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links

Links for May 2010

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links politics

Quote #254: Democracy

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken

Categories
Me sheffield

Sheffield Represent

Spotted in a doorway round the corner from the Union Pool, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

I am now back in Sheffield, England

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links

Links for March 2010 II

Categories
links

Links for March 2010 TED talks edition

I’ve been listening to podcasts while walking to work

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misc

Point Reyes, California


Photo taken approximately here, last Sunday

Categories
quotes

Quote #253

As important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws

Thank you, Al Gore. In his 2008 TED talk calling for a ‘new hero generation’ to deal with climate change

Categories
Me psychology

Narrative Extraction

I don’t predict what is going to happen when I watch a film. It isn’t like I can’t, it just doesn’t occur to me. When the bad guy turns out to be a good guy (or vice versa) my friends will say “Well that was obviously going to happen”. But it wasn’t obvious to me.

If you had described the salient facts to me, given me a plot summary, I would be able to make the correct prediction, I’m sure, but something about the way my brain works stops me making the leap from the level of experience to the level of description. I am stuck just experiencing the events of the film, and not representing them in a way that would allow me to draw obvious conclusions.

Let’s call this ability ‘narrative extraction’.

I’ve got some smarts, sure, but I think I’ve got a deductive kind of smarts. This is the kind of smarts that can take a set of facts, or axioms, and crunch through the consequences until you get to inevitable result. I’m good at maths and most logic puzzles. I think narrative extraction requires a different kind of smarts. It is the ability to pick an appropriate set of facts or an appropriate method of description which will provide you with an answer which serves your purposes.

For the film example you need to do more than just experience the characters, you need to classify them by their types, the film by genre, the plot by template and from all that infer what would be the most likely thing for an exciting film.

Moral reasoning requires the same kind of smarts. There’s a famous test of moral reasoning by Kohberg, where children are presented with vignettes (“Your wife is sick and you cannot afford medicine. Should you break into the pharmacy and steal it?” type things). Kohberg ranked children’s moral reasoning, giving the most credit to moral reasoning which invoked logical deductions from abstract moral frameworks.

Gilligan, in her book “In a different voice” has a powerful critique of Kohlberg’s system, on the grounds that it gave credit to one kind of reasoning – abstract logical deduction or calculus (e.g. “Stealing is wrong, but letting your wife die is worse, so I should therefore steal the medicine”) – and not to another kind of more contextually sensitive reasoning (e.g. “If I break into the pharmacy then I might get caught and then I won’t be able to help my wife, so I should find another way of getting the medicine”). This sensitivity to what is not in the question – what is not explicitly stated – is a part of narrative extraction.

There is another important, perhaps more primary, way in which narrative extraction is required for moral judgement. Kohlberg’s vignettes are not just logic problems, which can be convergently or divergently solved, they are also descriptions of the world. Thus they do one of the major tasks of moral reasoning for you – that of going from the nebulous world of experience to the concrete would of categories and actions.

As soon as you describe the world you massively constrain the scope for moral reasoning. You can still make the wrong judgement, but you have made moral reasoning possible by the act of description using moral categories.

Milgram demonstrated scientifically the banality of evil, that normal people could do inhuman things. Did those people who thought they were delivering lethal electric shocks make an incorrect moral judgement? Did they weigh “doing what you are told” against “the life of an innocent” and choose the former? My intuition is that they did not, not explicitly. Yes they made the wrong choice (we too would probably have made the wrong choice), but I believe that they were so caught up in the moment, in the emotion of the situation, that they did not move to the necessary level of description. We, reading this in comfort, are given the moral categories and the right choice is so obvious that we have difficulty empathising with their situation. The narrative extraction has been done for us, so right thing seems obvious. But it isn’t.

Categories
intellectual self-defence misc

Sorry No Ducks (a cartoon by Michael Leunig)

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links

Links for February 2010, part II

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links

Links for February 2010

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quotes

Quote #252: Silence, exile, cunning

“You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use . . . silence, exile, and cunning.”

James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Categories
books intellectual self-defence quotes

Moral Clarity by Susan Neiman


Susan Neiman’s “Moral Clarity – a guide for grown-up idealists” (2009) is a passionate and literary book about moral reasoning and the achievements of the Enlightenment (especially Kant). The book contains fantastic and acute re-readings of the myths of Job and Odysseus, as well as plenty of examples of Neiman’s own moral clarity – she has a great analyst’s knack of being able to articulate clearly and succinctly exactly what was so pernicious about many of the arguments and actions of the neocon government under Bush. Recommended.


“The Enlightenment gave reason pride of place, not because it expected absolute certainty, but because it sought a way to live without it”
(p218)

Categories
events

Study Leave

I am on study leave. I’ll be in Berkeley, California, in February and some of March, and then from mid-March I’ll be in New York. I am contactable by email.

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links

Links for January 2010

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books Me psychology

Better thinking through chemistry

This chapter was due for inclusion in The Rough Guide Book of Brain Training, but was cut – probably because the advice it gives is so unsexy!

The idea of cognitive enhancers is an appealing one, and its attraction is obvious. Who wouldn’t want to take a pill to make them smarter? It’s the sort of vision of the future we were promised on kids TV, alongside jetpacks and talking computers.

Sadly, this glorious future isn’t here yet. The original and best cognitive enhancer is caffeine (“creative lighter fluid” as one author called it), and experts agree that there isn’t anything else available to beat it. Lately, sleep researchers have been staying up and getting exciting about a stimulant called modafinil, which seems to temporarily eliminate the need for sleep without the jitters or comedown of caffeine. Modafinil isn’t a cognitive enhancer so much as something that might help with jetlag, or let you stay awake when you really should be getting some kip.

Creative types have had a long romance with alcohol and other more illicit narcotics. The big problem with this sort of drug (aside from the oft-documented propensity for turning people into terrible bores), is that your brain adapts to, and tries to counteract, the effects of foreign substances that affect its function. This produces the tolerance that is a feature of most prolonged drug use – whereby the user needs more and more to get the same effect – and also the withdrawal that characterises drug addiction. You might think this is a problem only for junkies but, if you are a coffee or tea drinker just pause for moment and reflect on any morning when you’ve felt stupid and unable to function until your morning cuppa. It might be for this reason that the pharmaceutical industry is not currently focusing on developing drugs for creativity. Plans for future cognitive enhancers focus on more mundane, workplace-useful skills such as memory and concentration. Memory-boosters would likely be most useful to older adults, especially those with worries about failing memories, rather than younger adults.

Although there is no reason in principle why cognitive enhancers couldn’t be found which fine-tune our concentration or hone our memories, the likelihood is that, as with recreational drugs, tolerance and addiction would develop. These enhancing drugs would need to be taken in moderate doses and have mild effects – just as many people successfully use caffeine and nicotine for their cognitive effects on concentration today. Even if this allowed us to manage the consequences of the brain trying to achieve its natural level, there’s still the very real possibility that use of the enhancing drugs would need to be fairly continuous – just as it is with smokers and drinkers of tea and coffee. And even then our brains would learn to associate the drug with the purpose for which they are taken, which means it would get harder and harder to perform that purpose without the drugs, as with the coffee drinker who can’t start work until he’s had his coffee. Furthermore, some reports suggest that those with high IQ who take cognitive enhancers are mostly likely to mistake the pleasurable effect of the substance in question for a performance benefit, while actually getting worse at the thing they’re taking the drug for.

The best cognitive enhancer may well be simply making best use of the brain’s natural ability to adapt. Over time we improve anything we practice, and we can practice almost anything. There’s a hundred better ways to think and learn – some of them are in this book. By practicing different mental activities we can enhance our cognitive skills without drugs. The effects can be long lasting, the side effects are positive, and we won’t have to put money in the pockets of a pharmaceutical company.

Link to more about The Rough Guide book of Brain Training
Three excellent magazine articles on cognitive enhancers, from: The New Yorker, Wired and Discover

Cross-posted at mindhacks.com

Categories
books events Me psychology

The Rough Guide to Brain Training (Moore & Stafford, 2010)

The Rough Guide to Brain Training is a puzzle book which incluces essays and vignettes by myself. The book has 100 days of puzzles which will challenge your mental imagery, verbal fluency, numeracy, working memory and reasoning skills. There are puzzles that will look familiar like suduko, and some new ones I’ve never seen before. Fortunately the answers are included at the back. Gareth made these puzzles. I find them really hard.

I have 10 short essays in the book, covering topics such as evidence-based brain training, how music affects the developing brain, optimal brain nutrition and what the brains of the future will look like. As well as the essays, I wrote numerous short vignettes, helpful hints and suprising facts from the world of psychology and neuroscience (did you know that squids have dounut shaped brains? That you share 50% of your genes with a banana? That signals travel between brain cells at up to 200mph, which is fast compared to a cycle courier, but slow compared to a fibre optic cable). Throughout the book I try to tell it straight about what is, isn’t and might be true about brain training. I read the latest research and I hope I tell a sober, but optimistic, message about the potential for us to change how we think over our lifetimes (and the potential to protect our minds against cognitive decline in older age). I also used my research to provide a sprinkling of evidence-based advice for those who are trying to improve a skill, study for an exam or simply remember things better.

Writing the book was a great opportunity for me to dig into the research on brain training. It is a topic I’d always meant to investigate properly, but hadn’t gotten around to. The claims of those pushing commercial brain training products always seemed suspicious, but the general idea – that our brains change based on practice and experience – seemed plausible. In fact, this idea has been one of the major trends of the last fifty years of neuroscience research. It has been a big surprise to neuroscientists as experiment after experiment has shown exactly how malleable (aka ‘plastic’) the structure and function of the brain is. The resolution of this paradox of the general plausibility of brain training with my suspicion of specific products is in the vital issue of control groups. Although experience changes our brains, and although it is now beyond doubt that a physically and mentally active life can prevent cognitive decline across the lifespan, it isn’t at all clear what kinds of activities are necessary or essential for general mental sharpness. Sure, after practicing something you’ll get better at it. And doing something is better than doing nothing, but the crucial question is doing something you pay for better than doing something else that is free? The holy grail of brain training would be a simple task which you could practice (and copyright! and sell!!) and which would have benefits for all mental skills. Nobody has shown that such a task or set of tasks exists, so while you could buy a puzzle book, you could also go for a jog or go to the theatre with friends. Science wouldn’t be able to say for certain which activity would have the most benefits for your mental sharpness as an individual – although the smart money is probably on going jogging. It is to the credit of the editors at the Rough Guides that they let me say this in the introduction to the Rough Guide to Brain Training!

There wasn’t room in the book for all the references I used while writing it. This was a great sadness to me, since I believe that unless you include the references for a claim, you’re just spouting off, relying on a dubious authority, rather than really talking about science. So, to make up for this, and by way of an apology, I’ve put the references here. It will be harder to track specific claims from this general list that it would be with in-text citations, so if you do have a query, please get in touch and I promise will point you to the evidence for any claims I make in the book.

Additionally, I’ll be posting here a few things from the cutting room floor – text that I wrote for the book which didn’t make it into the final draft. Watch out, and if you do get your hands on a copy of this Rough Guide to Brain Training, get in touch and let me know what you think.

Amazon link (only £5.24!)
Scientific references and links used in researching the book
Cross-posted at mindhacks.com

Categories
links

Quote #251: What man can make of man


An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behavior from autonomous man to the environment—an environment responsible both for the evolution of the species and for the repertoire acquired by each member. Early versions of environmentalism were inadequate because they could not explain how the environment worked, and much seemed to be left for autonomous man to do. But environmental contingencies now take over functions once attributed to autonomous man, and certain questions arise. Is man then “abolished”? Certainly not as a species or as an individual achiever. It is the autonomous inner man who is abolished, and that is a step forward. But does man not then become merely a victim or passive observer of what is happening to him? He is indeed controlled by his environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own making. The evolution of a culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia. But no theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been. And a new theory may change what can be done with its subject matter. A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

B.F.Skinner, last words of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)

Categories
quotes

Quote #250

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety

Benjamin Franklin, from notes for a proposition at the Pennsylvania Assembly, February 17, 1775

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links

Links for December 2009

Categories
quotes

Quote #249

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde, in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1895)

Categories
books intellectual self-defence politics psychology

Ad Nauseam

adnauseam I am reading Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, edited by Carried McLaren and Jason Torchinsky. The book is a funny, smart and sometimes shocking collection of articles from Stay Free Magazine and blog. I first came across Stay Free when I was researching the psychology of advertising and was impressed by their sophisticated take on how adverts affect consumers’ decision making. They discuss in Ad Nauseam how advertising is often misunderstood, with people relying on an intuitive ‘Advertising doesn’t effect me’ view or swinging to the opposite extreme of the ‘Sinister Advertisers Manipulate Consumers with their Mind Control Tricks’ position. Both positions distract from the very real, but not magical, power of advertising.

The book has a great discussion of Wilson Bryan Key’s Subliminal Seduction, the book that launched the idea that subliminal, and often sexual, figures are embedded in random features of adverts such as in ice cube shadows. The idea of these ’embeds’ is nonsense, of course, but great fun to look for and a great distraction from the real persuasive content of the advert. The book also has a chapter on the origins of modern advertising practice in 19th century pharmaceutical advertising (the manufacturing of ailments for which ready made ‘cures’ can be sold has been covered by Vaughan on mindhacks.com before, in relation to the mental health). Packed with critical analysis of the advertising industry, more informative history and some shocking examples of how consumerism has worked its way into many aspects of our daily lives, this book is essential intellectual self-defense, managing to be critical and aware without ever being sanctimonious or hysterical.

Cross-posted at mindhacks.com

Categories
Me psychology

Do you dream of being chased?

Last night I had two dreams in which I was being chased (once by a tour-de-france cyclist in Venice, once by a giant snake in a field, since you ask). I was thinking that being-chased dreams are probably my brain rehearsing escape behaviours – a night-time training programme built in by evolution. Thinking more on it, I realised that I have never had a chasing dream, only being-chased dreams. Is this because being-chased is more adaptive to rehearse, or because of something peculiar to my idiosyncratic psychology? Let’s find out, please vote using the poll below:

[poll id=”3″]

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links

Links for november 2009

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Me misc

My team

Inspired by badscience:

churchsign

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Me psychology

Tall Stories

Reprint of the text from my article in Prospect magazine, 4th July 2009, Issue 160

If someone tells you something that isn’t true, they may not be lying. At least not in the conventional sense. Confabulation, a rare disorder resulting from severe brain damage, causes its sufferers to relentlessly invent and believe fictions—both mundane and fantastical—about their lives. If asked where she has just been, a patient might say that she was in the laundry room (when she wasn’t) or that she’s been visiting Scotland with her sister (who’s been dead for 20 years), or even that she isn’t in the room where you’re talking to her, but in one exactly like it, further down the corridor. And could you fetch her hand cream please? These stories aren’t maintained for long periods, but are sincerely believed.

While it only affects a tiny minority of those with brain damage, confabulation tells us something important: that spontaneous, fluid, even riotous creativity is a natural part of the design of the mind. The damage associated with confabulation—usually to the frontal lobes—adds nothing to the brain’s makeup. Instead it releases a capacity for fiction that lies dormant inside all of us. Anyone who has seen children at play knows that the desire to make up stories is deeply embedded in human nature. And it can be cultivated too, most clearly by anarchic improvisers like Paul Merton.

Chris Harvey John taught me “improv” at London’s Spontaneity Shop. He can step on stage in front of 200 people to perform a totally unscripted hour-long show. There’ll be no rehearsal, no discussion of characters or plot. Instead, he and the other actors invent a play from scratch, based entirely on their unplanned reactions to each other. This seemingly effortless, throwaway attitude is the opposite of what we normally assume about the creative process: that it is hard work. Artists are often talked about in reverent, mystical tones. Art does connect with deep and mysterious human forces, but that doesn’t mean it is only available to a select few who, through luck or special training, are allowed to invent things.

Psychological research increasingly shows that inventiveness is fundamental to the normal operation of the mind. Aikaterini Fotopoulou is a research psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, who specialises in confabulation. She regards it as a failure of the psychological mechanisms responsible for memory. “These inventions are really memory constructions,” she says. “When people confabulate they are failing to check the origin of the material that they build into their memories. You or I can usually tell the difference between a memory of something we’ve done and a memory of something we’ve just heard about, and distinguish both from stray thoughts or hopes. Confabulators can’t do this. Material that, for emotional or other reasons, comes to mind can at times be indiscriminately assumed to be a memory of what really happened.”

There’s a clue to confabulation in the responses of other patients with damage to the frontal lobes. These patients, who may have suffered violent head injuries or damage from illnesses such as strokes or Alzheimers, don’t necessarily confabulate but will often have problems with planning and motivation. They can seem heavily dependent on their external environment. Some, for example, indiscriminately respond to the things they see, regardless of whether it is appropriate in the context. The French psychiatrist L’hermitte demonstrated this “environmental dependency” in the 1980s when he laid a syringe on a table in front of a patient with frontal lobe damage and then turned around and took down his trousers. Without hesitation the patient injected him in the buttocks. This was a completely inappropriate action for the patient, but in terms of the possible actions made available by the scene in front of her, it was the obvious thing to do.

In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories—their thoughts and wishes—rather than true memories. This is of course dysfunctional, but it is also creative in some of the ways that make improvisation so funny: producing an odd mix of the mundane and impossible. When a patient who claims to be 20 years old is asked why she looks about 50, she replies that she was pushed into a ditch by her brothers and landed on her face. Asked about his good mood, another patient called Harry explains that the president visited him at his office yesterday. The president wanted to talk politics, but Harry preferred to talk golf. They had a good chat.

Improvisers tap into these same creative powers, but in a controlled way. They learn to cultivate a “dual mind,” part of which doesn’t plan or discriminate and thus unleashes its inventive powers, while the other part maintains a higher level monitoring of the situation, looking out for opportunities to develop the narrative.

Both improvisation and confabulation show that the mind is inherently sense-making. Just as a confabulator is unfortunately driven to invent possible stories from the fragments of their memories and thoughts, so an improviser looks at the elements of a scene and lets their unconscious mind provide them with possible actions that can make sense of it. On stage, this allows them to create entrancing stories. But this capacity for invention is inside all of us. As audience or performers, we are all constantly inventing.

Categories
misc

‘Without a safety net’


the brakes slipped in the wet
somebody messed up
the dam burst
the reinforcements never came
the supports didn’t hold
i forgot to write the address down
you never called

the brakes slipped in the wet
the backups didn’t run
the first aid box was empty
the safety catch slipped on this gun

the worse came true
we weren’t prepared for this
this wasn’t supposed to happen
but it did

the lifeboats weren’t ready
we weren’t warned
the fire-exits were obstructed
the alarm didn’t go off

somebody should have said something
and somebody should have checked
but it wasn’t me

this wasn’t supposed to happen
but
it did

Categories
psychology

Me in a dream

And I dreamt that, for totally mundane reasons, I needed to change my clothes and as I took off the black t-shirt I was wearing I noticed a flash of red folded-up in the black of the t-shirt cloth. And in the dream I remember thinking to myself “What’s that? Oh, of course, it must be the red snood I wear” (A snood is a kind of scarf, and I do indeed often wear one, which is red). So, still in the dream, I started to peel apart the red and black cloth, as you do with clothes you have taken off all in one go. And the red cloth, it turned out, was not my snood, but instead a red t-shirt which I was wearing underneath my black t-shirt and which, I could see – or maybe ‘know’ in the way that you just know some things in dreams – was some kind of socialist / trade union t-shirt from the mid 1980s.

So far, so boring. This seems even more ordinary and unremarkable than most people’s dreams which have extraordinary and remarkable content, yet still manage to bore in the daylight telling. But listen to this – this ordinary story of a boring dream has a message about the nature of the mind, because, you see, I don’t own any red t-shirts that I wear underneath a black t-shirt. .

There’s a theory that dreams result from random activations in our brain, which trigger ideas and images and which some story-telling aspect of our minds then tries to weave meaning around. Dreams reveal the mind trying to make sense of noise, this theory goes.

Now, notice what happened in my boring dream. I – the voice I experience as “I” – was trying to make sense and I came up with a story about the flash of red, that it was my snood. In fact, this is the most plausible story, certainly more plausible than the red t-shirt story. If my mind was a unity then the red snood story adopted by my internal voice would have been the same story adopted by the part of my mind generating the dream experience. But it wasn’t. The dream world delivered me a different story, that of the red t-shirt, and told that story to me, not in terms of a internal voice, but in terms of a direct experience.

Conclusions? That my mind has at least two substantive parts, both of which are capable of reasoning about the world, of making sense of it and telling stories, but which speak a different language and make different inferences from the same data.

Categories
links

links for october 2009

Categories
quotes

Quote #248: “Then you win”


First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Mahatma Gandhi, attributed (but disputed)