Psychology

The 39,000 steps

There was a great documentary on Five TV earlier this year, entitled 'The Mentalists', which followed the UK 'Mr Memory' champion, Ben Pridmore, to the World Memory championship in Dubai. Mentalism, the feat of memorising long strings of numbers or facts, has been a popular entertainment since the heyday of music-hall, if not before. Its most famous appearance in popular culture is probably in the finale of Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film, 'The Thirty-Nine Steps.'

The current top mentalists would probably sneer at the film mentalist's achievement. He had, after all, plenty of time to commit his facts to memory. Today's exponents compete not only in memorising vast amounts of information, but also in doing so against the clock. Some of the tasks at last year's world championship included: memorising the order of as many shuffled decks of cards as possible in a minute (ten decks was considered a safe target); memorising sixty numbers, read out at the rate of one per second; memorising as many 4-digit BINARY numbers as possible in a minute.

What was interesting was that all the competitors had, for all the tasks, a similar system: they broke the information down into manageable groups, and had devised both a visual correlative for each group, and an imaginary spatial landscape in which to position the correlative.

If that sounds impenetrable, take an example. Ben Pridmore lives in a small house near Derby. He is also a fanatic of comic-book heroes. For every number from 001 to 999, he has assigned a fictional character, e.g. 091 might equal Superman. The geography of his house, garden and surrounding area is also the mental landscape in which he positions his characters. When faced with a thousand numbers to memorise, he divides them into threes and mentally places the corresponding character in his mental landscape, so that 091325467 might mean that Superman (in Ben's laundry cupboard) hands a frisbee to Marilyn Monroe (in the bathroom sink.)

A young UK contender to Ben's crown is currently memorising the whole of Milton's 'Paradise Lost', using a similar system and positioning his correlatives in his father's Wiltshire garden. Whatever one might think of the advisability of devoting all one's waking life to mentalism, it's interesting that the common tactics seem to involve:
1. making patterns
2. visualising
3. characters
4. landscape

Was the brain that can perform mentalism today actually forged thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers?

You're not thinking, you're just being logical

The quote is from physicist Niels Bohr, and is a nice contribution to the current human v. artificial intelligence debate.

There are three video interview extracts with Baroness Susan Greenfield on the BBC Science site, in which the eminent scientist offers some fascinating opinions and predictions on the future of artificial intelligence.

For Greenfield, "The hallmark of creative and exciting thoughts is the ability to make connections where they haven't been made before." There are already computer programs which can learn, in the sense that they can build a knowledge-base from their own experience, and refer to that knowledge base when presented with a new problem. If the new problem corresponds to a problem already encountered, then the computer can use that knowledge. What computers can't yet do, and may in fact never do, is 'think outside the box' (pun intended.)

Could a computer ever achieve consciousness? Greenfield has another nice quote, from Stuart Sutherland, who said he'd believe a computer was conscious when it ran off with his wife. For Greenfield, consciousness is more than just a complex brain, it's the unique byproduct of a complex human brain living INSIDE  a body. Human consciousness has to do with subtle shifts of EMOTION. Animals can perceive their environment as humans can (often better!) but don't, as far as we're aware, have FEELINGS about their environment. Until we can begin to understand the true meaning of human consciousness, how could we hope to model it in a computer?

You must remember this...

I commented, in a Psychology blog last month on a fascinating programme in Radio 4's Law in Action series, which dealt with the reliability of human memory from a lawyer's or criminologist's point of view. All of us, it seems, are susceptible to the implanting of 'false' memories.

You can put this to the test at the BBC Horizon page, where professor Dan Schacter of Harvard University presents an online video memory test. The test is a verbal version of 'Kim's game'  - the old parlour game, in which you had to remember objects on a tray, and then on a subsequent viewing, indicate which object(s) had been removed.

NB Take the test yourself before reading any more of this blog.

Schacter reads out, quite quickly, 15 words, beginning, "candy, sour, sugar, bitter..." He then presents 3 words, "point", "taste", and "sweet", and asks whether they were on the list. You can answer, yes, no, unsure yes or unsure no. Schacter has performed this test many times, and has found overwhelming uniformity in the results. Most subjects will answer:

1) "point" - No (it wasn't)
2) "taste" - Yes (it was)
3) "sweet" - Yes (it wasn't)

The inference of so many subjects getting "sweet" wrong is that our memory is not photographic (or phonographic) but, when presented with a rush of new information, retains the "gist" rather than the facts. Given that the gist was flavours, "sweet" fits very well, even though it wasn't there.

I myself wasn't fooled by "sweet'. I'm no great mnemnist normally, but wonder whether my training as a linguist somehow enabled me to identify a word that hadn't been read out?

Nonetheless, the majority result for this test has profound implications, not least for witnesses in criminal cases. If a well-meaning witness can have a false memory implanted because it fits with the "gist", then what hope is there for the defendant?

Men are from Mars, Women are from... oh, you know, that place where...

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London has come up with suggestions for why mens' and womens' memories are so different. We've known for years that men can remember travel directions and tomes of trivia but are particularly weak on wedding anniversaries. It's now believed that the actual genetic 'machinery' that makes memories is different in the sexes.

Professor Peter Giese, who led the Medical Council-funded research has identified two genes, not present in the female, which seem to be associated with learning and memory-making. So far, his experiments have been limited to male and female mice, so there's a way to go before any generalisations can be made about the human sexes.

Firstly, it was discovered that male mice learnt their way out of a maze more quickly than the females. The males, it seemed, were more quickly able to form the necessary spatial memories. Giese's team then bred mice who lacked these two crucial genes. The maze-solving abilities of the GM females was unaffected. The GM males, however were completely at sea, and spent much time examining their feelings about not being able to get out of the maze.

Research elsewhere has found further evidence of different hard-wiring in the sexes. Harvard Medical School has found that the brain's limbic cortex, which regulates emotions, is larger in women than in men. Interestingly, so are the parts of the frontal lobe concerned with decision-making and problem-solving. (Many women I know would tell me that this is not "interesting", but "obvious.") The Parietal cortex, meanwhile, which is involved with space perception and balance, is bigger in men.

Professor Carey Cooper, a psychologist, specialising in sex differences at Lancaster University, points out: "It is probably a combination of the genetics and hard wiring of the brain together with the social imprinting of gender that has led to the behavioural differences we now see between men and women."

I'm all for scientific research in this area. The sooner we have scientific confirmation of the vast differences between male and female brains, the sooner we'll be able to start getting on.

Synaesthesia tests smell purple

Following on from Monday's blog, I've just completed another online synaesthesia test. 'Do you see what I see?', also by Sagiv and Ward at UCL, will take you about 10 minutes to complete and gives you slightly more feedback on your responses than the music-and-colour test.

In the first part of the test, you are presented with a succession of numbers, letters and days of the week (all black on white) and are invited to select the most appropriate colour for each of them from a colour chart. I found that, for certain numbers, letters or days, I had no hesitation in selecting a colour. 'Tuesday' for me, has always been red, like the number four. I wonder why? My (non-expert) opinion is that my personal synaesthetic connections were formed in childhood, by the accidental choice of colours in my first reading and counting books. (Or perhaps the illustrators of my childhood books were, themselves, synaesthetics, and their choice of colours was dictated by their own synaesthetic preferences?)

The feedback on my responses was disappointingly incomplete. Rather than receiving enlightening comment on the fact that my 2s, As and Sundays were ALWAYS yellow, I was merely told that I'd selected murky green for nine of my twenty-three tests. Lots of things are murky-green to me, especially things I'm indifferent about.

In the second part of the test, I was given just a second to spot the geometrical shape made by several 2s in a sea of 5s. I thought I'd failed utterly as I clicked in turn on the various options, 'triangle', 'square' etc, and was then told I'd correctly identified all the shapes. The purpose of this test, apparently, is to investigate synaesthetic connections between numbers and spatial arrangement. I'm afraid this one passed me by completely, but then I've always had an aversion to numbers, in whatever form (which is, perhaps, worthy of study in itself :)

A further numbers test invited me to 'place' a given number on a clock-face surrounding another given number, e.g. to place 8 at some point on a circle around the number 19. I'm afraid the clock-face parallel was too great for me and, ignoring the central number, I simply placed numbers where they'd appear on a clock-face.

A final, brief test invited me to apply nonsense-words to nonsense-shapes. There were only two shapes, an amoeba and a jagged shape, and my descriptive options were something like "bloogle" and "kikkii." No hesitation there, then. Sagiv and Ward then pointed out that this sort of onomatapoeic connection 'may' lie at the root of all language. I'd like to find out more about this, and if I find anything interesting, I'll share it with you. Meanwhile, try some of the other tests on the BBC Psychology website.

Derek Tastes of Earwax

'Derek Tastes of Earwax' was the title of a BBC 'Horizon' documentary exploring the phenomenon of Synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is the apparently irrational linking in our minds of different senses. Examples might be that "Wednesday is red" or that "the number two is yellow".

The Derek of the programme's title was a regular in a pub, whose landlord was a synaesthetic. Whenever Derek came into the pub, or even if his name was mentioned, the landlord suddenly experienced the taste of earwax. The unfortunate landlord's synaesthesia wasn't limited to Derek. Another pub regular would cause the landlord to taste wet nappies

Synaesthesia was dismissed for years as unworthy of scientific research, though it provoked interest among 20th century artists and musicians, notably the painter Kandinsky and the composer Sir Arthur Bliss, who composed a 'Colour Symphony', in which each of the four movements had a different colour. Today there is much interest in studying how 'creative' minds differ from 'normal' or less-creative minds, and for some researchers, Synaesthesia hold the key to human creativity:

"a number of studies suggest that synaesthesia may be more common among artists, poets and musicians. This has led some scientists to argue that synaesthesia and creativity may share a similar basis - that both may be down to brain processes that involve linking two seemingly unrelated areas.

Some believe that our common synaesthetic abilities may also have been the springboard to language. Connections between our senses of hearing and vision, for example, could have been an important initial step towards the creation of words. Our earliest ancestors may have first started to talk by using sounds that actually evoked the object they wished to describe. According to this theory, language could have emerged from the multitude of synaesthetic connections within our brains."

Now you can discover your inner synaesthete. Sagiv and Ward at UCL have devised several online tests in which you can select, for example, the colour you most associate with certain extracts of music. I've just tried the music-and-colour test and found it initially fun but ultimately frustrating. As with most questionnaires, none of the available options corresponded to the way I wanted to respond. The musical extracts exist in the dimension of time, but the colour options were frozen. One piano extract sounded to me like silvery-blue morphing slowly into dark green, but the options available were blue OR green, neither of which quite fitted the bill. Have a go at the test and see (or hear, or taste) what you think.

So what is normal?

If you're going to investigate what is abnornal, you need to start with a definition of 'normal.' In her recent article 'Typically Twisted,' Kathleen McGowan challenges some of our assumptions about normality.

"Feelings or habits that are out of the ordinary are great fodder for art and entertainment, but they can cause anguish to those who can't understand—and don't appreciate—their own outre tendencies. Of course some people are proud to be twisted, and even cultivate strangeness: Half-blue-eyed, all-pasty-white Goth rocker Marilyn Manson surely doesn't spend much time moping around, wishing he were just like everybody else. But why do many others obsess over not being normal?"

For Dustin Wood, an assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, paying attention to norms is how we stay in step with social expectations. "Normality is the barometer people use to figure out if they're acting the way they should be."

In probing the common standards of normality, Wood has made a surprising discovery: being normal is actually extraordinary. It's an unusual combination of specific traits that all have to do with being extra likable. The people who see themselves as most normal (and are seen that way by others) are much less neurotic than the average person, uncommonly easy to get along with, unusually respectful of propriety, and highly responsible.

Normal people may be nicer than average, but they also have character traits that aren't universally appealing. They're not adventurous. They're not above average in intelligence, nor are they outgoing. If he truth be told, a lot of our best qualities are unusual. A sense for music like Mozart's is certainly exceptional. So is the ability to speak six languages, or the courage to leap onto the subway tracks to save a stranger's life.

Wood has found that monitoring normal behavior is one of the important ways we continue to grow and mature. But off-key qualities often have their own reason for being. They can even have unexpected upsides. Besides, they're what make us endlessly fascinating—and essentially human.

Typically Twisted

There's an entertaining, if somewhat rambling article in this month's Psychology Today, entitled Typically Twisted, in which author Kathleen McGowan lifts the lid on taboo impulses.

"Taboo impulses can be titillating… but more often they're a source of concern for those who harbor secret wishes or unusual desires. If you prefer gallows humor to slapstick or kinky to vanilla, take heart: Dark inclinations have their own logic and benefits."

Amongst other peccadilloes, McGowan examines the world of 'sick' jokes and asks whether these necessarily constitute abnormal behaviour. As an April Fool's prank this year, a student convinced his classmates that a teacher had been assassinated. This might strike us as both sick and abnormal behaviour, until we discover that the prank took place in Iraq. Life in Iraq today is definitely not 'normal', in which light, the prank can be seen as entirely understandable psychological behaviour i.e. normal for Iraq. In a similar prank, an Iraqui woman told her husband's family he'd been arrested by the Americans. How they all laughed when she finally fessed up.

Gallows humour can, it seems, play two vital roles; it gives the humourist distance and perspective from the distressing subject, and it creates a BOND between humourist and audience. The more distressing the prevailing circumstances, the more need humans have of social cohesion. Tyler Stillman, social psychologist at Florida State University says,

"It seems ghoulish, but joking about danger and death in some circumstances is a crucial coping mechanism, not a sign of mental instability. Doctors and emergency medical technicians are famous for gallows humor. Paramedics who tell morbid jokes have lower stress and less burnout than those who don't, one study found. It's never been studied rigorously, so it's hard to know exactly how this kind of humor functions, but having a laugh in the face of death or extreme hardship can certainly have a place in healthy coping. Humor allows people to detach from extremely trying circumstances and attach to other people to get through difficult times."

Anyone whose life circumstances or job description puts them in close touch with mortality may develop a particularly morbid sense of humor as a coping mechanism. Megan Wolff, a doctoral student in the history of public health, says that she and her colleagues often swap stories about their favorite disasters—how many died and whether their deaths were shockingly quick or horrifyingly slow. "Everybody will always name their favorite disaster right off the bat, and they're pretty chipper about it," she says. "My colleague is hugely excited about a flood in which thousands were killed. I'm excited about the Spanish Flu."

Circumstances for 'sick' jokes needn't be as extreme as living in Iraq or dealing with disasters. Knowledge of our own mortality will do fine:

Q: What do you call it when 100 bloggers fall overboard and drown?
A: A good start.

Game, set and a useful lesson learned

In a new book 'A Nation of Wimps' (Broadway Books, 2008)', Hara Estroff Marano examines some of the 'Pitfalls of Perfectionism.'
"Perfectionism may be the ultimate self-defeating behavior. It turns people into slaves of success—but keeps them focused on failure, dooming them to a lifetime of doubt and depression. It also winds up undermining achievement in the modern world."

There's much here which we sort-of knew already, but which is worth saying again, and is extremely well put. The pursuit of perfectionism can have disastrous consequences for us in our personal lives, and worse for our children or students if we are parents or teachers.

"You could say that perfectionism is a crime against humanity. Adaptability is the characteristic that enables the species to survive—and if there's one thing perfectionism does, it rigidifies behavior. It constricts people just when the fast-moving world requires more flexibility and comfort with ambiguity than ever. It turns people into success slaves."

Marano distinguishes between the outcome of an endeavour and the process. Fear of a bad outcome impedes the process. A student terrified of getting a bad mark in an exam will seize up and underperform. We've all seen Wimbledon matches when a player misses a few shots and completely goes to pieces. We've also seen matches when the player remains calm, learns from his/her mistakes, regains control of the match and eventually wins.

The crucial difference, according to Marano, is whether the subject takes adversity personally. Martina Hingis presumably took it very personally when she lost the Ladies' Final and refused to come back to accept the runner-up trophy. Interestingly, you never see Roger Federer throwing his racket and shouting at himself.

Teachers and parents should be on the lookout for children who tend to take setbacks personally. It's not the exam mark which is important in itself, but what the child has learned from the experience. For Marano, the correct response from teacher or parent is, "How do you feel about your mark? What will you do differently next time?" This objectivises the experience, enabling the child to stand aside and observe. Neuro-Linguistic Programming uses similar techniques to enable, for example, an addict to observe their addiction, rather than living in it.

Marano also talks about the curse of pushy parents, who render their possibly quite gifted children useless for employemnt, and quotes a CEO who will only employ the children of first-generation immigrants. Free from parental expectations, these children have grown up to achieve whatever they can achieve, and consequently make the most motivated and resourceful employees.

Laughing despite ourselves

Ever since Henri Bergson's 'Le Rire', scientists, psychologists, anthropologists and many others have been offering theories for humour. Why do we laugh, what makes us laugh, and how does it make us laugh? Why does humour seem to be such a defining human characterisic?

In the May 16 MFL blog, I reported on some of the findings of Jonathan Miller: "One of the reasons we seek [humour] is because it mobilises cognitive versatility. And the evolutionary advantage of cognitive versatility is self-evident: the smarter you are about categories, the smarter you are about similarities, about dissimilarities, about differences and resemblances, the smarter you are in dealing with life’s cognitive challenges.”

British science writer Alastair Clarke thinks along similar lines. His Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour
sees humour in terms of 1) recognition of of an unsuspected pattern and 2) payoff or reward for recognising it. When we 'get' a joke, we see a pattern we hadn't been expecting. In Miller's terms, we get 'smarter about categories'. Getting smarter is obviously to our evolutionary advantage, and, like so many activities which are to our evolutionary advantage (not least, sex!) the brain rewards us with a feel-good dopamine fix.

In Clarke's words, "The theory is an evolutionary and cognitive explanation of how and why any individual finds anything funny. Effectively it explains that humour occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, and that recognition of this sort is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response, an element of which is broadcast as laughter."

This new theory even explains how we can laugh, despite ourselves, at biting satire, where the topic is anything but amusing: it's not the joke's 'victim' we're laughing at, nor do we find the joke's 'truth' a pleasant one - we're laughing because we've recognised a pattern.

Steven Kolter, in Psychology Today  offers this example:
Q. How do you get a nun pregnant?
A. Dress her up as an altar-boy.

I found a similar one on the cover of this week's Private Eye
Mugabe's speech-bubble says "The opposition were soundly beaten." His bodyguard adds "To Death."