Worry is the mother of invention

A recent psychological study from Singapore Management University has found that being worried can help one's creativity:

By systematically manipulating the experience of emotional states, those who actually experienced worrisome emotions produced creative designs that were rated as being more creative by their peers (Study 2) and were more cognitively flexible in generating unusual uses of a common object under high cognitive load (Study 3).

Note that the study uses divergent thinking as the proxy for creativity. Taking this into account, we can say that being worried makes one to consider a greater range of options. This may also explain why in times of uncertainty and trouble people generate many conspiracy theories. It's not clear what emotional state helps separate good ideas from the bad ones.

tags: creativity, psychology, thinking, cognition, research

Lunch Talk: Cognitive neuroscience of sleep and dreams. (UC Berkeley)

Two lectures from UC Berkeley Cognitive Science 102 podcast.

Part 1

Part 2

tags: lunchtalk, psychology, science, cognition, biology

Reality Distortion Field (RDF) discovered.

Here's what Wikipedia tells us about Steve Jobs' RDF:

Reality distortion field (RDF) is a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs' charisma. The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible.

Is RDF real? Yes, seems the the answer. According to an MRI study conducted at Aarhus University in Denmark,

We find that recipients’ assumptions about senders’ charismatic abilities have important effects on their executive network. Most notably, the Christian participants deactivated the frontal network consisting of the medial and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally in response to speakers who they believed had healing abilities. An independent analysis across subjects revealed that this deactivation predicted the Christian participants’ subsequent ratings of the speakers’ charisma and experience of God’s presence during prayer.

In summary, interaction with a perceived charismatic person inhibits critical thinking. Furthermore, once the charismatic person becomes an authority figure ("genius"), the effect is combined with people's natural tendency to conform.

tags: psychology, control, communications, innovation, effect, cognition

Source: Uffe Schjoedt, et. al. The power of charisma—perceived charisma inhibits the frontal executive network of believers in intercessory prayer. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci (2011) 6 (1): 119-127. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq023 First published online: March 12, 2010.

A recipe for procrastination: more options and an important goal.

(November 14, 2011). NYT writes that it is difficult for beginning runners to start running because they face a lot of choices. The finding is consistent with a 2000 paper by Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin, "Choice and Procrastination."

- Our first main finding is that providing a person with additional options can induce procrastination. If a new option has a sufficiently high long-run net benefit, the person will plan to do this new option rather than what she would have otherwise done; and if this new option has a sufficiently large cost relative to its immediate benefit, the person now procrastinates.

- Our second main finding is that people may procrastinate more in pursuit of important goals than unimportant ones, or equivalently that increasing importance can exacerbate procrastination. The more important are a person’s goals, the more ambitious are her plans. But the more ambitious are her plans — i.e., the higher is the effort she intends to incur — the more likely she is to procrastinate in executing those plans.

The second finding is interesting because it runs contrary to the common advice to aim high with your goals. That is, for most people aiming high is a recipe for procrastination, i.e. they will end lower if they aim high rather than low. On the other hand, a person capable of dealing with procrastination has an enormous advantage when aiming high. In a world full of distractions, the ability to avoid them carries a large benefit. The famous Marshmallow Experiment seems to confirm this finding.

One way to fight procrastination is to use commitment devices. A commitment device is a mechanism that prevents you from being tempted away from a long-term strategy. For example, tying Odysseus to the mast to avoid the temptation of the Sirens' song is a commitment device.

The Lunch Talk videos I started posting in this blog every day at noon is also a commitment device. It guarantees that, instead of aimless web browsing during lunchtime, I've got at least a good chance to listen to an interesting speaker every day.

tags: psychology, control, education, problem, solution, cognition

NBA lockout: Strict Business vs Arousal as a recipe for breakdown.

The ongoing NBA labor negotiations is a textbook study of a mismatch between emotional and business levels of perception in a high-stake conflict.

(November 14, 2011. ESPN) - From a strict business standpoint, the players' best move is to offer a counterproposal, and to be prepared to accept the league's proposal if their counterproposal is rejected.

But the players aren't operating from a strict business standpoint. They're angry. They feel that they haven't gotten a fair deal from the owners, and the only way to ensure a fair deal is to take the league to court.

Anger is a psychological state of arousal. And we know, e.g. from a 2005 research paper by Ariely and Loewenstein (DOI: 10.1002/bdm.501) that:

Efforts at self-control that involve raw willpower (Baumeister & Vohs, 2003) are likely to be ineffective in the face of the dramatic cognitive and motivational changes caused by arousal.

Most likely, the negotiations will go nowhere until negotiators' business and psych levels are aligned.

tags: psychology, business, cognition

A review of The Mystery of Consciousness

Philosopher John R. Searle writes in The New York Review of Books:

DARPA: Education Dominance research.

via Wired:

Darpa, the Defense Department blue sky research shop, has been hard at work on the muscularly-titled Education Dominance Program aimed at creating digital tutors for troops. It’s worked pretty well thus far, too. When researchers looked at students using Darpa’s digital tutors for Navy IT training last year, they found that those using Darpa’s digital study buddies learned “substantially more” (.pdf) and did so in a much shorter time period than other students.

Fifty years from now DARPA–inspired study buddy will come with a "textbook" as an automated tutor-friend on you favorite social network. We won't have Matrix-like direct skill download, but most of the basic training in core school subjects - Math, Language, Creativity - will be incorporated into virtual learning environment.

tags: education, information, innovation, technology, social, network, cognition, 3x3, interface, interaction, psychology

A quote from Michael Wheeler's book "Reconstructing the cognitive world":

The strength of these connections are known as the network's weights, and it is common to think of the network's "knowledge" as being stored in its set of weights. The values of these weights are modifiable, so, given some initial configuration, changes to the weights can be made that improve the performance of the network over time.
... the specific structure of the network, and the weight-adjustment algorithm, the network may learn to carry out some desired input-output mapping.
... most connectionist networks also exploit a distinctive kind of representation, so-called distributed representation, according to which a representation is conceived as a pattern of activation spread out across a group of processing units. p.10

From this perspective, relevancy of information relates to its ability to change the network's weights. Irrelevant information passes by through the network without reconfiguring its "knowledge" and/or ability to act upon it.

Also of interest, a technique to build intelligence into a distribution sub-system. In this case, the distribution and control components of the system are integrated and cannot be substituted with a competing solution. The "vertical" axis (Distribution--Control) on the 5-element system diagram becomes not just important, but essential to the system's performance.

tags: cognition, network, control, computers, information, distribution, system, five element analysis

Laura T. Thomas and Alejandro Lleras, researchers from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, confirmed earlier findings that tracking even an unrelated pattern with your eyes can improve your problem-solving performance. Here's their 2007 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review paper.

I think it might explain that drawing things out during a problem-solving session, e.g. The Three Magicians exercise, helps people come up with better ideas.

Also, a recent book by Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin, describes some really cool methods to "solve problems by drawing".