Beauty of uncertainty

In 1975, Baruch Fischoff identified a major obstacle to forming new memories ..ourselves. He found that people frequently underestimate how surprised they are when events don’t turn out the way they expect. He polled a group of students before and after the Watergate hearings. Respondents who felt Nixon would be exonerated (with say 80% confidence) .. overwhelmingly came back and said they weren’t surprised by the verdict (and remember being just over 50% confident). When people learn the outcome of events, they unconsciously go back and adjust the estimate for what they thought would happen. This has the net-effect of revising memory so that it feels as if they “..knew it all along”, which diminishes the surprise-value of information [link]. More recently, neuroscientist Moshe Bar says that surprise is what gives ordinary events the informative-value necessary for transfer to long-term memory [link]. What we retain are mostly the novel bits of information we pick up along the way. They go on to form a ‘pool of scenarios’, which we use to prepare for future events. So if we go around dismissing the surprise-value of information, we sabotage memory, lower our ability to deal with the unexpected ..and don’t learn as much from experience. My friend Audrey likes to say that we can prevent future memory loss by making a conscious effort to do something out of the ordinary everyday ..increase our exposure to what’s new ..or at least give ordinary events greater value than “ ..it's just the same old story.”

Reading behavior

“Our universities deliver education in English ..[so] we should teach reading in the language that will be most useful.” Letter to the LATimes re. dual-language immersion ~ [link ]

As reasonable as this may sound ..it is not consistent with the way nature prepares children to read. Nor is it supported by the state-of-the-art in neuroscience and language development. The language children are going to need in college isn’t as important for reading education as their native language. Learning to read in one’s native language is the most effective route to fluency. That’s because learning to read starts out as a process of linking the sound of words on paper to their meaning in memory [link]. This puts children from non-English backgrounds at a disadvantage when trying to read English first. They have no ‘phonic memory’ for it. That’s what accounts for the high percentage of high school students in the U.S. who cannot read or write well. Furthermore, it is widely known that reading fluency in one language is easily transferable to another [link]. It only makes sense to teach children to read in a way that assures early success in one language and boosts their chances of future achievement in other languages.

Academic captivity

I have a theory. I think home schooling is more native to childhood development than the classroom. If you took a random sample of home-schooled children I think you’d find the same incidence of so-called ‘learning problems’ coupled with higher levels of achievement. That’s because dedicated parents, tuned to the strengths and weaknesses of their children, can overcome many problems ordinarily associated with classroom learning ..and do so without drugs. I’m talking about problems with attention span, short-term memory, and communication. Public education in the US is way behind the learning curve and traditional classrooms are designed to tap only a limited range of childhood potential. For instance, the kind of focused attention ordinarily required in a classroom is not all that helpful overcoming obstacles found outside the classroom. There are many instances where a wider focus of attention, which is usually associated with ADD, is way more adaptive [link]. This is also true of other developmental disorders, including autism. I know of a mother who taught her son to communicate even though he was in the most disabling range of the autistic spectrum. He’s now a prolific writer with several published works to his credit [link].

Neural basis of PTSD

Anxiety is a conditioned emotional response. First it focuses attention, and then it clamps the brain into rigidity by obsessively replaying past traumas [link].

Coming of age in a combat zone is bound to leave a deep impact on the tissues of the mind. I know that early experience with driving, while exposed to roadside bombs, can lead to phobias for city and highway driving. Witnessing the devastation of a mortar attack on a remote Afghan village can make a walk in the park seem like a high-risk venture and experiencing the impact of bombs detonating in town square can make it hard to sit still at Denny’s. Hearing someone say, “you’ll get over it” is not going to sound all that convincing. Why ..? I have a theory. We already know that the networks of the mind continue developing well into a person’s twenties. In fact most neural-development takes place outside the womb where it can be guided by culture and experience. I believe when combat is someone’s introduction to the ‘ways of the world’, it profoundly affects development that prepares them for adulthood. Depending on a soldier’s degree of resilience going in, the experience can produce a conditioned anxiety so pervasive; it becomes debilitating. It’s not uncommon for veterans to feel suspicious when neighbors knock .. panic in public places. Or they may find themselves taking different routes to work everyday ..sleeping less than five hours a night and barricading themselves indoors all weekend. Early combat experience becomes neurologically ‘cemented’ in the naive soldier’s mind creating a generalized fear that, at any point, at any time, someone’s going to take their life.

Gene pool

The qualities I was born with do not necessarily come from my parents ..it turns out that they could not have been ‘genetically engineered’ with much success either..not that anybody would want to try. No, life in the womb is way too volatile for that. Scientists - reporting in the journal of Nature - say they have found genes that can introduce random variation during embryonic development of the nervous system ..causing deviations from the genetic blueprint that guides the growth of the brain. Genes called ‘retro-transposons’ jump around in neural stem cells ..the cells that give rise to tissues in the brain and nervous system. Retro-transposons act to produce changes in the electro-chemical properties of nerve cells ..changing how they respond to signals ..and the way they link up to form networks. This explains why individual brains differ so much, even between identical twins ..allowing traits to vary from one generation to the next ..without waiting a millennium for some ‘cosmic mutation’ to occur. It also explains why ‘selective breeding’ for psychological traits - such as IQ or music ability - is not always a sure thing. I don't think we have to worry about creating a master race. Life defies our attempts to control these events.

Miguel Aguilar

Miguel Aguilar has been recognized as one of the most effective teachers in the L.A. unified school district. By devising a method of his own for teaching reading and language skills, he moved his students from the bottom 30% in the district to well above average. When they looked at what he was doing, they found he wasn’t simply ‘teaching to the test’. He broke the material down and prompted students to identify narrative components while they read. For instance, he would frequently stop and ask them questions about the goals and actions of the characters. He Then did something interesting. He would ask the class if they understood what kind of information he was looking for. Example: was it an inference about the character’s intention or a prediction about the consequences of their action. He wasn’t just teaching them to read the narrative explicitly ..but how to process the narrative implicitly [link]. I’ve heard people refer to this as the ‘meta’ or ‘pragmatic’ levels of comprehension. Studies show that when students start doing this on a regular basis, they become more active participants in what they previously considered to be a passive activity .. and reading scores improve dramatically [link].

Best practices in education

During graduate school, I figured the easiest way to tell if a teaching method was effective would be to use students as their own benchmark. I proposed collecting per-student changes periodically over time to evaluate a new teaching method. That way I could control for background and socio-economic factors that I didn’t have the time or facilities to deal with [link] . Per-student changes were averaged and the net change was used to see if a one teaching method was better or worse than another.

This is the basis for the ‘value-added’ method that’s currently being proposed for the LA Unified School district to evaluate the performance of teachers. Students act as their own benchmark. Prior year performance is compared with current year. Because it measures students against their own track record, it largely controls for influences outside the classroom. The aggregate net-change from one year to the next is telling. It may not be perfect, but it is the most representative and least contaminated method we have for identifying the most effective teaching practices in a heterogeneous school district [link].

Social Anxiety

Children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones, a new study shows. “If you misread facial expressions, you’re in trouble, no matter what other social skills you have,” says Emory psychologist Steve Nowicki, a clinical researcher who developed the tests used in the study. “It can make life very difficult, because other people’s faces are like a prism through which we look at the world.” Nowicki coined the term "dyssemia," meaning the inability to process signs. They also developed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) to assess subtle cues to emotional expressions, including visual signals and tone and cadence of voice. DANVA is now widely used by researchers in studies of everything from behavioral disorders to autism spectrum conditions. “..nonverbal communication can be taught. It's a skill, not something mysterious." They have found that in a range of children with behavioral disorders, including high-functioning autism, direct teaching can improve their non-verbal communication [link].

Remembering David Rumelhart

“Language, like most knowledge, relies mainly on memory and is represented in the brain by a network of connected meaning.” ~ David Rumelhart [link]

While at the University of California, San Diego, David Rumelhart developed the ‘adaptive structural network’ model for both encoding and retrieving information in long-term memory. According to his model, information is stored in a database and retrieved by an active interpretive process. Storage is a process of construction from a sensory-base whereas retrieval is a process of re-construction from a conceptual base [link]. David’s contributions influenced my field of study; he informed the direction I took and the decisions I made. He will be missed.

Aphasia

Written in response to an article in the LATimes ~>[progressive aphasia]

No wonder we don’t know how to relieve aphasia, we still talk about it as though it were a speech problem. It’s actually a memory problem. What’s lost are the pathways that enable look-up and retrieval of words stored in memory. It only presents itself as a speech problem at early onset [link]. That’s why aphasia doesn’t lend itself to speech therapy. Treatments that focus on memory skills for word-retrieval are more helpful [link].

Symptoms: First, you have difficulty finding the right pronouns and names for things. They may escape the speaker entirely. Verb usage generally remains intact. “I can’t find the right world.” comes out instead of “I can’t find the right word.” “I’m going to the office.” in place of “I’m going to the store.” Homonyms or words that sound alike frequently get switched: “I’m going dental.” for “I’m going mental.” When I think of the all the steps that have to be performed in a fraction of a second and in the right sequence ..I’m surprised speech is possible at all. Even though speaking feels like a single, automatic process ..it’s by no means a  single skill. When you break it down, it looks something like this:

Idea ~>  Lexical    ~>     Context    ~>   Syntax     ~>     Speech
              Look-up &         Integation        Generation        Timing & Production
              Selection                                                                        

Psychology of facebook

Presented to the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies

Part two

Continued from [ part one ] below:   Now I want to talk about ‘discourse analysis’ and what it reveals about communication over social networks. Discourse analysis is the branch of psychology dealing the way people process information from what they hear and read. I think it’s telling. Face to face communication is a probabilistic event. Language is a relatively narrow band of communication that can only suggest what the speaker has in mind. This presents the listener with a range of possibilities. Communication is successful only when the listener infers the most likely meaning intended by the speaker. Ordinary conversation is generally successful because we have context to help guide us along. We rely on facial expressions, intonation, emphasis, location and other visual and auditory cues. However, where ordinary communication is probabilistic, text messaging is a crapshoot. Text is cryptic. Context is lost and we rely on memory to supply the missing cues. However, memory is fallible. Research in discourse processing has shown that the biggest piece of missing information we supply is the intention of the speaker ..and it’s their intention that we most often get wrong. We perceive threat where none was intended. Offense at what may have only been sarcasm. By nature, the flow of conscious experience is displaced over social networks. This simply means it occurs outside the context of our immediate situation. That’s the beauty of the Internet. It allows us to share experiences that are ‘displaced’ in time and space with users from all over the world. It also places a heavy burden on text comprehension, which is much less developed than speech comprehension in the language centers of the brain. I believe this will provide a rich source of field-observation for the study of human consciousness for years.

Psychology of facebook

Presented to the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies

Anthropology:   I’m going to start with what I know about anthropology, which isn’t much but I feel it’s relevant. In my view, facebook is a fairly tame and nontoxic community – unlike others I’ve been in (such as high school, workplaces, dinner tables, neighborhoods, yahoo chat rooms). Without a constitution or written protocol, congeniality prevails. I think this says something about human nature.  Social networks are tuned to the way we are wired.  Like taking the first step out of a cave and into a larger community where there’s no anonymity – it’s best not to offend anyone. Privacy is a recent development. Tribal villages are more typical of human existence. Just look at the indigenous people of the Amazon. They live in circular settlements with one wall surrounding the perimeter, but no walls on the inside. They’re never alone and everyone can see what everyone else is doing. It pays to be on-guard and congenial otherwise you risk offending others and being banished from the tribe. In the Amazon, that means certain death. I believe that’s where the fear of abandonment comes from. I’m not talking about some trendy catch-phrase from pop psychology. It’s built into our constitution because it was essential for our survival. The threat of death-by-banishment is no longer real but the feelings certainly are. So, on facebook ..we tread carefully.

Behavioral science:   Psychologists have known for a long time now that there are few things more rewarding in life than validation from our peers. It beats television and ice cream and it’s the motivation underlying most communication. That’s why Twitter is so widely popular. Without let-up, it provides a constant stream of validation for every thought that crosses our brain.

“Still your mind and you will not age as fast as people whose minds are constantly struggling to hold their personalities together.” 

This is a Buddhist recommendation aimed at countering a very active function of the human ego:  impression management.   We put a lot of effort into presenting the right ‘persona’ .. or the way we want others to see and remember us. There’s nothing spontaneous going on there. The messages we broadcast are anxiously crafted to make us look the way we want to be perceived. Don’t believe me ..? Look no further than politicians approaching an election year. Newt Gingrich recently found religion because it sends the right message to Christian conservatives. Mitt Romney has ‘reinvented’ himself to look stupid and appeal to the average voter. What people choose to share on facebook in no way presents the whole picture. It’s not our nature.

Extraterrestrial adaptation

Robert Sapolsky

If an alien creature invaded earth by entering the brain of human beings, hijacking their nervous system and driving them to engage in high-risk ventures sure to lower their chances of survival .. you’d think some of us might notice something. Yet something disturbingly like this may be happening without notice. When mice get infected with toxoplasmosis, an alien bacterium, the toxoplasmum goes dormant inside the amygdala of their brain and reduces their fear of cats [link]. Cats eat the reckless mice and ingest the toxoplasmas where they wind up in the intestine mingling with others of their kind. Toxoplasmas reproduce sexually only in the gut of the cat, so suppressing the fear response in rats and mice is a sure way of gaining entrance into the cat intestine. Neuro-practitioners call this ‘adaptation by behavioral manipulation’ [link]. A parasite learns to manipulate host behaviors that enhance their own chances of survival. In other words, these alien bacteria learn to perform brain surgery in order to get rides to wild parties where they can exchange DNA and procreate!

Apparently these clever little creatures have found their way into people too. Nearly one third of all humans have dormant toxoplasmas sleeping inside their amygdala. Since people are pretty high up in the food chain ..the only real threat comes from themselves (or perhaps an unsuspecting bear or mountain lion). Chances are, infected individuals will start acting recklessly and wind up getting killed in a car accident involving excessive speed. So they only appear in the traffic section of the paper, or the actuarial tables of an insurance company. Otherwise, symptoms appear close enough to schizophrenia that they wind up in a psychiatric population and are never heard from again. I think I would call this a successful alien predation.

Bilingual advantage

“If you walk into a room, where a million things can attract your attention, how does your mind pay attention to what you need to pay attention to without getting distracted?” Dr Ellen Bialystok [link]

How we manage to stay ‘tuned-in’ is one of the miracles of modern humanity. Although we take it for granted, not all species are so equipped. The ability to focus and quickly switch focus is part of a legacy system handed down from our ancestors [link]. Neuroscience locates this system in the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain responsible for focusing attention, ignoring distractions and holding different scenarios in mind while trying to stay clear. According to the Journal of Neurology [link], bilinguals have an advantage doing this that lasts a lifetime. People who can hold a mental narrative in two languages ..and choose the one that best expresses their thoughts in conversation, also excel at swiftly deciding what’s important in situations where they’re presented with relevant and irrelevant information.

Neuro speculation

The amygdala is an almond-shaped mass of gray matter deep inside the cerebral cortex that plays a central role in self-control. It helps keep emotional expression in-compliance with culturally accepted norms. When damaged, an individual has difficulty with impulse-control and restraint from inappropriate and aberrant behavior [link]. Over the past decade, research has uncovered a lot more about the amygdala and how it processes signals from our social environment [link].

I have a theory. I believe that some social signals affect the amygdala differently than others. Some elicit greater restraint and vigilance while others offer release from conditioned restraint and vigilance. Neuroscience informs us that when the amygdala is surgically removed, animals show signs of inappropriate affect ..boredom where there should be fear and hypersexual activity where there is no enticement [link]. I predict that if you housed a normal group of animals where they could watch the frenetic activity of the amygdala-impaired group ..they too would show signs of inappropriate affect. Observation alone would induce the same effect as impairment. MRI studies already show heightened activity in response to authority and perceived threat. I believe they would reveal another type of activity in response to collapse of authority and diminished threat. My theory says that the amygdala would then act to release spectators from conditioned inhibition and give license to repressed impulses and sexual aggression.

This may explain the high incident of sexual assault committed by revelers celebrating the downfall of President Mubarak in Egypt [link]. Festivities associated with a break in the social order released a frenzy of predatory sexual behavior in a few that quickly spread to other participants in the crowd. Predatory behavior of this sort has also been observed at soccer matches and in crowds celebrating at the Rose Parade in California. I believe that lowered internal restraints coupled with the lax enforcement of sexual harassment laws in Egypt may have contributed to the chain of events observed. By no mean am I offering excuses for what occurred, I’m only trying to draw a possible connection between real-world events and accounts of aggression reported from the lab.

My heart goes out to the CBS correspondent who fell victim to it.

Avatar

At the University of Geneva in Switzerland, researchers performed a series of studies where they put subjects in a computer generated ‘avatar’ moving through virtual reality [link]. Each subject was fitted with a bicycle cap containing sensors to monitor brain activity and exposed to different digital, 3D environments through head-mounted stereoscopic goggles. What they found were significant changes in the brain's temporo-parietal and frontal regions – the parts of the brain responsible for integrating signals from the body with vision to produce a coherent perception of where we are in relation to our surroundings. Their results expand on clinical studies done in neurological patients reporting out-of-body experiences. Findings of a neurobiological basis for the sense of ‘self’ could lead to advances in the fields of kinesiology, neuro-rehabilitation, and pain treatments. They also contribute to understanding neurological and psychiatric diseases, and have relevance in the fields of robotics and virtual reality.

Neural regenerative training

“The number and size of neural-pathways and the integrity of myelination are important for rapid conduction in the nervous system. They are especially important for the accurate coding and transmission of speech signals.” ~ Dr Paula Tallal (left)

Continued from a previous entry ~> [link]  I leave Esalen and head north on Highway One to UC San Francisco where Paula Tallal and Mike Merzenich are developing neural retraining programs for dyslexia. I have to admit that it felt a little surreal being here after spending 14 days on the Big Sur coast. But I’m thankful to Portia for giving me this opportunity. Anyway, I listen as they explain how dyslexia is caused by “ ..under-developed neural-connections in the auditory system.” [link]. This makes it difficult for children to detect “..the subtle cues that signal the onset of phonemes.” Phonemes are the shortest and most ephemeral units of speech. They require high-speed network-connections to detect. Although they may not be as important for speech recognition ..phonemic awareness is definitely required for reading comprehension. This is especially true when children are trying to decipher words for the first time. They tell me that, by testing children’s’ ability to recognize properties of speech, it is now possible to detect dyslexia as early as the first year of life. Well ahead of reading instruction. They have developed a training program that can re-activate the growth of neuro-pathways for phonemic awareness. They have found that intervention later in life can also help regenerate neural growth if the training approximates the early learning environment of a child. In other words, neuro-regenerative training can be successful through adolescence and possibly adulthood if it is presented in a manner that’s both socially interactive and engaging

Training: They have developed a program of intense ‘sensory discrimination’ training to re-activate neural-growth. Training begins by presenting phonemes in an exaggerated manner. This means they sound louder, last longer and arrive farther apart than phonemes in regular speech. During a typical training session, they ask students to identify which phoneme they recognize from a series they’d previously heard. As students progress, the phonemes are softened, shortened and presented at a rate that more closely resembles the flow of speech. To make it both engaging and rewarding, they hosted training on an interactive computer game. Improvements were verified using standard reading tests and brain imaging. MRI scans actually showed progressive differentiation of neurons in the language centers of the brain [link]. I was stoked (because I’m weird like that). However, the next question I have to ask is whether or not these results hold-up outside the lab, where events in life can quickly overtake the best-laid plans of neuroscience practitioners.

to be continued ..

Neural regenerative training

Dr Patricia Kuhl

I met Portia Iversen while attending a writing workshop at the Esalen Institute in November, 2003. She was a screenwriter by day ..and a neuroscientist by night. I mean she would literally launch web crawlers overnight to see what research they found by morning that might help her son Dove who was somewhere on the spectrum of autistic disorders. When she discovered how little information there was, she started a foundation that awarded grants for research in the neurobehavioral sciences. The money came from the Hollywood movie industry, of which she was a member, and grants were awarded in the millions of dollars to research centers across the country that met two criteria: 1) they must have a reputation for working on developmental disorders and 2) they must be investigating neuro-regenerative practices. Needless to say, she got their attention. Universities around the country started ramping-up their labs to find techniques to help children suffering from either autism, dyslexia or attention deficit with the belief that these may not be discreet afflictions, but may fall somewhere on a distribution of early developmental imbalances. Today Portia is not only a screenwriter, but an author and member of the National Institute of Health. Her story is definitely worth reading [link].  Later at the lodge, she hands me a journal article and asks me to come up to speed so I could help her screen applicants. This led to a three-year collaboration where I learned about groundbreaking research in the neurosciences that literally blew me away. Since this is my first record of events, I’m going through my notes and starting from the beginning .. with the journal article Portia handed me.

Kuhl (2003) Foreign language experience in infancy [link]: It is generally accepted that phonemic awareness is ‘tuned’ by a child’s native language during the first year of life [link]. Initially we are capable of discerning differences between phonemes over a wide range of languages (known as the principle of equipotential). By the end of the first year however, the neural-pathways responsible for discerning native phonemes get established; and the pathways for discerning foreign phonemes, not available in the child’s verbal environment, get ‘pruned away’ by a process called juvenilization [link]. Language development is clearly an expression of the interaction between embryonics and environment outside the womb.

Findings: Dr Patricia Kuhl discovered that short-term exposure to foreign languages at nine months can significantly re-juvenilize areas of the child’s developing brain and help them retain the neuro-pathways for foreign phonemes (in this case English and Mandarin Chinese). Early language intervention can significantly alter the development of a child’s speech perception.

Naturalistic observation: Dr Kuhl cites evidence of neuro-plasticity in the wild. Zebra-Finches can be sufficiently influenced to override the innate preference for songs of their own species and learn the songs of a ‘foster’ Bengalis Finch that nurtured them.

Dyslexia: There is growing evidence to support the view that dyslexia starts out as an imbalance in the development of the auditory system. Neural pathways for phonemic awareness do not fully develop. Although it may not be severe enough to interfere with ordinary speech perception ..it can present problems with reading comprehension later in life [link]. Dr Kuhl cites studies being done at UC San Francisco that show intervention techniques that can: 1) enhance childhood auditory-development and 2) provide neuro-retraining exercises for later remediation [link] and [link].

continued ~> [link]

Receptivity theory

Dr Roger Schank

I have a theory. People who rate themselves as highly ‘consistent and uncompromising’ on issues are slower to adapt to change and less likely to learn from their mistakes. To put it bluntly, “I think inflexibility leads to arrested development”. Roger Schank has a model of speech comprehension that says sometimes people only tune-in long enough to retrieve the most likely script from memory [link]. After that, communication becomes a process of listening for information to fill-in the missing pieces. Tom Trabasso says script-based processing is a useful strategy but only when matters are highly predictable ..like listening to a kidnapping story where you can safely narrow your attention to the parts that talk about “what kind of force was used” or “what the kidnapper’s demands are.” My theory says that over-reliance on script-based processing is sort of like Procrustes bed in Greek mythology .. reception becomes limited to what conforms to a standard set of precedents in the listeners head. The rest is quickly dismissed as either immaterial, inconceivable or unacceptable (take for example John Boehner’s “Hell, no!” anti-Obama strategy, or Senator Russell Pearce’s claim that all opposing views are “treasonous”). I talked to Dr Thompson about it. Although he generally considers theories a dime a dozen, he thinks it merits attention and even suggested some ‘assessment tools’ I could use to measure ‘willingness to yield’ on issues. I didn’t think it would be hard getting people to admit to having an uncompromising nature and I have tests that measure how swiftly people handle unexpected events in a narrative. Now I’m interested in getting started and seeing what turns-up. Perhaps it’s already been done. I mean, you’d think it’d be a factor in Alzheimer’s or something. Considering the political atmosphere around here there’s bound to be some interest in the subject.

Therapeutic writing

Sian Beilock

Writing has been shown to replace ruminating. Ruminating is generally thought of as mental activity devoted to replaying past traumatic experience. It is a well-known contributor to clinical depression. That’s why writing workshops are often included in the treatment of depression. However, ruminating over future events, such as taking a high-stakes exam or something, can be equally disruptive. In this case, ruminating often leads to “choking” where students perform more poorly than expected given their skill level, especially when there are large incentives for optimal performance and negative consequences for poor performance. University of Chicago Psychologist Sian Beilock has found that the simple act of writing about anxiety can significantly reduce students’ chances of choking, especially if it’s done just prior to test-taking [link]. She says that when students are able to express their fears in writing, they’re given the satisfaction that they’ve dealt with them enough to move on and stop ruminating over them. This, in turn, releases space in working memory ..making it available to work on the task at hand.

Reception

In 1998, psychologist Arthur Graesser examined components of speech and reading comprehension in ‘real-time’ [link]. Components of comprehension include things like ‘unexpected event-handling’ and ‘outcome-resolution’. They are measured in milliseconds. Using an interactive computer-presentation, he recorded the time students spent at each step. Sort of like a reaction-time study. What he found was counter-intuitive. Comprehension scores were actually higher for students who took longer to process unexpected events in a narrative. Students who spent less time had lower scores. On closer examination, he found they were interpreting events way too quickly. Consequently, they were missing the bridge to ‘explanatory’ events presented elsewhere in the narrative. What this tells me is that receptivity is more important than reaching conclusions while listening to someone speak.

Advantages of ADD

The kind of focused attention ordinarily required in a classroom is not always helpful overcoming obstacles outside the classroom. A wider focus of attention, which is usually associated with ADD, is actually more adaptive according to neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman [link]. And from what I’ve seen, I believe it ..! They found that when students are more open to distraction, they do better navigating a computer-simulated labyrinth than when they are focused and blocking out distractions (as seen on an fMRI). Students actually see and hear more .. finding their way faster by heuristic than by analytic reasoning. In other words, in many situations, discovering relationships between vague and loosely connected information is more advantageous than step-by-step analysis.

Biomimicry

Notes from Bioengineering Conference, Nov 25, Long Beach, CA

I like to follow developments that are the result of ‘biomimicry’. Then again, I’m weird like that. However, I think it’s something that merits attention. Biomimicry is the practice of overcoming obstacles by seeing what works in nature. Naturalistic observation is just as valid as ‘laboratory observation’ in science. According to the speakers today, discovering how things work in nature has inspired breakthroughs in computer technology, renewable energy and regenerative medicine, just to name three.

Renewable energy: Biologists observing the motion of humpback whales have found more efficient ways to capture energy from the wind. They noticed how the saw-tooth bumps (tubercles) that line the edge of a whale’s fin help them perform better in slow-moving water. When they line the edge of blades on a wind-turbine with similar bumps; the blades rotate faster in response to slow-moving wind. This has led to the installation of more efficient and lower-profile ‘wind-mills’ in the desert outside of Palm Springs.

Regenerative medicine: Psychologists observing the natural development of language have made contributions to the field of regenerative medicine. They saw how children learn grammar as a result of social interaction ..with little or no coaching. When they simulate the social environment of early childhood; stroke victims make faster progress toward recovering language skills. This has led to the design of training-programs, hosted as video games ..that are more interactive and engaging. Results can be seen in speech performance as well as on MRI scans of the brain.

Closing remarks: Geoffrey Spedding, an engineer from USC, talked about limits to what we can learn from nature. He says “… the designs that come through evolution are just good enough to survive, that’s all. Nature has yet to come up with a decent wheel.” I had to disagree. In my humble opinion, evolution did produce an information-processing device capable of infinitely more ..the human brain. So, however indirect ..nature did invent the wheel.

Applied neuroscience

Brain surgeon Wilder Penfield [link] found that whenever he tugged at one place in childhood memory, he pulled the rest of childhood experience with it. His patients would report : “I can hear the sound of my mother’s voice calling me for dinner ..I smell the scent of fresh baked bread like I did then ..I see my mother waiting for me on the porch .. I feel her warmth ..I actually feel like I did as a child right now.” Psychologists see the same thing going on with their clients while they’re talking about present-day relationships. For example, when they report talking to somebody who has a voice or manner similar to one of their parents ..it often triggers the feelings they experienced in the presence of that parent. Could be feelings of warmth and pleasure ..or feelings of intimidation and submission. They may pass through these states during the day without even knowing it. What they do remember, however, is a feeling that tells them whether or not they enjoy someone’s company.

My first boss, Tony, was a commanding presence. He looked like a mafia don ..with a deep baritone voice and a quick temper. He shouted at people a lot and often in a disparaging manner. He intimidated my colleagues, which made them cringe in his presence. For some reason his behavior didn’t bother me. I even got a chuckle out of it. I think I figured out why ..and I believe I owe it to Dr Penfield. Although my father didn’t live with us very long, what I remember about him most is that he was gentle and reasonable. He would explain things I did wrong and never scolded. I don’t have memories of growing up with a ‘bully’ like many of my colleagues. Consequently, Tony didn’t evoke the same feelings in me as he did in them. I always figured there was a method to his madness and he always treated me with civility, while my colleagues always felt like they were getting a whipping.

Quality of understanding

“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence that is perceived is rapidly forgotten and memory is for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence” ~ Jacqueline Sachs [link].

For years, neuro-linguists have studied what remains after we hear somebody speak. What they’ve come up with is something that resembles a three-dimensional network inside of our head. The network is made up of propositions (coded events), scripts (a sequence of coded events) and associated images and feelings. Although part of the network is constructed from the original sentence ..most of it is supplied by the past experience of the listener. What we come away with is a feeling of resonance and familiarity, based largely on our own beliefs and experience ..and not necessarily the meaning intended by the speaker. These finding are consistent with the construction-integration model for narrative comprehension proposed by psychologist Walter Kintsch [link].