Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Different ways of learning, part 2: mechanical vs conceptual
The overwhelming majority of people are mechanical learners; they learn how to do things one step at a time. Show them the steps for a new task, and they learn the task by memorizing those steps; even before they've learned the entire procedure, they can do whichever steps they HAVE learned without difficulty. If you're like most people, not only is this the way you learn, it's the only way you've ever heard of TO learn, but there's a small minority who learn very differently.
The conceptual learner CAN'T learn a task by memorizing a list of steps (other than in trivial cases of few and/or basic steps); when faced with a new task, the conceptual learner is like Teflon, with every instruction they're given sliding off instead of sticking in their minds. When a 10-step process is demonstrated to them, they MIGHT remember the last step, or sort of remember the 1st one, but won't be able to recall more than that, or be able to partially do the task the way a mechanical learner of even minimal intelligence can after being shown something once; their recollection of what they saw will be a jumble. A conceptual learner with any shred of self-awareness KNOWS that this will be the result of anyone attempting to teach them mechanically, and so will often ask questions about the nature of the task, and of the steps, which tends to aggravate the person giving the instructions because it doesn't seem necessary and takes up time... but if they refuse to answer, by demanding that the learner "Stay focused" or "Just pay attention" rather than giving the information, they can demonstrate until they're blue in the face and not get anywhere. What the conceptual learner is instinctively trying to sort out is, you guessed it, the concept behind the task; when they haven't got it, their mind will be a blank in regards to the task, but once the final bit fits into place and the concept is grasped, they go from being able to do and understand nothing to being able to do and understand it all literally from one moment to the next. (This process occurs, not via any effort at analysis, but on a subconscious level, and then pops into the conscious mind like bread out of a toaster; I don't know how it happens, just that it does.)
The conceptual learner looks like sort of dunce so far, right? They need this extra time and info to do what a regular person can jump right into; isn't that awful? Yeah, it is, when you're a conceptual learner trying to absorb the information necessary to do a task from someone who's insisting on teaching it the mechanical way, and you have to struggle to learn something that's comparatively simple for a mechanical learner to pick up. However, many of the things we need to learn to do are NOT simple, especially when they're totally new to us, and under those circumstances being a conceptual learner is actually an enormous advantage; I'll give you an example of this from my own life (you DID know I was talking from experience, right?):
In college, I took a variety of courses that involved complicated and specialized uses of math; in one such course, because the textbook wasn't quite up to explaining things in enough depth for me to grasp the concepts, I was a regular visitor at the professor's office hours, where he'd hold problem-solving sessions. Because he was very young, and this was his 1st teaching position, he was open-minded about how to teach, and when I explained why it looked like I wasn't following him when he started explaining a problem he was willing to play along and see what happened; our standard procedure quickly became him going step by step, carefully explaining everything, with the other kids nodding and me looking blank when he checked over his shoulder to see if we were keeping up with him... and then when the concept clicked into place, he could SEE it, and he'd toss me the chalk and I'd go to the board and crank the rest of it out while my fellow students watched dumbfounded. When I'd finished, I thanked him and left, because I was DONE; the others would have to stay for sometimes HOURS longer, because they had to get all the steps memorized before they could do it, while my grasp of the concept meant that I could construct all the steps in my head automatically and so didn't need to memorize them. I wasn't just done for that day, either, I was done for the entire quarter where that sort of problem was concerned, because I didn't have to keep re-memorizing the steps for solving it for the tests and the final, I just had to keep track of the concept, and that was easy.
OK, you might be thinking, that'd be a nifty skill, but how often outside of college does a person have to learn stuff that's that complicated? Not often, granted, but there are other advantages to conceptual learning that are more widely applicable; one of them is that by allowing a person to quickly see a "formula" for how a certain category of things are done, it provides them with fast mastery over processes that are fairly simple individually but onerous to learn collectively. For example, when I 1st got online, I was part of several different clubs on Excite where people wanted to learn to use html for text formatting of their posts, and when presented with a few commands by more advanced folks, the others had to have a list and keep referring to it until they memorized the commands, and still would often get the syntax wrong, whereas *I* looked at the commands, saw the concept of how they had to be written (the brackets, quotes, opening and closing, etc), and right away could use them all effortlessly, with no mistakes, and without having to look them up... and when new commands were presented, I just plugged them into the "formula" for html and used them, which the others couldn't do even when I tried to coach them because they didn't KNOW the formula and refused to take the extra step of learning it-they needed to go through a new memorization process for every command. Now, granted, those people may well have EVENTUALLY figured out how html code needs to be written, but *I* went from zero to being seen as the html guru (don't laugh, no one any of us knew had any kind of website of their own then, much less knew how to make or modify one the way most of us in the blogosphere can these days) in a bunch of Excite clubs within a few weeks of seeing my 1st html command, and even after a year none of the rest of them were able to do more than a few things without looking them up, no matter how many times I explained the concepts to them. (An example of this advantage for non-tech people is that a conceptual learner could cook any sort of food they liked by sticking different ingredients into their preparation "algorithms," while a mechanical learner would have to memorize a recipe for every dish they wanted to cook.)
The 3rd advantage to being a conceptual learner is that you can look at stuff beyond your level of knowledge or skill and have a pretty good understanding of it; to use another code-related example, someone with no tech background might memorize every bit of html that I know (it wouldn't be that hard, as I don't know that much), but if you then presented them with the source code for a website, with html, JavaScript and CSS, it's very unlikely that they could make any sense of it, much less alter the code... but I, although not knowing any JavaScript or CSS and very little html, CAN usually look at a line or chunk of code and tell what it's doing, and can ascertain how to make the sorts of basic alterations that're in line with what I know-and I can do it better and faster than my husband, who DOES know basic JavaScript and far more programming in general than I do.
The final advantage to being a conceptual learner is that if you ask the mechanical learner to do a known task, but tell them they need to skip some steps and come up with the same end product, or handle some side issues as part of the process, or do something similar but for which few or none of the known steps can be used, or swap out part of the procedure for a new unrelated thing, or any other kind of significant change, you'd better not have your hopes up for them being able to figure it out, much less figure it out in a timely fashion and then do it correctly. For the conceptual learner, however, this sort of thing is trivial; if you give them a problem that has any connection whatsoever to a concept they've learned, they'll instantly see the procedure that needs to be done and be able to do it with no difficulties.
I've got a college example of this one, too; the professor of one of my most challenging upper-division courses approached me after class on a day that we'd been handed back a midterm that many people had choked on, and said he wanted to ask me about my answer to the most important of the questions (which was the reason for the aforementioned chokage). I flipped to the appropriate page, and he said, "You're one of only a couple of people in the class who got the answer to this one; there were a few others who got partial credit for making a good try in the wrong direction, but most people got a 0 for it. I covered it in class a couple of weeks ago, and I KNOW you weren't in class that day, and it's not in the book, so how did you work it out when the people who'd seen it before couldn't?" I explained to him that the problem posed by the question was conceptually identical to something that WAS in the book, and showed him how I used that concept to do easily what the very bright people in the class who'd studied that particular problem couldn't do at all; he was VERY impressed, and probably reassured that I hadn't done some extreme form of cheating to get the answer, which may well have been on his mind given the circumstances.
This final advantage to conceptual learning is the one that I get the most benefit from, and the one that has made my husband's attitude change over the years from "I wouldn't be a conceptual learner for any amount of $" to "given the choice between staying a mechanical learner or switching to conceptual, I'd pick conceptual." Overall I think it IS a better way to learn, but the entire world is set up to accommodate mechanical learning, with no provisions at all for conceptual learning, and it IS frustrating to not be able to quickly pick up a multi-step process for which the concept is as yet unknown, so I can see how anyone not intimately familiar with a conceptual learner might not perceive any value in learning that way... not that any of us have a choice, of course, as this is inborn and not learned or chosen.
Has any of this rung a bell? Are you or anyone you know possibly a conceptual learner? Keep in mind that anyone of any but the lowest intelligence and beyond early childhood can and does learn concepts, and even the most intensely conceptual person learns many mechanical processes (many of which don't HAVE a concept behind them beyond an extremely basic level), so no one's purely one or the other, but there's still a clear line of demarcation; most people learn lots of little steps from which they might synthesize a concept, and a few of us gather data, derive concepts from it, and then see the individual steps as a result. I hope I'll be able to give at least a few conceptual learners a much-needed explanation for the odd way their brains work... and just as importantly, that I'll give the parents, spouses, teachers or employers of a few conceptual learners some insight into what the heck is "wrong" with them. Conceptual learners will do their best learning when allowed at the beginning to have a little extra time and info to get them to the concept, and can be saved enormous amounts of aggravation later on by not being dragged through further mechanical steps that they don't need, or made to waste time "learning" related things that they can figure out immediately using the concept. I don't suppose I should hold my breath for this idea to make it into our schools any time soon, though...
Here's my final thought; can "The Truth" be perceived via a mechanical process, or a conceptual one, or can both take you there? Is the "The Truth" just a string of facts, or is it made of, well, concepts? hmmmmmmmmmmmm
The conceptual learner CAN'T learn a task by memorizing a list of steps (other than in trivial cases of few and/or basic steps); when faced with a new task, the conceptual learner is like Teflon, with every instruction they're given sliding off instead of sticking in their minds. When a 10-step process is demonstrated to them, they MIGHT remember the last step, or sort of remember the 1st one, but won't be able to recall more than that, or be able to partially do the task the way a mechanical learner of even minimal intelligence can after being shown something once; their recollection of what they saw will be a jumble. A conceptual learner with any shred of self-awareness KNOWS that this will be the result of anyone attempting to teach them mechanically, and so will often ask questions about the nature of the task, and of the steps, which tends to aggravate the person giving the instructions because it doesn't seem necessary and takes up time... but if they refuse to answer, by demanding that the learner "Stay focused" or "Just pay attention" rather than giving the information, they can demonstrate until they're blue in the face and not get anywhere. What the conceptual learner is instinctively trying to sort out is, you guessed it, the concept behind the task; when they haven't got it, their mind will be a blank in regards to the task, but once the final bit fits into place and the concept is grasped, they go from being able to do and understand nothing to being able to do and understand it all literally from one moment to the next. (This process occurs, not via any effort at analysis, but on a subconscious level, and then pops into the conscious mind like bread out of a toaster; I don't know how it happens, just that it does.)
The conceptual learner looks like sort of dunce so far, right? They need this extra time and info to do what a regular person can jump right into; isn't that awful? Yeah, it is, when you're a conceptual learner trying to absorb the information necessary to do a task from someone who's insisting on teaching it the mechanical way, and you have to struggle to learn something that's comparatively simple for a mechanical learner to pick up. However, many of the things we need to learn to do are NOT simple, especially when they're totally new to us, and under those circumstances being a conceptual learner is actually an enormous advantage; I'll give you an example of this from my own life (you DID know I was talking from experience, right?):
In college, I took a variety of courses that involved complicated and specialized uses of math; in one such course, because the textbook wasn't quite up to explaining things in enough depth for me to grasp the concepts, I was a regular visitor at the professor's office hours, where he'd hold problem-solving sessions. Because he was very young, and this was his 1st teaching position, he was open-minded about how to teach, and when I explained why it looked like I wasn't following him when he started explaining a problem he was willing to play along and see what happened; our standard procedure quickly became him going step by step, carefully explaining everything, with the other kids nodding and me looking blank when he checked over his shoulder to see if we were keeping up with him... and then when the concept clicked into place, he could SEE it, and he'd toss me the chalk and I'd go to the board and crank the rest of it out while my fellow students watched dumbfounded. When I'd finished, I thanked him and left, because I was DONE; the others would have to stay for sometimes HOURS longer, because they had to get all the steps memorized before they could do it, while my grasp of the concept meant that I could construct all the steps in my head automatically and so didn't need to memorize them. I wasn't just done for that day, either, I was done for the entire quarter where that sort of problem was concerned, because I didn't have to keep re-memorizing the steps for solving it for the tests and the final, I just had to keep track of the concept, and that was easy.
OK, you might be thinking, that'd be a nifty skill, but how often outside of college does a person have to learn stuff that's that complicated? Not often, granted, but there are other advantages to conceptual learning that are more widely applicable; one of them is that by allowing a person to quickly see a "formula" for how a certain category of things are done, it provides them with fast mastery over processes that are fairly simple individually but onerous to learn collectively. For example, when I 1st got online, I was part of several different clubs on Excite where people wanted to learn to use html for text formatting of their posts, and when presented with a few commands by more advanced folks, the others had to have a list and keep referring to it until they memorized the commands, and still would often get the syntax wrong, whereas *I* looked at the commands, saw the concept of how they had to be written (the brackets, quotes, opening and closing, etc), and right away could use them all effortlessly, with no mistakes, and without having to look them up... and when new commands were presented, I just plugged them into the "formula" for html and used them, which the others couldn't do even when I tried to coach them because they didn't KNOW the formula and refused to take the extra step of learning it-they needed to go through a new memorization process for every command. Now, granted, those people may well have EVENTUALLY figured out how html code needs to be written, but *I* went from zero to being seen as the html guru (don't laugh, no one any of us knew had any kind of website of their own then, much less knew how to make or modify one the way most of us in the blogosphere can these days) in a bunch of Excite clubs within a few weeks of seeing my 1st html command, and even after a year none of the rest of them were able to do more than a few things without looking them up, no matter how many times I explained the concepts to them. (An example of this advantage for non-tech people is that a conceptual learner could cook any sort of food they liked by sticking different ingredients into their preparation "algorithms," while a mechanical learner would have to memorize a recipe for every dish they wanted to cook.)
The 3rd advantage to being a conceptual learner is that you can look at stuff beyond your level of knowledge or skill and have a pretty good understanding of it; to use another code-related example, someone with no tech background might memorize every bit of html that I know (it wouldn't be that hard, as I don't know that much), but if you then presented them with the source code for a website, with html, JavaScript and CSS, it's very unlikely that they could make any sense of it, much less alter the code... but I, although not knowing any JavaScript or CSS and very little html, CAN usually look at a line or chunk of code and tell what it's doing, and can ascertain how to make the sorts of basic alterations that're in line with what I know-and I can do it better and faster than my husband, who DOES know basic JavaScript and far more programming in general than I do.
The final advantage to being a conceptual learner is that if you ask the mechanical learner to do a known task, but tell them they need to skip some steps and come up with the same end product, or handle some side issues as part of the process, or do something similar but for which few or none of the known steps can be used, or swap out part of the procedure for a new unrelated thing, or any other kind of significant change, you'd better not have your hopes up for them being able to figure it out, much less figure it out in a timely fashion and then do it correctly. For the conceptual learner, however, this sort of thing is trivial; if you give them a problem that has any connection whatsoever to a concept they've learned, they'll instantly see the procedure that needs to be done and be able to do it with no difficulties.
I've got a college example of this one, too; the professor of one of my most challenging upper-division courses approached me after class on a day that we'd been handed back a midterm that many people had choked on, and said he wanted to ask me about my answer to the most important of the questions (which was the reason for the aforementioned chokage). I flipped to the appropriate page, and he said, "You're one of only a couple of people in the class who got the answer to this one; there were a few others who got partial credit for making a good try in the wrong direction, but most people got a 0 for it. I covered it in class a couple of weeks ago, and I KNOW you weren't in class that day, and it's not in the book, so how did you work it out when the people who'd seen it before couldn't?" I explained to him that the problem posed by the question was conceptually identical to something that WAS in the book, and showed him how I used that concept to do easily what the very bright people in the class who'd studied that particular problem couldn't do at all; he was VERY impressed, and probably reassured that I hadn't done some extreme form of cheating to get the answer, which may well have been on his mind given the circumstances.
This final advantage to conceptual learning is the one that I get the most benefit from, and the one that has made my husband's attitude change over the years from "I wouldn't be a conceptual learner for any amount of $" to "given the choice between staying a mechanical learner or switching to conceptual, I'd pick conceptual." Overall I think it IS a better way to learn, but the entire world is set up to accommodate mechanical learning, with no provisions at all for conceptual learning, and it IS frustrating to not be able to quickly pick up a multi-step process for which the concept is as yet unknown, so I can see how anyone not intimately familiar with a conceptual learner might not perceive any value in learning that way... not that any of us have a choice, of course, as this is inborn and not learned or chosen.
Has any of this rung a bell? Are you or anyone you know possibly a conceptual learner? Keep in mind that anyone of any but the lowest intelligence and beyond early childhood can and does learn concepts, and even the most intensely conceptual person learns many mechanical processes (many of which don't HAVE a concept behind them beyond an extremely basic level), so no one's purely one or the other, but there's still a clear line of demarcation; most people learn lots of little steps from which they might synthesize a concept, and a few of us gather data, derive concepts from it, and then see the individual steps as a result. I hope I'll be able to give at least a few conceptual learners a much-needed explanation for the odd way their brains work... and just as importantly, that I'll give the parents, spouses, teachers or employers of a few conceptual learners some insight into what the heck is "wrong" with them. Conceptual learners will do their best learning when allowed at the beginning to have a little extra time and info to get them to the concept, and can be saved enormous amounts of aggravation later on by not being dragged through further mechanical steps that they don't need, or made to waste time "learning" related things that they can figure out immediately using the concept. I don't suppose I should hold my breath for this idea to make it into our schools any time soon, though...
Here's my final thought; can "The Truth" be perceived via a mechanical process, or a conceptual one, or can both take you there? Is the "The Truth" just a string of facts, or is it made of, well, concepts? hmmmmmmmmmmmm
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Different ways of learning, part 1: memory
Here's something that educators don't want you to hear; alot of what we call "learning" is actually just memorization (as opposed to understanding). There are a variety of different kinds of memory, and each of us receives a different degree of benefit from each of those ways of storing information... but the way we're taught is NOT tailored to the way we'd memorize/learn the best, which is bad news for kids who vary significantly from the memorizing "pattern" that our educators assume will work for everyone. Here's what I've come up with as the different kinds of memory that might apply to learning:
First, there's visual memory; much of how we teach in this country is based on expecting people to memorize what they see, in other words what they read or what a teacher writes on a blackboard. Sadly, most of us aren't really that great at it; aside from those rare folks with so-called photographic memories, most people have to look at written material over and over to even remember the gist of it, and would never be able to recall it all by memory... that's why students have to study rather than just reading the material once.
Next, there's auditory memory; in the classroom, this obviously refers to listening to the teacher drone on ("lecture"). From early childhood, we learn to tune out people talking at length, so it's more common than not for students, who usually make up a captive audience rather than a group of eager seekers of knowledge, to not be paying attention, and, although their brains automatically record everything they hear, they usually don't remember much of it.
I've got no science to back this up, but I think there's a subset of auditory memory that deals with music; it might be connected to how music is sort of like audible math, such that the part of the brain that handles math ability works with the part that remembers what we hear to format or store the sounds differently... in any case, you probably know people who can't remember a conversation for more than 5 minutes, but who can hear a song once and still sing much of it weeks later, and in general it's pretty clear that most of us can memorize a song far more easily than we could a speech of the same # of words. I suspect that those old "Schoolhouse Rock" songs
http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/
that used to play during Saturday morning cartoons, like "Conjunction Junction" and "I'm Just a Bill," were intended to take advantage of "music memory" to teach kids a little something without them realizing it... I haven't heard any of those songs for 30 years, but I can still sing them, and my husband says the same goes for him, so there must be something to it. For obvious reasons, there's unfortunately not much of what's taught in our schools that can be set to music; virtually all American children learn their ABC's with a song (sung to the same tune as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," did you ever notice that?), though, which is interesting when you think about it.
There's also muscle memory; that term is usually used to refer to how it's easier to do a physical activity that you've done before because your muscles (or rather the part of the brain that controls them) remember how to do it, but it can also be validly applied to ANY use of your muscles. I can recall being told by many teachers that it was important to take notes because when you write information down that means that an additional part of your brain is recording it, and that makes it more likely that you'll remember; I've certainly heard plenty of folks say that this works well for them, but for ME it was always the opposite... if I write something down, it removes it from my memory. I was always assured that this was impossible, as if I was hallucinating, so I was excited when I read a quote from Gore Vidal saying that when HE wrote something down it erased it from HIS mind; I marched down the hall to my mother's room and read it triumphantly to her, and although she'd always denied it when *I* said it, a famous stranger saying it stopped her arguments (sigh). Oddly, typing, which is conceptually a version of writing, does NOT erase things from my memory; I wish I knew if it works that way for Mr. Vidal.
I had the occasional teacher try to push me about taking notes, claiming it was necessary if I was to remember what was said in class; in each case, I'd sweetly inquire, "What do you think my test scores show about what I'm remembering from class?", and they'd hem and haw and drop the subject. The most amusing problem I had in this area was when I was new at a job, and the boss gave me an informative talk about all the ins and outs; he tried to arm-twist me to take notes, but when I told him that doing so would guarantee that I forgot everything he said, he dropped it... and then 1st thing the next day, he announced that I'd be tested on what he'd said. To be even more of a jerk, he made a big point of saying, "You can use your notes, so go ahead and get them out... oh, that's right, you don't HAVE any notes, do you?". His smug smile started fading fast when he handed me the test and I began writing rapidly, without needing to pause to think; by the time he graded it and was forced to give me a perfect score, he was stunned and sheepish. With gratifying humbleness, he asked me how I was able to give the correct answers without notes; I replied, "Because I LEARNED what you told me." He kept shaking his head in amazement, telling me that he'd never seen anyone learn the material in one day before, even with notes; my response was that they didn't learn BECAUSE they had notes, because people look at taking notes as meaning that they don't HAVE to learn right then. He quickly interjected that using their notes they could pass a test on the material; I pointed out that all that proved was that they could read their own handwriting, NOT that they knew any of the information. This concept astonished him, but to give him credit he thought about it and admitted I was right, and that he'd seen plenty of examples of how people who tested fine with their notes didn't know the facts when asked about them later... but when I suggested that he try giving talks without allowing them to take notes, he balked-old habits die hard.
Another facet of muscle memory is one you rarely hear about; when you speak, don't you remember what you say better than you remember the things other people say to you? Talking uses many muscles in your jaw, lips and tongue; furthermore, speech has its own area of the brain, and when you speak you use that area in addition to the one associated with muscle use AND the one for hearing, so naturally you remember more. I found this to be helpful to me when I had to memorize a great deal of material in a short time, and came up with the idea of reading it aloud, recording it, and playing it back, which greatly improved my memorization speed; a couple of friends that I persuaded to try it also had really good results, but it was seen as too much trouble, and, more to the point, too "different" for them to continue using it... old habits, again. It's typical for schoolkids to do a certain amount of reading out loud in class, but it's so time-consuming that this potentially useful way of increasing memory retention doesn't get as much attention as it probably deserves.
So, what does this all boil down to in terms of learning? If information is shoved at a kid in a way they can't store it effectively, that's a misuse of valuable learning time and effort, causes frustration, and might lead to the child disliking the subject being studied because it's being made more trouble and less fun that it could be; if information is NOT presented to a kid in a way that they CAN store it effectively, that's a valuable learning opportunity missed. What should our schools be doing about this? Even a well-funded school would be limited as to how far they could accommodate children's different "memory styles," because they'd have to do extensive testing to ascertain what each kid needed to be able to provide it for them, but one simple thing any school could do is give kids the option to do independent learning (monitored, of course) for any classes that they didn't seem to be benefitting from listening to the teacher in; this would not only give those students more learning opportunities, it'd allow the teachers to give more individual attention to those students who DID need to learn by listening, thus accommodating THEM as well. I would've killed to have had that available in my school days; because I have an exceptional ability to remember things I've read, going to classes was a complete waste of time for me, as all the teachers did even in my expensive private school, and later in college, was cover the material that had been assigned for us to read the night before, which I already knew. It used to tick my father off no end when he'd ask me "What did you learn at school today" and I replied, as always, "Nothing"; no matter how many times I explained the situation to him, he never accepted it, never stopped asking, and never stopped raging about why he was spending hard-earned $ on a private school where I wasn't being taught anything... I could have easily lied, told him what material had been covered in my classes and let him believe I'd learned those things from the teachers rather than from my books, but given his evilness I was happy to give him something to stew about. If I'd been allowed to spend my school days reading supplementary materials rather than listening to rehashing, I could have doubled or tripled what I'd learned with my homework rather than just frittering my life away all day every school day; not all kids will vary so wildly from the norm, but still, imagine how much more they could learn if all of them were allowed to absorb material in whatever way(s) worked best with their memories.
You can use your awareness of the different types of memory to help your kids learn, and yourself too if you're taking classes, or just expanding your horizons; it's time for us to stop being limited by traditional teaching methods and start harnessing the full potential of our memories.
Monday, December 05, 2005
A grim case of life imitating art
In the movie "50 First Dates"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=1083372&displayBoxArt=true#Cast
a young woman was in an auto accident that caused brain damage such that her memory "resets" itself every night while she sleeps, so she wakes up the next morning remembering nothing of what's happened since the crash. In 2 scenes at the medical facility for people with brain injuries, we're treated to a patient called "10 Second Tom," so called because that's how long his memory lasts... and it's portrayed as a joke, because who ever heard of such a thing?
Tonight, on TLC, I saw "The Man with the Seven Second Memory"
http://tlc.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=55264&gid=0&channel=TLC
"Once a renowned conductor and musician, Clive Wearing was struck down by a virus that caused massive damage to his brain. Against the odds, doctors managed to save his life but he was left with a memory that spans just seven seconds."
When I saw the title, my 1st thought was of the connection to the movie; my 2nd thought was that, far from being amusing, the real-life version of this affliction would be a fate worse than death... imagine, being hit over and over for the rest of your life by the realization that a few precious moments are all you have, and that they'll be gone from your mind almost before you knew you had them.
He can't read a book or watch a movie, because he can't follow the plots.
He writes in a diary to try to keep track of what he does, but he keeps scratching the old entries out and writing new ones that say the same thing, "I'm awake. Now, I'm awake. Now, I'm really awake"... his own words don't seem real to him, don't make sense to him, because he can't recall writing them.
He talks about not being able to feel emotional pain, because if something causes bad feelings it's gone from his memory before he can suffer; he points out that this is NOT a desirable state of affairs, that not being able to feel is essentially being dead.
The most horrific aspect of this disability was driven home by a story his wife told about finding him crying, and trying to get him to tell her what was the matter, to which he finally replied "I CAN'T THINK."
The vast majority of trains of thought that you have each day last longer than 7 seconds; if you lost all of that, what would there be left? How is it possible to exist in a permanent 7 second bubble, never knowing what's going on, what day it is, what the future holds, living in the eternal now... and knowing that you were once normal, that you were once someone important, and that although your intelligence is still there you can't do anything with it, EVER.
In the earlier years of his affliction, which he's endured for TWENTY YEARS, he was prone to violent outbursts; they said they never figured out why, but how could he NOT be filled with rage and lash out when all he has is 7 seconds at a time?
I can't begin to wrap my mind around the nightmare that is that poor man's life. I can't imagine having to live that way, and I wouldn't want to try; I'd rather be dead. Wouldn't you?
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=1083372&displayBoxArt=true#Cast
a young woman was in an auto accident that caused brain damage such that her memory "resets" itself every night while she sleeps, so she wakes up the next morning remembering nothing of what's happened since the crash. In 2 scenes at the medical facility for people with brain injuries, we're treated to a patient called "10 Second Tom," so called because that's how long his memory lasts... and it's portrayed as a joke, because who ever heard of such a thing?
Tonight, on TLC, I saw "The Man with the Seven Second Memory"
http://tlc.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=55264&gid=0&channel=TLC
"Once a renowned conductor and musician, Clive Wearing was struck down by a virus that caused massive damage to his brain. Against the odds, doctors managed to save his life but he was left with a memory that spans just seven seconds."
When I saw the title, my 1st thought was of the connection to the movie; my 2nd thought was that, far from being amusing, the real-life version of this affliction would be a fate worse than death... imagine, being hit over and over for the rest of your life by the realization that a few precious moments are all you have, and that they'll be gone from your mind almost before you knew you had them.
He can't read a book or watch a movie, because he can't follow the plots.
He writes in a diary to try to keep track of what he does, but he keeps scratching the old entries out and writing new ones that say the same thing, "I'm awake. Now, I'm awake. Now, I'm really awake"... his own words don't seem real to him, don't make sense to him, because he can't recall writing them.
He talks about not being able to feel emotional pain, because if something causes bad feelings it's gone from his memory before he can suffer; he points out that this is NOT a desirable state of affairs, that not being able to feel is essentially being dead.
The most horrific aspect of this disability was driven home by a story his wife told about finding him crying, and trying to get him to tell her what was the matter, to which he finally replied "I CAN'T THINK."
The vast majority of trains of thought that you have each day last longer than 7 seconds; if you lost all of that, what would there be left? How is it possible to exist in a permanent 7 second bubble, never knowing what's going on, what day it is, what the future holds, living in the eternal now... and knowing that you were once normal, that you were once someone important, and that although your intelligence is still there you can't do anything with it, EVER.
In the earlier years of his affliction, which he's endured for TWENTY YEARS, he was prone to violent outbursts; they said they never figured out why, but how could he NOT be filled with rage and lash out when all he has is 7 seconds at a time?
I can't begin to wrap my mind around the nightmare that is that poor man's life. I can't imagine having to live that way, and I wouldn't want to try; I'd rather be dead. Wouldn't you?
Sunday, December 04, 2005
A couple of cool blog additions
If you're a long-time reader, you know that I've gone through several Flash clocks, as newer and cleverer ones came out and replaced the older versions; if you check my sidebar, you'll see my latest one... I think it'll be here for a while, because it's gonna take some doing to beat it. First off, it's uber-cute; after all the modern designs, a retro-alarm style is wildly appealing, it's beautifully done, with its shiny chrome, cheerful colors and a shadow, and it has the day and date too... it was love at 1st sight. Second, when I tried to click on it to see if it was linked to a site, a box with a MENU appeared, which gives the choice of "standard ringtone," "cathedral bells" and "cuckoo," and a control that says "Let it ring now!"; I tried the 1st 2 sounds, and was pretty excited... and then I did the 3rd and noticed that the clock, which was faintly visible under the box, had CHANGED. It took a little trial and error, but I discovered that if you click the control to play the alarm and then move your cursor downwards and off of the image, the clock will perform for you; for the ringtone, the little clapper bangs quickly back and forth as you'd expect, for the bells it swings very slowly, and for the cuckoo sound the entire clock changes, becoming, you guessed it, a cuckoo clock, complete with a birdie that comes out and does its thing. Give it a try; go ahead, I'll wait.
The one problem, and there always is one, is with the hourly chime; I made the choice in my customized code to not have one, but it didn't work... worse, it plays the ringtone AND the bells at the same time, and sometimes the bells and the cuckoo at the same time, which sounds kinda grim. I tried taking out the line of code that refers to the hourly sounds, and that didn't help; changing to a version of the code that's supposed to play ONE sound didn't either. If you happen to be reading on here at the top of the hour in the next few days, you'll hear it if your sound is on; I'm guessing that a fair # of people who come in on other pages via search engines, or visit for the 1st time after new posts have gone up and so haven't read this one, will be in for a surprise if they're here at the wrong time, too. I hope I'm not being overly optimistic in thinking this will be handled in a few days; I emailed the site owner about the problem, and it shouldn't be a difficult fix, but... well, let's stay positive and see what happens. (Update: the site owner replied promptly, and it was apparently just a glitch-it works fine now.)
The other new addition was alot of fun to work on. If you go here
http://www.lintukoto.net/banner/index.php
you'll discover a whole bunch of nifty photos, most of them containing signs of some sort, into which you can insert text to make fun customized images; I tried most of them out, with a variety of messages, before picking the one I thought looked the most like it was "real." Because the proportions didn't seem optimal to me, I had my husband crop it down to look more interesting; I had him put the URL back on there, too, just the way it was originally, because it's only fair to give credit where it's due. Take a look at the bottom of my blog, and you'll see the one I chose... right under the pic of Einstein with customized wording that I made a few weeks ago here
http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php
and just realized that I never posted about. It's too bad I've gotta have 'em way down there where most people won't see them, but they're too big for the sidebar and I don't want them across the top of the page (assuming I could even figure out how to put them there), so I try to think of them as rewards for people who read an entire page of my posts.
I hope you got a kick out of my latest enhancements... although, as usual, *I* probably had more fun with them than anyone else will.
The one problem, and there always is one, is with the hourly chime; I made the choice in my customized code to not have one, but it didn't work... worse, it plays the ringtone AND the bells at the same time, and sometimes the bells and the cuckoo at the same time, which sounds kinda grim. I tried taking out the line of code that refers to the hourly sounds, and that didn't help; changing to a version of the code that's supposed to play ONE sound didn't either. If you happen to be reading on here at the top of the hour in the next few days, you'll hear it if your sound is on; I'm guessing that a fair # of people who come in on other pages via search engines, or visit for the 1st time after new posts have gone up and so haven't read this one, will be in for a surprise if they're here at the wrong time, too. I hope I'm not being overly optimistic in thinking this will be handled in a few days; I emailed the site owner about the problem, and it shouldn't be a difficult fix, but... well, let's stay positive and see what happens. (Update: the site owner replied promptly, and it was apparently just a glitch-it works fine now.)
The other new addition was alot of fun to work on. If you go here
http://www.lintukoto.net/banner/index.php
you'll discover a whole bunch of nifty photos, most of them containing signs of some sort, into which you can insert text to make fun customized images; I tried most of them out, with a variety of messages, before picking the one I thought looked the most like it was "real." Because the proportions didn't seem optimal to me, I had my husband crop it down to look more interesting; I had him put the URL back on there, too, just the way it was originally, because it's only fair to give credit where it's due. Take a look at the bottom of my blog, and you'll see the one I chose... right under the pic of Einstein with customized wording that I made a few weeks ago here
http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php
and just realized that I never posted about. It's too bad I've gotta have 'em way down there where most people won't see them, but they're too big for the sidebar and I don't want them across the top of the page (assuming I could even figure out how to put them there), so I try to think of them as rewards for people who read an entire page of my posts.
I hope you got a kick out of my latest enhancements... although, as usual, *I* probably had more fun with them than anyone else will.
Saturday, December 03, 2005
How good of judgments and decisions do we make?
In the December 2005 issue of Discover is an article entitled "Why Do People Behave Nicely?", much of which deals with why people behave stupidly or badly. Hold onto your hat:
"In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it. Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure."
Americans LOVE jerks; that's why so many of those in positions of wealth, fame and power in this country qualify. We find bad behavior, and those that engage in it, to be fascinating, glamorous, and sexy, and virtuous behavior, and the poor saps who bought the childhood messages that this was the proper way to act, to be dull, boring, even foolish. Every day, you make decisions on who you want to become friends with, have sex with, hire or promote; on whose CD's you want to listen to, whose movies you want to watch, and whose face on the cover of a magazine will make you buy it... and if you're like most people, your choices overwhelmingly favor people who objectively are well into jerk territory rather than those who've shown themselves to be honest, noble, caring, etc.
Given the acceptance and approval we internalize for bad behavior all our lives, it's no surprise how easily influenced most folks are to behave in ways that they KNOW are wrong:
"Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's 'Behavioral Study of Obedience,' published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a 'learning experiment.' The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the 'stranger' is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, 'Please continue.' If the subject still balks, he is first told, 'The experiment requires that you go on,' then, 'It is absolutely essential that you continue,' and then, 'You have no other choice, you must go on.'
By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a 'very strong shock,' some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.
What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled 'Danger: Severe Shock,' administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although 'subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will,' most were willing to do so."
Milgram should NOT have been surprised; *I* wouldn't have been, because I've seen countless examples of the effortlessness with which manipulators can get people to behave in the most atrocious ways, and the men in the lab coats would have had the aura of authority added on to the pitiful willingness of people to act contrary to their supposed moral standards just because someone asked them to... what's there to be surprised about?
Are you certain that YOU would have refused to administer those shocks, or at least the dangerous ones? Ask yourself this; how's your track record of refusing to do what people pressure you to do? How often have you spoken out against things you knew were wrong, compared to how many times you decided to just go with the flow, so as not to rock the boat... or not to draw the wrath of the instigators of evil against yourself?
"For more than a century, psychologists have attempted to get to the root of evil and error. What they have discovered is not encouraging. Milgram and earlier researchers demonstrated that the ability to act rationally can be subverted by crowds or by pressure from authority figures. Recent studies show that humans, even when left alone, are prone to bewildering mistakes and biases."
Unfortunate but true; I'm left with my jaw hanging open on a daily basis from seeing how often people act in flagrant disregard for facts, logic, common sense, fairness, morality and even their own best interests, and I mean intelligent, decent people, not winos in an alleyway or hardened criminals... doesn't anyone give a single moment's thought to doing what's best, what's RIGHT, or do we just blunder forward like blindfolded gorillas?
"Social psychology crystallized in the 19th century around a concern with crowd behavior: Why do otherwise reasonable individuals become irrational or even dangerous when placed in a mob of people? By the middle of the 20th century, social psychologists had widened their research to examine how people can be influenced to make incorrect judgments or cross moral boundaries. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, pitted naive test subjects against a group of strangers who made bizarre judgments about the relative lengths of lines. Pressured to conform to the group, subjects often disregarded the obvious visual evidence and adopted the prevailing judgment."
We're social animals, after all, so I suppose it makes sense that we'd tend to go along with the group, even if what they're doing or saying is ridiculous or dangerous... but it still sucks, and it gets even worse:
"About the time of Milgram's experiment, Princeton University professor John Darley studied why bystanders, when confronted with strangers in distress, sometimes respond by walking away or closing the drapes. Inspired by the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York City murder victim whose cries for help failed to rouse her neighbors to action, Darley showed that test subjects were less likely to aid a stranger if they thought they were just one among several witnesses."
How utterly despicable. It think it also helps explain why people don't intervene when someone is being attacked verbally, online as well as in real life... but I'm not sure I even WANT to know WHY the existence of multiple witnesses would lead to people acting in such an indefensible way.
"Despite evidence of sheeplike behavior, many researchers still assumed that individuals, on their own, could be counted on to be rational and moral. The sea change came in the 1970s, from insights gleaned through economics research. In a series of articles and books, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Amos Tversky rejected the long-held notion that humans are rational actors in a marketplace. Rather than using all the information available and calculating the best decision, they argued, the human mind relies on 'quick and dirty' heuristics, mental shortcuts or rules of thumb, to make decisions."
Not MY human mind, thanks very much; perhaps because I came from an abusive family of origin, and was a pariah at school as well, I had to learn to calculate all the possible effects of every action I might take in order to avoid as much trouble as possible... but then again, I know others from similar backgrounds who don't seem able to make even the simplest determinations of what will lead to the most desirable outcomes, or avoid the worst ones (a grim example was a woman whose ex-husband would beat her if he came home and found that the litter box hadn't been cleaned, who was nevertheless consistently unable to make the choice to clean the litter box before he got home), so maybe it's just what's natural for me to do given my personality. Either way, this is clearly one of those ways I differ wildly from normal folks, psychologically speaking, and explains some of the frustration I experience from bright, educated people seeming unable to look at all the facts and apply logic to them to make decisions.
"people use arbitrary categories to make judgments. On hot August days, for instance, people look forward to the first day in September, as if turning a page on the calendar would suddenly make the weather cooler... people make two errors in this case: They underestimate temperature changes within a month (assuming, for instance, that August will be uniformly hot) and overestimate the changes in temperature that will occur when the month ends.
... We humans have a variety of ways of perceiving ourselves as smarter, more skilled, and more appealing than we are in reality. Most drivers, for example, say they drive more safely than the average person, even though that is a statistical impossibility. People also tend to consider themselves more attractive than others say they are. We tend to underestimate the chance that past events will reoccur, like winning two poker hands in a row (the 'hot hand' fallacy). Likewise, we incorrectly assume that because a basketball player has made the last five shots he will make the sixth. We overestimate small risks, like being killed by a terrorist, yet underestimate much larger ones, like being killed in a traffic accident.
The list goes on: the 'hindsight bias,' the 'systematic distortion effect,' the 'false uniqueness effect,' the 'just world bias,' the 'clouded judgment effect,' and the 'external agency illusion.' And just in case you think you're hip to your own biases, researchers have unveiled the 'bias blind spot,' in which you see biases in others but overlook them in yourself."
In other words, the average person doesn't judge ANYTHING accurately; no wonder so many bad decisions, and thus so many mistakes, get made.
"Human thinking... is of two broad types. There are the snap judgments we make on the fly, like assessing whether a person approaching us on the street is welcoming or threatening. And there are the activities to which we apply the full force of our minds, like preparing a business presentation or solving a math problem. That laborious reasoning has long been assumed to represent the gold standard of human thinking. It is the type of reasoning that social psychologists themselves employ. Test subjects, however, are typically placed in a situation and required to guess, react, or estimate. Later, the researcher analyzes the behavior at length, through the lens of statistics or logic. Whenever there is a disparity, the test subject is assumed to be displaying the error or bias, not the researcher."
Verrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting... but WHY don't people use "laborious reasoning" "on the fly"? It doesn't actually take more than a moment to do for most situations one encounters in daily life, or even for most surprise situations; *I* automatically run multiple scenarios and analyses thereof in my head for everything, because I could be, and was, questioned at length about every move I made as a kid and young adult, and so had to be able to justify how all my choices were based on accurate analyses of all the available facts... yeah, that's not a pleasant thought, but the point is that it's doable in a couple of seconds even for a kid, and it leads to better results, so WHY don't people do it?
Another typical lapse in judgment is how people automatically assume that their preferences, beliefs, etc, reflect those of the majority, which is why those who find themselves in opposition to the results of studies will often proclaim them to be "wrong"... in contrast, you'll notice, to how *I* say that something a study shows is common doesn't apply to ME but NEVER deny the correctness of the findings. This sort of lapse has actually been studied:
"In a now famous study, Lee Ross and colleagues at Stanford University asked students if they would walk around campus wearing a sandwich board that read 'Eat at Joe's.' The test subjects who agreed to do this embarrassing task predicted that 62 percent of others approached to carry the sign would do it. But test subjects who refused to carry the sign thought that only 33 percent of others would agree to do it when asked. Researchers concluded that they had found a new bias in reasoning, which they called the 'false consensus effect'-that people have the naive tendency to project their individual attitudes, values, and behaviors onto the majority."
What's really interesting, though, is a different way of looking at it:
"By definition, most people are in the majority most of the time... Therefore, if you assume that your opinion will match that of the majority, you will be right more often than not."
That would explain why people might reasonably keep believing that others will think and feel as they do in many situations; it should NOT prevent them from grasping that they're not ALWAYS in the majority, though, or from asking themselves how likely they are to be in the majority in individual cases, but I suppose that's too much to ask.
"People don't decide on a strategy and then assume people will act similarly. Rather, they assume similarity and then act on that assumption... this may explain why we do many socially conscious acts, such as taking time to vote even though we know that our individual vote probably won't make a difference. The assumption that people will act like us actually influences our decision to participate.
The result is that there are higher levels of cooperation in groups where people project their beliefs on others."
All well and good, but most of what we do doesn't involve group cooperation, so I maintain that we still need to take a reality break before making judgments.
The last bit of the article that I found attention-grabbing was this:
"developmental psychologist Michael Maratsos of the University of Minnesota argues that the truly troubling revelation of Milgram's experiment was the extent of conformity and cruelty, 'given how little the subjects had at stake.'"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; these so-called experts need to start doing thorough studies of online interactions, which show human nature at its least restrained, because if they did they'd know that people will leap to conform with ugly behavior with NOTHING at stake... and if you don't think that the ringleaders of these online attacks would be perfectly willing to push people to do something physically painful to the victims if a way to do so were available, or that any of the co-attackers would hesitate to go along with it, you've never seen a REAL forum fight.
The absolute bottom line here is that you have the ability to think, and it's up to you to make a conscious effort to use it. It's not difficult to figure out what the right thing to do is, or whether a person whose life impinges on yours is good or bad, and to act appropriately; you just need to CHOOSE to do the figuring out and the acting. For less effort than you probably expend trying to decide what to watch on TV each night, you can wildly improve your judgments and decisions, not to mention your karma (by supporting good people and opposing the bad ones); isn't it worth a try?
"In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it. Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure."
Americans LOVE jerks; that's why so many of those in positions of wealth, fame and power in this country qualify. We find bad behavior, and those that engage in it, to be fascinating, glamorous, and sexy, and virtuous behavior, and the poor saps who bought the childhood messages that this was the proper way to act, to be dull, boring, even foolish. Every day, you make decisions on who you want to become friends with, have sex with, hire or promote; on whose CD's you want to listen to, whose movies you want to watch, and whose face on the cover of a magazine will make you buy it... and if you're like most people, your choices overwhelmingly favor people who objectively are well into jerk territory rather than those who've shown themselves to be honest, noble, caring, etc.
Given the acceptance and approval we internalize for bad behavior all our lives, it's no surprise how easily influenced most folks are to behave in ways that they KNOW are wrong:
"Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's 'Behavioral Study of Obedience,' published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a 'learning experiment.' The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the 'stranger' is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, 'Please continue.' If the subject still balks, he is first told, 'The experiment requires that you go on,' then, 'It is absolutely essential that you continue,' and then, 'You have no other choice, you must go on.'
By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a 'very strong shock,' some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.
What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled 'Danger: Severe Shock,' administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although 'subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will,' most were willing to do so."
Milgram should NOT have been surprised; *I* wouldn't have been, because I've seen countless examples of the effortlessness with which manipulators can get people to behave in the most atrocious ways, and the men in the lab coats would have had the aura of authority added on to the pitiful willingness of people to act contrary to their supposed moral standards just because someone asked them to... what's there to be surprised about?
Are you certain that YOU would have refused to administer those shocks, or at least the dangerous ones? Ask yourself this; how's your track record of refusing to do what people pressure you to do? How often have you spoken out against things you knew were wrong, compared to how many times you decided to just go with the flow, so as not to rock the boat... or not to draw the wrath of the instigators of evil against yourself?
"For more than a century, psychologists have attempted to get to the root of evil and error. What they have discovered is not encouraging. Milgram and earlier researchers demonstrated that the ability to act rationally can be subverted by crowds or by pressure from authority figures. Recent studies show that humans, even when left alone, are prone to bewildering mistakes and biases."
Unfortunate but true; I'm left with my jaw hanging open on a daily basis from seeing how often people act in flagrant disregard for facts, logic, common sense, fairness, morality and even their own best interests, and I mean intelligent, decent people, not winos in an alleyway or hardened criminals... doesn't anyone give a single moment's thought to doing what's best, what's RIGHT, or do we just blunder forward like blindfolded gorillas?
"Social psychology crystallized in the 19th century around a concern with crowd behavior: Why do otherwise reasonable individuals become irrational or even dangerous when placed in a mob of people? By the middle of the 20th century, social psychologists had widened their research to examine how people can be influenced to make incorrect judgments or cross moral boundaries. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, pitted naive test subjects against a group of strangers who made bizarre judgments about the relative lengths of lines. Pressured to conform to the group, subjects often disregarded the obvious visual evidence and adopted the prevailing judgment."
We're social animals, after all, so I suppose it makes sense that we'd tend to go along with the group, even if what they're doing or saying is ridiculous or dangerous... but it still sucks, and it gets even worse:
"About the time of Milgram's experiment, Princeton University professor John Darley studied why bystanders, when confronted with strangers in distress, sometimes respond by walking away or closing the drapes. Inspired by the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York City murder victim whose cries for help failed to rouse her neighbors to action, Darley showed that test subjects were less likely to aid a stranger if they thought they were just one among several witnesses."
How utterly despicable. It think it also helps explain why people don't intervene when someone is being attacked verbally, online as well as in real life... but I'm not sure I even WANT to know WHY the existence of multiple witnesses would lead to people acting in such an indefensible way.
"Despite evidence of sheeplike behavior, many researchers still assumed that individuals, on their own, could be counted on to be rational and moral. The sea change came in the 1970s, from insights gleaned through economics research. In a series of articles and books, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Amos Tversky rejected the long-held notion that humans are rational actors in a marketplace. Rather than using all the information available and calculating the best decision, they argued, the human mind relies on 'quick and dirty' heuristics, mental shortcuts or rules of thumb, to make decisions."
Not MY human mind, thanks very much; perhaps because I came from an abusive family of origin, and was a pariah at school as well, I had to learn to calculate all the possible effects of every action I might take in order to avoid as much trouble as possible... but then again, I know others from similar backgrounds who don't seem able to make even the simplest determinations of what will lead to the most desirable outcomes, or avoid the worst ones (a grim example was a woman whose ex-husband would beat her if he came home and found that the litter box hadn't been cleaned, who was nevertheless consistently unable to make the choice to clean the litter box before he got home), so maybe it's just what's natural for me to do given my personality. Either way, this is clearly one of those ways I differ wildly from normal folks, psychologically speaking, and explains some of the frustration I experience from bright, educated people seeming unable to look at all the facts and apply logic to them to make decisions.
"people use arbitrary categories to make judgments. On hot August days, for instance, people look forward to the first day in September, as if turning a page on the calendar would suddenly make the weather cooler... people make two errors in this case: They underestimate temperature changes within a month (assuming, for instance, that August will be uniformly hot) and overestimate the changes in temperature that will occur when the month ends.
... We humans have a variety of ways of perceiving ourselves as smarter, more skilled, and more appealing than we are in reality. Most drivers, for example, say they drive more safely than the average person, even though that is a statistical impossibility. People also tend to consider themselves more attractive than others say they are. We tend to underestimate the chance that past events will reoccur, like winning two poker hands in a row (the 'hot hand' fallacy). Likewise, we incorrectly assume that because a basketball player has made the last five shots he will make the sixth. We overestimate small risks, like being killed by a terrorist, yet underestimate much larger ones, like being killed in a traffic accident.
The list goes on: the 'hindsight bias,' the 'systematic distortion effect,' the 'false uniqueness effect,' the 'just world bias,' the 'clouded judgment effect,' and the 'external agency illusion.' And just in case you think you're hip to your own biases, researchers have unveiled the 'bias blind spot,' in which you see biases in others but overlook them in yourself."
In other words, the average person doesn't judge ANYTHING accurately; no wonder so many bad decisions, and thus so many mistakes, get made.
"Human thinking... is of two broad types. There are the snap judgments we make on the fly, like assessing whether a person approaching us on the street is welcoming or threatening. And there are the activities to which we apply the full force of our minds, like preparing a business presentation or solving a math problem. That laborious reasoning has long been assumed to represent the gold standard of human thinking. It is the type of reasoning that social psychologists themselves employ. Test subjects, however, are typically placed in a situation and required to guess, react, or estimate. Later, the researcher analyzes the behavior at length, through the lens of statistics or logic. Whenever there is a disparity, the test subject is assumed to be displaying the error or bias, not the researcher."
Verrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting... but WHY don't people use "laborious reasoning" "on the fly"? It doesn't actually take more than a moment to do for most situations one encounters in daily life, or even for most surprise situations; *I* automatically run multiple scenarios and analyses thereof in my head for everything, because I could be, and was, questioned at length about every move I made as a kid and young adult, and so had to be able to justify how all my choices were based on accurate analyses of all the available facts... yeah, that's not a pleasant thought, but the point is that it's doable in a couple of seconds even for a kid, and it leads to better results, so WHY don't people do it?
Another typical lapse in judgment is how people automatically assume that their preferences, beliefs, etc, reflect those of the majority, which is why those who find themselves in opposition to the results of studies will often proclaim them to be "wrong"... in contrast, you'll notice, to how *I* say that something a study shows is common doesn't apply to ME but NEVER deny the correctness of the findings. This sort of lapse has actually been studied:
"In a now famous study, Lee Ross and colleagues at Stanford University asked students if they would walk around campus wearing a sandwich board that read 'Eat at Joe's.' The test subjects who agreed to do this embarrassing task predicted that 62 percent of others approached to carry the sign would do it. But test subjects who refused to carry the sign thought that only 33 percent of others would agree to do it when asked. Researchers concluded that they had found a new bias in reasoning, which they called the 'false consensus effect'-that people have the naive tendency to project their individual attitudes, values, and behaviors onto the majority."
What's really interesting, though, is a different way of looking at it:
"By definition, most people are in the majority most of the time... Therefore, if you assume that your opinion will match that of the majority, you will be right more often than not."
That would explain why people might reasonably keep believing that others will think and feel as they do in many situations; it should NOT prevent them from grasping that they're not ALWAYS in the majority, though, or from asking themselves how likely they are to be in the majority in individual cases, but I suppose that's too much to ask.
"People don't decide on a strategy and then assume people will act similarly. Rather, they assume similarity and then act on that assumption... this may explain why we do many socially conscious acts, such as taking time to vote even though we know that our individual vote probably won't make a difference. The assumption that people will act like us actually influences our decision to participate.
The result is that there are higher levels of cooperation in groups where people project their beliefs on others."
All well and good, but most of what we do doesn't involve group cooperation, so I maintain that we still need to take a reality break before making judgments.
The last bit of the article that I found attention-grabbing was this:
"developmental psychologist Michael Maratsos of the University of Minnesota argues that the truly troubling revelation of Milgram's experiment was the extent of conformity and cruelty, 'given how little the subjects had at stake.'"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; these so-called experts need to start doing thorough studies of online interactions, which show human nature at its least restrained, because if they did they'd know that people will leap to conform with ugly behavior with NOTHING at stake... and if you don't think that the ringleaders of these online attacks would be perfectly willing to push people to do something physically painful to the victims if a way to do so were available, or that any of the co-attackers would hesitate to go along with it, you've never seen a REAL forum fight.
The absolute bottom line here is that you have the ability to think, and it's up to you to make a conscious effort to use it. It's not difficult to figure out what the right thing to do is, or whether a person whose life impinges on yours is good or bad, and to act appropriately; you just need to CHOOSE to do the figuring out and the acting. For less effort than you probably expend trying to decide what to watch on TV each night, you can wildly improve your judgments and decisions, not to mention your karma (by supporting good people and opposing the bad ones); isn't it worth a try?
Friday, December 02, 2005
Odds and ends #2
I've made a strange and disturbing discovery; if I eat beyond a certain amount of candy, I get nauseous. It's not that I think that either my weight or my health would benefit from unlimited candy consumption, it's just that this year I've also started getting tummy disturbance from fruit and vegetables, and I've developed an increasing inability to eat beyond a certain amount of protein or fatty foods without "cutting" it with bland carbs such as plain rice or potato chips (yeah, I know, but when you start feeling internal distress, if you're smart you'll quickly eat whatever will settle it down) ... it scares me a little, because if "dry salties" and such stop paving the way for other foods to be comfortably eaten, what will I eat THEN?
I saw a show on the Discovery Science Channel called "More Clever Critters" that demonstrated the astonishing problem-solving ability of keas, which are parrots that live in New Zealand; the REALLY mind-boggling thing was that they did the mirror test on the birds, to see if they're self-aware (in other words, if they recognize that their reflections are them, rather than believing them to be other birds)... and they ARE!! It was a big, BIG deal when they 1st realized that chimps are self-aware, because they'd arrogantly assumed that only humans were, and still a big deal when they found self-awareness in other primates, but a BIRD?!! One of the keas actually went so far as to strike various poses while looking back and forth between the body part it was moving and its reflection... and then they showed footage of a chimp doing the same sort of thing, which drove home the point of what level of mental functioning these birds are at. The one part of the test that was missing is where they mark the animals with paint where they can't see it (they're handled in a way that doesn't alert them to the paint being applied), to verify that when they look in the mirror they notice the spots; the keas, being wild birds, obviously couldn't be tested that way, but they really need to try it with some tame ones to be absolutely sure that they're understanding the meaning of their reflections, and aren't just showing some other sort of behavior that mimics recognition.
If you see a connection between being self-aware and having a soul, as I always have, this news about keas proves that at least some birds have them; imagine how lovely a hummingbird's soul would be, if it has one. I read recently that dolphins pass the mirror test too; their legendary willingness to rescue drowning humans had already made me pretty certain that they had souls, and this just backs it up. Self-awareness in animals seems directly linked to intelligence... and that, to me, is further evidence of the soul being made of the energy of thought.
And finally, I've realized something about my collections; my little figurines, stuffies and toys provide me with physical things to be attached to, and thus help anchor me in the physical world... without them, I'd be adrift in a sea of ideas, thoughts, reading, writing, cyberspace, analysis, and spiritual contemplation, punctuated only periodically by my more, um, meaningful interactions with my husband, and those rare times with friends when we do something more than exchange ideas or maybe watch a movie. Most days, if I could operate a computer directly with my gray matter, and science articles and such could be piped directly into it, I could live as a disembodied brain in a jar and not see much difference... except that looking around at my things makes me happy, both because of their attractiveness and because for most of my life I didn't have much of anything, so I'd be much LESS happy without them. I could withdraw to an austere life of poverty in a spiritual retreat on an isolated mountaintop and probably be pretty satisfied with an existence in bare stone rooms, as long as they had digital cable and a decent DSL connection... except that I'd be miserable without my shelves full of collectibles smiling down on me every day. Perhaps that makes my collections a barrier to my ultimate levels of intellect and spirituality; so be it.
If you were wondering where I envisioned my husband would be if I was living in a retreat... he'd be living there too, because he's even more of a natural hermit than I am, and even less attached to the physical world (he doesn't have collections). His requirements for computer equipment are more extreme than mine, and he'd have to be allowed to be helicoptered out occasionally to see some of the noxious no-talent bands he likes perform, which is cheating a little, but overall he'd be happy to just be a lump in front of a screen, and wouldn't mind having to discuss spiritual issues if it meant he didn't have to work or maintain a household anymore. Actually, he had one other requirement, that none of the other retreat-dwellers be less skilled on the computer than he is, so that he wouldn't be stuck giving tech support to anyone but me; he says that his idea of hell is 500 people who don't know how to use their computers, all expecting his assistance.
Anyways; if anyone ever tries to question the wisdom of my having such huge collections, I'll have a pretty slick reply... other than my standard 2-word one, that is.
I saw a show on the Discovery Science Channel called "More Clever Critters" that demonstrated the astonishing problem-solving ability of keas, which are parrots that live in New Zealand; the REALLY mind-boggling thing was that they did the mirror test on the birds, to see if they're self-aware (in other words, if they recognize that their reflections are them, rather than believing them to be other birds)... and they ARE!! It was a big, BIG deal when they 1st realized that chimps are self-aware, because they'd arrogantly assumed that only humans were, and still a big deal when they found self-awareness in other primates, but a BIRD?!! One of the keas actually went so far as to strike various poses while looking back and forth between the body part it was moving and its reflection... and then they showed footage of a chimp doing the same sort of thing, which drove home the point of what level of mental functioning these birds are at. The one part of the test that was missing is where they mark the animals with paint where they can't see it (they're handled in a way that doesn't alert them to the paint being applied), to verify that when they look in the mirror they notice the spots; the keas, being wild birds, obviously couldn't be tested that way, but they really need to try it with some tame ones to be absolutely sure that they're understanding the meaning of their reflections, and aren't just showing some other sort of behavior that mimics recognition.
If you see a connection between being self-aware and having a soul, as I always have, this news about keas proves that at least some birds have them; imagine how lovely a hummingbird's soul would be, if it has one. I read recently that dolphins pass the mirror test too; their legendary willingness to rescue drowning humans had already made me pretty certain that they had souls, and this just backs it up. Self-awareness in animals seems directly linked to intelligence... and that, to me, is further evidence of the soul being made of the energy of thought.
And finally, I've realized something about my collections; my little figurines, stuffies and toys provide me with physical things to be attached to, and thus help anchor me in the physical world... without them, I'd be adrift in a sea of ideas, thoughts, reading, writing, cyberspace, analysis, and spiritual contemplation, punctuated only periodically by my more, um, meaningful interactions with my husband, and those rare times with friends when we do something more than exchange ideas or maybe watch a movie. Most days, if I could operate a computer directly with my gray matter, and science articles and such could be piped directly into it, I could live as a disembodied brain in a jar and not see much difference... except that looking around at my things makes me happy, both because of their attractiveness and because for most of my life I didn't have much of anything, so I'd be much LESS happy without them. I could withdraw to an austere life of poverty in a spiritual retreat on an isolated mountaintop and probably be pretty satisfied with an existence in bare stone rooms, as long as they had digital cable and a decent DSL connection... except that I'd be miserable without my shelves full of collectibles smiling down on me every day. Perhaps that makes my collections a barrier to my ultimate levels of intellect and spirituality; so be it.
If you were wondering where I envisioned my husband would be if I was living in a retreat... he'd be living there too, because he's even more of a natural hermit than I am, and even less attached to the physical world (he doesn't have collections). His requirements for computer equipment are more extreme than mine, and he'd have to be allowed to be helicoptered out occasionally to see some of the noxious no-talent bands he likes perform, which is cheating a little, but overall he'd be happy to just be a lump in front of a screen, and wouldn't mind having to discuss spiritual issues if it meant he didn't have to work or maintain a household anymore. Actually, he had one other requirement, that none of the other retreat-dwellers be less skilled on the computer than he is, so that he wouldn't be stuck giving tech support to anyone but me; he says that his idea of hell is 500 people who don't know how to use their computers, all expecting his assistance.
Anyways; if anyone ever tries to question the wisdom of my having such huge collections, I'll have a pretty slick reply... other than my standard 2-word one, that is.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Odds and ends
I looked out at the patio tonight, and saw what I thought was our possum boy... and something was wrong with his ear!! I called anxiously to him to get him to look at me so I could see if he was injured... and I saw that this was a different possum, our THIRD. He's somewhat smaller than our male, with lighter fur and what appears to be an oddly pigmented ear; he was a little nervous, but bolder than either of the other 2 had been when they 1st came. He was a perfectly nice looking possum... and I should have chased him away, because when he and the other male encounter each other, they'll fight, and the little female would probably run away, or be chased and possibly attacked. The thing is, possum faces are so sweet in their goofy way, and he was obviously starving, and... and I just couldn't do that to an animal whose only crime was to be hungry enough to come into an area that must reek of the other, bigger male to grab some food.
Possums are solitary animals, aside from brief necessary encounters during mating season; our original 2 are already acting totally outside of their normal parameters by hanging out together, but does that mean that another MALE can hang out here too? I tend to doubt it, especially after the incident I posted about on 11-13-05, when my possum boy was barking protractedly at another possum that was on the other side of the fence, and trying to climb over and get to him... but all I can do is cross my fingers and see what happens next.
I discovered something cool today, a site called Freecycle
http://www.freecycle.org/
from which you can find associated groups in your area, not just in America but many other countries as well, where you can offer up stuff you want to get rid of, and then decide who among those in the group that want it can come and pick it up, be the recipient of things that other members are giving away, and even post requests to be given things... all FREE. The idea is to extend the reuse/recycle idea to stuff that accumulates in the backs of closets, or gets piled on the curb on trash day, especially the latter (because what gets thrown away often ends up in landfills), and to be able to help people out. I'm big on donating unused items to charity, but not every charity takes every kind of thing, and most of them won't send a truck to pick up bigger things (which is why so much furniture just gets thrown out, because no one wants to rent a truck to take a near-worthless table or whatever to Goodwill), and it's a cool idea to be part of a community that allows everyone to give directly to those who have themselves given to others, so... check them out.
My husband and I had an amusing, if gross (no surprise there), marital moment today; we were doing some silly thing with our fingertips touching, and then, because he's the king of flatulence, I pushed his finger, pointing out that that was the opposite of PULLING his finger (that disgusting American game that's supposed to make the person fart)... and he BELCHED, telling me that pushing the finger instead of pulling it caused the fart to back up and come out the other end. I didn't know whether to shriek, laugh, or smack him, so I did all 3. He was very proud of himself, especially that he'd been able to belch at will, which I don't remember him having done before; he then tried to teach ME to do it, but no matter how much air I swallowed, or what sort of throat contortions I did, nothing happened, thank goodness... I'd be dismayed if my body were capable of any such crude noise-making.
Never a dull moment, lol.
Possums are solitary animals, aside from brief necessary encounters during mating season; our original 2 are already acting totally outside of their normal parameters by hanging out together, but does that mean that another MALE can hang out here too? I tend to doubt it, especially after the incident I posted about on 11-13-05, when my possum boy was barking protractedly at another possum that was on the other side of the fence, and trying to climb over and get to him... but all I can do is cross my fingers and see what happens next.
I discovered something cool today, a site called Freecycle
http://www.freecycle.org/
from which you can find associated groups in your area, not just in America but many other countries as well, where you can offer up stuff you want to get rid of, and then decide who among those in the group that want it can come and pick it up, be the recipient of things that other members are giving away, and even post requests to be given things... all FREE. The idea is to extend the reuse/recycle idea to stuff that accumulates in the backs of closets, or gets piled on the curb on trash day, especially the latter (because what gets thrown away often ends up in landfills), and to be able to help people out. I'm big on donating unused items to charity, but not every charity takes every kind of thing, and most of them won't send a truck to pick up bigger things (which is why so much furniture just gets thrown out, because no one wants to rent a truck to take a near-worthless table or whatever to Goodwill), and it's a cool idea to be part of a community that allows everyone to give directly to those who have themselves given to others, so... check them out.
My husband and I had an amusing, if gross (no surprise there), marital moment today; we were doing some silly thing with our fingertips touching, and then, because he's the king of flatulence, I pushed his finger, pointing out that that was the opposite of PULLING his finger (that disgusting American game that's supposed to make the person fart)... and he BELCHED, telling me that pushing the finger instead of pulling it caused the fart to back up and come out the other end. I didn't know whether to shriek, laugh, or smack him, so I did all 3. He was very proud of himself, especially that he'd been able to belch at will, which I don't remember him having done before; he then tried to teach ME to do it, but no matter how much air I swallowed, or what sort of throat contortions I did, nothing happened, thank goodness... I'd be dismayed if my body were capable of any such crude noise-making.
Never a dull moment, lol.
