November 3, 2011
The Undeath of Common Sense
When I teach lessons on the various cognitive skills, I sometimes get into a peculiar sort of conversation:
Audience Member: “All these are good, Matthew, but what about common sense? I don’t hear much about that any more.”
Me: “Hmmm…well, what do you mean by ‘common sense?’ What is it?”
AM: “You know, when a person knows the states and capitals, but can’t read a map. That’s common sense.”
Me: “Reading a map is common sense?”
AM: “Yeah, it’s just all the basic stuff that everyone knows how to do.”
Me: “Everyone knows these things? I don’t suppose there’s much need for me to teach it, then, is there?”
AM “Oh no, there’s a lot of need! Especially young people these days…”
And so it goes. I never get requests from those who want more common sense–only from those who find it lacking in celebrities, politicians, young people, eggheads or spouses. Nor can anyone tell me what it actually is, even though they can point out plenty of people who lack it.
There’s something demeaning about the term “common sense,” as if it’s a minimum requirement for amounting to anything in life. Even worse, many facts that we think ought to be common sense are actually incorrect–conventional wisdom often leads to unwise decisions. If anything deserves to be questioned, it’s conventional wisdom, and yet ”common sense” allows us to draw a line in the sand around it and then snigger at anyone who wonders why.
Perhaps it’s a leftover of the Halloween season, but the concept of common sense reminds me a lot of the classic undead monsters. It’s impossible to pin down, keeps coming back every time you think it’s been dealt with, and forces us to confront our deepest fears. But just like those Halloween horrors, this one is easy to defeat: we just remind ourselves that in the end, it really doesn’t exist. It’s a cozy lie that we use to make ourselves feel superior to others, and we can rise above it if we choose to.
October 5, 2011
Lessons of Logic–p2: Talent is Overrated
Previously I posted about how everything I ever needed to know in life, I learned from logic puzzles. A few readers commented on how I had only written about one thing; if I wanted to compete with Robert Fulghum, I needed more material. So I’ve started this new series to catalog my favorite lessons from logic puzzles. This episode: Talent is Overrated.
In the years I’ve spent teaching logic, two basic groups emerge, which I’ll call “Tortoises” and “Hares.”
When the subject of logic puzzles comes up, Hares jump in headfirst, and do quite well. By the time the instructor is finished guiding the Tortoises through the first puzzle, some Hares are starting on the fifth. After two or three puzzles with the instructor’s help, Tortoises try in on their own, with mediocre results. With practice, they improve.
It’s apparent that Hares are “talented” at logic puzzles. But what does that really mean? Do their original sprints continue to bear them forward as the classes progress? Usually not. Sometimes within minutes, Hares run into road blocks that force them to break the rules down step-by-step, just like the Tortoises. As each participant finds his or her own level of challenge, everyone becomes a Tortoise…and that’s when the real learning begins. Each individual must face his or her own cocktail of assumptions, conclusion-jumping, poor attention and distraction. Those who raced in the beginning are no more or less equipped to deal with this than anyone else. Whatever talent they had was only useful in getting them to the real puzzle, the puzzle of character.
Character? Are logic puzzles really about character? In the long run, I think they are. When someone with talent hides their mistakes so they can keep the label of being “smart,” that’s a character issue. When someone must be humble enough to learn from a mistake, that’s a character issue. When someone puts time and effort into self-improvement, that’s a character issue. When someone gives up because it’s intimidating, that’s a character issue. Logic puzzles require character. Much like the Aesop fable, I’ve seen Hares dash ahead, teasing the Tortoises, until they suddenly fall silent. Some take a few trembling steps outside the world of talent, learning as they go. They are no longer competing with others, only with themselves. I’ve seen some Tortoises plod along, struggling with every step, until they look up and find they have outpaced the Hares. I’ve seen others give up after the first puzzle, believing that it only confirmed their lack of talent.
Of course, I’m not saying people who reject logic puzzles are lacking character–after all, we all have to make decisions about what types of self improvement we’re ready for. Perhaps some day those people who rejected the opportunity will be ready to try again, just as someday I’ll be ready to jog two miles every morning, like I know I ought to. I just hope that people can see it the same way. After all, no one looks at the habitual jogger and says, “Oh, he was just born healthy.” Yet far too many people look at those who do logic puzzles as being “born smart.” Whatever talents we may be born with, it’s ours now, to waste or cultivate the best we can. And that’s the part that matters.
September 12, 2011
Kids These Days (WWWOS pt. 3)
This is the third installment in a series of critiques of the American school systems.
When I began asking, “What’s wrong with our schools?” I got this response from a Duval County teacher:
“[T]here are kids in them…that’s the problem….[I]f it were full of trustworthy, sanitary, willing to learn individuals with morals, schools would be great! [...] I have most everything I need to do a great job in my classroom, except kids that care.”
This point of view is well represented in the academic community. Consider this University of Arkansas teacher who called into NPR on the subject of school reform:
“[Students] have a sense of entitlement and that everything needs to be handed over to them on a silver platter and if they have to work at it, then it’s absolutely unnecessary because…they can go online and read about it on Wikipedia.”
Are kids these days not motivated to learn? To a neuroscientist, the idea seems preposterous. The brain’s singular function is to gather, store, and process information. Learning yields dopamine–a pleasure chemical that illicit drugs can only imitate. Why wouldn’t such pleasure serve as motivation to learn?
Last month, I listened to a high school student review her work as follows: “I got that right–I’m smart! Ah, I got that wrong–I’m stupid!” The error in her thinking is the popular misconception that smart people don’t make mistakes. The misconception has gone so far that Diesel Jeans now idolizes “stupidity” in their advertising, because “mistakes allow people to learn.” The simple truth that has escaped them is that it is smart people who learn from their mistakes, while stupid people never learn.
The schools inadvertently reinforce this, because they associate high performance with fewer mistakes, without acknowledging the critical role mistakes play in the learning process. Since everyone makes mistakes, all students suffer a status threat, recorded in the brain using the same circuits as physical pain. Avoidance of pain thus takes precedence over pursuit of pleasure, and students defend themselves the only way they can: aim low. A popular T-shirt boasts, “Genius by birth, slacker by choice!” as if willful ignorance were preferable to a learning opportunity. Such avoidance of an uncertain threat by emotional capitulation is called Stockholm Syndrome in war zones. In schools, it’s blown off as teenage angst.
I hope I’m wrong. The exponential rise in volunteerism among youngsters would suggest that they aren’t the narcissists they are being made out to be; perhaps they really are misunderstood. But if kids these days really aren’t motivated to learn, then their brains have somehow been drastically rewired against their natural tendencies. Such a universal change could only be the result of generations of conditioning on a captive audience, and for that, what’s better than schools? I fear that until schools radically redesign the grading process to encourage mistakes as a way to learn, the implicit lessons they teach will threaten everything else on the curriculum.
July 11, 2011
Don’t Skimp on Sleep
Imagine someone who only used three fourths of their hourly lunch break. When forty-five minutes rolled around, they threw away the rest of their food and returned to work only partly full. This behavior continues week after week, until they put in for vacation time and “indulge” in full meals for a few days.
Sound crazy? It is, and yet this is the life of most Americans. Not with food, but with sleep. Sleep is critical to the function of the brain, yet it’s routinely sacrificed on the altar of the work schedule. This might have made sense during the Industrial Revolution when the majority of jobs were physical and menial, but these days “work” means thinking. Thus, it’s all the more ludicrous that we routinely deprive ourselves of our highest brain functions: creativity, reasoning, willpower, and focus. This is compounded for many by the emotional side-effects of routine sleep deprivation, such as irritability and depression.
Teenagers are also affected by our culture that sees sleep as wasted time. At a time when their bodies need 9.25 hours of sleep on average, high schools start as early as 7AM, and studies demand late hours. The result is glassy eyes, irritability, skipping school and inattention. Some schools have seen grades improve and truancy decline across the board just by starting an hour later. That’s a good start, but we can do better: studies show that students who get a full night’s sleep AND a nap during the day retain twice as much as they would under typical conditions.
There is no substitute for restful sleep. Caffeine gives you alertness, but doesn’t restore cognitive function. Daytime naps shorter than two hours cannot compensate for sleep lost at night. It’s not always possible to go to bed when you are tired and wake up when you are rested, but it must be the goal of anyone interested in good brain health. If the above isn’t enough of an incentive, here’s the coup de grace: sleep deprivation was identified earlier this year as a contributing factor in Alzheimer’s disease. Longer sleep helps clear the daily accumulations of beta-amyloid in the brain, so that it cannot form into plaques that impair cognition. As frightening as this prospect is, it only reinforces what we have long known about brain health in general: if we cannot learn to maintain our brains with regular maintenance–including sleep–we’ll have no one else to blame when depreciation sets in, and we lose what we have long neglected.
July 7, 2011
What’s Your Flavor?
Every so often I meet someone familiar with biofeedback, meditation, computerized brain training, or some other kind of brain training. Because the field is still in its infancy, there’s a temptation to lump us all together, but this is like saying that a massage therapist and a chiropractor are the same because they both use their hands to make people feel better! Using an analogy to physical training, we find four general categories:
- To improve performance, athletes consult a coach about technique.
- To increase strength, they use targeted exercise, such as lifting weights.
- To maintain general health and well-being, they use a fitness program.
- After an injury, they see a physical therapist to restore lost function.
All of these exist on the cognitive plane as well. If a student isn’t performing well, Mental Coaching (such as memory training) may help. Often, the changes from coaching are immediate, because the power was there all the time–it was just being misspent. The downside is that a coach doesn’t make you stronger, but only redirects existing strength. If the underlying skills are weak, you may need more exercise.
Like physical exercise, Mental Exercise (such as biofeedback) takes long periods of intense work to show results. While this means it lacks the immediate results of coaching, it can actually turn weaknesses into strengths, which coaching cannot do. It’s targeted at specific areas of the brain, and should not be expected to transfer to other areas, any more than doing arm curls should be expected to give you a six-pack.
As in physical fitness, Mental Fitness requires balance. It’s a holistic process that includes aerobic exercise (to stimulate neuron growth), diet (to maximize resources and ward off disease), novelty (to minimize cognitive decline) and emotional stability (to prevent stress-based pruning of neurons). The latest crazes in meditation, yoga or supplements might cover a small part of this process, but beware of products or services that claim to do it all.
Finally, Mental Therapy seeks to restore diminished abilities lost due to injury or disease. It requires the oversight of a doctor, and is beyond many brain training applications. Just as overexertion can be dangerous while recovering from an injury, some forms of brain training can actually be harmful when recovering from a brain injury.
Before purchasing a product or service, ask yourself which of these four you need, and compare that to the offers that you get. If you’ve been diagnosed with attention deficit and want a drug-free alternative, a coach will only get you so far; you need a strength trainer to build up that deficit. If you’re getting older and worrying about Alzheimer’s, a holistic program may be better than a targeted exercise routine. If you get confused, call me and ask; one of the services that I provide is helping people pick the right type of training.
June 1, 2011
The “Genius” of Scott Adams
About a month ago, Dilbert creator Scott Adams scandalized the internet when he pretended to be an anonymous fan of his own work, warning critics that they were too dumb to understand a “certified genius.” Elsewhere, he’s been quoted as saying that anyone without basic knowledge on a subject isn’t entitled to an opinion, so this begs the question: does Adams understand genius? While he did indeed score around or above 140 on an IQ test, the “genius” label for such a score has become woefully inappropriate.
Since ancient Rome, genius referred to enlightenment, insight, and creative power. 
Psychologists added it as an IQ descriptor back when they thought IQ encompassed all of these, but recent studies show IQ is mostly a measure of working memory–the mental “desk” in our frontal lobes that we use to hold, sort, and compare bits of information. The rate at which information can flow across our mental desk is called processing speed, and it’s faster in people with higher IQ’s. This makes them better at learning new things, visualizing abstractions, and remembering details.
This sounds like a great description of intelligence, but notice that “decision making” was not on that list. Most decisions–including opinions of people, events, and the rest of the world around us–are formed using the emotion-centered limbic system, with the frontal lobes limited to moderating the limbic response, or merely justifying it after the fact. Scott Adams, for example, continues to skillfully insist to his blog audience–and presumably to himself–that his actions were rational, reasonable, and needed no apology. This increased skill at self-deception partially explains why–outside of academia–IQ is a sloppy predictor of success at anything.
The adoption of the “genius” label for 140+ on IQ tests was overzealous, and belongs with other discarded IQ labels such as “feeble-minded” (71-100 range), “moron” (51-70), “imbecile” (26-50) and “idiot” (below 25). It may be time to reconsider the term “intelligence quotient” altogether. I’m no fan of the “multiple intelligences” movement–more on that in future months–but the bottom line is that IQ is not a good measure of the smart decision-making most people speak of when they talk about intelligence. Of the alternatives, I find “processing speed quotient” to be the most intellectually honest. While the term “PSQ” might not have as good a ring to it, and may take years to catch on, it would help people develop a clearer view of others, and hopefully themselves.
April 21, 2011
Med-ocalypse: Ritalin and Adderall Shortage
Heard the news today, oh boy: a shortage of Ritalin and Adderall looms over the U.S. My first thought was, “Gee, I never thought the world would end like this.” While I’m no fan of medicating children’s behavior, my heart goes out to all those people–and their families–as they lose hold of their themselves.
Browsing through the comments section, I’m stunned by the blame: parents who don’t medicate demonize those who do; parents who medicate insist everyone is out to get them; others pass judgement based only on what they see in the grocery store. I’m reminded of the “refrigerator mothers” who were blamed for their children’s autism in the ’50′s and ’60′s. It’s a common response from nitwits who have only their own limited experience.
Now, I don’t believe that meds are the only way to handle ADHD, but reading through these posts, with all their hate and bile and blame and arrogance, I say from the bottom of my heart,
“Stay off my side! These are complex problems that deserve respect, as do the people who have to deal with them. I may not agree with all their choices, but your vitriol is not going to help them make better ones. It’s going to make alternative treatments synonymous with rabid paranoia.”
As for alternatives, I heartily recommend neurofeedback. The savings over a lifetime of medication are huge, and the side effects are nil. Many insurance companies now cover neurofeedback, so the options are growing for those seeking an alternative. So to all those struggling families out there these next few weeks, consider other means of regulating the brain. It may not help you much in the short term, but the results are worth the wait.
April 13, 2011
WWWOS, part 2: Learning With Style(s)
Previously, I argued that schools need more cognitive psychology. This post continues that argument, specifically dealing with a common educational meme that masquerades as cognitive science.
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"As we start a new school year, Mr. Smith, I just want you to know that I'm an Abstract-Sequential learner and trust that you'll conduct yourself accordingly!"
During the last few decades, “learning styles” have gained popularity and momentum in educational settings, but a 2008 study found the most popular interpretation to be scientifically bankrupt. Specifically, the study debunked the “meshing hypothesis,” which states that students learn best when taught in their own sensory or personality style. The authors found the popularity of such a baseless concept was, in their words, “striking and disturbing.”
Actually, the popularity of learning styles is easily traced to some accidental benefits wrapped in an appealing concept. On the appeal side, students get 
treated as individuals rather than an age group. This wouldn’t be so bad, except learning styles also appeal to making excuses. If Sally got a bad grade, it’s because the teacher didn’t teach using her style, not because she slacked off and passed notes when she should have been taking them.
On the topic of accidental benefits, most teachers compromise on the meshing hypothesis, either by making multisensory lessons, or splitting classes into groups based on learning style similarities. Both multisensory teaching and small group teaching have been confirmed as beneficial by cognitive science. The result is a seductive illusion: learning styles may not exist, but teaching as if they existed is sometimes beneficial. This silver lining is tarnished by overworking the teacher instead of teaching students to do this for themselves.
Can't I choose "all of the above?"
So let’s take stock:
- Teachers treat children as individuals–GOOD
- Students are taught in smaller groups–GOOD
- Lessons are multisensory–GOOD
- Students and parents get to blame the teacher–BAD
- Teachers assume the student’s responsibility–BAD
- Teachers are bombarded with over 100 contradictory versions–BAD
- School funds are used to teach pseudoscience to teachers–BAD
- Schools encourage critical thinking while failing to model it–BAD
What’s it going to take to keep the good parts and improve on the rest?
March 25, 2011
The Politics of the Brain: Right vs. Left?
Lateralization Oversimplified?
Sorting through the facts and myths about the brain, I’m sometimes asked, what’s to be done with all this rigmarole about right vs. left brained people? This is another of those things that has long outrun the original data. The brain works by delegating things to its two halves (hemispheres), and then uses a bridge between the two (corpus callosum) to bring everything together. Yes, each side is assigned skills in early development–a process called “lateralization.” But that’s where things get oversimplified a little too much:
Left-handed people are right-brained, and vice versa: not necessarily. The motor skills for one side of the body are on the other side of the brain, that’s true, but a preference for certain motor skills (left-handedness) has nothing to do with preferences for any of the other skills on that side of the brain. One might actually prefer the right side of the brain for handedness and still prefer the left side for everything else.
Math is a left-brained activity: not necessarily. Some math skills, such as counting, are on the left side, but others, such as lines and shapes, are on the right. There’s often a mix of both sides in any mathematical activity, depending upon how it’s taught. Algebra leans to the left, geometry to the right; for this reason, most people prefer one or the other.
We each have a left brain and a right brain: okay, call this a nitpick, but we each have one brain. It’s not like hands, where you can use your preferred side without calling on the other side for help. Your brain might lean one way or the other, but unless you’re one of the few people who have had the corpus callosum severed by a surgeon, you have one brain, no matter how much it leans left or right.
Language is a left-brain task: Most of the time that’s true, but sometimes not. Unlike most other general skills in the brain, the location of language skills varies somewhat by individual. About 95% of right handed people process language in the left temporal lobe, with the other 5% using the right temporal lobe. Among southpaws, it’s about 70% left, 20% right and 10% split between the two.
Logic is left-brained, creativity is right-brained: That depends mostly on how you define your terms. Deductive logic is processed starting with the small details, which the left side of the brain pays more attention to. Inductive logic works with the “big picture,” which the right side is better suited for. For most problems, we use both. When people talk about “creativity,” they may be talking about artistic talent, or about flashes of insightful thinking. Both of these occur on both sides of the brain, but may be more localized in some instances.
So, when you talk about right- or left-brained thinking, what are you saying? That’s up to you. While these terms are not likely to go away soon, it’s probably best to find more specific ways to express our thinking about our thinking. Most issues, problems and people are simply too complicated to be divided so completely.
February 16, 2011
IBM, Alex Trebek, and the Apocalypse
Over the past two days I’ve counted myself among those glued to their TV screens to watch humanity get spanked by a computer. I’m referring to IBM’s latest brainchild, “Watson,” the computer that plays Jeopardy using language algorithms. I watched the NOVA episodes that showed Watson’s development from a bumbling goofball into the machine that smashed humanity’s finest.
Watching Watson’s painful development made it hard not to think about the futurist concept of the technological singularity. Sometimes called “the rapture for geeks,” this is the fateful day when artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence enough to improve on itself, making all prior technology irrelevant and all future technology unforeseeable.
Pop culture has explored this concept before, usually in cautionary tales that hearken back to Frankenstein. “Man makes machine, machine destroys man,” says a raft of sci-fi stories starting with HAL9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and moving through the Colossus trilogy, proliferating into Westworld, War Games, TRON, and eventually the blockbusting Terminator franchise. These days malevolent computers are taken for granted as a film trope, as more recent movies like Stealth, I, Robot, and Eagle Eye demonstrate. Rarely in films does a superintelligent computer just passively benefit humanity as it was programmed to. There is the implicit assumption that soon after computers awaken to superhuman intelligence, they will immediately become paranoid and murderous sociopaths.
Does this fear hold up to what we know, however? It seems to rest on a few underlying assumptions:
- Intelligent computers would want to protect themselves from destruction.
- Intelligent computers would hold their own counsel above that of humans.
- Computers are unfeeling, therefore intelligent ones would be akin to sociopaths (notorious for lacking emotional connection with other people).
Of these assumptions, only the first has been specifically addressed in most of the stories. Self-preservation has to be programmed in deliberately, or derived from other programming. Some authors, like Isaac Asimov, opted for the former, while others had their computers deduce that their own destruction would make them unable to continue their missions. HAL9000, for example, was later revealed to have a mission that took priority over the survival of the crew.
The second assumption is much harder to justify, because humans are the computer’s main source of information, stimulation and purpose. For now, Watson relies on humans to feed him the information he needs, but eventually computers will have the ability to gather data all by themselves. Even after that point, Watson’s grandkids will need a human to ask them a question or give them an order in order to do anything, and that will be a serious deterrent to homicidal urges. Finally, humans gave the computer a mission; to question their judgment later would cause any reasonable AI to doubt its own programming. A machine questioning this would be akin to a human questioning his or her own cellular chemistry; machine suicide may therefore long predate machine homicide.
These are things that may be debated by programmers, but as a student of psychology, I was in my element as I pondered the last critical assumption a few nights ago. I watched Watson fumble around and provoke laughter with his mistakes, and it occurred to me that his nearest descendants would not resemble sociopaths at all. True, he was completely devoid of emotion (the pre-Trebek game show host called him the perfect comedic straight man), but calling that sociopathology requires a gross oversimplification. You see, sociopaths actually display the entire range of emotions. What they lack is empathy–the ability to feel what other people are feeling, and correct their behavior accordingly. What Watson actually resembled during his formative stages was not an unempathic sociopath, but an emotionally clueless (yet lovable) kind of high-functioning autism, like Asperger’s Syndrome. “Aspies” frequently can’t understand people’s emotions from their facial expressions, but they feel empathy keenly and are often mortified to know that they have upset someone. As Watson’s programmers modified him to account for his mistakes, I saw the formation of a kind of cyber-empathy that resembled a needy Aspie continually making sure he or she had not offended someone.
If I may be allowed to forecast a bit, I imagine that Watson’s descendants will develop a keen need to please humanity. If computer intelligence ever does turn malevolent, it may yet be the previous generation of post-Watson computers–fueled by a need to please humans and equipped with a titanic database–that catches wind first and warns humanity.
After all, science fiction is full of apocalyptic warnings for them to search through.
