COGNITIVE ENGINEERING & THE SECRET OF THE MODERNS

Think fast. It might be good for you.

2006-09-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

When people are made to think quickly, they report feeling happier as a result. They also say they are more energetic, more creative, more powerful, and more self-assured. In short, they reported a whole set of experiences associated with being "manic."

Fast thinking, or "racing thoughts," is most commonly known as a symptom of the clinical psychiatric disorder of mania (and of the manic part of bipolar disorder or "manic-depression"). But, according to Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin, most healthy people also have experienced racing thoughts at some point in time--perhaps when they are excited about a new idea they have just learned, or when they are brainstorming with a group of people, or even when they lie in bed unable to fall asleep. Pronin and her Harvard colleague Daniel Wegner decided to explore whether inducing people to think fast might lead them to feel some of the other experiences also associated with the manic experience....

The researchers found that regardless of the content of the statements, people felt happier, more energetic, more creative, more powerful, and more grandiose when they read the statements at a fast rather than a slow pace. In fact, the effect of thought speed was just as powerful as the effect of the content of the thoughts. In other words, the speed of people's cognitive processing was just as important as what they processed in determining their mood. Even thinking sad thoughts at a fast pace made people relatively happy.
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Interesting possibilities. We all know that ideation builds excitement and feeds on itself. We even know how to produce ideation--with brainstorming. Now we find that this process works even when psychologists "make" their subjects think rapidly. That is probably the worst way to get the effect. If it works when somebody else makes you do it, think how much better it might work if you have your own way to do it. Actually we do have ways to elicit rapid ideation:

Sprint thinking: Take any word. Shout words that it reminds you of. Do that as fast as you can. Shout the words out loud. If you do this while waiting in line, it may offer the extra advantage of clearing out the line in front of you.

But I said ways, didn't I? Ok. You have 5 minutes to think of variants of the above sprint. Use words like: noun, adjective, verb, cause, result, adverb, image, opposite, fear, joke, odor, taste, place, abstract, and concrete.

Does this really affect your brain? Probably. Somebody will soon use fMRI to observe and describe the effect. But it probably increases blood flow in the parts of the brain that are used for the task. Gives them a warm-up . Might help. Couldn't hurt.

Confidence: The on and off switch

2006-09-11T13:54:00.000-05:00

Women score much lower on math tests if they are first asked unrelated questions about gender issues. ... black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form. ...dozens of other experiments have confirmed that subtly cuing women or minorities to think ... about their sex or race causes them do poorly in areas where the stereotype suggests they are weak.

University of Texas psychologist Matthew S. McGlone wondered if there wasn't another side of the story. What if you prompted people to think about their strengths rather than their stereotypical weaknesses -- would that be enough to improve performance in areas where they weren't supposed to do well?

In a novel set of experiments, McGlone, working with Joshua Aronson of New York University, found that the answer is yes. "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083002858.html?sub=AR

What a novelty! Psychological research turning from what is wrong with the world and finding ways to fix it. Actually, we have known for a long time that what people tell themselves has an important influence on what they do. Especiallly if they don't notice what they are tellling themselves. One way people can deal with that situation is to pay more attention to what they are telling themselves. And whether it is worth believing. And what effect it is having on them.

That is the recommendation I gve in:

How to build self-confidence by doing really easy things.

Watching a brain at work

2006-08-17T12:56:00.000-05:00

Brain Imaging Identifies Best Memorization Strategies
Exploring exactly why some individuals' memory skills are better than others has led researchers at Washington University in St. Louis to study the brain basis of learning strategies that healthy young adults select to help them memorize a series of objects. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers uncovered brain regions specifically correlated with the diverse strategies that subjects adopt.

Well, some of this is hype. At most, the study identified best strategies for an impractical task that may never be used beyond the laboratory. And some of this is inept reporting. Would a competent reporter let a phrase like the researchers uncovered brain regions creep into news that does not involve open the skull?

But the basic information is worth knowing: Some of the strategies were verbal, some were based on imagery. The fMRI displayed differences in location of the brain activity that appeared to match the strategies. There were differences between people and differences within the same person on different occasions. Somebody could use fMRI as an objective measure of learning strategies. No doubt somebody will.

Is neophilia new?

2006-07-22T14:51:00.000-05:00

Gizmodo: Call us tech fiends, gadget freaks, fashion victims, or whatever, but one thing's for sure: if you're reading this, there's a good chance you're a neophiliac. That's right, you're a marketer's dream, someone who loves everything new or novel. But your techno-addiction might not be your fault. Beyond just putting a label on it, researchers in Japan say they have identified a genetically-determined enzyme associated with this novelty-seeking tendency, where that joy juice is continually goosing you up for the new, different and innovative. Yeah, the enzyme made you do it.
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Oh, victim for sure. Novelty addict. Maybe that is like AD/HD, which (novel idea here) may not be a disorder at all. Just a natural response to boredom. If you think that looking for new things is a human trait, watch your dog when you let him out in the morning. And universal among children and teens. Can last into old age. If left untreated.

But socialization does tend to cure it. The problem is that socialization is about preserving the past. Neophilia is about finding the future. Socialization is the opposite of destabilization. No wonder they want to cure us. Fortunately, for us neophiliacs, they only have old treatments. And we know what to do with old treatments.

Seeking the power of the quest

2006-07-16T13:45:00.000-05:00

Here is more evidence for the power of the quest: research published today in Applied Cognitive Psychology. (primary investigator Antonia Kronlund)

The study found that when participants had to solve an anagram before seeing a target brand, they were more likely to claim to have seen the brand before. Participants also had higher preference ratings for the brand relative to competing brands in the same product category.

"It's the actual contrast between seeing the anagram in its initial, versus its solved form, that we believe creates this preference effect. That is because the anagram in its initial form appears to be non-fluent--participants have never seen anagrams such as GANECY before.

Once solved, however, the solution is processed with high fluency. Think of the "aha" experience one would feel when realizing the solution is AGENCY. We believe that this surprising fluency, arising from the disparity, gets misattributed to brand recognition and preference," says Dr. Kronlund.

"Our research demonstrates that certain problem solving techniques, which pose a challenge to the consumer, trigger a response that makes the target brand seem highly fluent, or familiar. This process consistently translates into increased recognition of the brand, and more importantly, higher preference towards the brand over the competition. Such techniques can be used by marketers in magazine layouts, in store displays--the possibilities are endless," says Dr. Kronlund.

Another demonstration of something we already knew. But we need it. Because of the persistent fable that having somebody read something is the way to make sure that they know it. I have made this point in several blogs:
Module Quests and Closure

Your Brain Modules at Work

State Statements and Quest Questions

This study is especially interesting because it shows that the discovery need not be relevant to the conceptual context. That that you don’t have to be smart to apply the principle. A computer could make anagrams. And probably foster vocabulary learning. I think such anagrams are often used in educational workbooks or online websites.

So why is this lady still doing research on it? Because there are lots of people who don’t know it. They probably read it. And still believe that people are going to remember what they are told.

Triumph of tradition over experience.

The Attack of the Giant Aggregators

2006-07-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

Years ago, long before the web, the woe mongers warned of the information explosion. Now people hardly mention it. Probably buried in all that information. But we have not been overwhelmed by information because our species long ago developed a two layer defense against information overload: Ignore and aggregate.

These days, the web offers us a huge amount of information to ignore. Or to feed the aggregators if they get big enough to take it on. The first web aggregators applied what I call the horseless carriage model of aggregation. The first cars were “horseless carriages.” People saw them as doing the same job as carriages. Just without a horse.

We can laugh now at that short-sighted interpretation. The car revolutionized Western culture in the last century. The web will revolutionize culture in this century. But not until we outgrow the viewpoint that the web is just a convenient way to do things the way we used to.

Those first web aggregators (think Yahoo) made up directories. You needed directories in the olden days so when you looked for things, you could know where to look. People soon recognized that a computer could also use terms to find things. The first web-oriented aggregator appeared. The search engine. But those old directories did not just organize. The also evaluated. Google met that need by using a kind of popularity as a basis for evaluation. Trouble is, Google gives me a million items. I only want one.

I talked about this need for evaluation in an earlier blog (SEE YOU LATER, AGGREGATOR): What you want is of no use to you if you can’t find it. And something is not cheap if you have to spend a lot of time finding it. (Unless your time is cheap.) So the crucial need now is to evaluate. Perhaps there is a role here for different kinds of aggregators. For example, one that aggregates evaluations.

Digg is one of the new breed that aggregates evaluations of news items. Digg members evaluate and a news item rises to the top if a lot of members “dig” it.

Another level of development appears in Stumbleupon. This technology evaluates websites to support a new kind of browsing. Instead of using a generic evaluation to fit all readers, it seeks to cluster users into similarity groups. It then gives and gets evaluations from users with similar interests.

The Universal Aggregator. Stumbleupon (despite its poor choice in a name) does seem to be on the right track to evolve into a universal aggregator. Serves everybody. But does not serve the same product to everybody. Hears everybody. But sends the evaluation only to those who want it. Not just an aggregator of web pages. An aggregator of evaluations.

That’s what we need. The better the evaluation, the less we have to ignore.

The mouth doesn't speak for the brain

2006-07-01T12:57:00.000-05:00

A new study by Princeton University psychology researchers Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske shows that when viewing photographs of social out-groups, people respond to them with disgust, not a feeling of fellow humanity.

The researchers made this observation by noting the activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This module is activated when a person thinks about a person. The brain activity showed that pictures of out-group members did not elicit this person-related activity.

Thus, a person may consciously see members of social out-groups as people, while the brain is treating these people as less than human.
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Nothing remarkable here. The MPFC is evidently part of what the Thinkerer calls the Empath. We have long known that people make a strong distinction between in-group and out-group. What we see in this study is a demonstration of the neurological basis of this distinction. It is probably related to the mirror neuron system that supports imitation.

The study also points out the potential difference between what the mouth is saying and what the brain is doing. Verbal instruction can tell people what the should think. They will learn to say what they know the should say. Different modules. Different jobs. No deep repression here. Just that one part of the brain doesn’t know what another part is doing. Happens all the time. Just like it does to Microsoft.

By the way, there is nothing in this study to suggest that the definition of in-group and out-group are unchangeable. Methods for getting people to redefine in-group have long been known. No doubt, future studies will investigate the effect of such methods on the relevant brain activity.

Curing the Closure Addiction

2006-06-25T13:40:00.000-05:00

Closure: a long established concept in psychology. I have posted several items on it. Now comes a theory on the neurological basis of closure. And some evidence to support it. The theory was based on earlier findings that binding sites for natural opiates increase in density along, a part of the brain involved in image recognition and processing.
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“The "click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. …

In a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging trials with human volunteers exposed to a wide variety of images, Biederman's research group found that strongly preferred images prompted the greatest fMRI activity in more complex areas of the ventral visual pathway.

Biederman also found that repeated viewing of an attractive image lessened both the rating of pleasure and the activity in the opioid-rich areas.

Biederman: “Without thinking about it, we pick out experiences that are richly interpretable but novel."
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In other words, quest questions followed by closure. The present data only bear on visual closure, but Biederman thinks the theory applies widely. There is plenty of psychological support for the notion that people seek novel, but interpretable, experiences and lose interest once they achieve interpretation (closure).

So there we have it. Explanation of why people like to play games, solve puzzles, and generally learn things when the control the process. And when they don’t know the outcome till they get there.

And now we understand the function of formal education. It is to cure people of this addiction to discovering things on their own. The first step is to tell them what they are supposed to know up front. Much more efficient. They don’t waste time finding out things that the experts already know. This strategy keeps them from finding out that they can discover things that the experts do not already know. You can see why that strategy would take hold with the experts.

Another step, of course, is to help people with boredom management. As things become more familiar, they don’t deliver that high. If you tell people the outcome in advance, the will get plenty of practice at boredom. If they manage it in a classroom acceptable way, they will be “good students.” If they don’t, the probably be diagnosed as ADD or AD/HD. Then they can take medication to help them with boredom management.

Now this effort will not completely cure people of their addiction to discovering things on their own. It will, however, let us shift the activity to socially disfavored activities such as games, puzzles or heroin.

But there may be a rent in this garment. Suppose some people take on the puzzle of how to remain curious in an educational system that is designed to cure curiosity. Now that is a question to be curious about. A quest question.

Explorer Modules

2006-06-22T15:25:00.000-05:00

Quest questions and state statements. I talked about those before. Now I’ll come at it from a different perspective. Does the brain handle these things differently? Of course, I think it does. But the issue can be settled by fMRI. Here is one step in that direction, from a study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in Nature on 15th June.

These researchers distinguish between exploration (taking actions to find out new things) and exploitation (taking actions that exploit what you already know). What they found was that exploration activated brain areas not involved in taking actions on the basis of what people already knew.

Exploration, of course, corresponds to quest questions. Exploitation is somewhat like state statements although I was talking about statements coming in from the experience of other people. So the evidence I want to see is not in yet.

That research will not be easy to get. Dr Daw, of UCL, pointed out: "Most people switch between exploring and exploiting seamlessly and this has always made it hard to distinguish between someone who is doing something they know will offer the highest pay-out and a person who is testing out new options.” These researchers used a specialized method to make that distinction.

But in the absence of data, I will speculate. It is likely that exploration draws on a lot more brain power than does trying to store verbal input in declarative form. The problem in such research is likely to be that you cannot tell what storage methods the subject is using. Skilled learners probably have routines (such as forming their own quest questions) that activate the exploring parts of the brain.

You could ask them about their strategies, but they may not have noticed. Or they may think everyone else is doing the same thing.

An alternative would be to compare effective learners with less effective learners. See what differences you find between the brain activation. That might suggest some ways to improve learning strategies. The UCL researchers identified particular brain modules that were activated in their paradigm. I think these might turn out the be part of the Explorer system. If so, the best learning strategy might be to turn a learning assignment into an exploration. And you could tell how well people were using that strategy if you know what brain areas were being activated.

Young Mirror Neurons

2006-06-20T14:49:00.000-05:00

UPPSALA, Sweden, Jun 19, 2006 (UPI via COMTEX) -- Swedish scientists say children as young as 1 year can learn to predict the outcome of another person's actions as well as adults can. The study by Uppsala University researchers suggests infants learn to predict the actions of others about when they learn to perform such actions themselves.

In this study, infants and adults watched a video of a hand placing toys in a bucket. The researchers tracked eye movements. Adults and 12-month old babies learned to look at the bucket before the hand reached it, showing that they were predicting the outcome of the movement.

This kind of learning is the basis for imitative learning and is probably supported by the mirror neuron system. The fact that it develops so early may suggest the important role it plays in cognitive development. This kind of learning is later dismissed by verbal systems as “mere intuition.”

People who so casually dismiss the products of the mirror neuron system may be ignoring one of the most powerful brain systems they were born with. People who pay attention to the products of that system may gain an advantage over those who do not. An unfair advantage, I suppose, from the viewpoint of verbal systems. But my intuitive feeling is that people get the service they look for out of their brains. And don’t get the service they don’t look for.

The Engineer Module?

2006-06-17T09:37:00.000-05:00

We have long known that language is organized into hierarchical structure that could not be constructed without advanced planning. Some people have noticed that human actions are usually organized in the same way. (Probably not just humans, but I’ll stick to human behavior in this discussion. Psychologists are such anthropomorphic chauvinists.) Some people have suspected that the brain modules that support the organization of actions evolved long ago and later came to support the organization of language.

Now there may be solid evidence about that idea:

Broca's area in the brain (and its counterpart in the right hemisphere) is a major center for organizing hierarchies of behaviors. This is the finding of Etienne Koechlin and Thomas Jubault of Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Ecole Normale Supérieure, described their experiments in the June 15, 2006, issue of Neuron.

Broca’s area has long been known as a major speech “center.” If these results are correct, its role in speech is the same as its role in organized planning of behavior. This operation represents much of the work that I like to attribute to the Engineer. And it would be working with what the Thinkerer calls joblets.

It is reinforcing to see recognized brain modules tied to the behavioral functions describe in the Thinkerer.

Focus and Ritalin

2006-06-11T10:16:00.000-05:00

Further research on Ritalin may help us understand the neural mechanisms of focus. We know empirically that it increases the ability to focus. Note that I left off the usual qualifier “in people with attention deficit disorder.” I have seen reports that it is being widely used by college students with no such diagnosis. So I think the effect is not limited to people for whom it is prescribed.

According to a recent report in the Journal of Neurophysiology, Ritalin raises norepinephrine levels in the brains of rats to help focus attention while suppressing nerve signal transmissions in the sensory pathways to make it easier to block out extraneous stimuli. This combination of effects may help explain the paradox of a stimulant that decreases hyperactive behavior.

The combination may also help describe the difference between Focus and Scan. Both are important to brains. Formal education seems to be mainly concerned with focus, to the neglect of scan. That is reasonable because formal education is socially driven and so seeks to focus a child’s attention on what suits society and the educational system.

Where, I wonder, in the educational system, does the child learn how to manage focus and scan effectively? To choose what to focus on and to choose when to go into scan mode. We can tell children what to focus on. We can even believe that they do what they are told to do. (Ok, it worked for Tinker Bell.)

But teens become increasingly and obviously self-directed. I suspect that self-direction chooses what to focus on by going into the scan mode and scanning over possibilities. I suspect that the skill of effective self-direction is more valuable than the skill of explaining initiative, referendum, and recall.

And I wonder whether children can get that skill from Ritalin.

See Brain Remember

2006-06-01T10:33:00.000-05:00

(HealthNewsDigest.com).. DURHAM, N.C. -- People may permanently store memories in their brains, even if they cannot consciously recall them, according to a study by Duke University Medical Center researchers. The team's findings were published in the May 24, 2006 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.
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Standard paradigm: Show list of words. Later show another list containing old words and new words. Subjects say whether a word is old or new. Research shows that various kinds of cueing or psychological set can increase chances of correctly recognizing old word as old. Evidence generally supports the conclusion that the memories are always stored and that reporting errors are produced by failure of access at the time or retrieval. (I think this is now called Error 404.)

In this study, researchers used fMRI to observe activity in the medial temporal lobes (MTL), an area known to play a role in the paradigm. An old word always elicited increased activity in the rear portion of the MTL, regardless of whether the subject recognized it as old. That is certainly the result to be expected from the psychological literature, but this research shows a new way to study the process.

In this study, for example, we get evidence about what happens in failure to recognize. When a subject correctly reported that the word was new, there was increased activity in a front portion of the MTL. But when subject failed to recognize an old word, there was increased activity in both parts of the MTL.

I would interpret this last result in terms of the pandemonium model. The two parts of the MTL are reporting conflicting conclusions. The rear MTL is saying “old data!” But it is not shouting loud enough to quiet the other part. In the behavioral paradigm, you add cues or psychological set. These probably boost the activity of the rear MTL (testable hypothesis) and increase the odds of recognition. With fMRI, we can see that when the two modules remain in competition, the result is an error.

Another Day, Another Module

2006-05-22T08:22:00.000-05:00

Another Day, Another Module
Researchers are still connecting the dots between performance in psychological studies and brain activity. In this study, they found a pattern (call that a module) of brain activity associated with interactions between a pair of subjects.
“The study, led by Dr. Read Montague, professor of neuroscience at [Baylor College of Medicine] and director of its Brown Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity in pairs of subjects during a social exchange game. The study made use of a new approach to studying social interactions, called hyperscanning, where two interacting brains are monitored simultaneously.”
Research like this may prove useful in understanding various behavior disorders that involve social interactions. I like to think of the research as showing a physiological basis for such Thinkerer devices as the head team. In the long run, researchers will do fMRI studies on people while they carry out introspective tasks like mulling things over with the head team.

THE FOCUS AND THE SCAN

2006-05-17T11:59:00.000-05:00

The Focus and the Scan
Daydreaming.  Not yet identified as a disorder.  But clearly a failure to focus.  An attention deficit.  And you may view it as a disorder if you are caught behind daydreaming when the light turns green.
Clearly not practical.  Not goal-oriented.  Undisciplined.  The school teacher can detect it. There is a far off gaze.  The student is looking at something that is not there.  Looking into another dimension.  The school teacher has a treatment.
“Johnny, can you answer that question?”
Johnny might know the answer.  But Johnny does not know the question.  In this case, we have some evidence about people who do not have this kind of attention deficit.  These people are called autistic.  This, at least, is suggested by a recent brain-imaging study. Daniel Kennedy and co-researcher Elizabeth Redcay published the findings in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Kennedy’s interpretation of the brain imaging results:  "[Daydreaming has] actually got a very high metabolism -- it's using lots of oxygen, glucose, the neurons are really firing," he says. And the activity is widely distributed over the brain.
Nature does not waste energy.  Not even to aggravate teachers.  There is a reason for this daydreaming.  I like to call it scanning.  The opposite of focus.  The point where your brain checks its inbox to see what it needs to focus on next.  The point where you hear from those quiet modules about the work they have done while you were not paying attention to them.  The point where you can notice those things that did not get your attention while you are focused.  You may view it as an altered state of consciousness if you accept the socially correct view that you are naturally supposed to be focused on what the teacher is telling you.
You might also view it as whole-brain “thinking,” to judge by Kennedy’s description of the brain activity.  Just think!  You could have bought lots of books about how to do whole brain thinking.  You could have focused you attention intensely on the exercises you have to practice the learn how to do whole brain thinking.   Or you might have found that you had the power all along.  You did not even need Dorothy’s ruby slippers.  You just needed to let your mind wander.  And to follow it.
And a little confidence in those quiet modules would help, too.  You will never learn to swim until you learn to trust the water.

Your Brain on Dread

2006-05-10T12:46:00.000-05:00

If you are facing something what will certainly be painful, do you want to put it off or do you want to get it over with? Suppose you know it will be more painful now and less painful if you put it off? Surely, you will want to put it off. At least that’s what economists would say is the rational choice.

Economists and psychologists are always fond of showing that people don’t act rationally. In a recent study, people had just that kind of option. Most of the participants preferred to shorten the waiting period, but 28% (extreme dreaders) were willing to take more pain just to avoid waiting.

In this study, Neurobiology Of Dread, the researchers looked at why. Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, used fMRI to find the brain modules that were involved in dread. (Published in the May 5, 2006 issue of the journal Science) They found that the modules were parts of the pain network linked to attention. The modules that control fear or anxiety were not involved. The extreme dreaders, in particular, had more activity in the attentional modules. And the activity developed earlier in the trials than it did with the others.

Dr. Berns concluded that what makes dread intolerable is the attention devoted to the prospective pain and the response to it. Thus, dread is quire different from anxiety. Dr. Berns: “The key factor seems to be that extreme dreaders devoted more attention toward the part of their body that was about to be shocked.”

From that standpoint, the choices are not unreasonable. They just appear irrational to people who are not fully informed about the costs. Here is an explanation that economists could understand: A company is threatened by lawsuits. They are offered a settlement. They believe they could go to court and get of with a much lighter settlement. In this case, the economist will point out that litigation will require attention in the form of legal advice and actions to comply with it. (I skip other issues here because attention is the issue of interest.) The cost of attention (here in legal fees) may outweigh the gain of the delay.

Economists, like accountants, know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. If you don’t notice a price on attention, you may think it is free. People who hire you don’t think that way because your attention is what they are buying.

Dr. Berns reads the results as suggesting that dread (as in waiting for the dentist) can probably be reduced by diverting attention. Mothers already know this. Zen practitioners know this. The key concept here is what I call focus form. Focus form is the skill of targeting your focus on a project that you will later he pleased to have focused on. It is a skill you may want to practice. It has uses beyond dentistry.

Reward Module Ups the Ante

2006-05-05T12:16:00.000-05:00

If you expect an reward for remembering something, you are much more likely to remember it. In an article in the May 4, 2006, Neuron, Alison Adcock and colleagues describe the process from the standpoint of brain modules.

The studies used the following task: Volunteers saw scenes and later had to indicate whether the recognized the scene. The scenes were marked with a symbol indicating how much reward (no money to $5.00) they would get for quick response in recognizing the scene.

Observations from fMRI were taken during the task. The first study showed that high-valued trials activated a particular brain region known to play a role in processing emotions. Of course, the high-valued scenes were remembered much more successfully.

In a second study, the researchers presented the value signal ahead of the scenes. The evidence indicated that a high-value signal tended to activate both the emotion-related brain region and the learning-related hippocampus. The results suggest that the reward-related module alerted the relevant memory module to strengthen the process of memory formation. This process is an example of psychological set. The brain is not merely accepting inputs and passively storing them. It is actively filtering them on the basis of what it expects.

Psychologists have long known about the effect of psychological set, emotion and reward on memory. This study documents the brain modules involved in a particular instance.

Since psychologists already know about this principle, they must have impressive procedures to apply this knowledge to practical learning goals. In school, for example. I am still waiting to be impressed.

Behold the power of academic abstraction to know everything in general and nothing in particular:

>If you do something to establish a reward set and then show that it improves memory, the psychologist will say, “Of course. We have known that for years.”

>If you do something to establish a reward set and then show that it does not improve memory, the psychologist will say, “You obviously failed to establish a reward set.”

The technical term for this last statement is tautology. If you don’t get the predicted result, the outcome proves that you did something wrong. The power of academic abstraction. You can’t be wrong about abstract terms if you don’t specify what they mean.

The R&D problem in this case is that psychology has not established an independent way to measure the effectiveness of procedures that are intended to establish a reward set. There are some guidelines. Here are some relevant suggestions;
When is a Goal not a Goal?
Dump Your Goals.
Your brain modules already know your short-term goals.
The Goal of Goals

Here I will just point out that the this study shows how to get an independent measure of reward set. It will not be easy or cheap (fMRI is neither of these). But it will be more rewarding than academic abstraction. Will that prospect of reward motivate psychologists to do more studies on how to establish a reward set? Wait till next year.

Depression, Anxiety, and Other Annoyances

2006-05-01T14:05:00.000-05:00

Last week, Don Dansereau asked me to search on the Thinkerer site for words like depression and anxiety. I was surprised to find essentially no results. So I thought that over. Why would I leave out words like that?

It is not that I don’t understand search engines. People will search on those terms. I think the Thinkerer would have some useful things to say to those people. There are pages on mood and mood management. Other pages deal with relaxing, focus, and self-awareness. All these are relevant to depression and anxiety.

But the Thinkerer is not about what is wrong with people. It is about what is right with people. It deals with strengths, not with defects. It also reflects my preference for thinking in verbs rather than nouns. Or process rather than product.

Those observations call to mind a book that I heard about on IT Conversations. Here is a link to the podcast: Mind Set. The book is “Mindset -- The New Psychology of Success." In the book and in the podcast, Dr. Carol Dweck (author) distinguishes between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Taking on the growth mindset is apparently the “New Psychology of Success.”

I endorse the idea of the growth mindset. It is not new. But it may be new to some parts of psychology. Particularly to a psychology that focuses on what is wrong with people. It is not new to all of psychology. The relevant concept is locus of control, although various other terms have also been used. I like the summary slogan: “There are two kinds of people. Those that things happen to and those that make things happen.”

Depression and anxiety are sometimes part of a diagnosable mental disorder. Anyone with such a disorder needs appropriate medical evaluation and treatment. But these are also terms in common language. Perhaps too common. I suppose that’s why I am reluctant to spread them around on the Thinkerer site. That and my feeling that talking about depression is too depressing.

Why the Bee is Like the Brain

2006-04-26T19:50:00.000-05:00

The existential question for the honeybee is simple. The meaning of life is to have a home. A hive. But, as with you and me, it does require a choice. How do 10,000 bees make a choice? How do the 100 billion neurons in your brain make a choice?

With the bees, at least, we can watch. Here is a report by Thomas Seeley and his group . . (May-June issue of American Scientist,)

A honeybee swarm bivouacs on a tree branch, waiting for scout bees to select candidate sites for a new home, deliberate among the choices and then reach a verdict -- a process "complicated enough to rival the dealings of any department committee," says Cornell biologist Thomas Seeley. …

Scientists had known that honeybee scouts "waggle dance" to report on food. Seeley and his colleagues, however, have confirmed that they dance to report on real estate, too, as part of their group decision-making process.

The better the housing site, the stronger the waggle dance, the researchers found, and that prompts other scouts to visit a recommended site. If they agree it's a good choice, they also dance to advertise the site and revisit it frequently. Scouts committed to different sites compete to attract uncommitted scouts to their sites, the researchers have discovered, but because the bees grade their recruitment signals in relation to site quality, the scouts build up most rapidly at the best site.

As soon as 15 or more bees are advocating one site, the process of swarming to the new site begins. "The bees' method, which is a product of disagreement and contest rather than consensus or compromise, consistently yields excellent collective decisions," said Seeley

Your neurons don’t do a waggle dance. Instead, they send out more signals or coordinated signals. That gets them more attention and more connections. The strategy is similar to the pandemonium model described by Selfridge many years ago (http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/pandemonium.html).

People are not words

2006-04-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

Jeffry Phillips has an interesting discussion about two types of people:
Thinkers versus Doers

In Phillips view, a firm has (and needs) both types. The general idea is probably right. But here is a quest question: “What type of person does the firm need for a CEO?”

After a bit of hesitation, the answer you will probably hear is: “Both types.” And there the koan has exposed the deceptive simplicity of language. Language works by abstraction. To use it, you have to strip off some attributes. One of the attributes you strip off it this case is time. Actually, what the firm needs in the CEO is not both types at the same time. What it needs is a thinker at the appropriate time and a doer at the appropriate time. And a good judge of which role is appropriate in the moment.

Notice that I changed the language here. Type connotes a fixed characteristic. Role connotes a set of behaviors that a person can take on or take off. People take on many different roles. Parent, spouse, customer, employee, teacher, guard. Among other things, people shift between thinker and doer. That is the concept expressed in the title Thinkerer.

In an organization, these roles will be fixed by job assignments. And some individuals are better suited for one assignment or the other. But you, as an individual can’t afford the luxury of sticking to just one role. You’ve just gone one brain, so it will have to do the whole job for you. Just as the company has one CEO, who will have to fill both roles in the top job.

Another thought applies here: “There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide people into two kinds and those who do not.” I belong to that small set who do not. There are several kinds of thinking. Philips is talking about mainly about creativity. The fact that he has to use the word thinker to refer to creative people is an example of verbal chauvinism.

I don’t believe that creative people think in the sense that philosophers or logicians think. I believe most creative people will tell you that they understand their ideas well before they have thought out how to explain them in words. So I will create a new word here: ideator. It refers to someone who is skilled in generating new ideas. Or it refers to a job description that calls for such a person.

And in creating a new word, I show that words do not make people. People make words. At least the ideators do.

Your “Self” Has a Toggle-Switch

2006-04-20T15:10:00.000-05:00

Watching the brain switch off 'self'
Everybody has experienced a sense of "losing oneself" in an activity--whether a movie, sport, sex, or meditation. Now, researchers have caught the brain in the act of losing "self" as it shuts down introspection during a demanding sensory task. The researchers--led by Rafael Malach and Ilan Goldberg of the Weizmann Institute of Science reporting in the April 20, 2006, issue of Neuron--say their findings show that self-related functions actually shuts down during such intense sensory tasks…
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Experimental subjects got the same sensory inputs but were performing different tasks. One task was a sensory judgment about the content. The other task was an introspective judgment about the subject’s reaction to the sensory input. Observation was by fMRI. Introspective judgments activated the prefrontal cortex (known to play a role in such judgments). Sensory judgments activated the sensory cortex and related structures. Importantly, the prefrontal cortex was inactive during the intense sensory processing.

The researchers wrote: "… the picture that emerges from the present results is that, during intense perceptual engagement, all neuronal resources are focused on sensory cortex, and the distracting self-related cortex is inactive.” They also cite “Eastern philosophies such as Zen teachings, which emphasize the need to enter into a 'mindless,' selfless mental state to achieve a true sense of reality."

Oh, yes. The music of the modules. The sense of “I” is lost in the union with reality. You can see it in the fMRI. But don’t expect to hear it from your verbal system. It is clueless about what was happening. What the researchers were observing was obviously an “altered state of consciousness.” The power of focus. The power of the Hunter. My speculation is that the power of the Hunter is very much the same as the power of cocaine. Just better controlled and more effectively focused on goals.

Getting the power of the Hunter to work on long-term goals, however, also requires contributions from that prefrontal cortex. It is a matter of timing. “There is a time for everything. A time for planning. A tine for doing. And a time for knowing what time it is.”

About that toggle-switch for your “Self.” The power is not in which but in when.

Chronic Stress Fosters Anxiety

2006-04-19T14:57:00.000-05:00

Neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School and its affiliate Mclean Hospital have shown that long-term exposure to stress hormone in mice directly results in the anxiety that often comes with depression. After years of circumstantial evidence linking stress and depression, this evidence may be the "smoking gun" of what, for some, causes some types of mood disorders. The research appears in the April issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, which is published by the American Psychological Association.
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This study helps to organize what we already know about stress, anxiety, risk-taking, and depression. First note the important term: long-term stress. Not short-term stress. This study showed adverse effects only from chronic exposure to stress hormone (two weeks in the mice).

This study does not provide much actionable intel. It indicates that people would want to avoid long-term stress. But people already want to avoid long-term stress. They experience it only if they can’t find a way to avoid it.

There is a link here to something I discussed in earlier blogs. I commented on findings by Caltech economics professor Colin Camerer and his colleagues. Camerer discussed aversion to ambiguity and suggested that “… aversion to ambiguity is like a primitive freezing response that we've had for millions of years”

The mice in the current study showed reluctance to enter unfamiliar territory. The researchers called that anxiety. But it is somewhat like what Camerer calls “aversion to ambiguity.” If we assume that The Caltech students in Camerer’s study had been under chronic stress, then their aversion to ambiguity might have been a result of chronic exposure to a stress hormone.

How long do the effects of chronic stress persist in humans? Say, for example, the stress of college students preparing for mid-terms. I don’t think the answer is known. It probably is a complex formula depending on the length and intensity of the stressing environment. But I would have to wonder whether a person’s readiness to tolerate ambiguity is a stable characteristic of the person or a situational characteristic that varies with the person’s recent stress levels.

Aside from the observation that such effects might give misleading results in economics (and psychological) research, how could we use this information? Perhaps the educational system needs courses in stress management. It seems to me that psychology has enough R&D on things like relaxation, and time control to create a stress management curriculum. The goal would not be to eliminate stress, but to keep it from acting as chronic stress.

Service Oriented Innovation

2006-04-16T09:05:00.000-05:00

Yes. I took this title from popular software concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). If service is so important that it gets a whole software movement named after it, it surely deserves some innovation.

What triggered this line of thinking was a blog I ran into at Courant’s new hub on innovation: 3 types of innovation in your business (Jeffrey Phillips). The taxonomy represents what I would call Product Oriented Innovation. My Geek side really wanted to call it Object Oriented Innovation. But my Empath subsystem keeps saying “Don’t speak Geek when you are not talking to Geeks.”

The concept of Service Oriented Innovation (SOI) goes back to the middle of the last century. Business consultants then expressed it in the question:

“What business are you in?”

At that time, the industrial revolution was running out of steam (note the old cliché, appropriate for the context). Companies had long focused on the business of making and selling products. They needed to rethink their business model. What some business consultants realized was that the demand for products is usually driven by the demand for the services they provide. And the demand for a specific service lasts longer than the demand for a specific product.

It was sometimes useful for companies to shift the focus from the products they made to the services those products provided. The focus of their innovation shifted:

“How can we make the product better?” (POI) became “What service are we providing and how can we do it better?” (SOI)

You can see what the results would be: Product Oriented Innovation gets you better products. Service Oriented Innovation gets you better services. That can mean different products. Or it can mean a different way of providing the service. Those developments are called disruptive innovation. Especially by those who used to sell the products. I hope some software vendors are listening.

An article in Business Week Online speaks of this concept as Business Model Innovation. But I like to include the service concept because it give you a better idea of where to look.

As a familiar example, take the service of home entertainment. Start in mid-stream. VCRs reach the consumer market. People realize that you can put movies on those video cassettes. They start selling cassettes with movies (product).

The underlying service, however, is a type of home entertainment. Some people, notably Blockbuster, see that they can provide a similar service at lower cost by renting the tapes. This step disrupts the market for movies on tape. Score one for SOI.

Blockbuster easily adapts to the introduction of the DVD. Similar product. You can distribute it the same way. For SOI, turn to Netflix. Part of the service is aggregation and distribution. Blockbuster does that with stores. But you can mail a DVD. And you can aggregate on the web. Netflix comes out of nowhere and threatens to put Blockbuster out of business. Blockbuster probably calls that disruptive innovation. Score another one for SOI.

But the story continues. Nobody wants a DVD. People want the content it supplies. We all know that the content can be distributed over broadband. In fact, content is already being distributed over broadband, much of it in violation of copyright. But companies can license content and distribute it. In this case, the product (content) is already available. The service will lie in the improved distribution. Somebody will get it right. Probably later this year.

Maybe Netflix and Blockbuster with do it. Otherwise, they will know the power of disruptive innovation. Score another one for SOI. I don’t even know the winning player. But I am sure that the winning focus will be service oriented.

More about social diseases: Disease-mongering

2006-04-12T08:16:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered whether we have more diseases now? I recently made up a name, ethnogenic, to cover diseases caused by society. I had in mind problems like AD/HD, dyslexia, and maybe obesity. But then I ran into an article describing a different aspect of ethnogenic diseases:

Drugs companies 'inventing diseases to boost their profits’
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent (The Times Online, UK.)

PHARMACEUTICAL companies are systematically creating diseases in order to sell more of their products, turning healthy people into patients and placing many at risk of harm, a special edition of [Public Library of Science Medicine].

The special issue, edited by David Henry, of Newcastle University in Australia, and Ray Moynihan, an Australian journalist, reports that conditions such as female sexual dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and “restless legs syndrome” have been promoted by companies hoping to sell more of their drugs.

Here is the original article (Public Library of Science Medicine ): Disease-Mongering. According to the article, disease mongering is the practice of “creating” new diseases or redefining existing conditions to reinterpret them as diseases. (As an illustration of this point, I recently commented on another study about inflating the frequency of depression. The authors in that study sought to deflate claims that nearly half the U.S. population suffers from depression.)

Here, from the article on Disease-mongering, is a list of methods for disease-mongering.

Promotion of anxiety about future ill-health in healthy individuals. See if you can find examples on the evening news.

Inflated disease prevalence rates. That sounds familiar.

Promotion of aggressive drug treatment of milder symptoms and diseases.

Introduction of questionable new diagnoses—such as PMDD or social anxiety disorder—that are hard to distinguish from normal life. Why am I thinking AD/HD right now?

Redefinition of diseases in terms of surrogate outcomes (i.e., osteoporosis becomes a disease of low bone density rather than fragility fractures)

Promotion of drugs as a first-line solution for problems previously not considered medical, such as disruptive classroom behaviour or problematic sexual relationships.

I have one point of dissent here. It is not just the drug companies that are promoting the Disease Interpretation of Everything. The first level of responsibility lies with the researchers. They are depending on a serious and wide-spread disease to gain them political and financial support. I think they should make full disclosure of the extent to which they have a financial interest in the Disease Interpretation of their research.

And then notice the news media. Will they look for conflicts of interest in this research discoveries of new, more troublesome, and more treatable diseases? Will they do fact checking? Will they report the extent to which their ad income depends on the pharmaceutical industry? Or have they already joined in the disease-mongering? You be the judge.

A funny thing happened on the way to depression

2006-04-09T09:56:00.000-05:00

And if it gave people a good laugh, some people may have missed the depression altogether. In a paper being presented in an American Physiological Society session at Experimental Biology 2006, Lee S. Berk of Loma Linda University, reports that the mere anticipation of watching a favorite funny movie produced a substantial increase in beta-endorphins. The effects lasted through the movie and for a while afterwards.

Beta-endorphins are similar to opiates. They operate on the same brain systems as opiates. But they are produced in your brain. And your brain knows how to use them for your benefit. And the government doesn’t know how to ban them. Yet.

Beta-endorphins make you feel good. They change your mood. They counteract mild feelings of depression. I mean non-clinical levels of depression. The kind many people might have if things go wrong.

Last Wednesday I commented about people who were depressed and were showing a particular pattern of persistent vigilance (by fMRI). I would expect that humor, if it could be induced in such patients, would interrupt that pattern and provide some relief from the depression. (With clinically depressed patients, there would be a problem in getting them to respond to the humor.) I expect an investigation of such effects is already in the works.

But other people can use a bit of mood management, too. So the take-away message here is that things you find funny make you feel better. Maybe you already know that and so keep things at hand that will make you laugh. Maybe you even spread the funnies around to share the laughter.

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

But just in case you have forgotten about the benefits of laughing, this study shows serious reasons for laughing. Beck suggests, “important positive implications for wellness, disease-prevention and most certainly stress-reduction.” (The potential benefits include strengthening the immune system.)

Sounds like everything you could expect from the next herb supplement fad. But more entertaining. (When was the last time you got a laugh out of herb supplements?) That reminds me. I need to refill my comedy prescription at Blockbuster. I just used up my supply of “Barney Miller”. Opened my stock of “All in the Family.” Maybe I’ll get a dose of Bugs Bunny for next week.

Can we sue the news media for making us depressed?

2006-04-07T09:07:00.000-05:00

I mean, of course, those of us who are depressed. And pay a lot of attention to the new media. I have not seen any research about correlations between attention to the news media and depression. But I suppose that would be worth investigating. I have heard people complain that the news is depressing.

What started me on this line of thinking was research I commented on last Wednesday. That dealt with people who were depressed and were showing a particular pattern of persistent vigilance (by fMRI). Apparently pattern that was associated with persistent rumination over negative thoughts. In the study, the negative thoughts would have been unfavorable self-descriptions. But I could imagine that persistent rumination over disasters and threats of disaster might have a similar effect.

Who would persistently ruminate over disasters and threats? The news media of course. (I wonder what the rate of clinical depression is in the news media.) But don’t take my word for it. The link below will take you to an excellent article on the matter. (Caution. This article is funny. If you are news-depressed, it will probably interrupt your depression. If you stop being depressed, you won’t have grounds to sue. That would be depressing.)

If everything is killing us, why do we live so long?
By Jeff Randall (Filed: 31/03/2006) Business.Telegraph

Excerpt: Flick through the daily papers' news pages and it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that everything is killing us. But then turn to the personal finance sections and it seems that our pension funds are [in trouble] because nobody is dying.
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As this excerpt shows, Mr. Randall has neatly caught the media’s talent for persistent rumination. The media have thus given new meaning to the expression “No news is good news.” I picked up an example from Reuters just today:

Is a strong economy bad for your health?
Risk of fatal heart attacks rises when economy is healthy, study finds

One of the best long-term efforts by the media menace mongers has been base on the flu. Back in ’02 and ’03, the pending peril was SARS. Those of us who did not die of that were threatened the following flu season with a
Flu Vaccine Shortage!

Some of us survived that disaster. Only to be confronted this flu season with
Bird Flu!!!

Bird Flu!!! has not yet started to infect birds in the western hemisphere. You might think that is good news, but it really means that this year we will have daily reports on the steady approach of Bird Flu!!!

In their defense, of course, the news media will argue that people susceptible to depression can just avoid the news. Or the medai can argue (with evidence) that nobody takes the news media seriously any more. Personally, I prefer to treat the media as a new version of the funny papers. You can’t sue the funny papers. But they are good for a laugh. If you are willing to accept the risks of laughing.

What Brain Modules Can Say about Depression

2006-04-05T09:15:00.000-05:00

Whether or not cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) will help a person recover from depression can be predicted through brain imaging, according to research results published by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the April issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association.
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Method: fMRI. Participants saw emotional words and were asked if the words applied to them. Nine of the depressed participants had decreased activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex after they read negative words in this task. Seven of these recovered after CBT. Another five depressed participants showed no such decreased activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex. Only one of these recovered after CBT.

Lead researcher: Dr. Greg J. Siegle (assistant professor of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine).

A key player here was the amygdala. People who showed increased activity there after reading the negative words tended to show better recovery. The amygdala is vigilant to emotional stimuli.

The back story on this is that one common problem depressed people have is that they persist in unfavorable thoughts about themselves. In response to that symptom, cognitive behavioral therapy teaches techniques to stop it. Dr. Siegle suggests that some depression occurs because “the amygdala doesn't turn off as fast as it should after it recognizes something as being negative. The subgenual cingulate cortex regulates emotions and plays a part in turning the amygdala on and off. If the amygdala doesn't get 'turned off' in a person with depression, when exposed to negative information, the person may ruminate, going over this information again and again.”
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My comments. This research has direct implication for diagnosis and treatment. The number of subjects is small, so a larger N is needed. But the logic makes very good sense. There is another module playing in this story. The route to distress was the language system. The researchers used it to initiate the brain activity. And it may have been playing a role in that rumination Dr. Siegle mentioned. It certainly played a role in the CBT. Or perhaps two roles. The instructions in CBT had to go through the language system. And the instructions were evidently directed at suppressing the rumination that probably involved the language system.

I find several ideas here that deserve elaboration. One is “How to talk yourself into depression.” Another is “Can we sue the nightly news for making us depressed?” A third is, “A funny thing happened on the way to depression.” But I will leave them as unfinished tasks. That’s not a symptom of AD/HD because I am grown up.

Meanwhile, it may be interesting to consider how such methods as meditation, prayer, chanting, and the like would affect that troublesome rumination that so agitated the amydalas in these patients.

Attention Span and Brain Buffers

2006-04-02T09:51:00.000-05:00

Why do people have a limited attention span? Some recent research offers me a basis for speculating. The study was done by Philippe Peigneux and colleagues at the University of Liege. It was published in the open access journal PLoS Biology.

They used fMRI to observe brain activity. The test activity was a ten-minute auditory attention task. This task was done three times, separated by half-hour periods. During the first separation period, the participants performed other tasks. The second separation period was simple rest. The intervening tasks were selected to place demands on different brain modules.

The results showed that the brain activity in the second and third occasions of the test task was systematically changed by the intervening task. The evidence is interpreted as showing that the brain was actively processing the stored results of the test task, even while it was handling the intervening task.

Behavioral research has long used this kind of study to asses the effects of intervening tasks on learning. The intervening task can interfere with consolidation (the theoretical equivalent to the processing results described above).

Speculation: When you meet something new to your brain, it stores the input in “raw” form. This storage is somewhat analogous to connecting a video camera to your computer. This raw storage takes a lot of space and is not readily available for access. Later, you will take the video offline and let the computer process the raw into compressed form with annotation (tags).

The tags I would expect out of my computer would be things like date and time. If I believed the tech media, of course, I would expect it to recognize faces and familiar terrain. It would then have tags that would let it answer questions like “Who did I get on video at the meeting yesterday?”

I won’t get that out of my computer (yet). But everybody gets that kind of work out of their brains. So follow that analogy to attention span. My computer’s attention span in this task is fixed by the size of its storage buffer. Fill that buffer and it gets a bad case of ADD.

Brain overload leads to graceful degradation. But when you fill up your brain buffer, you probably need to take that system offline and shift to another task. How long does it take to fill a brain buffer? My guess is that you can tell from the length of the attention span. And how long is that?

That depends. (I had to say that. I am a psychologist.) But I will offer a rough estimate for unfamiliar things that take a lot of cognitive processing, memory, and attention. Ten minutes.

I’ll go on about this on a later blog. But I have to stop now. I am over my ten minutes.

Ethnogenic Disorders

2006-03-31T10:31:00.000-06:00

I needed a new word. So I made one. We have iatrogenic diseases. These are diseases generated by physicians. I think we are entitled to ethnogenc diseases. And, for the benefit of mental medicine, ethnogenic disorders. An ethnogenic disease is one generated by the culture. Obesity might be considered an ethnogenic disease generated by western culture.

The reason I need the word is to talk about dyslexia and AD/HD. I did talk about dyslexia before. The research I cited noted that children code words in three forms as they learn to read and to spell. They code words by sound, by the parts that signal meaning or grammar, and visual appearance. Dyslexia appears to be a problem with the system that manages coding for visual appearance.

The ethnogenic nature of the problem is obvious. It was not a problem until cultural progress demanded that everyone must learn to read (and spell) fluently. Some people have also argued that the problem is exacerbated by the look-and-say method of reading instruction. In any case, the problem is of cultural origin. Apparently, it can be reduced by cultural intervention of the form of specialized instruction.

One might ask whether dyslexia is a disorder of children, of instructional methods, or of matching instructional methods to the needs of the individual child.

I also talked previously about AH/HD and span of attention. I reviewed the diagnostic characteristics. The line that went through my mind was:

We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

The list of characteristics describes what used to be called a “difficult child.” That was before we realized that any childhood behavior we don’t like is a disorder and should be treated by medication. In those days, it was a discipline problem and treated with bottom therapy. They called it spanking. But spanking is out of style, so I modernized the language. You can do anything if you call it therapy. Even administer powerful drugs.

The central theme in the list is the child doesn’t do what the adults want. But is this a disorder of the child or of what the adults want? Many of these items relate to span of attention. Is there a “normal” span of attention? Are all children supposed to have it? Does span of attention vary with the task? Does it vary with the child’s skill at the task? Does it vary with the intrusiveness of competing stimuli? Does it vary with age? Do adults know what it is reasonable to want in a span of attention?

The source I used for my previous comments said: As many as 3.8 million school-age children, most of them boys, are believed to have attention deficit disorders.

The passive voice, you will notice, let them evade the question of who did that believing. I found that the number of children in grades K-8 is (census bureau, projected for 2005): 38 million. That says that about 10% of the kids have ADD, if you believe those anonymous believers. This is good news for people who will make a career out of studying the disorder. And for the pharmaceutical companies who will sell pills to treat it.

My assessment is that when 10% of your population has a disorder, this is a really serious disorder. Or else the diagnostic criteria are too loose.

I’ll get back to this (unfinished) task later. I need to switch to another unfinished task now. Fortunately, I am an adult. So this switching is culturally acceptable. Not an ethnogenic disorder.

Spin of Attention

2006-03-27T14:17:00.000-06:00

Last week I promised to look into span of attention as it relates to ADHD. I got distracted to another topic. Now I got distracted back to this topic. But I will give it my owns spin. To do that, I will call up my Un. That is the unsocial part of my brain. The perpetual adolescent that remains unregimented, unconventional, and undisciplined. You have that part, too. But you may be unaware of it.

Google turned up a convenient summary from West Virginia University. Here are some excerpts, along with undisciplined annotations from my Un.

To be diagnosed as having ADHD a student must display, for six months or more, at least eight of the following characteristics prior to the age of seven:
1) fidgets, squirms, or is restless
Un: When? You know this is when adults want the child to sit and be quiet.
2) has difficulty remaining seated
Un: You mean even on the floor in front of the television?
3) is easily distracted
Un: It is a good thing this only applies to children under the age of seven. And by the way, does this really mean that when the child is busy watching TV, the child is easily distracted by a call to dinner?
4) has difficulty waiting for his/her turn
Un: As contrasted with adults, who have difficulty waiting in traffic and check out lines.
5) blurts out answers
Un: What do adults do when you ask them questions? They give you an answer. Why is that not blurting?
6) has difficulty following instructions
Un: As contrasted with adults, who always read and easily follow the instructions that come with consumer goods that they buy.
7) has difficulty sustaining attention
Un: Watch the typical male adult at the TV. When the commercials come on, how long does he sustain attention?
8) shifts from one uncompleted task to another
Un: Task? What is a task for a six year old? It is something the parent or teacher want the kid to do. When a you kid doesn’t do what you say, that’s a disorder. Right?
9) has difficulty playing quietly
Un: And why is it important for kids to play quietly? Because the noise bothers the adults around. Is that really a treatable disorder?
10) talks excessively
Un: I have heard adults talk a lot. But never excessively. Just ask them. If you have time to listen to the answer.
11) interrupts or is rude to others
Un: Undisciplined, in other words. Obviously calls for medication.
12) does not appear to listen
Un: So the kid has not learned to give the appearance of listening. Actually, this means “attend carefully to what is being said to you by adults.”
13) often loses things necessary for tasks
Un: Remember, this only applies to little kids. It is perfectly normal for adults to lose keys, TV remotes, and cell phones.
14) frequently engages in dangerous actions
Un: Well, look. You told the kid the action was dangerous. The kid should have paid attention and stopped doing it. Everybody says that being fat is dangerous. That’s why everybody stopped being fat.

I’ll have more to say about this in a few days. If I don’t get distracted.

Crazy Creativity?

2006-03-25T12:23:00.000-06:00

Is there a connection between mental illness and creativity? A blog by Renee Hopkins Callahan started me on this line of thinkering. In a previous episode, I commented on Bipolar, ADHD, creativity. I’ll get back to that and, as promised, talk about span of attention. But I get bored if I stay on one task very long, so I’ll shift to another subject under the same question.

In the same blog, she suggested that creative people are more open to input from the environment and that this condition, if badly managed, might be associated with psychosis. She mentioned a study that seemed to support that idea. That study used methodology I would call quaint. The modern method for investigating this question is clearly fMRI or some other noninvasive measure of brain activity. Here is something I got from Google.
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New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity.

The work by Vanderbilt psychologists Brad Folley and Sohee Park was published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.
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Schizotypes are not psychotic. Just weird. Or at least weird as judged by psychologists. (I know people who think psychologists are weird.) But anyway, some psychologists think they can assign people to the schzotype category with some “personality” tests. As you can guess, the psychologists who invented the category thought it way related to schizophrenia.

The researchers in this study measured creativity and brain activity (NIRS) in normals, schizotypes, and schizophrenics. NIRS is not fMRI, but is another method for locating brain activity. The researchers used a common psychological measure of creativity: they showed the subjects common household objects and asked them to make up new ways to use them. The schizophrenics and the normals were about equal on this measure. The schizotypes were more “creative”. That means they thought of more novel ideas. The NIRS results showed that in doing this task, the schizotypes generated greater activity in the right hemisphere, as compared to the others.

I am not going to endorse the category of schizotype here. But I consider it useful if it can be associated with distinctive patterns of brain activity and behavior under specific conditions. Nor am I going to endorse the “fixed category” view of creativity that is apparent in this line of thinking.

Consider, for example, “normal” people. That is, people who would be considered normal by psychologists. There is abundant evidence that such people can increase their creativity by practicing the relevant skills. Brainstorming is the best studied of these methods, but the Thinkerer suggests others: Ideator.

Or to put it existentially, why do you care whether people with mental illness tend to be more creative than “normal” people? What you really care about is what you, here, now, in this moment, can do to achieve the kind of creativity that is of use to you. Is that a crazy idea? You decide.

Bipolar, ADHD, creativity (2)

2006-03-22T13:14:00.000-06:00

A blog by Renee Hopkins Callahan started this line of thinkering. In Episode 1, I described a study she cited as suggesting that the bipolar condition may be associated with creativity. As I said then, the study is inadequate for substantial conclusions, but it does suggest actionable intel. Here is the actionable suggestion she offered in her blog:

“I also wonder if specific training in creativity skills might help bipolar people whose symptoms don't currently manifest themselves as the more positive creative traits. Perhaps if they knew what to do with their innate creativity, these folks would be able to live more on the positive than the negative side of creativity.”

The idea behind this thinking is that the manic phase of the bipolar condition may have some similarity to creativity (or at least to aspects of creativity).

For people who are diagnosed with the bipolar condition, I think the therapist is in the appropriate source to recommend such things as training in creativity skills. But for people (including children) at increased risk of the condition, the suggestion of creativity training is worth considering. Such training has value of its own. Any prophylactic benefit for the bipolar condition would just be an added benefit.

But I mentioned actionable intel. Training in creativity skills is too abstract to be actionable. So I will apply Engineer creativity: move down the pyramid of abstraction to the level of concrete events. Examples of creativity are found in music, art, drama, literature, and advertising, for example. But narrow the field with a little Networker creativity: Where in these areas would you find anything like the manic phase of bipolar?

Here are some events that meet that test and might be trainable:
Drama: perform a role that is somewhat like the manic phase. An example would be Rose in the musical “Gypsy.” (Works best in the Method Acting context.)
Literature: Write a story or play about someone who is flushed with success, excited, highly enthusiastic.
Advertising: Engage in a brainstorming session.

All of these have some aspects of the manic phase. And all of them are distinguished from it by the feature of control. The person is able to set up conditions that induce a state of hyperactivity, excessive confidence, and disregard for consequences. The person is also able to terminate that condition more or less at will. A skilled actor, playing manic, will probably not be able to turn off manic characteristics instantly. But the actor will not follow the irrational patterns of the manic phase.

Both drama (as psychodrama) and writing (as therapeutic writing) have been used in clinical psychology for therapeutic purposes. They are also used in general society for creativity training (and for professional production). Certainly they would be reasonable candidates for investigation as helping to moderate the effect of bipolar and ADHD.

Bipolar, ADHD, Creativity

2006-03-20T13:08:00.000-06:00

Renee Hopkins Callahan posted a recent blog titled Bipolar children more creative than other kids. It cited a study on this topic and offered some interesting thoughts. First, the study:

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown … that a sample of children who either have or are at high risk for bipolar disorder score higher on a creativity index than healthy children… (A small study, published in the November issue of the Journal of Psychiatric Research.)
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The researchers studied 40 bipolar parents and 18 parents without medical problems. The study focused on the children. Half the children of the bipolar parents also had bipolar disorder. The other half had ADHD, which is common in children of bipolar parents. (This 50/50 ratio was probably part of the study design.)

The study measured creativity with the Barron-Welsh Art Scale. I am quite skeptical of the inference that a high score on this scale, or on any scale, measures what we commonly mean by creativity. But I think the score may represent one of the elements of creativity.

The results showed that both bipolar and ADHD children had substantially higher scores on the scale than children without such “disorders.” The results could be interpreted as suggesting that both conditions were associated with higher potential creativity.

The study is not adequate as a basis for strong conclusions and I am sure the researchers pointed this out. It does offer what I call actionable intel, some of which is in Callahan’s blog. I will get to that later this week, but here I will point out the question it raises about ADHD.

Calling on my own unconventional mental module, I suggest that many cases of ADHD are nothing but a low tolerance for boredom. After all, the most public symptom is a failure to sit quietly in school and be bored. (I am speaking from personal experience on this. I avoided being bored out of my gourd in school only by daydreaming.) Use clicks on the TV remote as a measure ADHD and we might be able to headline it as The Next Great Threat to the American Way.

If this theory is correct, the best solution would be to make school work more interesting. (Hear the theme from “Man of La Mancha” at this point.) Lacking that, maybe we could just teach the children the fine art of looking quietly attentive while daydreaming. I mean, before they develop the skill on their own.
Meanwhile, I will see if I can find some good research that relates span of attention to ADHD. If I don’t get distracted.

Modules: Risk and ambiguity

2006-03-18T13:48:00.000-06:00

Distinct regions of the human brain are activated when people are faced with ambiguous choices versus choices involving only risk, Duke University Medical Center researchers have discovered.

"We were able to see individual differences in brain activation depending on the person's preferences or aversions to risk and ambiguity," said Scott Huettel, Ph.D., lead author and a neuroscientist with the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. "People who preferred ambiguity had increased activation in the prefrontal cortex, and people who preferred risk had increased activation in the parietal cortex.”
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This study was similar to the Caltech study I used in several earlier blogs (Risky Business). Participants chose between pairs of monetary "gambles." In the risk condition, they were told the odds they would win. In the ambiguous condition, they were not told the odds. Observation was by fMRI. Preference means frequency of choice between the two options.

The interesting finding here is that fMRI can detect different brain modules being activated in people with different behavioral patterns. We can be reasonably sure, of course, that different behavioral patterns imply different brain modules. But now we can observe the match between behavior patterns and brain modules.

I will speculate that a specific psychological set corresponds to activation of a specific aggregation of brain modules. The ideal “economic man” would activate what I call the Vulcan. The behavior would be properly Vulcan: logical and without emotion. I suppose this is the system activated by economists and statisticians when confronted with a task.

The ideal economic man would never pay for a lottery chance. A simple calculation or simple logic will always show that this is a loser’s game in the long run. But some people pay for lottery tickets, even though they “know” how to determine the long term prospects. They are clearly not calling on the Vulcan modules.

Some people, including psychologists and economists, will express astonishment and disapproval at this inconsistency of behavior. I see no inconsistency at all. If I don’t start my calendar program, I will not get reminders about my schedule. My computer “knows” about the reminders but it will not access them unless the appropriate module is active.

These risk-ambiguity studies with fMRI are most likely studying the activation of the Vulcan modules versus the activation of other modules. I hope they will find ways to help more people activate their Vulcan modules. Vulcans know how to manage risk and uncertainty.

Knowing good and evil

2006-03-15T10:52:00.000-06:00

Viewing a person as dishonest or immoral can distort memory, a Cornell study suggests. So much so, that when we attempt to recall that person's behavior, it seems to be worse than it really was.

Psychology Professor David Pizarro, at Banfi's Restaurant on campus, found that people who read about a man who walked out on a restaurant bill remember the bill as much higher if they're told he liked to steal; people who thought he left because of an emergency remember a significantly lower bill.

Previous studies have found that leading questions can influence memory of an incident, and that thinking that someone is good (or bad) in one area tends to influence judgments about them in other areas.
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The power of expectation. The power of belief. Psychological set. A minor matter in this case. But it operates in real life, too. It colors what you think about yourself and about the people around you. It affects what you do. And what you don’t do.

People who don’t understand these effects are likely to attribute them the “the subconscious mind.” They may assume that there is nothing to be done about the effects. People who do understand the effects recognize them as the crude work of the talking modules. They activate the Vulcan fuzzy phrase warning.

Now try another memory test. In the King James Version of the Bible, Genesis, Chapter 3, there is a story about Adam and Eve in the garden. There is a tree, a serpent, and a fruit that gets eaten. What was that fruit and what was the effect of eating it?

Most people will have read or heard about this story. Religious people, I suppose, will have read it carefully, since it has major theological implications.

You can check your memory at this site. Read verse 5 carefully. Ask yourself whether your influenced your memory. Read verse 5 again. Ask yourself whether your expectations are making it hard for you to understand this sentence.

For added amusement, ask other people the questions above. See if their memory is also affected by knowing good and evil.

Remember what you can do

2006-03-12T10:50:00.000-06:00

Confidence In Memory Performance Helps Older Adults Remember
Believing that you can retain a good memory even in your twilight years is the first step to achieving that goal. Those who believe they can control their memory are more likely to employ mnemonic strategies that help keep memory fit despite the march of time. These are the conclusions of a new Brandeis study published in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.

"One's sense of control is both a precursor and a consequence of age-related losses in memory," says lead author Margie Lachman, professor of psychology and director of the Lifespan Lab at Brandeis University. "Our study shows that the more you believe there are things you can do to remember information, the more likely you will be to use effort and adaptive strategies and to allocate resources effectively, and the less you will worry about forgetting."
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Luke Skywalker: I don’t believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.

This is not Tinkerbell here. You don’t get it by believing in fairies. You get it by believing in yourself. In what you can do. In your ability to find ways to make things better. Because that is the first step in making things better. Once you believe, you will take the remaining steps that are needed to make things better. If you don’t know what those steps are, you will find out. If you believe you can find out.

And this is not just about memory, either. Memory just happens to be an instance that illustrates the effect of directed self-confidence. Note the qualifier. Directed. Confidence in what you can do. About some specific goal. And the confidence is just the start button. It changes what you do. What you do gets you to that specific goal.

You could call it the self-directed life. If you believe in what you can do.

High Percentages Of Depression Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

2006-03-11T11:58:00.000-06:00

According to widely reported community-based research, almost half the U.S. population suffers from depression. But research by two sociologists indicates that percentage is greatly exaggerated or is a misrepresentation. …

There are a number of reasons that these high rates are perpetuated. One is that political support is more likely for an agency devoted to preventing and treating a widespread disease such as the National Institute of Mental Health. Another reason is that pharmaceutical companies capitalize on these survey findings to broaden their markets. The explosive growth in sales of antidepressants may indicate its effectiveness. Lastly, advocacy groups lay claim to the prevalence of mental disorders. They equate the millions of people that surveys identify with disorders with the serious mental disorders in order to reduce the social distance between the mentally disordered and others, thereby lowering the stigma. This may only hinder the truly disabled by shifting resources from where it is truly needed.
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Widely reported by the news media. But use a little logic. Community-based research is forced to ask people standardized questions and draw conclusions from their responses. If those questions were adequate to diagnose mental illness, the questions would be used for diagnosis in mental health practices. All of the people involved in this community-based research know that the questions would be inadequate for diagnosis in a clinical setting.

I applaud these sociologists for their reasonable analysis and for their frank appraisal of the underlying financial incentives. I would add one more item. These reports are widely covered by the news media. There is no hard-hitting reporter to ask penetrating questions like:

“These surveys were diagnosing people for depression. Are these the same diagnostic methods used in clinical practice? And those people that you diagnosed as depressed – did you advise them that they needed to seek treatment?”

Reporting on medical studies is close to the perfect stream for the media. The lab issues a press release, already written for the public. It is available on the web and probably by RSS feed. Editing is mostly cut, copy and paste. No fact-checking needed because research has its own fact-checking. Just put on an alarmist headline and run it. Put some medical ads nearby to complete the perfect stream (of income).

There you have it. Incentive analysis for the production and distribution of new or huge medical problems. I find the situation depressing. Last December, I dealt with another bout of news depression. That came from another news disease: a report in the New York Times about Internet Addiction and prospective cures. My proposed cure is described here: How we are curing our news addiction

As to depression, my suggestion for people who don’t feel that they need clinical treatment is: Pick one thing that makes you unhappy. Do something to make it better. If you need help on that, see Problem Solving.

And if anyone gives you a survey asking how depressed you are, tell them your charge for answering surveys is $100/hour. You will either keep them from leeching your time or get $100. Either way, you probably won’t feel depressed for a while.

Fixing is different from complaining

2006-03-08T10:31:00.000-06:00

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids may influence mood, personality and behavior, according to results of a study presented today by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers at the 64th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Denver.

…researchers found that participants [healthy adults] who had lower blood levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids were more likely to report mild or moderate symptoms of depression, a more negative outlook and be more impulsive. Conversely, those with higher blood levels of omega-3s were found to be more agreeable.

…While the cardiovascular benefit of increasing omega-3 intake is well recognized, relatively little is known of the potential mental health effects among the general public.
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No actionable intel here. The cardiovascular benefit is well known and well publicized. So people who pay attention to such things already have higher intakes of omega-3.

I mention this research for two reasons. First it serves as another reminder that the mind is not different from the brain. It is just the activity of the brain seen from another viewpoint.

The other reason is something I first thought of as a possible confounding issue. Since these people were not asked to change their diets, the level of omega-3 was the result of their normal diet. The phrase “may influence” implies a causal effect. That phrase was probably provided by a rewriter, rather than by the researchers. Their language properly describes the finding of an association.

Such an association could occur if people who are depressed are less likely to take omega-3 as a supplement or in the recommended foods. These were people with depressive characteristics below clinical levels. But what we know about depression suggests that such people might be less active in taking care of their health.

Reduced efforts at self-care might lead to conditions that favor depression. Thus a vicious circle. A therapist would notice this problem and attempt to intervene. Such intervention might be one of the things that makes cognitive-behavior therapy useful.

But not everybody needs a therapist to intervene. Most people probably handle their own intervening. How would people handle their own intervention? I think they would call up their Explorer to look for solutions. Then they would call their Engineer to plan a route to solutions.

The basic difference between fixing and complaining is that fixers believe they can fix.

Luke Skywalker: I don’t believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.

Happiness Is What You Can Do

2006-03-06T11:58:00.000-06:00

The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don't Use Them
By Robin Lloyd, Special to LiveScience

Psychologists have recently handed the keys to happiness to the public, but many people cling to gloomy ways out of habit, experts say.

Polls show Americans are no happier today than they were 50 years ago despite significant increases in prosperity, decreases in crime, cleaner air, larger living quarters and a better overall quality of life.
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Puff warning: This article is mostly news puff. Mental meringue. Looks good but when you bite into it, there is nothing there. Take those polls (please).

I think how I would react if some pollster phoned to ask me if I was happy. “Well, I was happy until the phone interrupted me.” I would explain that my consulting fee for answering silly polls is $100/ hour (or fraction thereof). Payable in advance. If they paid me, I suppose that would make me happy. But I will also be happy if pollsters don’t bother me. And the don’t. So I am happy.

I was also interested to see that happiness comes in an amount. I wonder about the units. Is it in fluid ounces, like Budweiser? If a pollster asked me how happy I was, I would insist on knowing the units. That would probably get them to stop wasting my time.

And how happy are people supposed to be? I don’t know. Apparently, something is wrong with people because they haven’t become happier in the last 50 years. This, of course, is standard popsych. There is always something wrong with people. And in popsych, it is always their fault. Blame the victim. Maybe this sells news.

In case you wonder about those keys, check them out. They are all vague abstractions that roll trippingly off the tongue. And don’t really tell you what to do. Of course, they are not about you. They must be about someone else. Because if you were not happy enough, you would do something about it.

What would you do? You would pick something that made you unhappy. You would start figuring out how to make it better. You would get so engaged in fixing that problem that you would lose track of whether you were happy or not.

After you got it fixed, you might feel happy about getting that problem off your plate. You might feel happy to realize what you can do when you put your mind to it. You might feel happy to think about what you will do to the next problem that gets in your way. You might even feel happy to notice that happiness is not where you go but what you take with you.

Keeping the Talk Modules Quiet

2006-03-04T09:08:00.000-06:00

Repeating mantrams can help control the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, have a calming effect in traffic and even ease the boredom of exercise, according to a study in the latest issue of Journal of Advanced Nursing.

83 per cent of veterans and hospital staff surveyed after a five-week mantram course told researchers from the US Department of Veterans Affairs that they found the technique -- which involves silently and continuously repeating calming words or phrases throughout the day - useful on a number of occasions.

"The people taking part in the study found that silently repeating a specific word or phrase helped them to handle a number of difficult situations" explains lead researcher Jill E Bormann, Research Nurse Scientist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System in California. Most of the volunteers chose words or phrases that reflected their religious beliefs. People without specific beliefs chose other soothing phrases.
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The process is similar to other meditation practices. It is also similar to chanting, saying the Rosary, ritual praying, or trying to understand the illogical part of a koan. That last item I call the confuse-a-cat model after the Monte Python sketch. Give the verbal system something to keep it occupied and you may keep it out of the way while the rest of your brain deals with the problem.

The Thinkerer has several suggestions on using this method: Clear Your Head. The Relax Clipit. I do have one disagreement with the people who are actively selling this as a product. They tend to suggest that “more is better.” That is a Great American Marketing Phrase. But not even Budweiser tells you that. Personally, I prefer a less materialistic phrase: “Enough is enough.”

The verbal system does have its uses, of course. The important thing is to be able to turn it on an off when it suits your purpose. Just like your TV. On when you need it. Off when it interferes with what you want to do. That is what you do with your TV, isn’t it?

You could think of mantrams and meditation as the remote switch for your verbal system. Quieting the audio in your head. So you can hear from your quiet modules. If you try it, you might hear something important.

Psychological Set in the EEG View

2006-03-02T11:28:00.000-06:00

Scientists can now predict memory of an event before it even happens. A team at UCL (University College London) can now tell how well memory will serve us before we have seen what we will remember.

Scans of brain activity, published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, indicate that the brain can actually get into the 'right frame of mind' to store new information and that we perform at our best if the brain is active not only at the moment we get new information but also in the seconds before.
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The interesting part of this research is that the researchers were able to observe brain activity (by EEG) that gave good predictions on whether the participants would remember or not. People have known for many years that preceding experiences affect memory. That is common knowledge and why we often tell people to pay attention when we are about to say something we think is important. The effect is widely studied in psychology as psychological set. Psychology also offers useful recommendations about how people can prepare their brains to remember things. Predicting is good. Being able to do something about it is much better.

The research described here may later be able to evaluate various was to get in the “right frame of mind” for remembering. And perhaps clarify the role of boredom as the wrong frame of mind (The Brain Borers That Ate Your Memory). I think we can guess that boredom is the wrong frame of mind for remembering. Or, as psychologists would prefer to say, an inappropriate psychological set.

Complaining Is Easier Than Fixing

2006-02-27T15:45:00.000-06:00

Take this headline in a CNET report from Reuters

Tech makes working harder, not easier

And here is the opening claim.
Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research.

This was research conducted for Day-Timers, a maker of organizational products. (By an odd coincidence, these products will help you schedule your days.) The cause, according to the article, is technology.

In case you are wondering how this claim squares with the annual increases in productivity regularly reported by econometrics, the explanation is that “less accomplished” does not really refer to objective productivity. It refers to accomplished as a fraction of what people expected to accomplish.

Part of the explanation:
Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, voice mails and the like, research showed.

People actually get paid to do research like this? People actually get paid to write news reports about such findings?

I will guess that Day-Timers saw this research as a contribution to their marketing effort. And they will probably offer a solution from their product line. That illustrates one of my favorite problem-solving lines:

Every problem is an opportunity being mismanaged.

Entrepreneurs like Day-Timer see problems and sell solutions. There is not much market for complaints (unless you are in the news business). The market is for solutions.

In case Day-Timer doesn’t solve all the problems, here are a few other (free) solutions.
Time control
Time Sucker Clipit
Joblets

Of course, complaining is easier than fixing. And lasts longer.

Why the Mind is in the Brain (3)

2006-02-25T11:12:00.000-06:00

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have found evidence that a hormone produced in the stomach directly stimulates the higher brain functions of spatial learning and memory development, and further suggests that we may learn best on an empty stomach.
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My first thought was to ignore this report as having no popular interest. That was yesterday. The work of my fast brain modules. They tend to be quite superficial, so I generally don’t expect serious work out of them. I left the matter undecided and slept on it.

This morning I had input from my quiet modules. They are much slower, but they are more thorough. And they run in the background, so I don’t have to give them any attention until they have some results. So the following is the memo I got from the quiet modules this morning.

I did a couple of blogs about the mind in the brain before (1, 2). The main theme was that what happens in the brain also happens in the “mind.” They are not really two things. Convention language uses two words, but the legitimate distinction is between viewpoints. The brain is the objective entity. The mind is your subjective experience.

This business is sometimes called “the mind-body problem.” That is a testimony to the ability of language to create a problem where none exists. People have long known that what goes into the body affects “the mind.” That goes back at least to the invention of beer and wine. See Genesis 9 for the story about how Noah got drink and passed out naked.

For a more modern account, I did a Google search on tryptophan turkey. Got over 200K citations. Most of them probably tell (with varying qualifications) about how tryptophan in turkey makes people sleepy on Thanksgiving. I will leave it to the popular media to explain why this effect is notable only on Thanksgiving.

The research is of considerable technical interest. But I did not see any reason for popular interest. Parents already know, from observation, the effects of eating on their children. Teens and adults notice the effects of eating (and drinking) on their behavior and “mental” function. The effects depend on various individual characteristics, so that generalized research will not be as useful as observation and persistent self-awareness.

But then (later, next morning) I realized that the generalized research points out the possible benefits of using self-awareness as a guide in scheduling what you do (Time Control). So I thought this research was of value as a reminder about scheduling to get the best work out of your brain. Sort of like the reminder to sleep on it.

Zen Thinking

2006-02-22T12:19:00.000-06:00

Here are two reports on studies by Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues.

'Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions (NewScientist.com news service)
Sleep on it, decision-makers told (BBC news)

Actually, the studies did not demonstrate the benefits of sleeping on a decision. Not that a demonstration was needed. Those of us who follow the practice are quite convinced by our own observations. It is widely available as commonsense advice.

What the studies did demonstrate was the benefit of drawing on the non-verbal parts of the brain. I won’t quote the news reports here. They are in the standard pop-psych language of the “conscious mind” and the “unconscious mind.” I am not going to accept language that treats nonverbal modules as “unconscious.” Nor will I accept the popular convention of two minds.

You have one brain. It has many modules. Those modules will not always agree with each other. You may experience that disagreement as internal conflict or, in this case, buyer’s regret. You can reduce the disagreement of the modules by giving the quiet modules a chance to finish their processing and get the results into your awareness. I like to call this Zen thinking.

Concrete description of the research. The researchers gave participants information about things people buy. Some of the things, such as oven gloves of shampoo, presented simple choices. Other things, such as a house or a car, presented complex choices.

Some participants were asked to ponder the information and make a choice. Other participants were told they would be asked for a choice later. In the meantime, they were asked to work on a series of puzzles. (I assume, that both groups spent the same amount of time before making a choice.)

The choices were considered “good” if the person remained happy with the choice as some later time. “Bad” choices were presumably instances of buyer’s remorse. Here is the score”

Ponderers tended to make good decisions on simple choices.

Puzzlers tended to beat the ponderers on complex choices.

The puzzles were intended to occupy the “conscious” processes and so give more opportunity for Zen thinking. Evidently they succeeded. (Other common methods with similar objectives include chanting, meditation, and sleeping)

The “unconscious” processes did a better job than the “conscious” processes on handling complex processes. I hope you appreciate the absurdity of the term “unconscious” in this context. The only thing unconscious here is the inept choice of a term to denote processes that can beat the verbal processes when they get chance.

Can you use this information? Not just talk about it. Use it. Yes. Check with the Startalittles. They will tell you how to get Zen thinking to work for you.

The Grammar of the Modules

2006-02-19T13:00:00.000-06:00

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have discovered that two areas in the human brain are responsible for different types of language processing requirements. They found that simple language structures are processed in an area that is phylogenetically older, and which apes also possess. Complicated structures, by contrast, activate processes in a comparatively younger area which only exists in… humans. … (Brain Researchers Discover…)
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The distinction here can be understood (at least in English) as the difference between simple and complex sentences. Simple sentences: “The boy kicked the ball. The ball hit the window.” Complex sentence: “The ball that the boy kicked hit the window.”

People who have tried to get computers to interpret or translate language will recognize the distinction as important to processing requirements. Educators will recognize the distinction as easily seen in language development. Writers (at least some) will recognize the distinction as an element of style that affects reading difficulty. (A few writers may even think of Strunk & White at this point.)

With the evidence that complex expressions require additional processing by another brain module, we can understand why complex sentence structures deserve such recognition. There are probably other variations in writing style that relate to specific brain modules (though maybe not as big and obvious as Broca’s area). Processing of passive voice, subjunctive mood, and abstract terms are good candidates.

Eventually, I will include, in my blog about homework, a series about “brain-based communication.” One thing I notice about complex writing style is the deviation from narrative form. Human culture certainly evolved with narrative (storytelling) as a major element. I think we can assume that there are brain modules (not necessarily localized) that handle the recording and retelling of experiences. I wonder if we are demanding more processing from the reader when we deviate from narrative form.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to the role of narrative form in communication. I don’t mean the Discovery Channel, Animal planet, or the news media. They understand and use the narrative form extensively. I mean the people (like me) who write about “the role of narrative form in communication” when they could say “what storytelling tells.” An example of what storytelling tells is the myth: “A myth is not a female moth.”

When we find out more about the relationship between language structure and the processing load on the brain modules, we may be better prepared to relate writing style to our communication objectives. Match the grammar of the language to the grammar of the modules.

Dyslexic Children Show fMRI Response To Training

2006-02-17T10:02:00.000-06:00

Brain images of children with dyslexia taken before they received spelling instruction show that they have different patterns of neural activity than do good spellers when doing language tasks related to spelling. But after specialized treatment emphasizing the letters in words, they showed similar patterns of brain activity. These findings are important because they show the human brain can change and normalize in response to spelling instruction, even in dyslexia, the most common learning disability.

The research is unique in that it looks at images of individual brains rather than the composite group images…. Being able to study how individual brains differ between good and poor spellers and how they normalize after receiving one of two treatments is an important advance, according to University of Washington neuroimaging scientist Todd Richards and neuropsychologist Virginia Berninger, who headed the research team.

Earlier research by the UW team and others has shown that dyslexic children exhibit a different pattern of brain activity while reading compared to youngsters who are good readers, but that the brain is malleable and this pattern can normalize with specialized instruction….

Researchers have found that humans code words in three forms while learning how to read and spell. These codes draw on common and unique brain circuits. The brain codes words by their sound…, by the parts of words that signal meaning and grammar …and by their visual or written form.
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The findings appeared in the January issue of the journal Neurolinguistics. The researchers used fMRI to observe patterns of brain activity and to distinguish the effect of instruction. Instruction that emphasized focusing on and remembering the letters in written (visual form) words led to the most favorable results in terms of brain activity.

Comments: The report illustrates to role of (at least) three brain modules in the development of reading and spelling skills. It also illustrates how fMRI can display the changing patterns of module use as the child learns to read more effectively. Those changing patterns can provide prompt and therefore valuable evidence about the effectiveness of treatments.

This study used only a small number of subjects. More studies, with more subjects, will probably be needed. The encouraging thing is that fMRI seems to be able to give definitive results. This is not only an issue for dyslexia. For more than 50 years, there has been a debate over the appropriate method for teaching reading.

(Vulcan Fuzzy Phrase warning: the appropriate method carries the assumption that there is one method for all children and for all ages and stages of development.)

I did a Google search on the key words: "look and say" read "sound it out"

I found about 75 items. Apparently, the debate has not been settled (perhaps because there is no one appropriate method for all cases). Perhaps fMRI will offer a definitive method not only for settling the debate, but for adjusting the training to the individual needs of students and their current level of preparation.

It is easier to grasp what you can grab.

2006-02-14T08:47:00.000-06:00

A Dartmouth research group has found a new and unexpected way our attention can be grabbed -- by Grabbable Objects. Their study, which appears in the March 17 advance online issue of Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates that objects we typically associate with grasping, such as screwdrivers, forks or pens, automatically attract our visual attention, especially if these items are on a person's right-hand side.

"People had already shown that simply viewing graspable objects activates motor areas in the brain," explains Todd C. Handy, the lead author. “Now here's evidence that, to help us do this, grabbable objects can literally grab our attention.” The researchers use both EEG and fMRI in the study.
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Here is a finding in basic research that may be important in brain-based communication. That’s a topic for my other blog, after I have thought it through a bit more. Despite the description above, the study actually used images of graspable objects. Thus the finding can reasonably be applied to PowerPoint presentations, web pages, and documents. But the effects are might be stronger with physically graspable objects.

This research itself does not test any practical application, but we can put this evidence together with other information about attention for an inference: Graspable objects, in catching attention, will be more effectively remembered. (Psychology students note: Testable hypotheses there.) Further speculation: The object may aid or hinder the presentation depending on whether the presentation incorporates them.

Thus, for example, a screwdriver image would probably catch attention in a PowerPoint presentation. If it were unrelated to the nearby topic, it would probably act as a distraction. If it were logically associated with the nearby topic, it would probably improve recall of that topic. Presumably, the presenter would point out the association. (Psychology students note: Testable hypotheses there.)

Would the position in the visual field matter as it did in the experiment? Probably not much. No harm in putting images to the right. We do that in the Thinkerer web pages. But experiments that deal with presentations to the left or right visual field have to get the participant to maintain a fixed gaze on some point in the presentation screen. In real life, people look around too much to suppose that what they see is going to only one side the brain.

Would physical objects be better than images? (Vulcan Fuzzy Word Warning: better is undefined. Vulcan thought requires consideration of the definition.) Would physical objects produce better recall than images? Probably. (Psychology students note: Testable hypotheses there.) A presenter might actually pick up and handle the objects to give them emphasis. That might improve a PowerPoint presentation. In the Thinkerer, we suggest that people print Cuepons and Clipits. Perhaps having them in physically grabable form makes them more effective as reminders.

The Unsettling Effects of Set

2006-02-11T08:54:00.000-06:00

Summary: An inability to step outside of one's own head may be behind e-mail miscommunication, according to recent research

Psychologist Justin Kruger, PhD, has seen plenty of e-mails gone awry. Now, Kruger and his colleague Nicholas Epley, PhD, of the University of Chicago, have published research that helps explain why these electronic misunderstandings occur so frequently. In a study in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 89, No. 5, pages 925–936), they find that people overestimate both their ability to convey their intended tone–be it sarcastic, serious or funny–when they send an e-mail, as well as their ability to correctly interpret the tone of messages others send to them.

The reason for this communication disconnect, the researchers find, is egocentrism–the well-established social psychological phenomenon whereby people have a difficult time detaching themselves from their own perspectives and understanding how other people will interpret them.
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Egocentrism? Well, yes, in the technical sense used by psychologists. But not a good choice of terms in a non-technical report. Too susceptible to misinterpretation. Open to other interpretations by people who do not share the perspective and understanding of psychologists. I suppose psychologists “have a difficult time detaching themselves from their own perspectives and understanding how other people will interpret them. “

Is egocentrism an explanation for miscommunication? Not really. It is just another name for the phenomenon. Psychology works just like medicine. Give something an impressive name and it sounds like you know what you are talking about.

I’ll use a simpler name: psychological set. And a more familiar example: proofreading.

(Vulcan logic here. Seek the superset. Find sibling classes. See if they have useful ideas for your problem.)

When you write for publication, you know what you intended to say. You will leave out words, misspell, write the wrong word, and omit essential punctuation. You will also use pronouns with ambiguous reference and phrases that can easily be misread.

You will find that you can read over what you wrote and see none of these defects. Psychologists will attribute this effect to psychological set or expectancy. If you know what to expect, you often see what you expect rather than what is there.

Now take another example, this from the beginning of the story: “An inability to step outside of one's own head…” Inability. Can’t do it. This language expresses an expectancy of helplessness. The an ineffective psychological set. Makes me think of “learned helplessness,” once a popular topic in psychological research.

Proofreading has long been a problem. But nobody talks about an inability to proofread. Instead, people found standard solutions for breaking set.

Here are a few set-breakers (courtesy of Vulcan logic) suggested by proofreading:

Leave it for a few days so it will be newer to you. Read it aloud. Read it word for word while ignoring the meaning. Use a text-to-speech program to read it aloud while you look at the text. Have someone else read it and mention what they find confusing. Call up someone on your head team and read it in their style. If you are trying to be funny, call up the Vulcan or the Canter. See how they would interpret it. (The Thinkerer uses these mythical characters to help people break out of an ineffective set and choose another set that may be more appropriate.)

The researchers tested one such method and found it useful. The researchers know the difference between inability and difficulty. The difficult calls for a problem-solving set. At least for problem-solvers.

Is it best to expect the worst?

2006-02-09T15:41:00.000-06:00

Psychologists test long-held theory of emotional cushioning.

Margaret Marshall of Seattle Pacific University and Jonathon Brown of the University of Washington, Seattle first asked more than 80 college students to fill in questionnaires that measured their general emotional outlook on life - whether bright or gloomy. The students then practiced a set of moderately difficult word-association puzzles on a computer. They then rated how well they expected to perform on a second set of such problems.

The researchers then gave half the students problems that were slightly easier than the first set, while half got harder puzzles. This ensured that the students' performances would either exceed, or fall short of, their expectations. Afterwards, the subjects filled in a questionnaire to measure their emotional reaction, such as how disappointed or ashamed they felt.

Students who expected to do badly, the researchers found, actually felt worse when they messed up than those who predicted they would do well but similarly botched their test.

The study, published in Cognition and Emotion1, suggests that a person's reaction to disappointment or failure is determined mainly by their general outlook on life. …

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Let’s start with the title: Is it best to expect the worst? That might lead you to expect findings that could guide you to a course of action. But later you see the suggestion that a person's reaction to disappointment or failure is determined mainly by their general outlook on life. If that is so, then the person’s expectation is probably also determined by that general outlook. The expectation, then, does not cause the reaction. It is simply another expression of the same general outlook. Any useful course of action would have to come from a change in that general outlook.

Where would that general outlook come from? And how general would it be? One source, of course, would be experience. People know where they have been successful. But that would not be a general outlook. A person would be optimistic in areas of previous success. And pessimistic in areas of previous defeat. If possible, the person would avoid the latter areas.

Sometimes people (students will understand) cannot avoid areas they find difficult because of demands from long term goals. What then? Well, let’s step outside of feel-good issues for a moment and get real. The people will either find a way to succeed or find other goals that are easier to reach. My suggestion is to call on the Vulcan and the Engineer. Use defeat as a learning experience. Apply Troubleshooting. Here are a few Bounce-Back slogans that people have found useful.

Use problem-solving for defeats. Save emotion for successes. And expect both. In natural order.

One Memory, Three Modules

2006-02-07T10:36:00.000-06:00

Single Memory Processed In Three Separate Parts Of The Brain

UCI researchers have found that a single brief memory is actually processed differently in separate areas of the brain … The results were published this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a study using rats, researchers Emily L. Malin and James L. McGaugh of UCI’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory demonstrate that while one part of the brain, the hippocampus, is involved in processing memory for context, the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the cerebral cortex, is responsible for retaining memories involving unpleasant stimuli. A third area, the amygdala, located in the temporal lobe, consolidates memories more broadly and influences the storage of both contextual and unpleasant information.

“These results are highly intriguing,” said McGaugh, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who pioneered the study of drug and stress-hormone influences on memory. “It is the first time we have found this fragmentation in the brain of what we would think of as a single experience. For example, different aspects of an experience, such as a car accident, would be processed by different parts of the brain. The experience is fragmented in our brain, even though we think of it as one event.”
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I think fragmentation is a poor choice of words. It tends to suggest coming apart for no purpose. I prefer analysis. You use that term when you intentionally take something apart to produce specific parts for specific a specific purpose.

And, by the way, that car accident only becomes one event by the power of language to make one entity out of a collection of details. There was a context, where it happened. The context has little emotional tone. If it is a familiar place to a particular person, it may have the warm and comfortable feeling: “I have been here a lot and feel at home here.” Probably the hippocampus is at work on this part.

There was an unpleasant event. Of course that should be stored somewhere else. You want to have the event connected to alarm bells, tensing of the body, release of adrenaline. And evolution wanted the event connected to the context and to anything that could warn you about the prospect of a repeat.

One event? It seems few days ago since I was talking about the concept of Linguistic Determinism. You might well think of one event if that is the language you choose.

But here I think the best language is that of document management. Imagine that a company has an important document. A contract, for example. One event. Do you think they will store it in one place? No. They will send copies to everyone who may have to act on it. That’s what the brain is doing. Storing copies where they will be needed. Some people may wish they had filing systems that worked as well.

The Right Words

2006-02-04T15:43:00.000-06:00

Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left
Aubrey L. Gilbert *, , , Terry Regier , Paul Kay ¶, , ** and Richard B. Ivry *

The question of whether language affects perception has been debated largely on the basis of cross-language data, without considering the functional organization of the brain. The nature of this neural organization predicts that, if language affects perception, it should do so more in the right visual field than in the left visual field, an idea unexamined in the debate. Here, we find support for this proposal in lateralized color discrimination tasks.

Reaction times to targets in the right visual field were faster when the target and distractor colors had different names; in contrast, reaction times to targets in the left visual field were not affected by the names of the target and distractor colors. Moreover, this pattern was disrupted when participants performed a secondary task that engaged verbal working memory but not a task making comparable demands on spatial working memory. …
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Linguistic Determinism: the language we use determines (rather than describes) how we view and think about the world. Benjamin Lee Whorf popularized that notion. It is clear that our language determines how we name things and thus how we group things for social discourse. A strong interpretation of this view is that language determines how we perceive things. For example, if we have two color patches that we would call “green,” we might find it more difficult to discriminate between them than if we called one “green” and one “aqua.”

This notion is about 75 years old. The researchers here have cleverly updated it by reworking it in terms of modern concepts of the brain. The language system is in the left hemisphere, so it should have quicker connections to the visual processing areas in that hemisphere. The researchers show effects of the verbal system in the right visual field (which is processed by the left hemisphere). They show a lack of effect in the other visual field.

I doubt that this study will resolve the debate, at least as it appears in Intro Psych texts. Our public language system so much prefers either-or propositions that we tend to ignore both-and conclusions. (Is this linguistic determinism, conflict-building or just habitually sloppy thinking? You decide.)

I think the simplest way to interpret these results is to note the well-established principle that language can induce psychological set. And psychological set is well known to influence reaction times. My speculation is that the color patches activate the modules in the verbal system that would provide the name of the color if someone asked for it. If both swatches activate the same naming module but you can see a difference in the color, you will have to resolve the conflict before you can respond to the discrimination task. When the patches are presented to the right (nonverbal) hemisphere, the signal has to go across to the other hemisphere. It probably doesn’t get there in time to produce a conflict.

The effects of verbal processes on set have been widely studied in the Stroop effect. Elsewhere, I discussed an effect of post-hypnotic suggestion in reducing conflict induced by verbal set. In the present case, the experimenters reduced the conflict by using a task that engaged verbal working memory. Note the similarity between this task and chanting, cheering, or repeatedly reciting “Hail Mary”

The Truth in Your Brain

2006-02-01T12:12:00.000-06:00

Brain Scans May Be Used As Lie Detectors By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer
CHARLESTON, S.C. - Picture this: Your boss is threatening to fire you because he thinks you stole company property. He doesn't believe your denials. Your lawyer suggests you deny it one more time — in a brain scanner that will show you're telling the truth.

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Two entrepreneurial organizations are planning to offer just such services: Cephos Corp. and No Lie MRI Inc. (Gotta love that name.) The services could only be used where the person agrees, so they might better be described as truth certification.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised by these plans. With fMRI, you can infer (at a gross level) what brain modules a person is using for a particular task. You would expect that a person who chooses to maintain a lie will have to activate some extra modules for that job. I have seen research reports identifying brain parts that are activated in support of lying, though I don’t know how reliable this information is for the detection of lying.

Thinking with the Emotional Brain

2006-01-30T09:43:00.000-06:00

(From a press release) Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored [with fMRI] while they pondered.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward…

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making. The study has potentially wide implications, from politics to business, and demonstrates that emotional bias can play a strong role in decision-making, Westen says.
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Comments: Excellent research. Hyped publicity release. The fMRI results show that the people in this study did not activate the reasoning brain modules that I call the Vulcan. The comments in the last (red) paragraph show that researchers can also reach irrational conclusions when evaluating their own research for the benefit of a publicity release. I am confident that Dr. Westin would have called up his Vulcan and tempered his conclusions if he had been speaking to a professional group.

What I don’t like about these conclusions is their demonstration of the bias in psychology to put reports in the form of what’s wrong with people. (Pleas note that I said bias and meant to suggest that psychologists, like political partisans, sometimes “ignore information that cannot be rationally discounted.")

These conclusions convey the impression that the political partisans were so controlled by their biases that they were unable to think rationally. I don’t believe that impression is correct. As I look at the instructions, I don’t know that the instructions even asked them to think rationally.

If the investigators had wanted to frame a request to think rationally, they could have asked: “Put yourself in the place of a foreigner with no particular interest in this election. How would that foreigner evaluate these things from a logical viewpoint?”

The existence and management of bias has been studied extensively in psychology, particularly in the area of group processes. Collective bias is called “groupthink” and has been the subject of many books, such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395317045/103-1645611-1198237?v=glance&n=283155

The role of groupthink was widely discussed in connection with the Bay of Pigs incident: http://www.probe.org/content/view/1088/162/

The standard method for dealing with groupthink in group processes is the devil’s advocate: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3645/is_199610/ai_n8747359

The Thinkerer offers a similar method of dealing with individual bias in the form of the Canter. The Canter’s role is to raise objections to your initial thinking. Here, as an illustration, are things the researchers might have heard from their Canters, if they had listened. (And will hear from referees if they submit these conclusions for publication.)

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making. Canter: You can’t say that. You have no evidence that they were engaging in political decision-making. They were partisans, so their decision-making had already been done. You asked them to evaluate. They probably evaluated from the viewpoint of how the item would affect their presentation of their existing position. They were "spin-doctoring."

The study has potentially wide implications, from politics to business, and demonstrates that emotional bias can play a strong role in decision-making… Canter: You can’t claim important implications without saying what the implications are and why they are important. The results do demonstrate the role of bias, but there have been innumerable prior demonstrations of that. You need to cite novel implications to claim that they are important.

Wiring the Modules

2006-01-28T10:01:00.000-06:00

A Stimulating Solution to Severe Depression: Canada’s (CBC) weekly science podcast January 21, 2006 carried a report about a new way to treat “untreatable” depression. Most clinically diagnosed depression responds to modern treatment methods. A small number of cases resist current treatments. From the CBC text description:

Now a team of Canadian scientists has developed a radical solution for treatment-resistant depression: brain surgery. These researchers have discovered a "sadness centre" in the brain, and by stimulating that area with electrodes implanted in the brain, they've been able to bring light into these people's lives for the first time.

Here is the link: Quirks and Quarks
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Of some interest is the method for identifying the “sadness center.” In one phase, they had healthy people read sad stories or watch sad movies. Then they used a PET scan to identify active areas. They found a consistent rise in activity in a specific area. In another phase, they used medication to treat sadness. They observed a consistent decline in activity in that same area.

The brain stimulation method has been used on only a few patients, but has produced dramatic results in most of those cases.

Nothing here of direct use to the public. But reverse field. Healthy people can activate the “sadness center” by reading sad stories or watching sad movies. Perhaps they can turn down the “sadness center” with happy or amusing content.

I think most people realize that they can influence their moods by the kind of entertainment content they choose. They probably have some idea about the effect of particular kinds of entertainment content. But I wonder how often people consciously choose a particular kind of entertainment content to get a particular effect on mood.

I am not talking about the passive choice of picking music or other entertainment to match your mood. That works to strengthen a mood that is already there. But you might not want to strengthen a mood. You might want to change a mood.

Have you ever tried selecting a mood and choosing entertainment content to build it? Apparently, this is a fairly common practice in the case of music. For example:
When is Music Used to Change Mood
Objective measurement of mood change induced by contemporary music.

Music has offered POD (play-on-demand) features for most of the last century, so its use as an active mood-mover may result from its availability. Now that we have POD features on most entertainment, people may want to experiment with mood-moving by DVD or video recording.

Entrepreneurial Alert: Some enterprising person might go further. How about mood-movers on the web? A website, for example, that offers links or playlists selected to encourage a particular mood. This is not something you would do for treatment of disorders, of course. But it might be a useful way for healthy people to send wireless messages their brains modules.

Why the Mind is in the Brain (2)

2006-01-26T15:47:00.000-06:00

Scientists Work on 'Trauma Pill' By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer Sat Jan 14, 1:04 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060114/ap_on_he_me/trauma_pill_1

After stress, people often develop post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD). The symptoms (such as flashbacks) make people feel as if they are reliving the trauma. Apparently, what happens during and after a traumatic event is that the brain (quite reasonably) says “I don’t ever want to see this situation again. I will record everything I might need to stay out of this.”

James McGaugh and colleague Larry Cahill have shown that adrenaline and other emergency hormones lead the brain to add extra strength to the memories it is storing at the time. (McGaugh is director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California at Irvine.)

That was the best out ancestors could do. We still carry those ancestral brain parts. Sometimes they overdo their jobs. What this news article describes is research seeking ways to prevent or undo the effects of the kind of memory that appears in PTSD. A plausible mechanism for treatment is propranolol, a drug used to treat high blood pressure. That is now under investigation.

And what can you do with this information? This article is all about promising, but undemonstrated, methods for treating PTSD. Why would it be of interest to the public? Maybe it was just a slow news week. But one of the DIY tools of cognitive engineering is the Two-stage Knowledge Amplifier.

Stage 1: What is it like?
Stage 2. What is the opposite?

What is it like? The most familiar (and harmless) thing it is like is known as “flashbulb memory.” When a person has a strong emotional experience, the person may have vivid recall of many irrelevant details. The Kennedy assassination is a familiar example. Many people could recall where they were when they first heard the news. They could recall how they got the news and where they were standing or sitting. Adrenaline at work again.

What is the opposite? My view is that the opposite of “strong emotional experience” is boredom. And I suspect it has the opposite effect on memory. As I suggested in my blog about homework, boredom is just your brain’s way of telling you that what you are doing is not important. And therefore, not worth remembering. So if there is something you want to remember, you will do better if you learn about it when you are not bored.

But is there some way to get better memory storage without a traumatic experience? Sure. Broaden the question of what is it like? We started with “strong emotional experience.” Does it have to be strong? Of course not. You don’t need (and don’t want) the kind of memory boost you get out of PTSD.

Does it have to be unpleasant? Of course not. People also vividly remember their hard-won successes. (And seldom seek treatment for it.) Success (psychologists call it reinforcement), frustration, and humor are all examples of mild emotional experiences that are known to favor better recall. And they are all readily available to help your brain store memories. If your mind remembers to use them.

Why the Mind is in the Brain(1)

2006-01-24T13:09:00.000-06:00

And what you can do with that knowledge.

Exercise boosts mood in depressed patients
Even a single bout of exercise—30 minutes of walking on a treadmill—can lift the mood of patients suffering major depressive disorder. Researchers say the findings show immediate benefits… All patients had recently been diagnosed with major depressive disorder; none were exercising regularly or taking antidepressants.

“The question,” said lead researcher Dr. John Bartholomew, an associate professor in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin, “was whether an individual bout of exercise would provide benefit. Bartholomew emphasized that a single session on the treadmill can offer only symptomatic relief, providing transitory improvement in mood rather than a change in diagnosis.
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Exercise is a mood-altering activity. Psychologists (and people) have known that for years. This study is of medical interest because it suggests that exercise might make useful contributions to the treatment of clinical depression. I am commenting on it here for two reasons:

First, it serves as an additional reminder that the mind and the brain are one. The same thing viewed from different perspectives. We keep needing reminders of this because our verbal systems operate from the perspective that the “mind” is independent of the brain. That doesn’t matter if the just want to talk about the “mind.” It is a misleading perspective if we want to do something about the workings of the brain.

My other reason for commenting on this study is that it points to a good example of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) cognitive engineering. I could give you a review of the literature about how exercise alters moods, alertness, and other “mental” functions. But that would just tell you about what exercise does for other people. What does exercise do for you and your brain?

That is a quest question. You will not find the answer in any book. As with any quest, you find the answer in yourself. But here is the beginning of a map.

This quest only works if you exercise frequently. Fortunately, exercise has general benefits, so you might already be doing it frequently. Or you might be on the verge of doing it frequently. If you want some suggestions on crossing that verge, try these:
Resolutions.
Habits.

Once you are exercising frequently, this quest calls for nothing more than another habit. Start paying attention to what you are thinking about and how you feel. Pay attention before, during, and after exercise.

You will probably find some of these characteristics:
More upbeat.
More alert.
More new ideas.
Sharper thinking.

You may want to print the Strengths page in the Thinkerer and circle the strengths that seem to be a little better.

Risky Business (3)

2006-01-22T09:21:00.000-06:00

In previous blogs on this topic, I described a study showing how different levels of risk or uncertainty resulted in different patterns of brain activity. I suggested several viewpoints that the participants could have used under the uncertainty condition.

The experiment showed that the uncertainty condition produced activity in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). That activity could be interpreted as increased vigilance, alertness, or emotion. I think it might correspond to a subjective feeling, “This is unfamiliar territory. I need to be cautious.” There was a corresponding behavioral change toward increased caution.

The viewpoints I suggested are all mental strategies for morphing the situation into a more familiar territory. From the findings of the study, we know that the when the participants were given the odds, they treated the situation as more familiar territory, were less cautious and did not power up their the amygdalas. My speculation is that any of the viewpoints I described would readjust the situation to be subjectively like the condition in which the participants were given the odds and would give the same results.

These viewpoints illustrate what humans often (but not always) do to take cognitive control of an unfamiliar situation. They search through what they know to find points of similarity. They take a viewpoint that lets them see the matching points and use them to make a head model of the situation. That head model represents cognitive control and makes them more comfortable with the (previously) unfamiliar situation.

I think this process corresponds to what psychologists call closure. In common terms, this means finding a subjectively satisfying result. I described this process in other blogs:

TOTE unit http://cognitveeng.blogspot.com/2005/09/tote-units.html

Module quests and closure http://cognitveeng.blogspot.com/2005/07/module-quests-and-closure.html

Is this what module closure looks like?http://cognitveeng.blogspot.com/2005/09/is-this-what-module-closure-looks-like.html

The conceptual model I have in mind, derived from the TOTE unit, is that brain modules are activated with an internal goal. In the present case, the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) were activated to deal with the uncertain situation. The internal goal was something like, “Find a satisfactory strategy to deal with this situation.”

I believe that any of the viewpoints I described would be satisfactory to most people and so choosing one would deactivate the amygdala and OFC. The person would probably experience this closure as, “Now I think I know how to handle this situation.”

The important cognitive elements illustrated here are
Exploration
Flexibility of viewpoint
Choice.
Making a conscious choice may be quite important in this case. That action may be needed to produce subjective closure and turn off those emotional modules.

The exploration viewpoints are objective winners here, since they would collect information from the situation and help select the best strategy. (Best here means approved by economists and statisticians.)

But the pragmatist’s strategy is not bad either. It may not maximize the payoff, but if it satisfies the amygdala, it unloads one brain job and lets the brain get on to other work.

Maybe the real risk here is that the participant will waste brain power on the petty cash in the experiment rather than using it effectively on, say, that calculus test.

Risky business (2)

2006-01-19T08:30:00.000-06:00

In my previous blog, I described a study showing how different levels of risk or uncertainty resulted in different patterns of brain activity. I also posed the question of whether there is a less emotional and/or more useful to respond to uncertainty. Here I open the fan of possibilities for you to examine.

But first let me pose a quest question: Suppose the same experiment is done with an added condition. The experimenter gives the same instructions as in the original uncertainty condition. “You get $10 for drawing a red card. Some of the cards are red.”

As you will recall, the uncertainty condition left the participants uncertain about the best strategy, activated emotional brain parts, and led them to be more cautious than they were when the experimenter told them the percentage of red cards in the deck. The new condition I propose is this: The experimenter offers to let the participant examine the deck and count the cards for a price of, say, $12. How would you expect that offer to affect the results?

(Psychology students note: The above experiment could be run without the fMRI to study the acceptable price, the effect on conservatism strategy, and the relation of individual differences on acceptable price.)

Now to the fan of possibilities, assuming the original uncertainty condition. Here are some viewpoints the participant could take to reduce the uncertainty (and presumably the level of the emotional response).

Viewpoint: statistician (Vulcan). If I have no information about the number of red cards, I start by assuming that that all numbers are equally probable. The experimenter said “some red cards.” That expression implies any number from 2 to 20. It would be to my advantage to draw a cord if the expected value of a draw exceeds the $3 I am spending to draw. If 30% of the cards are red, the expected value of the draw is $3. Since the deck has 20 cards, 30% is 6 cards. Any number from 7 to 20 favors drawing. An number from 2 to 5 favors taking the sure thing. Only 4 numbers favor the sure thing.

My initial analysis thus favors drawing. But I also note that drawing is equivalent to buying information on cards at $3 per test. My best strategy is to buy that information and use it to estimate the odds.

Viewpoint: strategist (Vulcan and Empath). I agree with the analysis of the statistician, but I will not assume that all numbers are equally probable. The experimenter chose the number for the objectives of the experiment.
Obviously, I can estimate the frequency of red cards by drawing cards at $3 each. If I get mostly cards of one kind or the other, I will quickly conclude that the deck is loaded in favor of one choice or the other. The number that will keep me uncertain over the greatest number of trials is 10 red cards (50% odds).

Despite my insightful analysis, I reach the same conclusion as the statistician.

Viewpoint: Explorer. I don’t see anything dangerous here. I will get a little money for very little effort. If I take the sure thing, I will collect $72 and learn nothing. If I draw cards, I will find out whether drawing pays better than $3. If it doesn’t, I can change strategies. But my view is that I was buying information, not throwing away money.

Viewpoint: pragmatist. I am not going to overthink this problem. I can expect to come out of this with more money than I brought in. The best case is $240. The worst case is nothing. These values are small compared to my tuition at Caltech. I will do what feels most comfortable and be content with the result. I’d rather spend my brain power thinking about my calculus test tomorrow.

How would a participant be affected by adopting one of these viewpoints? You probably have an opinion already. I will post my speculation in a later blog.

Risky Business

2006-01-14T08:14:00.000-06:00

The brain responds to different levels of economic uncertainty by activating different sets of brain modules. That’s the finding of research by Caltech economics professor Colin Camerer and his colleagues. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060111082311.htm)

Two conditions were used: risk and uncertainty. In both cases, Caltech students played a game in which they chose between a sure thing (say, $3) or drawing a card that could either win them $10 or nothing. They played the game while being scanned by fMRI, so that the researchers could see what brain areas were being activated.

In the risk condition, the students were told that half the cards were red (worth $10) and half were blue (worth nothing). In the uncertainty condition, the students were told nothing about the odds of winning on a trial.

These conditions represent familiar models in game theory, economics and statistics. The risk condition is not risky at all, at least not to anyone who understands gambling. The statistician story: You win $5 on half the trials. On average, 24 trials (the number used in the experiment) will get you $120 if you draw a card every time. If you take the $3 on every trial, you will have $72 at the end of the game. You are quite certain about the best strategy.

In the uncertainty condition, the students did not know the odds and so could not (as easily) determine the best strategy.

Brain findings: In the risk case, the dorsal striatum tends to light up. In the uncertainty case, the more emotional parts of the brain known as the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are involved.

Camerer’s interpretation: the OFC and amygdala presumably work together when a person is confronted with a bet on unknown odds. The amygdala sends a "caution" message and the OFC processes the message. Under such circumstances, students become more cautions. In this case, they drew fewer cards. The increased caution cost them money.
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Selby's comments: “The increased caution cost them money.” This is the kind of finding that economists are fond of citing as evidence that people do not always make good economic decisions (and would do better if they got advice from economists). But it is only the experimenter, with a God’s eye view of the situation, who can know the correct strategy. If there had been only five winning cards in the deck of 20, the average pay-off per draw would have been $2.50 and the cautious strategy would have saved them money.

Still, the results are important in showing how the brain changes its modules according to the demands of the situation. They are also useful in raising the question of whether there is a less emotional way and/or more useful to respond to uncertainty.

I am confident that there are several such ways. I will go into the fan of posibilities in a later blog. Meanwhile, I suspect that some readers will mull it over, sleep on it, and come up with their own ideas.

The Real Job of New Year’s Resolutions

2005-12-29T20:00:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-26T09:25:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-24T08:40:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-21T09:54:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-18T09:43:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-16T09:28:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-14T10:35:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-13T10:47:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-10T08:55:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-07T08:59:00.000-06:00

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

2005-12-03T10:20:00.000-06:00

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

Applied Cognitive Engineering

2005-11-30T08:56:00.000-06:00

Oxymoron, of course. Engineering is inherently applied. But in this case, I think the term refers to something you make money from. Or, at least, you intend to make money on. I am talking about a company. Applied Cognitive Engineering. They offer a computer game intended for training basketball players. The IntelliGym™.

According to their website, the game has been implemented in over 16 Division-1 college basketball teams. From their marketing copy:

"…a revolutionary training tool that enables basketball players to dramatically improve their game-intelligence skills. The trainer directly stimulates the brain-functions responsible for basketball's cognitive skills. By doing so, this unique trainer enables super-quick development of proficiencies that, until now, were considered impossible to teach: decision-making, execution, shot selection, peripheral vision, court sense, team play and more. Training results on the system by actual basketball teams has shown their performance to improve by 22% to 28%.

"The concept of the ACE training software, the ACE IntelliGymTM, was originally developed for fighter pilots of the Israeli Air Force. It features an automatic, self-adjusting training regimen set in a computer-game-like environment that is both familiar and fun. The trainer evaluates the skill-set of each player's skills and administers a customized training program to fit that player's individual needs.

"The game bears no external resemblance to basketball. The player initially shoots down enemy spacecraft using the keyboard’s arrow keys. Over the span of a dozen or so 40-minute sessions, the tasks get more complicated, challenging the player to confront a variety of enemies with a range of weapons. That may sound like standard video-game fare, but there’s a carefully planned strategy underneath: each level is designed to exercise specific skills used in basketball, such as predicting an opponent’s trajectory, deciding when to shoot at an opponent who keeps changing direction, and working with other team members to defeat a number of opponents. Reports of player and team performance are automatically generated for review by coaches.
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I have no independent information about this game. Here, I am calling attention to the entrepreneurial concept of developing and marketing a game as training device in the context of evaluation. They are marketing this product to college basketball teams and apparently getting evaluation of effect on performance. If it can show results there, of course, it will have a bigger market in high schools ($85 per team member) and individuals ($150 for you teen). These prices are probably acceptable if the game is as effective as claimed.

I will have more to say about ACE later, but here is their take on cognitive engineering:

"Cognitive training consists of a variety of brain exercises designed to help improve functionality. The principle underlying cognitive training is to help improve the "core" abilities, which most people mistakenly consider as instincts. Abilities such as coordination, attention control, peripheral vision, perception and many more are not "born instincts" but rather cognitive skills. The science of cognitive engineering focuses on the evaluation and analysis of these skills. An especially remarkable aspect of the science is cognitive training: the enhancement of human cognitive skills to improve performance."

Video Games as Cognitive Engineering

2005-11-26T08:41:00.000-06:00

Baby boomers regularly head to the gym to combat middle-age spread. Now evidence is piling up that exercising the aging brain is just as important. A new cognitive training program designed to rejuvenate the brain's natural plasticity could slow down mental decline by as much as ten years. The program and others like it may be an accessible way for older people to take advantage of recent advances in the neuroscience of aging. (The developer is Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco, who's been studying the neural basis of learning for 30 years.)

Recent research has shown that reading the newspaper or doing crossword puzzles can help to keep older people mentally fit. According to Merzenich, a more focused and rigorous approach will have a considerably larger impact. In 2003, he founded the for-profit Posit Science in San Francisco to develop a software program based on the idea that individuals can retrain their brains to think faster…

One potential drawback to such a training program is the amount of time and effort it takes to see a difference. Much like physical exercise and dieting, mental workouts require a healthy dose of discipline. "The potential is significant, but it takes a lot of self-motivation and willpower," says Elias. From: Exercising the Brain
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I think there is plenty of evidence that brains keep active by keeping active. Just like legs and intestines. But I am skeptical about the merits of a specially prepared (and probably expensive) computer program. Studies will certainly show benefits, but the results will be confounded by the general effect of giving attention to people in nursing homes and by the self-selection processes described above as “willpower”.

I am also not sure that there much benefit in retraining the brain to think faster. I’m going to blog about another study in a few days: “Ignoring useless information aids memory.” Maybe you don’t need to think faster if you think smarter.

Maybe a few people need the benefits of a specially prepared computer program. And maybe a few of those would still have enough “willpower” left to stick to the program. On the other hand, maybe somebody will do a study to assess a VR system like Second Life. Available free. A whole world to explore. People to interact with. Easy to use (if you don’t want to program).

And if you do want to program, you can build about anything you want. Researchers who want to program have a wide range of possibilities for educational and “therapeutic” environments. They may even develop an environment that the clients enjoy. Thus combining the entrepreneurial spirit with cognitive engineering. If only in virtual reality.

Video Games as Treatment

2005-11-23T08:25:00.000-06:00

When her 11-year-old son was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder last year, Janet Herlihey warmed up to an unthinkable solution for his problem: video games. What sold her on games instead of medication was NASA technology. The technology would help "tune" her child's brain to focus and relax while he played fairly innocuous, off-the-shelf games like "Ratchet and Clank" on Sony's PlayStation 2.

The system, called Smart BrainGames, essentially monitors her son's brain waves through the use of sensors in a helmet while he plays a game. A box that can be hooked up to PS2 then initiates changes in the game. The more the player concentrates, for example, the faster a car will go in a racing game.

The San Diego-based Virtual Reality Medical Center has been using games and virtual environments as a tool to treat phobias, such as the fear of flying. Others have found a niche for relaxation and meditation games, such as The Journey to Wild Divine, which uses biofeedback techniques to measure brain waves and monitor muscle tension during the game. From CNET news
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As a counter to the idea that video games are a disease, here are some alternatives. I have no information on whether these games provide an effective treatment for anything. But they do suggest a different viewpoint on games.

I am a little puzzled about the role of video games in ADD or ADHD. If children can focus their attention on a game, do they really have an attention deficit? A game would be plausible as a way to measure attention when the child is motivated. Quite apart from the elaborate (and expensive) apparatus offered by Smart BrainGames, any video game demands attention. It would be remarkable if playing video games did not improve attention.

In my blog about homework, I have been speculating about the Brain Borers. The general idea is that people attend to and remember things they see as important. If they are bored by something, it is because they don’t recognize that something as important.

So I wonder whether teachers or parents might confuse boredom with attention deficit. I don’t think I had that confusion when I was a kid. I did a lot of daydreaming in class. Since I was quiet, the teachers thought I was paying attention. Since my grades were OK, nobody was concerned. But I certainly was bored. And certainly had an attention deficit for class activities.

Fortunately, the teachers couldn’t read my mind. So they didn’t try to cure me. That was before Ritalin, of course. The cure was a paddle in those days. Maybe in the future it will be a video game.

Life is not a disease

2005-11-20T08:46:00.000-06:00

Gaming fanatics show hallmarks of drug addiction
Excessive computer gaming has the hallmarks of addiction, suggests new experiments on “drug memory”. The researchers argue it should be classified as such, enabling “addicts” to start seeking help. “We have the patients and we have the parents and family members calling us for help,” says Sabine Grüsser of the Charité University Medicine Berlin, in Germany. The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, in Washington DC.

From World of Psychology: http://psychcentral.com/blog/
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In the World of Psychology, Dr. Grohol gives this story a well-deserved shredding. My own theory is that some clinical psychologists are addicted to finding new mental disorders. Which they plan to treat. And charge for treating.

I can see a book. “The New Puritans.” “Will psychologists cure us of everything we enjoy?”

The behavior pattern this research describes is what the Thinkerer calls the Hunter. It is determined goal-seeking. To see some more socially acceptable goals, watch any of these movies:

“Erin Brokovich,” “Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail,” “Edison, the Man,” “Rocky (1),” “(Jerry Seinfeld) Comedian.” You can probably get any of these from Blockbuster or Netflix.

In a less dramatic form, you can easily find the hunting behavior in all forms of human competition. And from time to time, it is called an addiction. Football addicts, TV addicts, golf addicts, even workaholics. I think most of these terms came from the media, not psychologists.

You will have noticed that people use unfavorable language to characterize the Hunter when they disapprove of the goal. If there is any genuine problem here, it lies in the choice of the goal, not in the behavior. The most useful choices are those that match short-term goals to long term objectives. People usually make this match by planning.

Planning does not require therapy and the failure to follow long-term plans is not a disease. But…
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If all you have is therapy, everything looks like a disease.

Researching the obvious

2005-11-17T10:11:00.000-06:00

Reflecting on meaningful values provides biological and psychological protection from the adverse effects of stress, UCLA psychologists report in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science.

In the study, 80 UCLA undergraduates completed stressful tasks. They delivered five-minute speeches about their qualifications for an office job in front of “speech evaluators” trained to be non expressive, who would coldly tell them during pauses, “You still have time remaining. Please continue.” After a short break, they were instructed to subtract 13 from 2,083 under harassing conditions. They were told to go faster and at each mistake, they were told, “That is incorrect. Please start over from 2,083.”

Prior to these stress tests, one group of students (a randomly assigned “value affirmation” group) reflected on values they had identified in advance as especially meaningful to them, answering 10 written questions. These could have been religious values, in which case they were asked a series of questions about their religion, the Bible and God. In other cases, they reflected on meaningful secular values — such as their political beliefs or social values — answering questions about, for example, Abraham Lincoln or community service work.
From World of Psychology
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From the unsocialized part of my brain: I would like to reflect on the personal values of these UCLa psychologists who think it is reasonable to subject UCLA undergraduates to harassment and humiliation. I suggest that reflecting on some personal values may protect psychologists from the effects of empathy, interpersonal responsibility and guilt.

From the Vulcan part of my brain: This study falls in the class of psychological studies in which people get publications by doing research to prove what people already generally believe. Studies of this kind have the advantage that they are seldom challenged. Few people would seriously challenge the merits of reflecting on personal values. It would be like challenging God, motherhood, and apple pie. (There may be another study here.)

The general principle here is that studies confirming popular beliefs are protected from challenge and thus need not bother with methodological rigor (more research opportunities here.) The study, for example, was conducted on a small set of late adolescents attending UCLA (and probably enrolled in psychology classes). The study would be of little interest if it were limited to that population. But since people already believe the conclusion, there is no risk to generalizing it to everybody.

This type of study does not do much to extend knowledge, but it does get publications.

From the Networker part of my brain: People have long known that a focus on roles and responsibilities serves to control stress and emotion. Psychologists who deal in therapy, counseling, or group processes can expect to deal with hostility from clients as a result of their professional actions. They learn to maintain a professional role in the face of such stresses. Similar training is often provided to police officers, customer relations people, and others who must deal with the public under emotional conditions.

A more general principle is: People respond to stress effectively if they have previously practiced the effective course of action. That’s why we have fire drills. (Another opportunity for researching the obvious.)

Positive Thinking the Key to a Longer Life?

2005-11-11T14:09:00.000-06:00

The short answer is, yes, of course! Research has already tied positive thinking with more positive surgical outcomes, so it’s not such a leap to imagine that thinking positively in general could also more generally help us out in life.

Of course the challenge is how to keep a positive attitude when so many of us are dealing with very unhappy or bad things happening to us. There’s no easy answer to that one.

A growing mountain of evidence suggests that an upbeat, positive attitude could be the key to a long life. http://psychcentral.com/blog/
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This is a job for my head staff.
http://thinkerer.org/HeadOffice/HOffIntro.htm

Un: Our problem is that we have too many keys. And no key ring.

Networker: And no way to spell cliché without that funny mark.

Vulcan: The logical problem with the assertion is that there is no way to demonstrate a causal link. The evidence lies in correlations. It is quite possible that the same genetics that lead to long life also lead to an optimistic outlook.

Engineer: I don’t care. I ignore advice that doesn’t tell me what to do in the here and now. Nobody wants to be depressed. Nobody needs the promise of a long life to encourage them to be optimistic. If people knew how to become optimistic, they would do it.

Empath: Pessimism is not a choice. It is a reaction.

Canter: And a realistic recognition of all the things you can’t do.

Hunter: And a determined neglect of all the things you can do. The view of the hunted rather than of the Hunter.

Vulcan: A choice to want what is out of reach.

Hunter: A neglect of what you can reach.

Engineer: A neglect of the rule that you can’t do what you haven’t planned for. A neglect of the planning that turns a can’t into a can.

Hunter: Not planning by itself, but planning and action.

Un: An ounce of action is worth a pound of positive thinking.

Hunter: People might do some of these things and find that they are becoming more upbeat.

Canter: Perhaps. But we Canters are not optimistic about it.

Hunter: You get no hope from the Canters. You get hope from the Hunters.

The pan, the spoon, and the imagery

2005-11-09T08:19:00.000-06:00

Recently a sleep expert on NPR: Science Friday said that Thomas Edison used to sit and think with a metal spoon in his hand. A metal pan on the floor waited below. Edison, dozing, dropped the spoon. He waked and caught new ideas.

I did a little searching and could not verify the story as applied to Edison. I did find the same story told about Salvador Dali. That story, however, indicated the objective was to get a refreshing, brief nap.

If you try this scheme, you will probably become aware of hypnagogic imagery, something that people usually experience (with little recall) in between waking and sleeping. I can readily see why Dali, a surrealist painter, would have been interested in such dream-like imagery. I can also see why Dali, a great self-promoter, might have made up the story to tell a gullable reporter

I mention this story as a concrete example of cognitive engineering in a simple form. No mushrooms, no Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, no fMRI. Maybe only useful to painters, graphic artists, interior decorators, architects, VR designers, theatrical set designers, and people trying to understand brain function from the insider’s view.

Personally, I think to-do lists and schedules are more generally useful bits of cognitive engineering. But these are too mundane to catch much attention.

For a bit of cognitive engineering that is widely useful but not so widely used, I suggest the Startalittle scheme: When you have something to do, start it right away. But only do a little. About ten minutes is right. Think of it as putting your brain to work on the job. A few hours later, you will have thought of things you didn’t think of in the starter session.

Does it work for you? You won’t know unless you try it. Startalittle scheme.

Your Brain Cells May 'Know' More Than You Let On By Your Behavior

2005-11-05T08:28:00.000-06:00

"For the first time, we can a look at the brain activity of a rhesus monkey and infer what the animal knows," says lead investigator Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory. Neurobiologists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies carried out experiments that prove for the first time that the brain remembers, even if we don't… They report their findings in the Oct. 20th issue of Neuron

One way to study associative memory is to train rhesus monkeys to remember arbitrary pairs of symbols. Allbright: "We wondered what happened in the brain when the monkeys made the wrong choice, although they had apparently learned the right pairing of the symbols."

So, while the monkeys … made their error-prone choices, the scientists observed signals from the nerve cells in a special area of the brain called the "inferior temporal cortex" (ITC). This area is known to be critical for visual pattern recognition and for storage of this type of memory.

When Albright and his team analyzed the activity patterns of brain cells… more than 50 percent of active nerve cells belonged to a novel class of neurons, which the researchers believe represents the memory of the correct pairing of cue and associated symbol. Surprisingly, these brain cells kept firing even when the monkeys picked the wrong symbol. "In this sense, the cells 'knew' more than the monkeys let on in their behavior," says Albright.
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There is nothing new here except the demonstration that researchers can identify neuron activity that fails to determine behavioral choices. Humans are sometimes aware of such activity and describe it as “weighing the options.” If humans are unaware of the activity, psychologists might call it subliminal perception. The Thinkerer refers to developing awareness of this activity as “listening to the quiet modules of the brain.”

The Hunter and the Hunted

2005-10-29T07:55:00.000-05:00

Excerpts from: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051025075538.htm

A provocative new study has found that people who respond to stressful situations with angry facial expressions, rather than fearful expressions, are less likely to suffer such ill effects of stress as high blood pressure and high stress hormone secretion. The paper, authored by scholars at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine will be published in the November 1 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry.

"We tested whether facial muscle movements in response to a stressor would reveal changes in the body's two major stress-response systems -- the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) axis. Analyses of facial expressions revealed that the more fear individuals displayed in response to the stressors, the higher their biological responses to stress. By contrast, the more anger and disgust (indignation) individuals displayed in response to the same stressors, the lower their responses," said Jennifer Lerner, the Estella Loomis McCandless Associate Professor of Psychology and Decision Science at Carnegie Mellon and lead author of the study.

This paper challenges two long-held assumptions: one, that stress elicits undifferentiated negative emotions and as a consequence produces a uniform biological response; and two, that all negative emotions, such as fear and anger, provoke the same psychological and biological reactions. This paper builds on a line of work led by Lerner showing that anger triggers feelings of certainty and control as well as optimistic perceptions of risk. A landmark study by Lerner found that Americans' initial emotional reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks predicted their risk perceptions two months later, those reacting with anger the most optimistic and the most likely to favor aggressive responses to terrorism…

…In the past, researchers have assumed that anger can contribute to coronary disease and hypertension, co-author Shelley Taylor added. Although a chronically angry, explosive temperament may do just that, justifiable anger in response to short-term frustrating circumstances appears to be a healthier response than responding with fear.

During the experiment, 92 participants performed mathematical exercises…To ensure that the tasks were creating stress, researchers assessed the participants' emotional states and measured their stress hormone (i.e., cortisol) level, pulse, heart rate and blood pressure during periods of relaxation as well as immediately following the exercises. Increases in those biological measures were less pronounced in the participants displaying anger and indignation than in the participants displaying fear.
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Comments from SE. My Networker noticed a connection between this item and another that I had picked out for later use in this blog.

Positive Thinking the Key to a Longer Life? (from http://psychcentral.com/blog/)

There are various related topics in psychology: Fight or flight. Learned helplessness. Mastery. The Thinkerer represents this concept as the Hunter. (The opposite behavior, the prey response, is not included in the Thinkerer because I have never seen the value of being the “deer in the headlights.”)
From the standpoint of personal psychology, the results of this study illustrate that the effect of a behavioral stressor is deeply influenced by how a person interprets it and reacts.

The Thinkerer: “The difference between a trial run and a failure lies in what you get out of it.”

One word of caution about the results. The biological side seems to have been well done. But I doubt that the same can be said about the characterization of facial expressions. There is no objective way to characterize an emotional state from expressions. You can measure the tensing of muscles, but you can “observe” the emotional state only by asking the person or by getting judgments from others.

In the present case, I wonder if “anger” might have earned other characterizations (for example, “determination”) with different methods. This issue is irrelevant to the distinction between the two kinds of reaction, but it is critical in helping people understand what kind of reaction is useful and when. That is why the Thinkerer uses the metaphor of the Hunter rather than of the Fighter. We readily think of the Hunter as determined, focused, methodical, and supported by a strong emotion that is somewhat like anger, but really deserves another name.

I don’t think I have figured all of this out yet. My lack of understanding does not make me fearful. It doesn’t make me angry either. Who could I be angry at? Myself? Would that kind of anger be productive? What I do feel is determined to gather more information and to find connections with what I know. The voice of the Hunter. One of my favorite voices.

Goals for those quiet modules.

2005-10-22T09:48:00.000-05:00

The Thinkerer speaks on behalf of those quiet brain modules that often don’t get to speak for themselves. One place where that speaking may need added attention lies in the topic of goals. The Thinkerer has a number of pages about goals. One of the slogans I like is:

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.”

To borrow a few lines from another page: http://www.thinkerer.org/Tools/ToolsGoalNotGoal.htm

After all, we know that we should have goals. Explicit goals. Preferably quantitative. Certainly concrete enough so we will know when we reach them. This is the moral imperative of organizations.

If you are an organization, you need explicit goals. Organizations need explicit goals because they operate by cooperation among people. Cooperation only works when everybody understands the goal. Not just the words. The goal as it will appear in reality.

The problem with talking to people about goals is that talk filters through the verbal system. The verbal system interprets the world in terms of words. So it naturally treats talk about goals as talk about verbal statements of goals.

That is why the Thinkerer uses elliptical statements like the slogan above. The statement does not make much sense under a strictly verbal interpretation. So the verbal system has to hand off the job to other systems. This statement makes perfectly good sense to the navigation system you use to travel around and not get lost.

But that navigation system rarely deals in verbal statements of goals. It only needs words if you have to write something down or communicate to other people. Pay attention to how your handle your navigational goals and you will realize that you use only a minimum of talk. Nowhere near enough verbal instruction to get you where you intend to go if you did not already know your destination.

And then there are the times when you only know the name of your destination and somebody gives you verbal directions. These are the times when you really understand the difference between being told and knowing.

Notice a few things about this quiet system and the way it handles goals.
It works in the here and now.
It develops from experience.
If it has the experience, it knows how to get what you want.
It knows when you get where you want to go.
It has been serving you for years without verbally stated goals.

Now if I can just figure out how people can get similar service out of other parts of their brains, I’ll have something to write next week.

Online games, replay

2005-10-16T10:36:00.000-05:00

From my other blog:
While checking out the site for the ASTD (American Society for Training & Development. http://www.astd.org/astd). I found to blogs with content relevant to homework and the Thinkerer. Here is one of those that seem to fit better in this blog:
http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/
One of the items in this blog dealt with on-line games in learning and fMRI research.

http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/2005/10/online-gaming-as-learning-tool.html

Byron Reeves of Stanford. Findings:
- People were more excited when they got to pick their own avatars rather then getting assigned one
- People were more excited in a rich media environment
- The story for the game had a big effect on excitement

Speaking of online games, Second Life ( http://secondlife.com/ ) has a program supporting educational projects.

Campus: Second Life program: … we offer educators some land on a temporary basis to use as a 'headquarters' for their class to meet. Details about Campus: Second Life can be found here: http://www.secondlife.com/csl

There are ten such projects operating now:
Exploring healthcare applications in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing
Multiplayer Game Design"
Introduction to Sociological Perspectives on Education
Designing Digital Communities
Human Computer Interface
Urban Planning in the Gaming World
Foundations of Instructional Technology
Introduction to International Business
Digital Collaboration in Architecture
Art in Virtual Worlds

I intend to look into them and report on their experiences if possible.

Attentional chauvinism,

2005-10-08T10:06:00.000-05:00

In new work, researchers at Boston University and the University of Montreal unify two lines of research--our understanding of classical learning and a phenomenon known as the attentional blink--to achieve an important demonstration that high-level mental processing is required even for subliminal learning. (Published in Current Biology, Dr. Aaron Seitz and colleagues)

http://coglab.wadsworth.com/experiments/AttentionalBlink/

…there is a brief time after paying attention to one stimulus where attention cannot be focused on a subsequent stimulus. This duration is called an attentional blink because it is analogous to being unable to see objects during an eye blink.

Subliminal learning is a low-level perceptual learning process that can occur without awareness of what is learned…
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Low-level? It is so designated by the “high level” processes that plan research and write papers. Attentional chauvinism, I call it. I suppose people differ in the extent to which they use these non-verbal processes, but that may be just a matter of differences in cognitive practices. Personally, I don’t put much of a load on my attentional or verbal processes. If I try to write something and don’t know what to write, I just put that aside and expect that I will have a better idea later. That has always worked up to now.

I suppose that is subliminal thinking rather than subliminal learning, but it probably comes from the same brain subsystems. I think we use attention to put those brain systems to work on projects that the verbal (long-term planning) system cosidrs important. Don Dansereau calls this “seducing” the brain to work on a project. He also uses the model of the Trickster and speaks of tricking the subliminal systems into working on conscious projects. (This is why the coyote graphic appears in the Thinkerer.)

A straightforward view of this operation is in the page on the Startalittles.

http://www.thinkerer.org/Tools/ToolsStartaLittle.htm

The basic strategy is to spend a little time starting early. This gets those subliminal systems to work on the task you started. They keep working on it while your attention is directed at other jobs. The idea is much the same as in any organization: delegate responsibility and don try to micromanage.

And don’t think of those working under your direction as “low-level.” John Henry and his peers were just as important to railroads as was the president of Union Pacific . And John Henry got the song. Do you know who was the first president of Union Pacific

Strange Distracters

2005-10-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

Report from:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002493.html

Summary of reports: Last April and May, there was a media avalanche about how email, texting and other communications technologies "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis" (according to the Guardian), "lower the IQ more than twice as much as smoking marijuana" (according to the London Times), "reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic" (according to CNN), have effects "similar to the impact of missing an entire night’s sleep" (Red Herring), "temporarily knocks 10 points off a users' intelligence, compared to four for a joint" (the Mirror). The associated headlines were things like Why texting harms your IQ; E-mails 'hurt IQ more than pot'; Distractions at work 'lower the IQ of staff'; and TXTING MKS U STPID: It lowers your IQ more than smoking cannabis. This research has become part of the public's conventional wisdom about the deleterious effects of modern life, as suggested by browsing the 615,000 Google hits for {"email IQ pot"} and similar probes.

Comment from the original researcher: This "infomania study" has been the bane of my life. I was hired by H-P for one day to advise on a PR project and had no anticipation of the extent to which it (and my responsibility for it) would get over-hyped in the media.

There were two parts to their "research" (1) a Gallup-type survey of around 1000 people who admitted mis-using their technology in various ways (e.g. answering e-mails and phone calls while in meetings with other people), and (2) a small in-house experiment with 8 subjects (within-S design) showing that their problem solving ability (on matrices type problems) was seriously impaired by incoming e-mails (flashing on their computer screen) and their own mobile phone ringing intermittently (both of which they were instructed to ignore) by comparison with a quiet control condition. This, as you say, is a temporary distraction effect - not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 Ss somehow became "80 clinical trials".

Since then, I've been asked these same questions about 20 times per day and it is driving me bonkers.
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My comments
I missed most of this media avalanche. Probably because of my theory that paying too much attention to media hype has some kind of association with stupidity.

But back to these strange distracters: e-mails, phones ringing, media hype. Especially media hype. People can turn off phones and email info. Pop-up web ads and flashing screen ads are other problems. But technology works both ways. People use pop-up blockers. And ads don’t flash me for long. If I want to read the page, I just adjust the window so the ad is hidden.

I think there is a place for more cognitive engineering on media hype and general news glut. I get most of my news from Yahoo now. Since it is sorted into categories, I can manage the news glut by putting the less important categories on pages I look at only rarely. One improvement I would like to have is a way to filter out news items on subjects that I don’t want more info about. I can set a filter now to show me stories about Paris Hilton. What I would like is a filter to exclude stories about Paris Hilton. Or about text messaging and IQ. Or about flu vaccine shortage.

This seems a natural for Google. They have the search technology. They could easily let people set up a Junk News filter to put items they don’t want on a junkyard page.

Being Google, they would aggregate the data on what people designate as junk. They would probably report it as news, just as they report the most frequent searches. News media might use the info to moderate their hype before it starts getting laughs.

The Junk News filter might even work for networking. There are various arrangements to let you send other people the news items you think are important. You can, for example, put links in your blog and other people could subscribe. How about an Unblog? People could subscribe to Junk News filters from people they trust. They could get rss feeds to keep their filters up to date. Well know people would probably offer their Junk News filters just for the visibility.

You could probably get a Junk News filter from Paris Hilton.

What the pirate ship told me

2005-09-24T13:16:00.000-05:00

The pirate ship was part of a small game set up as a temporary build in Second Life (MMORPG, for those who like impressively bad titles). Here is a link to a description with pictures. http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/09/burning_life_05_3.html

The game consisted of a complex of caves and the pirate ship. The goal was to find three keys and open a treasure chest. The keys were hidden somewhere in the caves or on the ship. The game was appropriately simple, well suited to its context of something like a state fair. It could be completed in a couple of hours. Most of that time would be spent searching the cave and the ship. I played it and enjoyed it. I also checked on it several times and saw that it had many visitors, all searching for the keys.

What the pirate ship told me was that you learn more from the question than you do from the answer. I easily found two of the keys. The third key was more difficult. A clue suggested that it was in the ship. So I searched the ship thoroughly.

The ship was an elegant piece of work. It may not have been technically accurate, but otherwise could have been a museum piece. But if I had found it in a museum, I would have given it nothing like the careful examination I gave it as I searched for the key.

Suppose, instead of a pirate ship, the construction had been drawn from technically accurate physiology. The cave, I noticed, could have easily been done as a blood vessel or an axon. I imagined a new version of “Fantastic Voyage” in which players traveled through parts of the body to identify and repair some problem. The same build could accommodate a large number of problems. Just a matter of changing the script.

The ship also offered a large number of talking objects. You could click on these and get comments. The comments were interesting, but not helpful. But they could have carried partially helpful information. In a physiological build, appropriate objects (macrophages, for example) might offer potentially information about their function. Whether the information would be useful or not would vary with scenarios.

More generally, the pirate ship told me that it was doing something quite different from the usual paradigm of discovery learning as found in education. That paradigm usually calls for a special instructional plan for each element to be learned (discovered). That may well be the best for instruction, but it costs a lot in time or money. In the pirate ship model, the quest is for something trivial. It can easily be redirected for different elements of the subject.

These observations seem particularly appropriate for a virtual reality like Second Life, which could accommodate any subject that will yield to “concrete” representation. I wonder how such notions could apply to more abstract concepts like Cognitive Engineering?

What’s important gets a bigger module.

2005-09-17T09:26:00.000-05:00

By examining how sounds are registered during the process of learning, UC Irvine neurobiologists have discovered a neural coding mechanism that the brain relies upon to register the intensity of memories based on the importance of the experience.

Norman Weinberger and his colleagues found that when the brain uses this coding method, information is stored in a greater number of brain cells, which should result in a stronger memory.

In the study, the researchers trained rats to press a bar to receive water when they heard a certain tone. The tone was varied in its importance to different rats… After brain mapping these test rats, the researchers found that the greater the importance of the tone, the greater the area of the auditory cortex that became tuned to it.

While neurobiologists have long hypothesized this type of neural coding, the study presents the first evidence that a "memory code" of any kind may exist.

Study results appear on the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders supported the effort.
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In terms of the Selfridge model, more neurons make a demon that shouts louder. The evidence suggests a general principle: to improve memory, get more neurons involved. Actually, this is a well established principle, but this evidence ties in another well established principle, cue, response, reinforcement. I would like to tie it to another behavioral observation: emotion strengthens memory. This is commonly noted in the context of “flash bulb” memory. But, as I have pointed out in connection with closure, there is minor satisfaction in getting the right answer to a trivia question.

Educators have long noted that some people learn a subject easily and some people learn the same subject with difficulty. I would speculate that easy learning comes from getting more neurons involved. In the Thinkerer, we suggested a number of ways to do that in the Study Skills page.
http://www.thinkerer.org/Studying/StudySkillsRatem.htm

This notion also follows from the general Thinkere theme of unity. Getting your head together is not just a casual phrase to those who understand cognitive engineering. Or Zen.

Wells Fargo and MMORPGS

2005-09-15T12:29:00.000-05:00

Here is a follow-up on my previous post about MMORPGS: Wells Fargo Introduces Stagecoach Island – Industry’s First Virtual Reality Online Game to Help Young Adults with Financial Literacy

Wells Fargo today introduced Stagecoach IslandSM, a free, multi-player, online role-playing game developed to teach young adults important lessons in financial literacy. Wells Fargo is the first financial institution to use an online game of this kind for both financial education and entertainment purposes. Young adults in San Diego and Austin, Texas are the first to experience the Stagecoach Island game in a pilot program that kicked off Labor Day weekend this year and will end in mid-November.

The Stagecoach Island game allows players to select a virtual character and participate in an “island adventure.” Participants can choose to explore the virtual island - lush parks, hip cafes, dance clubs, trendy shops, amusement parks, hair salons and more. They can also interact in dozens of virtual, social situations – like skydiving, riding jets-skis, or playing games like paintball with other participants. Many activities on the island are “free,” but participants gain access to other experiences, such as dancing in a club or purchasing new clothes, by spending, saving and earning virtual money. Players can earn money by visiting the Virtual Learning Lounge and answering trivia questions about banking basics such as budgeting, saving and managing money.

Today, over half of U.S. high school students graduate without knowing the basics of banking, checking and savings accounts, budgeting, credit, and investing according to a study by Jump$tart Coalition. In addition, 70 percent of U.S. college students play video games, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“The popularity of online role-playing games is staggering — there are millions of people participating in role-playing games worldwide and the typical college student spends nearly as much time playing video games (10,000 hours by graduation) as they do in class,” said Dr. Rodney Riegle of Illinois State University, developer and teacher of the world’s first online Role-Playing Course. “I think that young people who’ve grown up on computers and video games will embrace the Stagecoach Island experience, which is similar to a video game but actually provides a better opportunity to learn, explore and socialize in an immersive and interactive environment.”

Press release: http://www.wellsfargo.com/press/index.jhtml

Second life: http://secondlife.com/

Is this what module closure looks like?

2005-09-10T08:59:00.000-05:00

In their experiments reported in the September 1, 2005, issue of Neuron, the researchers [Anthony D. Wagner, Brian D. Gonsalves, and Itamar Kahn of Stanford University] asked volunteers to look at series of faces as the subjects' brains were scanned.

The researchers asked the subjects to rate their familiarity with each face as "remembering" if they strongly recalled the face, "knowing" if they had a feeling of recognizing the face, or "new" if they didn't recall seeing the face before.

The fMRI scans revealed that the decrease in medial temporal lobe activity tracked the level of perceived memory strength for the faces.

Gonsalves and his colleagues concluded that "medial temporal structures, in the service of declarative memory, support recognition of stimuli that were previously encountered, allowing organisms to discriminate between novel and familiar items.
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A decrease in activity looks a lot like turning off a TOTE unit. I would assume that the TOTE unit gets a face and the quest question: “Do we have a previous image of this face in storage?” The TOTE unit will exit when the test returns a yes, meaning that a recognizing unit has made an adequate match with the input. If a name is needed, the recognizing unit will now try to activate another unit that can say the name.

TOTE Units

2005-09-03T12:26:00.000-05:00

Another slow news week. So I am back to writing about old ideas. Here is one that is worth a revisit.
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…TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) proposed by Miller, Galanter & Pribram (1960). Miller et al. suggested that TOTE should replace the stimulus-response as the basic unit of behavior. In a TOTE unit, a goal is tested to see if it has been achieved and if not an operation is performed to achieve the goal; this cycle of test-operate is repeated until the goal is eventually achieved or abandoned.
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The TOTE unit is not gone. At least not in computer programming. In that context, the equivalent is the venerable and durable DO loop. And the operation of the TOTE unit is the basis for the operations I have been imputing to modules.

When I wrote about the Halle Berry neuron, I described the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. A person sees something, say an actor’s picture, and cannot remember the name. “The name is on the tip of my tongue.” Later, perhaps the next morning, the person does remember the name. In my interpretation, a module is started by the initial experience and continues to operate (like a TOTE unit) until it activates the module that can say the name. I suggest that the Test-Exit condition is sometimes perceived as subjective closure and has the effect of reinforcement.

If this is a reasonable description of what is happening in the brain, it has several implications.
1. The modules are routinely operating in reference to goals. These goals are not necessarily stated clearly in words.
2. Closure and reinforcement correspond to reaching these goals.
3. Searching units are readily set into search mode by questions.
4. The satisfaction (closure) derived from finding an answer depends on the presence of an activated search module.
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These observations have implications for instruction. They suggest that instructional materials might to well to include more quest questions. (Note that not all questions are questions are quest questions.) They also suggest a way to develop independent learners: give them the habit of making their own quest questions.

Image Modules Work Wordlessly

2005-08-27T08:28:00.000-05:00

University students saw pictures of five simple objects and words corresponding to their names. Participants were instructed to keep a silent mental count of the appearance of a specific target. For instance, in the first study, they looked for the word "globe." Its appearance on screen created a noticeable brain response. "We found that the appearance of the word 'globe' elicited a large electrical response called the P300, a positive-going ERP that occurs about 300-500 ms after the presentation of a target, " author Todd Watson states. Psychophysiology (recent issue)
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This is a standard response to a search target. More interesting: a picture of the globe got a similar, weaker response. In a second study, the picture of the globe was the target. As expected, that target got a strong response. But here, the word “globe” did not get a strong response.

This is a story of set, search, and closure. I think we could view the P300 as a physiological analogue of closure. Momentary closure: “I found one.” This is, after all, the Easter egg version of search. The set is asymmetric here. A set to look for a word activates both the module that represents the word and the module that represents the concrete denotation of the word. A set to look for the concrete denotation does not necessarily activate the word module.

Part of the asymmetry may come from the issue of meaning. If you see the word “globe,” you are sure that you know what it means. To draw that conclusion, you would need to look it up in your repertoire of concrete representations. If you see words like “wabe,” or “drog,” you are sure that you do not know the meanings because your search gets no returns.

It would be interesting to see the same experiment done with nonsense words. It would also be interesting to see the same experiment done with a real globe as well as an image of a globe.

This is an important paradigm in that it provides an efficient way to investigate connections among modules with equipment more readily available than fMRI.

MMORPGS and Cognitive Engineering

2005-08-21T08:18:00.000-05:00

I haven’t seen any new findings that I can relate to cognitive engineering or brain modules this week. So I resort to the standard journalistic practice for handling a newsless week: Talk about what’s already been said.

AUTISM LINKED TO MIRROR NEURON DYSFUNCTION. Do we have any taxonomy that would help us deal with the investigation of imitation skills and their application in cognitive engineering? Not that I know of. Presumably, there are areas of instruction that can make use of imitation skills. Do we know how to recognize those areas? Do we know how to adapt imitation skills to those areas?

I think, for example, of the instruction manual. Instruction on how to do something seems a natural venue for imitation. Do printed instruction manuals elicit imitation? Could they? An instructional video probably does elicit imitation, but at considerable expense. How about things in between: Audio presentation, Macromedia Flash, comic book format? My guess is that these methods would depend importantly on the effectiveness of the presentation. Does cognitive engineering know what makes an effective presentation in an instruction manual?
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I haven’t found the answer to that that question. The subject does not lend itself to laboratory research. The alternative presentation methods I mentioned are difficult to produce and much more difficult to replicate for different instructional content. The general strategy in these methods is to include modalities (modules) other than text presentation. One might easily reason that if you read text, the main thing you can imitate is text. You might, for example, learn to produce parodies. Come to think of it, I have seen some parodies if instructional manuals.

If you are going to imitate an action, presumably the best presentation is to see the action. Probably several instances, from different viewpoints, and with some pointing at critical aspects. Apprenticeship does that. Video, animated cartoons, and comic books could approach this kind of presentation if done well. Audio presentation or text would have to encourage visualization of the action being described. That is done in fiction and story-telling.

I have found another method of presentation that might by useful: the MMORPG. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game for those people who don’t want really ugly names on their methods. The specific instance I have in mind is Second Life, at
http://secondlife.com/

In SL, players set their own roles and objectives. The game vendor supplies the graphic software, the server network, and some incentives. The user sets the goals. The goal could be instruction.

The system is probably too elaborate to justify use in ordinary instruction about equipment. I am thinking about it in the context of learning (including academic learning and therapeutic learning). I find that the display easily creates a sense of place and of real objects. It allows the rendering of reasonably realistic objects. I doubt that the rendering and animation would be adequate for desensititization of phobias, but it might be worth trying. See this related blog:
http://www.ismho.org/archives/2005/06/16/cybertherapy-2005ismho-mini-meeting/

Here’s a concrete application: Show people how to use tables or maps. Either of these would be easy to construct as a floor or a wall. Each node or cell could have its own text annotation. Annotation could be hidden, to be disclosed by some user action or by animation that the user could later imitate. Flipping over to show the other side, for example.

At present, audio presentation is possible, but not easy. A future version, however, would allow audio presentations at will, using something like Skype or audio instant messaging. The audio could step you through the display.
Producing an instructional sim in this context would take patience, but no artistic skills. The sim would be replicable and consistent enough for experimentation. If anyone could produce a demonstrably effective sim, dissemination would be simple: For a one-time payment of about $10, a person could get unlimited access to it.

And perhaps cognitive engineers could learn something by imitating the online gaming community. If they still have their imitative subsystems on line.

Gestalt: The whole is greater than the sum of the modules

2005-08-13T08:46:00.000-05:00

The figure is famous: a deceptively simple line drawing that at first glance resembles a vase and, at the next, a pair of human faces in profile. [N]erve circuits in the brain's visual center …organize information into a "whole" even as an individual's gaze and attention are focused on only one part, according to Johns Hopkins researchers writing in a recent issue of the journal Neuron.

"Our paper answers the century-old question of the basis of subconscious processes in visual perception, specifically, the phenomenon of figure-ground organization," said Rudiger von der Heydt, a professor in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute. "Our work suggests that the system continuously organizes the whole scene, even though we usually are attending only to a small part of it."

The report, based on recordings of nerve cells in the visual cortex of macaque monkeys, suggests that this automatic processing of images is repeated each time an individual looks at something new, usually three to four times per second.

"The result of this organization is an internal data structure, quite similar to a database, that allows the attention mechanism to work efficiently," von der Heydt said. "An image can be compared with a bag of thousands of little Lego blocks in chaotic order. To pay attention to an object in space, the visual system first has to arrange this bag of blocks into useful 'chunks' and provide threads by which one or the other chunk can be pulled out for further processing."
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I prefer to think of these blocks as small and specialized modules. Larger modules, representing objects, are formed by combining these blocks. A few points of interest:

We are not aware of the process. With ambiguous pictures, we do notice the result. Otherwise, we jump to an inference about the real world. The underlying processes are done by the quiet modules.

The process is dynamic. The image is reprocessed several times a second.

The reprocessing is influenced by something that is potentially under conscious control. You start the reprocessing by shifting your attention. You probably influence the result by the new focus of attention. In the vase-faces figure, you can back off to see the faces. Or look at the center to see the vase.

Shifting viewpoint. Changing perspective. New meaning for the term “head cocked to the side.” And maybe another view on why the Thinkerer suggests those Cuepons or Head Views. The cognitive parts of the brain must also have to reprocess when a new idea intrudes.
http://thinkerer.org/Cuepons/CueIntro.htm
http://thinkerer.org/HeadView/HeadIntro.htm

The visual system is built to force eye movements and reprocessing. Not so the cognitive system. A cognitive system can get stuck in a rut. If that were not so, we would not have the expression. And we would not know what it means. And we would not see why a randomly chosen Cuepon could jog someone’s thinking out of a rut.

Learning without Awareness

2005-08-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

Learning may be unconscious and happen even when people are not aware of their learning experience. The research comes out in the July 28, 2005 issue of Nature.

Researchers from University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the San Diego Veterans Affairs Health System had undertaken the study to find out if like animals humans could learn through habits formed even when they are actually not aware of doing so.
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Learning without awareness has been well demonstrated in humans. I searched for

"learning without awareness" psychology

in Google and got 471 returns. Here, the interest may be that the subjects had destruction in the hippocampus and related strictures. Thus they were (supposedly) unable to learn new memories. The research showed that they were able to learn a simple discrimination task, even though they could not remember having practiced the task.

The results seem to show that the simple discrimination learning used a different part of the brain (different module) from the hippocampus system. This study could not give evidence about processes in an intact brain, but we might speculate that the same modules are in use. What is learned with awareness becomes automatic with overlearning. Perhaps that reflects acquisition by other modules that function without awareness.

What functions without awareness may be hard to access when the awareness modules try to change it. I have made some suggestions about that in the Thinkerer:
http://thinkerer.org/Tools/ToolsHabitClipit.htm

Hypnosis affects modules and module conflict

2005-07-30T09:08:00.000-05:00

Conflict was produced by the Stroop paradigm: Name the color of the ink for words. Color names, printed in the wrong color, take longer for response than other words.

From: Sciam.com (Scientific American)
In previous work, Amir Raz and his colleagues at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University had illustrated that hypnosis could be used to reduce this conflict in highly hypnotizable individuals. In the new work, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and readings from scalp electrodes to monitor brain activity while subjects completed the ink-naming task.

The researchers gave the subjects a posthypnotic suggestion to interpret the colored words as gibberish, which presumably would allow them to focus more on the color of the ink instead of reading the word. Highly hypnotizable individuals had better accuracy and quicker reaction times compared to those previously identified as being less responsive to hypnosis. The imaging data indicated that the hypnotizable subjects showed reduced brain activity in both visual areas and the anterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in conflict monitoring. Thus, the authors conclude, the results "illuminate how suggestion affects cognitive control by modulating activity in specific brain areas."
……….
The Stroop paradigm can be regarded as an example of conflicting set. The set induced by experimental instructions is opposed by the highly developed set to translate printed words into spoken words. In the above brain activity result, the reduction in the visual area presumably reflects reduced response in an area that helps to interpret printed words. I wish this summary had been more explicit on that point.

This line of research is helpful in demystifying the story of hypnosis. If hypnosis is simply inducing a set, its effects are readily interpretable. With the aid of fMRI, researchers can compare the brain activity under several ways of breaking the reading set. For example, printing the word in badly mixed type fonts would probable weaken the reading set.

This research also illustrates how module conflict is a normal and appropriate process in the context of an unpredictable environment. It makes a brain for all seasons. Some set of modules will fit the task and that set will win the conflict.

Nobody would want to imagine unconscious or subconscious processes to describe this conflict. Both modules operate almost without awareness. But either module can be influenced by cognitive processes. The conflict between modules can be reduced by strengthening the conditions that favor one module over the other. But the conflict is inherent in the way the brain makes the best choice for the moment.

State Statements and Quest Questions

2005-07-23T08:57:00.000-05:00

The notion of module quests leads easily to the title above. A common way to start a module quest is to ask a question. (In answer to that question in your mind, quest and question do have the same Latin root.) And a common way to end a module quest of that sort is with a statement. Of course, you can avoid the module quest entirely if you just give the statement first. That would be faster and surely more efficient.

Or maybe not. Let’s try an analogy on the web. If I go to a website to order something, the system will present me with a page that asks for several items of information. I have files on my computer that carry my name and address. It would be faster and easier for me to copy and paste to give the website the information. That would not be more efficient, however, because the computer would not know how to handle the text string I would paste in. In order for the computer to make effective use of the items, I have to match my response to the computer’s request.

The reason I have to pamper to computer it that it needs to store the text in a way that lets it find any particular item it needs. I think this is analogous to what can happen with those efficient state statements. Efficient input may impose a cost of inefficient retrieval.

It is generally recognized that recall is more successful when the stimulus conditions are similar to those of learning. A quest question is probably a salient cue in learning the answer. Moreover, the experience of closure is clearly satisfying and so probably provides reinforcement.

This line of thinking suggests that recall would be strongly affected by the quest questions. And, at the metacognitive level, self-guided learning would be effective only to the extent that the person is able to frame appropriate quest questions.

Most of this thinking feeds into the homework project and I will pursue it in that context.

Here are a few ideas that will suggest additions to the Thinkerer:

People often use quest questions to set goals for themselves (and others). That is probably especially true for short-term goals. The Thinkerer needs to clarify the role of quest questions and show how they serve in place of (or as precursors to) formally stated goals.

Quest questions evidently set modules to a job. They may be an important channel of communication from the verbal system to the other modules. Furthermore, something about the question may select modules in particular Head Staff types. Examples:

A trivia question would call for the Networker. (And, by the way, illustrate the intrinsic interest in quest questions.)

A question like, “How would I do that?” would call for the Explorer or the Engineer.

Thus we might use quest questions as a way to help people link their long-term goals to their short-term goals. And to take the formality out of goal setting.

Module Quests and Closure

2005-07-16T09:45:00.000-05:00

I know a little more of what I understand about modules and closure. This might remind you of the opposite remark: “I don’t understand all I know about that.” But the reverse is also a common experience, at least for those of us who are professionally obliged to explain what we understand in language. People who don’t have to talk about what they understand would not run into this problem.

As pointed out several times in the Thinkerer, people can have unverbalized goals. You can find out about someone’s unvberbalized goals by watching what they do. You can find out about your unverbalized goals by watching what you do.

Now let me be clear. Having unverbalized goals is normal. It is not a disease. It is not a neurosis. It does not need a cure. Verbal systems may not see things that way. Or rather, they may not talk about things that way. But I am not writing on behalf of verbal systems.

Sure, it is convenient to have some match between verbalized and unverbalized goals. And that’s why I am thinking about module quests and closure. In this case, it takes two to tangle. For that, we need two names. So I picked the name quest for those unverbalized goals. The name, as drawn from Native American traditions, seems to fit. There certainly some sort of objective in such a quest, but it is not of the clearly measurable variety. “You’ll know it when you see it.” That seems to describe the goal of the traditional quest and the searching of a module. I think the experience of closure, for example, in remembering the name of a partially forgotten actor, is very much like knowing it when you see it.

Another reason I like the term quest is that it has a major role in human myths and is historically significant in psychology as part of a Jungian archetype. See:
http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Hero
http://www.vinnys.net/campbell.html

At present, my quest is to find a way to show people how to use the unverbalized goals to support their verbalized goals. Or to use the powerful machinery of language to support unverbalized goals. The main elements presently in the Thinkerer are:

Find your unverbalized goals by watching what you do.
http://thinkerer.org/Topics/TopicsGoalOfGoals.htm

Start your silent modules on an activity of your (conscious) by the Startalittle method. This is set, a well established principle in psychology.
http://thinkerer.org/Tools/ToolsStartaLittle.htm

Select modules well suited to the objective and start them on the activity. Example: Storyboarder, representing the episodic “memory” subsystem. I am working on a Clipit to help people apply this to study of a chapter.

Give started modules time to work before you force closure by calling an end to the job. (Zeigarnik effect)

Your Brain Modules at Work

2005-07-02T09:01:00.000-05:00

In a new study published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 27-July 1), Michael Spivey, a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell, tracked the mouse movements of undergraduate students while working at a computer. The findings provide compelling evidence that language comprehension is a continuous process.

In his study, 42 students listened to instructions to click on pictures of different objects on a computer screen … when the students heard "candle" and were presented with two pictures with similarly sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken.

"The degree of curvature of the trajectory shows how much the other object is competing for their interpretation; the curve shows continuous competition. They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete; it's a dynamical system."
…even partial linguistic input can start "the dynamic competition between simultaneously active representations."
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Another illustration of modules and the pandemonium model. The report does not make clear whether the pictures or the sounds were presented first. Assume the pictures, since that seems more likely in this paradigm. A picture of familiar object will activate the relevant concept modules. Assume the set: “Listen for the name and point to the object.” That set would activate the auditory and name recognizing systems. When the images are presented, the relevant concept modules (probably more than one for each image) will activate whatever name modules they have connections to.

As shown with many studies of set, the prior activation of name modules reduces the time it takes them to respond. In the present case, speaking the name will activate all names that start with the same sequence of phonemes. When the phoneme sequence resolves the ambiguity, one module takes control (closure). It suppresses the activity of the other modules (reciprocal inhibition) and gains access the perceptual-motor system to determine the overt response.

The researcher makes much of the continuous nature of the response. The use of a mouse is an ingenious way to collect data on a continuous response. It benefits from the extensive experience most college students have with this computer interface. I don’t think this demonstration is new, but data collection method offers new possibilities for analyzing the continuous response.

The Halle Berry Neuron.

2005-06-25T13:36:00.000-05:00

At the end of the last episode, I was talking about closure. Conveniently, the following news item provides an occasion for speculating about closure as it might work with brain modules.
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When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some individual cells that reacted to a particular celebrity, landmark, animal or object.

In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her "Catwoman" costume, a drawing of her and even the words, "Halle Berry."

The findings appear in a part of the brain that transforms what people perceive into what they'll eventually remember, said Dr. Itzhak Fried of the University of California, Los Angeles, a senior investigator on the project. The researchers tested eight people with epilepsy who'd had electrodes placed in their brains so that doctors could track down the origins of their seizures.
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The cell described for Berry was acting like a concept of Halle Berry. I don’t know that this was the only neuron acting as the Halle Berry concept so I prefer to talk about the Halle Berry module. I speculate that people have a module like this for each of the concepts they can use effectively. For face concepts, the process would operate something like this:

An initial recognition set is established. Example: Do you recognize this person?

With a face (real, photograph, drawing) in your visual field, analyzing modules with face specialization go to work and generate activity in proportion to the features in the face. Each module specializes in a particular feature. One module might specialize in round faces and be activated by Leonardo de Caprio, Another might specialize in long faces and be activated by John Kerry. Analyzer modules would have strong connections to the appropriate concepts. An active round-face module would activate your concept modules for de Caprio, and for anyone else you know with such a face.

Initially, all of your face concept modules would be slightly activated by the question and your recognition that what you see is a face. When the face analyzers get to work, the concept modules would be further activated by the inputs that represent how well the face matches each of the features. Recall the pandemonium model. Each module is shouting. But one is getting ahead of the others. When it gets enough ahead, it shouts so loud that everybody else shuts up (reciprocal inhibition).

This event is a kind closure. You may say, with mild satisfaction, “Yeah. I do recognize that person.” You may not be able to say the name (tip-of-the-tongue phenomena). But your concept module had signaled closure of phase 1. The module probably has a good connection to the name module (over in the verbal system). But the connection may not be good enough to activate the name module. In that case, you may start drawing on other information accessible from the concept module. You may be able to say: “This is a movie star from black and white pictures around 1950. He played bad guys. He played in “The Maltese Falcon”. He played in “Arsenic and Old Lace”. He was a small man. He generally played a subordinate role. He had a soft voice with subtle menace.”

If you have seen these movies, you probably know who I am talking about. You can probably say, “Not Humphrey Bogart. Not Sidney Greenstreet.” You my not know the name. But you are sure your could recognize the face. You may be able to form an image of the face. And you probably can remenber the distinctive voice. You are probably sure that you could recognize the name if I gave it to you. The initials are P. L.

The additional information may activate the name. You may have a direct connection from the Maltese Falcon module to the P. L. module, since he was prominently listed in the screen credits. The Maltese Falcon module may thus be able to send additional activation to the P. L. module.

But wait. Would anyone spend time trying to remember the name of a movie actor? Have you ever seen that happen? Why would people do that? The only reward you get is a sense of closure when you remember the name. And perhaps some cognitive reassurance that your memory hasn’t started to fail yet.

I am going to refer to the actions above as starting and closing a module process. I will think of it as like stating and closing a computer program. The opening is initiated by a question or something else that carries an implied objective requiring the activation of a module: “Who is this?” Closure normally occurs when all relevant parts of the module have been sufficiently activated to meet the objective. In this illustration, the full name of P. L. would reach a level of awareness that allows you to speak it.

Now I will suspend the discussion. If you have not yet reached closure on the name, you will probably find that the started module continues to run (Zeigarnik effect). Perhaps you will think of it later. Perhaps you will think of it in the middle of the night. Perhaps you will wake tomorrow morning with closure on the name.

Or perhaps you will think more about closure. In any case, I will.

Implications of Brain Modules

2005-06-19T13:18:00.000-05:00

I didn’t find any new module reports this week. So I will speculate a bit about the implications of brain modules for cognitive engineering, particularly in connection with my blog about homework.

There are two connections. The obvious connection lies in how we could use the modular model to assist in homework. The other lies in how I am explicitly using to modular model to write the blog.

Each item is written in the role of a particular head team character. I see this as a kind of division of labor and think I have always done it without much attention. Except in the job of creativity. The standard advice in group processes and brainstorming is that creating and evaluating do not mix. So I don’t mix them. And when I am thinking of new ideas, I don’t pay much attention to people who tell me what is wrong with them.

I started being explicit because I noticed it would fit well with the writing. Now I am noticing some useful results of the increased awareness. Today I was writing as the Engineer. I noted that I wanted a better title. That did not distract me because I call on the Un and the Networker for titles. They work any time, including when I am asleep. So I can leave that job to them and see what they come up with.

The situation reminds me of the early days of time sharing on computers. Time sharing requires the computer to save the current state of a job and swap in the (previously saved) state of another job. The first timesharing computers spent most of their time managing the swaps. Inefficient? Maybe module shifting is inefficient, too.

Of course, module shifting might also have advantages. Modules may get tired. That may the process underlying span of attention.

(Aside: My Un and my Networker just broke in to point out that Spam of Attention would make a good title for something if I could just think of something to put under it. Perhaps something about distractions. Maybe distractions about irrelevant titles.)

Perhaps there is an optimal period for using a particular module. Not necessarily in minutes, possibly in some units of processing activity. Or in terms of closure.

The term closure brings me back to homework. (Perhaps the module I was using to write the above is tired.) I found definitions with a Google search for define:closure.

In Gestalt psychology the term refers to the way that we fill in gaps where there is missing information in a stimulus.

In the analysis of texts, the term refers to ideological closure, which means the strategies used in the text to lead the reader to make sense of the text according to a particular ideological framework. The idea of ideological closure is useful because it leads us to examine how a text has been constructed to lead to a particular reading and exclude other possible readings.

When the Customer is satisfied that an incident has been resolved.

Bringing a narrative to a conclusion that is satisfactory. Proper closure accounts for all the clues and mysteries, leaves no stray ends, makes themes clear, and gives readers a sense that order is again in sight.

Settlement: something settled or resolved; the outcome of decision making; "the finally reached a settlement with the union"; "they never did achieve a final resolution of their differences"; "he needed to grieve before he could achieve a sense of closure"
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Closure seems to have important meanings to people. I was going to use it to lead into a discussion about goals and closure. But I will stop now. Without closure. I will understand more about closure next week.

The Storyboarder’s Story: Scripted Cooperative Learning

2005-06-12T09:36:00.000-05:00

Not so long ago, in an episode not far away, the Engineer suggested the notion of learning power-packs. One example was cooperative learning scripts. Here’s how something like that might work:

Parental power-packs. These are designed to look like innocent web pages. Each page carries a script for interactive homeworking. The script describes the roles to be played by the parent in this episode. Different scripts will assign different roles. For example, the parent may be a peer, cooperatively learning with the child. Or the parent may be the learner, with the child doing the teaching. Or the parent may be an assistant, providing particular kinds of help.

Each script will also focus on a life-learning skill. Life-learning skills are general skills relevant to learning at any time (not just in school). Examples are goal-setting, question-answering, getting started, and Canter control. Specific mnemonic tricks may also be included.

Scripts will probably also come in several styles. Examples of styles might be auditory, imagery, and particular characteristics to be exhibited by the parents. The Vulcan points out that we will need a taxonomy of styles, skills, and other set designation that a Storyboarder can so easily throw around. We’ll leave that to the day of the Vulcan.

The parent will choose the power-pack that fits the particular assignment and the child. After the child has some experience with the power-packs, the parent will probably get advice from the child on the choice of power-packs. Because the power-packs deal with general skills, they can be reused many times.

The Networker points out that these power-packs are a lot like what educators call “instructional activities.” Since children and parents naturally hate “instructional activities,” it will be important to make clear the distinction. The parent is merely helping the child with the homework. The scripts merely vary details of the help. Parents should not let the script delay the work. The scripts will produce incidental learning over time, but this is incidental.

Brain Networks Change According To Cognitive Task

2005-06-05T08:36:00.000-05:00

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Using a newly released method to analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Northwestern University researchers have demonstrated that the interconnections between different parts of the brain are dynamic and not static. This and other findings answer longstanding debates about how brain networks operate to solve different cognitive tasks. They are presented in the current (June 1) issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Equally important, the researchers discovered that the brain region that performed the integration of information shifted depending on the task their subjects performed. In this study, the subjects were assigned two language tasks. In both, subjects were asked to read individual words and then make a spelling or rhyming judgment.

Depending on the goal of the task -- whether subjects were asked to make an orthographic (spelling) judgment or a phonological (rhyming) judgment the Northwestern researchers found that different convergence zones in the network were involved in the task.

[E]ach task preferentially strengthened the influences converging on the task specific regions (LTC for rhyming, IPS for spelling). This finding suggests that task specific regions serve as convergence zones that integrate information from other parts of the brain.
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The above news item illustrates the conceptual brain model of the Thinkerer. Guided by the short-term goal, the subjects activated appropriate brain modules to support that goal. Their success at the task depended on the effectiveness of the individual modules, and the effectiveness of the integration process. The effectiveness of the integration, in turn, would be influenced by accurate selection of processes and the suppression of competing processes (defocus). Note that the overt actions would be strong in awareness, but the person would probably not be able to report any sense of the selection and integration processes.