1. How much should we practice? by Jonah Lehrer
- ” We spend a lot of time trying to improve our perceptions on very particular tasks, whether it’s a jet fighter pilot learning how to fly or a baseball player learning to hit a fastball or child with dyslexia learning how to read. Although we currently assume that the only way to improve is to constantly practice – in technical speak, the act of practicing provides a “permissive signal” that allows the accompanying stimulation to “drive learning” – this research demonstrates that we can also improve through mere exposure. Furthermore, our obsession with practice comes with serious drawbacks, since the tedium of practice can prove discouraging for beginners. And so we quit the piano and give up on our reading lessons, because we can’t stand the training regimen.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can just play Yo Yo Ma in the background and expect to master the cello, or put the textbook underneath the pillow and expect to ace the algebra test. We still need to practice. We just might not need to practice as much as we think.”
2. Neural Exercises Boost The Aging Brain
- “Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry and aging at UCLA, says there are ways that we can reduce the effects of this kind of memory loss by exercising our brains—training our neurons the same way that we can exercise our muscles at the gym using relatively simple techniques. He distills the basics of these down to three concepts: ‘look, snap, connect.’
‘”Look stands for focusing attention. The biggest reason that people don’t remember things is they’re simply not paying attention,” he says. “You’re running outside the house and you can’t remember whether you did some minor task because you weren’t paying attention. Snap is a reminder to create a mental snapshot of information you want to recall later. Many of us find it easier to remember visual information than other types of information. And then the third step connect, is just a way of linking up those mental snapshots, so an example would be if I’m running out quickly and I have two errands, pick up eggs and go to the post office. I might visualize in my mind and egg with a stamp on it.’”
Personal note: I mention a very similar technique in my article, “Are You A List Maniac? How To Build A Better Memory“
3. Structure your world for success by thinking abstractly by Art Markman, cognitive scientist, University of Texas
- “When you work to create an environment that supports your long-term goals, you are engaging in prospective self-control. This kind of planning for the future helps you to achieve your goals by minimizing the number of temptations that cross your path and by helping you to prepare in advance for those that do emerge.
A paper by Kentaro Fujita and Joseph Roberts in the November, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology examines one factor that may make people more likely to engage in this advance planning.
These authors suggest that when people think about a situation more abstractly, they may be more willing to structure their world in ways that help them to satisfy long-term goals than when they think about a situation concretely.”
Personal note: Later in the article it mentions how researchers get participants to think more abstractly by asking them the “Why?” behind their actions rather than the “How?”
4. Study: Playing Violent Games Helps with Stress and Depression
- “Research concluded: ‘As with aggressive behavior, the evidence did not support that short-term randomized exposure to violent video games either increased or decreased hostile feelings or depression. By contrast long-term exposure to violent video games was associated with reduced hostile feelings and depression following a stressful task. Subjects who were exposed to violent video games were not less aggressive, but they were less hostile and depressed.’
It was also noted that violent videogames could possibly considered as “mood management tools,” which could help treat mood disorders and other health-related issues.”
5. For First Time, Monkeys Recognize Themselves in the Mirror, Indicating Self-Awareness
- “Typically, monkeys don’t know what to make of a mirror. They may ignore it or interpret their reflection as another, invading monkey, but they don’t recognize the reflection as their own image. Chimpanzees and people pass this “mark” test—they obviously recognize their own reflection and make funny faces, look at a temporary mark that the scientists have placed on their face or wonder how they got so old and grey.
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For 40 years, scientists have concluded from this type of behavior that a few species are self-aware—they recognize the boundaries between themselves and the physical world.
Because chimps, our closest relatives, pass the test, while almost all other primate species fail it, scientists began to discuss a “cognitive divide” between the highest primates and the rest.
But a study published today (Sept. 29) by Luis Populin, a professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shows that under specific conditions, a rhesus macaque monkey that normally would fail the mark test can still recognize itself in the mirror and perform actions that scientists would expect from animals that are self-aware.”
6. We should be music testing athletes!
- “Waterhouse, Hudson and Edwards (2009) took music and artificially sped it up and slowed it down (in 10% increments). They found that people’s performance (measured in cycles/minute) increased as the tempo increased. Sure, sure, we all knew music makes workouts more enjoyable – but it appears it can actually deliver benefits.”
7. Compassion and Civic Responsibility by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
- “Neuroskeptic has excellent coverage of the recent headline-making study on the genetics of ADHD that was overly-hyped as the ‘first direct genetic link’ to the disorder and overly-slammed as a drug company ploy.
For example, BBC News has a report on the study where you can see researcher Anita Thapar making some unrealistic claims for the significance of the interesting-but-preliminary study while the science-retardant child psychologist Oliver James counters by cherry picking evidence (and not even very accurately).
Neuroskeptic does a great job of untangling the actual import of the research and discusses why the finding of copy-number variations or CNVs in about 16% of the ADHD kids compared to 7.5% of the controls is neither a ‘direct genetic link’ nor evidence against the idea that the condition is ‘socially constructed’.”
9. Rediscovering Your Motivational Innocence
- “Say, you and I happen to be on the same metro car. I have flip-flops on. You have stiletto shoes on. The train car sways, you lose balance and nail my foot down to the floor with your stiletto heel. Now I need reconstructive surgery, develop a limp and chronic pain, and get depressed. My wife leaves me. My life is ruined. We bump into each other again. I tell you the story. Should you feel guilty? Of course not. Regretful, but not guilty. It’s clear you had no motive to hurt me. But I got hurt.
Life’s chaotic like that: a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and you have a tornado in Arkansas. Should we blame the butterfly for the devastation of a tornado? Of course, not. But, in a way, we do. We are sticklers for cause-and-effect.
If you happen to be involved in the causal chain of events, let alone if your behavior is an immediate antecedent of some kind of mishap, you blame yourself. So, if you are the one who stepped on my toes, you conclude that if you had been more balanced, you would not have injured me and my life would not have been ruined. If you are a self-loathing, CNN-watching butterfly in the Amazon, then you’d conclude that if you had only not flapped your wings, that trailer park would be still standing.
This is a very formal way of looking at causality. Everything is inter-related, inter-connected, and inter-twined. Any event is a collision of multiple variables. Each variable is a cause of some effect. The question is which one is the necessary and sufficient cause/reason behind the mistake you are beating yourself up for.”
10. Counter-Intuition by Daniel Simons, experimental psychologist, University of Illinois
- “Daniel Simons is the head of Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois. His recent research explores the cognitive underpinnings of our experience of a stable and continuous visual world. For example, his studies reveal the surprising extent of inattentional blindness — the failure to notice unusual and salient events when attention is otherwise engaged and when the events are unexpected. More broadly, he tries to identify those aspects of our environment that automatically capture attention and those that go unnoticed.”
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Earlier this morning I was watching a lecture on positive psychology by former Harvard professor Tal Ben-Sahar. During each day of the class Sahar allocated two or so minutes of complete silence. This is all done in the name of embracing stillness and introspection, a practice that Sahar finds extraordinarily important in improving one’s health and well-being.
Within the lecture he cites a study done by MIT Professors David Foster and Matthew Wilson, one which Sahar found rather convincing regarding the importance of reflection in our everyday lives and specifically its effects on our cognitive abilities.
In this study researchers looked inside the brains of rats. They paid particular attention to the hippocampus, a brain structure that has shown to be responsible for learning and memory in rodents, primates, and humans. They performed brain scans on rats as they went through a maze, and then also after the experience, during times of reflection.
- “What the results suggest is that while there certainly is some record of your experience as it is occurring (in other words when the rats were running the maze), the actual learning – when you try to figure out: ‘What was important? What should I keep and throw away?’ – that happens after the fact, during periods of quiet wakeful introspection.”
Rats who were given a chance to relax and reflect showed better signs of learning than rats who were not given a chance to relax and reflect. Scientists have implied that it could be that “replaying a sequence of behavioral events in our mind” is an important mechanism in effective learning and memory retention.
Further Implications
If we can reinforce learning by actively replaying memories then certainly there is good reason to practice wakeful introspection. Like Sahar, we should set aside a time and place for it. Even by reflecting on negative events, we can extract lessons from our old ways and thus learn to gain something positive from them. The implications of this study are more than just getting rats to run through mazes faster, it can also have a significant effect on building new habits and improving the quality of life.
On this site I often write about the importance of relaxation on our health and happiness. To know that these exercises can also improve our cognition and learning is just another good incentive to continue practicing these everyday.
Most of us have grown up in a culture surrounded by noise, clutter, and busy-ness. There is sometimes even a disdain for silence; we find it awkward, unproductive, or boring. But maybe we are just not very good at it? Perhaps this modern culture also explains how we have left society with so many children with ADHD and other learning disabilities.
Is it really so hard to find the time for a little peaceful reflection? Even just 5 or 10 minutes a day is enough to start seeing the difference. We could easily accomplish this during a lunch hour or after dinner. It is a good way to soak in everything that has happened to us throughout the day and at the same time relax all the tensions from family, relationships, and work. It gives us time to ask, “Am I staying on course? Am I doing the right things? Am I improving myself?” These are just some of the questions we can ask to better ourselves.
Information And Transformation
All knowledge is processed knowledge. We don’t know things in the form of their raw sensory experience, but the form in which we conceptualize them. We then integrate these concepts into our representation of the world, just like the rat does when it makes a mental map of a maze.
As Sahar describes in his lecture, information is the sensory data of what we experience and transformation is the map we create from that data. When we reflect we are re-initiating this process of transformation by deriving new meaning from our memories.
During transformation we decide what parts of the experience were most important and worth paying attention to. When our mental schema doesn’t work, we can always reflect back, re-focus, and adjust our understanding of that experience. Although this may seem like commonsense, very few people actively practice this technique.
Sahar believes that the road to improvement isn’t necessarily about getting more and more information, but transforming our understanding of the information we already have. This requires us to look inside at what we already know and to use that knowledge in a more effective manner. The educational tools and resources are all already there inside of us.
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Whether you are a college student cramming for a final exam or a teenager with ADHD, the important of maintaining a healthy and cognitively fine-tuned brain can never be underestimated.
But what is the best way to improve our attention and our ability to retain information?
So far psychopharmacology has had the most influential impact on how we treat those with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Drugs like adderall are also becoming a common cognitive enhancer amongst college students.
Some doctors believe these psychostimulants are getting abused. Studies have shown how similar drugs such as modafinil boost dopamine levels in the brain, which in return cause a greater chance of an individual getting addicted to the drug later in life.
Surely there can be better ways of improving our brain-functioning than having to depend on pills? Of course there are some individuals who have a chemical imbalance, but that isn’t typically how psychiatrists diagnose a patient with ADHD – it is only their justification for resorting to pills as proper medical treatment instead of probing deeper into why children today are suffering from these poor attention skills.
For example, how do we know the rise of ADHD is not due to the environmental factors of living in an industrialized, overstimulating society? Surely these kinds of factors can affect our brain chemistry, but it doesn’t mean that our brain chemistry was the origins of the disorder.
If I am right – and I am certainly not the first person to bring up this idea nor will I be the last – then changing our living habits and our environment may be a much better and long-lasting cognitive enhancer than resorting to the temporary solutions that drugs typically offer.
One study by Berman, Jonides, and Kaplan (2008) (pdf), tested the effects of different environments on attention and found:
“Attention Restoration Theory (ART) provides an analysis of the kinds of environments that lead to improvements in directed-attention abilities. Nature, which is filled with intriguing stimuli, modestly grabs attention in a bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed-attention abilities a chance to replenish. Unlike natural environments, urban environments are filled with stimulation that captures attention dramatically and additionally requires directed attention (e.g., to avoid being hit by a car), making them less restorative. We present two experiments that show that walking in nature or viewing pictures of nature can improve directed-attention abilities as measured with a backwards digit-span task and the Attention Network Task, thus validating Attention Restoration Theory.”
PsyBlog reports that when participants went for a nature walk they did 20% better on a memory test then participants who took a walk through a busy city.
With knowledge like this why wouldn’t we try changing some of our living habits? These studies have implications that can affect everyone: students, those with ADHD or Alzheimers disease, and even your regular Joe and Jane. It is important that we find some space and time to spend with nature, especially if we are typically accustomed to the busy reality of our industrialized world.
Why not visit a local park one afternoon, do your homework in the nature preserve, or spend the weekend hiking in the Catskill Mountains? For some of us winter is right around the corner so we should have a good incentive to go outside while it is still nice. Your Xbox 360 and Macbook will still be there when you get back.