news should convince me that I am even worse off than I thought: an unhappy loser. This discovery is not going to make me confident, optimistic, and energetic.

“Nothing to be done,” to quote Estragon (Waiting for Godot), speaking for the unhappy people. But who will speak for the happy people? The ones who are confident, optimistic, and energetic. Here are a few whose help I acknowledged in the Thinkerer: Captain James Tiberius Kirk, of the starship Enterprise; Mr. Spock; Luke Skywalker; Obi-Wan Kenobi; Yoda; Dorothy and her friends in Oz; Bilbo Baggins; Walter Mitty; Perseus, Son of Zeus; The Little Engine That Could; Rocky Balboa.

All fictional, you say? No. All mythical. All representing the millions of real people to whom “Nothing to be done.” is a challenge rather than a wall. All representing the part of the personality (or brain module) that I call the Hunter. The Hunter is (you guessed it) confident, optimistic, and energetic. Is that the same as being happy?

I think you need one more trick to feel chronically happy. You need to be able to sic your Hunter on long term goals that you consider important. Will you be happy then? You will probably be too busy to notice unless some psychologist comes along to ask whether your happiness is causing your success. Feel free to answer that you are too busy to talk to psychologists right now.

Internet May Aid In Treating Panic Sufferers

Internet-based treatments for sufferers of panic disorder may be just as effective as face-to-face methods, a study by Monash University (Australia) researchers has found. Project Co-ordinator, Dr Litza Kiropoulos, said the results supported a new method of treatment for sufferers of panic disorder that was convenient and flexible to people throughout Australia. The study shows that Internet-based treatments may be just as effective as face-to-face methods. Preliminary results, based on more than two years of research, showed that Internet therapy was comparable with face-to-face treatment in reducing disturbing thoughts and improving stress and anxiety.

When undertaking Internet-based therapy, sufferers of panic disorder have an initial face-to-face consultation with a psychologist and are then in regular email contact with the therapist… Science Daily.
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“You’ve got treatment!” Not just for Sleepless in Seattle. Also for Panicked in Perth and Anxious in Adelaide.

And the advantage is not just in helping the rural population. This cuts the cost. A psychologist can handle far more clients via e-mail. The treatment was cognitive behavior therapy. That is rather like education and training. So it is reasonable to think that communication methods that prove effective for education and training may also work with cognitive-behavior therapy.

Now for some speculation: People may benefit from some education and training about themselves. Say, for example, about their cognition and behavior. They could do that on the web also. On their own. Without having anything wrong with them. Maybe just curious. Maybe just ambitious. Maybe just wanting to get a little better at what they do. That, at least, is the concept behind such sites as the ABCs of self-help, Psych Central, and the Thinkerer.

The Canters and the Power of Yet

Don Dansereau teaches a class in the Mini-University offered to parents by TCU. He has summarized his main points for the Thinkerer:
http://thinkerer.org/Parenting/ParNewLight.htm

I elaborated on one of his points in an earlier blog. Here I take up another:

Children’s attitudes about themselves and others may be distorted due to a lack of brain maturity when they are formed. Unfortunately these attitudes can be self-sustaining. They create expectations, which lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, children who have had bad early experiences with math because of lack of brain development may create self-images that lead them to avoid or give up on math courses even if their brains are now capable of handling this material.

“I can’t” is built into childhood. And growing up demands changing can’t into can in many contexts. Parents and educators are familiar with this need. The theme is represented in the Thinkerer by the Canters. And it is not limited to children. Nor is brain development the only rate limiting factor.

In dealing with children who can’t, adults routinely bring in the power of Yet. “Maybe you can’t do that yet.” The limitation may be in brain development, lack of practice, or some combination. No matter. With time and practice, the child will probably master all the common skills of growing up.

Does the power of yet apply to adults? Only when they want it to. Only when they judge that the skill is worth the time and effort to get the skill. Only when they do not think of themselves as a finished product. Only as long as they can say of themselves, “I am not finished yet.”

“And a little child shall lead them.” Why did I think of that quote right here?

A Brief on Stress

To Survive Stress, Keep it Brief. By Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, Special to the Washington Post

Among the potential stressors in modern life are news articles that warn you about a threat but don’t give practical advice on what to do about it. To my surprise, I found that the article is not one of those.

The essence of the article is that brief stress (promptly resolved) is invigorating and empowering. That’s why people pay to ride a roller coaster. The resolution releases transmitters in the brain that are sensed as pleasure and satisfaction.
Persistent stress, however, is debilitating. You want to avoid it. But don’t get stressed out worrying about why you can’t avoid it. Start by understanding how stress becomes persistent.

According to Robert Sapolsky (Stanford University) the main reason is that humans can use imagination, memory and language to create psychological stress in the absence of any real threat. I would add empathy and learning by observation to those human skills that can build psychological stress.

So what do you do about it? Once you understand what it is, you are beginning to deal with it. Simply recognizing it may make it easier to turn this kind of stress into productive stimulation, Sapolsky said. Meditation, Sapolsky said, can focus the mind and bring the roots of your stress into awareness. For some, merely taking stock can do the same.

Here are two pages in the Thinkerer that might help.
Skills of Self
Tranquility Base

A cure for game addiction

A few weeks ago, I commented on technology from Applied Cognitive Engineering. They offer a computer game adapted for training basketball players. The technology, Cognitive Simulation, is derived from a technology originally developed for the Israeli Air Force.

The stated learning objectives of this system were

• Decision-making
• Execution
• Shot selection
• Team play
• Movement anticipation & Pattern recognition
• Heightened court sense Peripheral vision

Connect this list to another recent item in this blog about ignoring useless information. The flip side of ignoring useless information is focusing on important information. Put those two together and they probably fit with several of the learning objectives above.

Now consider two more items from a report on Video Game Training by David Kushner

Dr. James Rosser Jr. of the Advanced Medical Technologies Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York: "Surgeons who play video games three hours a week have 37 percent fewer errors and accomplish tasks 27 percent faster."

NASA senior research scientist Dr. Alan Pope hooked gamers up to an EEG machines to monitor the brain activity and adjusted the controllers so that maximum steering control was only available if the player produced a particular brainwave showing intense concentration. The results: gamers, including some with ADD, improved their concentration skills.

Concentration is probably another name for focusing on important information. And for ignoring useless information. And for knowing the difference. The evidence here suggests that these skills are useful, trainable by computer games, and measurable by EEG. One could use the measurements to evaluate the effectiveness of various computer games in developing the skill.

How well such skills would transfer to other tasks would also require investigation. But given that you can measure effectiveness directly, you could work first on improving the effectiveness of the game in developing the skill. Then a test of transfer would get you more information.

How would this cure game addiction? Simple. We call it training. That’s good for you. Maybe you can get really engaged in things that are good for you. But the headlines won't call it addiction. Therapists won't offer to cure you. Senators won't try to protect you from it.

Now can we cure the media of name addiction?

Brain modules and sex

Well, sex differences, at least. News people never miss a chance to put sex in a headline. So I won’t miss the chance either.

New research from the University of Alberta shows that men and women utilize different parts of their brains while they perform the same tasks. The results of the research are reported this month in the journal NeuroImage.

The study involved volunteers who performed memory tasks, verbal tasks, visual spatial tasks and simple motor tasks while their brain activity was monitored with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology.

"It is widely recognized that there are differences between males and females, but finding that different regions of the brain are activated in men and women in response to the same task has large potential implications for a variety of different clinical situations," said Dr. Peter Silverstone, a psychiatrist at the U of A and an author of the study.
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=002000001PHC

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And not just for clinical situations. But the important point for more general purposes is that people can do “the same task” with different brain modules. There are other studies suggesting that differences in experience and practice also lead to such differences. Skilled musicians apparently handle music with brain structures not heavily used by amateurs.

In general, extended practice (psychologists call it “overlearning”) with a skill probably produces changes in the brain structures (modules) that manage the skill. Consider the statement “Beginners look down the rapids and see the rocks. Experts look down the rapids and see the flow around the rocks.” Connect this statement with my discussion last week about ignoring irrelevant information.

In this case, relevant information changes with experience. If I am a beginner, I see the rocks. They are scary. They tell me to stay out of these rapids. Sometimes you get better advice from rocks than from the people around you. As long as I am focusing on the rocks and threat they pose, I probably should run the rapids only with an expert in control of the canoe.

To the expert, the relevant information is the flow around the rocks. That is where the canoe is going. The expert looks at the rapids and calls up the Hunter. The Hunter is the part of the brain that focuses on the relevant information for reaching the target. And provides the short-term motivation to go for the goal.

We can’t expect fMRI studies on people running rapids. We can expect them on people running simulated rapids in computer games. I am confident that such studies would show big differences in the brain structures used by people with different levels of experience. It is possible that males typically have more experience than females with this kind of task. If so, we would also find sex differences in people who are apparently performing “the same” task.

In this case, we might find experience differences or sex differences, depending on what we looked for. Differences due to practice could be larger than differences due to sex. They might be of less interest in clinical contexts. They might be of much greater interest in learning contexts. Somebody will organize research on that in due time. It probably won’t get as much press. “Brain modules and learning” is not a catchy headline.

How we are curing our news addiction

News Item: Hooked on the Web: Help Is on the Way (New York Times)

Dr.Grohol is mad again. And again about addiction. (World of Psychology)

Only last month he was complaining about the recent discovery that computer games are addicting. Now he is complaining about a recent discovery by the New York Times that the web itself is addicting. The Times has discovered that people “…spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.” (That’s instead of reading the New York Times, I might add.)

The Times is always careful to cite its sources: ‘”mental health professionals who support the diagnosis of internet addiction.” One of the things I admire about the mental health profession is that they rarely find a new disorder without finding a treatment that they are ready to provide. At a few hundred dollars an hour. One of the things I admire about reporters is the care they take to match their (unnamed) sources to the content of the report. You check the article and you will find that the “mental health professionals who support the diagnosis of internet addiction” said just what you would expect them to say.

Before the Internet Addiction, we had the Television Addiction. I Googled the phrase “television addiction” and found nearly 25,000 pages. But there is hope. The Internet Addiction promises to cure the Television Addiction, according to internet experts. A Google on “internet addiction” produced more than 450,000 returns. (Google hype factor 450000/25000=18.) Thus, Internet Addiction is 18 times more important than Television Addiction according to research by internet experts.

But wait! There’s more! Internet Addiction is also curing News Addiction according to internet experts. People who get their news via the internet generally get it from a source like Yahoo, where they can see the headlines and the first few lines. Usually that tells them that they can ignore the rest of the story.

Soon someone (probably Google or Digg) will automate the ignore process, according to internet experts. You will set up a personalized ignore list. News stories with key words on your ignore list will be excluded from your news pages. (A few of my picks: addiction, face transplant, avian flu, New York Times). Later someone will offer stats on the items in the ignore lists. That will give the opposite of the Hype Factor. The Bore Factor. The Hype Factor and the Bore Factor, taken together at mealtimes will cure News addiction according to internet experts.

Who are these internet experts I keep talking about? Nobody. I just made them up. Since I didn’t cite the source, no one can do fact-checking on me. It makes writing a story much easier. And my invented sources always say what fits my story. Of course, reporters would never use imaginary, unidentified sources. Would they?

But I am not one to complain about these empty news stories. Why, it seems like only last week I was writing about how ignoring irrelevant information aids memory. Come to think of it, that was last week. I can remember that because I ignored the irrelevant information around it.

I believe people can learn to filter out and ignore irrelevant information, to the benefit of their memories. But it takes practice. So I am grateful to news media like the New York Times for offering the people so much information to ignore.

Ignoring useless information aids memory

Headline: Discovery disproves simple concept of memory as 'storage space'

As I read this news release, I realized that I could save storage space in my brain by ignoring useless information. So in this case, I have included long passages of what I consider useless information. I have put those passages in italics to make it easier for the reader to ignore the information and thus save memory.

(In other posts, I have simply cut out this information when excerpting a story. Of course, I didn’t know why I was doing that until I came upon this discovery. Now I realize that I was trying to help my readers save memory.)

From the story, useless information in italics: Even if you could get more RAM for your brain, the extra storage probably wouldn't make it easier for you to find where you left your car keys.

What may help, according to a discovery published Nov. 24 in the journal Nature, is a better bouncer – as in the type of bouncer who manages crowd control for nightclubs. The study by Edward Vogel, an assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon, is the first to demonstrate that awareness, or "visual working memory," depends on your ability to filter out irrelevant information.

"Until now, it's been assumed that people with high capacity visual working memory had greater storage but actually, it's about the bouncer – a neural mechanism that controls what information gets into awareness," Vogel said.

The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person's memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia.

(It’s been assumed? By whom? This phrase is an example of what I call the passive evasive voice. It lets you make an assertion without taking responsibility for knowing the source. I doubt that any psychologists have ever made this assumption. To see what informed people really think about the relation between memory capacity and intelligence, read “Inside the mind of a Savant” in the December, 2005, issue of Scientific American.

(In any case, all this talk about a scientific discovery that overturns previously held beliefs is pure hype. And hype is useful to publicists. But not to readers.)

The study used a new technique for measuring brainwaves, developed by Vogel and previously reported in Nature (April 2004), which allows researchers to record the effects as objects pop into the minds of their subjects on a moment-by-moment basis.

(Sounds like mind-reading, does it?)

…Vogel recorded brain activity as people performed computer tasks asking them to remember arrays of colored squares or rectangles. In one experiment, researchers told subjects to hold in mind two red rectangles and ignore two blue ones. Without exception, high-capacity individuals excelled at dismissing blue, but low-capacity individuals held all of the rectangles in mind.

(The actual data gives reasonable support to the general conclusion. It is good research and did not need the hype. The real information is in the graphic results included in the reference below. To my disappointment, I did not find anything about objects popping into people’s minds.

(The conclusion about filtering out irrelevant information has been widely accepted since the early days of Gestalt psychology about 75 years ago. What Vogel has reported is a paradigm that shows the effects of filtering out irrelevant information on observable brain activity. That paradigm might be used, for example, to measure the effects of training on such filtering.)

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/uoo-dds111805.php