This article is rather long, but still will only take a few minutes to read.  It is a small compilation of amazing phenomena that to me demonstrate how little we really know about what our conscious minds are actually doing.  Some and maybe much of what we subjectively experience may be an illusion and what is actually happening “out there” may be a lot different.  I find it all incredibly fascinating and I hope you do too.  Some of this is really hard to accept because it strikes at what we call free will, but I would ask you to open your mind a bit and go where the evidence leads.

There are people who can clearly see and pick up objects when instructed to do so.  And yet these same people will insist they are blind.  Their conscious mind has no visual picture.  There are other people with the opposite problem.  They clearly cannot see, but believe they can.  If you asked them to describe how you look they would.  The description would be inaccurate because they are blind, but their conscious mind is creating a picture of you in their heads.

Split-brain patients who have no idea why their right brain picked up a fork, will make up a plausible sounding story with their left brain and they believe it.  They have no idea that they just made it up.  Evidently our brains are more than willing to make up a story that is false as long as it is plausible.  Remember that the next time you explain why you did something.  Also consider the following.

Experiments have shown that your brain is often making decisions about what to do before you consciously think you have decided.  In an article in the April 13th 2008 issue of Nature Neuroscience, the authors described an experiment in which computer analysis of brain scans were able to predict which choice a subject would make up to seven seconds before the subject consciously decided which choice to make.  While the predictions were not perfect, they far exceeded chance.  This is a replication of earlier controversial experiments indicating the same thing.  One scientist even hooked up a machine to his subjects that detected their brains decision to push a button.  He then had the machine advance a slide that the subject was deciding to advance by pushing the button.  Those subjects were completely surprised by seeing the slide advance before they consciously were aware that they had decided to push the button and advance the slides!

Ponder the implications for a moment.  Even when we have time to consciously decide, we may not be actually consciously deciding.  We may be consciously believing we are consciously deciding something our brain has already decided unconsciously.  Maybe it’s like the split brain patient and we are just making it all up.

Susan Blackmore describes an interesting illusion that demonstrates how our stream of consciousness can fool us:

Consciousness also does funny things with time. A good example is the “cutaneous rabbit”. If a person’s arm is tapped rapidly, say five times at the wrist, then twice near the elbow and finally three times on the upper arm, they report not a series of separate taps coming in groups, but a continuous series moving upwards―as though a little creature were running up their arm. We might ask how taps two to four came to be experienced some way up the forearm when the next tap in the series had not happened yet. How did the brain know where the next tap was going to fall?

How indeed?  It’s an illusion and our subjective experience does not reflect what really happened.  If our conscious representation of what was happening “out there” was a real-time realistic representation, this illusion would not be possible.

A couple of months ago while watching the Wimbledon men’s final between Rafael Nadal and Tomas Berdych, I remembered some articles I had read about how long it takes a picture to form in our conscious mind after the photons strike our retinas.  It’s at least 100 milliseconds and maybe as much as 200 to 300 milliseconds.  So if you do the math, you would conclude that when Nadal serves to Berdych, the ball will be well on its way across the court and maybe even at the net, before Berdych would have a conscious picture in his mind of Nadal’s racquet striking the ball.  By the time Berdych “watched” the ball into his racket it would be bouncing off the backstop.  This basically makes it physiologically impossible for Berdych to consciously react to the serve in time to hit it; the ball is moving too fast for that.  So how does he hit it and why does he think he is observing it all in real time?  How does a batter hit a pitch coming at him at 100 mph?  Does he really see it in slow motion like he might claim?

One theory that has some clear evidence for it is that our brains see into the future.  For moving objects the brain doesn’t draw a picture in your conscious mind of what it actually sees, but draws a picture in your mind of where it predicts the object will be when it takes into account its own visual processing delay.  I can hardly get my mind around that one but I’ve read about some experiments that support it.  I’ve also read the theory that it is the much faster unconscious mind that is controlling the action.

When you are driving down a street and a child runs out in front of your car, your foot comes off the accelerator and moves toward the brake long before you are consciously aware of seeing the child.  When you see what looks like a snake or an actual snake you jump out of the way before your brain can present the picture in your conscious mind.  I’ve experienced this with our cat.  It pounces with such lightning speed, I am jumping before I see it.  Our brains can even see and interpret images that are too fleeting to register at all in our conscious minds.  These phenomena are all demonstrable in the lab.

Our memories are notoriously bad.  Each time we recall a memory we must store it all over again.  The corruptions and mistakes in recall are thus made part of the new memory and we can’t distinguish the difference between the true and the false.  People who have false memories implanted will often insist they are real even after they have been told they were planted.  Yet even knowing all this, I subjectively experience my own memories as accurate.  That doesn’t make them true; many of them likely are seriously in error.

To me this is all endlessly fascinating.  It certainly does not match our subjective experiences or intuitive beliefs.  But I don’t take it all too seriously.  The fact that it is our unconscious minds controlling much of our behavior doesn’t mean it is in someway not us.  I do not believe our stream of consciousness is just an endless stream of fantasy.  We are way too successful a species for that to be the case.  Our conscious minds obviously work for us in some way and we function quite well with them on a day-to-day basis.

As humans we have a remarkable ability to examine our own minds, but we must do it in a rigorous and scientific manner.  In that regard, we must let go of our personal and subjective biases and go where the evidence leads.  The neurosciences are in their infancy and I believe we have many more surprises to come.  I can hardly wait.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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“Working memory is the cognitive function responsible for keeping information online, manipulating it, and using it in your thinking. It is the way that you delegate the things you encounter to the parts of our brain that can take action. In this way, working memory is necessary for staying focused on a task, blocking out distractions, and keeping you updated and aware about what’s going on around you.” – Cogmed

What if there was one feature of your brain that was critical to:

• Your ability to control your attention?
• Your ability to concentrate in the face of distractions?
• Your ability to multi-task?
• Your general reasoning ability?
• Your ability to learn and comprehend what you read?
• Your overall performance on measures of intelligence?

Further, what if it is possible to improve the performance of that one feature and consequently improve all those other abilities that are dependent upon it?  There has recently been some tantalizing new evidence that working memory is that key feature and that in can be improved with training.

“At present, working memory capacity is the best predictor for intelligence that has yet been derived from theories and research on human cognition.” — Heinz-Martin Süß

I find it an intriguing possibility that we may be able to increase general working memory ability.   Historically it has been believed that working memory and fluid intelligence are fixed abilities that can’t be improved.  Even worse, tests unambiguously show that these abilities actually decline with age; something that affects virtually all of us that live long enough.  Your working memory and fluid intelligence peak at around age 25 and working memory declines significantly by age 50.

In 2010 a panel convened by the NIH reviewed the studies and literature available and concluded that cognitive training was the only method that had clearly been demonstrated to reduce the risk of cognitive decline in aging.

There have been numerous studies on whether practicing mental tasks might improve mental abilities.  While practicing a certain mental task usually shows an improvement in the performance of that particular task, there is seldom any transference to other abilities or to any kind of general ability.  That may be changing with some recent evidence on working memory training.

Simply using your working memory, which you do continually, doesn’t improve it any more than simply lifting a beer bottle to your lips is going to make your biceps stronger.  That requires focused and intense workouts with gradually increasing resistance.  So it goes with your working memory.  You don’t get something for nothing.  You have to work at it.  The more you work at it, the greater your improvement.  For me however, it is an investment that pays huge dividends and is more than worth the effort.

How to Improve Your Working Memory

What follows is the best information I have found on improving your working memory.

Dual N-Back Training

A study on dual N-back training garnered huge publicity a couple of years ago and may be the most effective training available for the improvement working memory.  In dual N-back training, you simultaneously keep track of the the locations of an object on the screen and the sequence of auditory letter sounds.  As you train, you progressively get better at holding more instances of both in working memory at the same time.  It is a very intense mental workout.   There is a free download called Brain Workshop that is based on the study is very well done.  I highly recommend it and use it myself.  It also has the option of triple, quadruple, and quintuple N-Back training.  I have been able to verify that using N-Back training has improved my working memory performance on working memory tests.  I know this anecdotal, but I have attempted to verify the improvement in the most objective way I can.  Here is an article in Wired about the N-back study: Forget Brain Age: Researchers Develop Software That Makes You Smarter

Chess

Chess may be another activity that stretches your working memory capacity.  As you play out move sequences in your mind, you must maintain them in working memory as you analyze the various options.  In one study of older people, chess was the single activity most predictive for a reduction in the risk of mental decline.

Reading

In order to comprehend what you read, you must maintain the beginning of the sentence in memory as you read through to the end of the sentence.  The more complex the material, the higher the load it puts on your working memory.

Dopamine

The drug Ritalin is often used by college students and I believe has been shown to improve working memory.  Instead of Ritalin, try increasing your brain’s dopamine levels by more natural or safer means.  Take L-Tyrosine and/or DL-Phenylalanine supplements to increase the levels of dopamine in your brain.  These are natural amino acids.   I recommend from 1.5 grams to 6 grams daily of each divided into three doses taken between meals.  These foods are also good sources.

• Wild game
• Cottage cheese
• Chicken
• Duck
• Ricotta
• Turkey
• Pork
• Wheat germ
• Walnuts
• Soybeans
• Dark chocolate
• Granola
• Milk
• Egg
• Yogurt
• Oats
• Sausage meat
• Low-fat cheese

Exercise

Exercise is such a proven benefit to brain health, it’s hard to believe it doesn’t help maintain the parts of the brain involved in working memory.  Even if it doesn’t, it helps other aspects of brain function so it should be a part of any program.

The best book I’ve read on the subject of working memory is The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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“Contemplative Man, the fellow who came to understand the world sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is a goner. He’s being succeeded by Flickering Man, the fellow who darts from link to link, conjuring the world out of continually refreshed arrays of isolate pixels, shadows of shadows. The linearity of reason is blurring into the nonlinearity of impression; after five centuries of wakefulness, we’re lapsing into a dream state.”  — Nicholas Carr

Note From Stephen:  This is a moderately long article.  In the spirit of it’s content, I resisted the urge to shorten it even though I know that means fewer people will read it all the way through.

Our brains are plastic; their structure changes based upon the way we use them.  This is no longer in dispute.  Therefore, it would be reasonable to conclude the Internet and our modern, always connected, world is changing our brains in new ways. We may actually be changing the way we think in important ways.  Whether this is good or bad is a subject of considerable debate.

Aside from changes in the wiring of your brain, there is evidence that the way information on the Internet is organized impacts how much of it we retain; how well we learn.  As an example, when we are reading on the internet we are typically bombarded with a lot of decisions to make.  The very existence of hypermedia links require our brain to make a decision on whether to click on them or not.  These decisions and other distractions increase the cognitive load on our brain and make us less likely to remember the material.  The more of your very limited cognitive resources you focus on encoding and integrating the ideas you are exposed to, the more likely you will be to remember them.  The web is not optimized for that kind of focus.

An excellent tool to remove the clutter and distractions surrounding text on websites is Readability.  Try it out on this article.

“The ability to skim text is every bit as important as the ability to read deeply.  What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading.  Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself – our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts.  We’ve reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State’s Joe O’Shea – a philosophy major, no less, is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn’t read books but that he doesn’t see any particular need to read them.” — Nicholas Carr

If you care about your intellectual self, you owe it to yourself to consider how your Internet behavior is affecting your brain.  A thoughtful argument that we are losing something important with our Internet ways can be found in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.  I found the book to be a compelling and thought-provoking read. As a book, it is much more in-depth and persuasive than his famous article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  For an alternative viewpoint try Clay Shirky who is endlessly enthusiastic about the potential of the Internet.  His latest book is Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.  The Google article and and a series of articles by various authors in response are available on the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog.

I think both sides are right.  Google and the Internet are making us both smart and stupid.  There is endless potential, but if we are not careful we may be risking some of the traits we value most in ourselves.  I for one don’t want to become just another node on some giant global Google brain.  Wisdom and creativity spring from a deep well of personal knowledge and experience that is absorbed, integrated, and shuffled over a period of time.  People who believe they can outsource their knowledge to the Internet, and this is quite common among the young, will be missing that deep well of knowledge from which our intellect arises.  That well doesn’t come from the shallows of social media and infotainment.  Unless we drag ourselves out of the shallows and into some deep water on a regular basis, I think we are indeed losing some of what makes us special.

Attention spans have shrunk to what seems like a few seconds.  How many of you can sit still for a 10 minute video?  You would think people are being asked to watch 4 hour documentary on the history channel.  Unfortunately the best ones are usually the longer ones; occasionally they have some meat (TED talks for example).

Deep and reflective thinking seems to be disappearing and I think it is in large degree a result of changes brought about by Internet.  If it is still there it is being overwhelmed by the shallows.  Writers no longer write what they think, they write what they hope will rank in Google.  Despite all the touted diversity of the Internet, obsession with Search Engine Optimization often takes priority over content.  Google is funneling us into the narrow and boring land of the common.

We are undergoing a monumental technological and cultural shift in the way we live, work, and communicate.  We are probably undergoing a significant shift in the way our brains work.   On the whole I think it is a positive change and I for one would never want to go back to the pre-Internet era.  I doubt many others would either.  I have benefited in immeasurable ways from this information explosion; I feel like the world is literally at my fingertips.

The key to thriving in this new world while retaining some of our intellectual heritage is a sense of balance.  I know that sounds cliché but it may be nowhere more important than with regard to the Internet.  Unfortunately, if you watch the trends especially in young people who have grown up with all this, balance is exactly what is missing.

Here are some suggested alternatives to being online; alternatives that encourage deeper intellectual development:

• Disconnect for significant periods of time – When you disconnect that means stop texting, talking on your cell, and checking email on your PDA.  You should disconnect for hours at a time and if that is too hard start slowly.  I know this is hard; it’s hard for me.  That seductive addiction to the online world will want to drag you back.  But you simply can’t focus the way you need to when you are connected, regardless of what you may believe.
• Focus on something intellectual while you are disconnected – If you spend all your disconnected time watching mindless reality shows, you really aren’t accomplishing anything.  Yes you need down time and relaxation time, but I’m suggesting you also need thinking time.  TV is somewhat passive so it’s not my first choice, but there is quality content if you look for it.  Documentaries, history, biographies, nature, and science shows are all excellent choices.
• Read books – Reading rates for pleasure are dropping rapidly.  Even more frightening is that much of the time spent reading is also spent multi-tasking with other media like watching TV or texting.  This is especially true among children.  Reading paper books or electronic books on something like a Kindle in a quiet place away from your computer allows you to concentrate in a way that’s nearly impossible online.  If you are using other media or skimming and hopping around online you simple can’t get lost in your thoughts or in a story.  If you are in a noisy environment put on headphones and listen to white noise such as pleasing rain sounds.
• Read non-fiction part of the time – I read mostly non-fiction.  You don’t have to read books on theoretical physics, but try to read books that make you think.
• Read in moderate stretches of time – I will sometimes read for hours at a time.  That’s probably a mistake because your brain needs time to consolidate what you are reading.  There is some evidence that you should take short breaks about every 30 minutes.  But you can’t get lost in thought or into the flow of what you are reading if you read in 5 minutes stretches.
• Spend time in reflective thought – This is probably by far the toughest for most people.  I know it is for me.  I have a difficult time doing it in a chair so I usually combine it with a walk in a pleasing, at least partially natural environment.
• Rest and Renew – learning requires renewal time.  Time for your brain to reload and to consolidate and integrate what you are absorbing into long-term memory.  Sleep is critical to this process so get plenty of it.  But even beyond sleep, activities like a quiet walk in a park have been shown to increase subsequent mental performance.

“But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”.  A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” — Richard Foreman

I don’t want to be a pancake.  What about you?

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These are scientific ways to boost your creativity and problem solving skills.  They are all simple and based upon the results of controlled experiments.  They may seem silly or strange, but they are proven to work.

Priming is a technique where you think about something or create some environmental cue that will alter your subsequent performance.  Seeing a design where one item stands out as different or thinking about creative types will significantly impact your creative output.

• Spend a moment thinking about the typical traits of artists or musicians to increase creativity.
• Spend a moment thinking about the typical traits of a professor, scientists, or mathematicians to increase problem solving ability.
• Put a design like this on your computer background or print it off and hang it up so you are peripherally aware of it.  You can use whatever designs you like but make sure you you make something stand out as a contrast and use positive colors like green, blue, orange, and yellow.  Avoid red and black.

Creativity Booster

• Think for a few moments about what problem you are trying to solve or what you are trying to create.  Then, for a little while (5 to 15 minutes) do something that totally consumes and distracts your brain such as a Sudoku puzzle.  Then go back to your problem and write down any ideas that come to mind.
• Work in an area with a window that looks out on trees, grass, gardens, or other natural environments.
• Do your creative work in a natural setting outside.
• Place a plant or flowers on your desk.
• Expose yourself to bright hues of the colors green, orange, yellow, or beige.  Avoid red and dark colors.
• Do anything to relax such as soothing music, breathing, meditation.
• While working put your hand on the table or other object and gently pull towards you.  You don’t need to pull hard enough to move anything.
• Expose yourself to novel ideas, information, experiences.
• Lie down instead of sitting or standing up.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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Novelty is an important component in fostering creativity.

Optical illusions work because of the perceptual shortcuts your brain has developed from past perceptual experience.  This tendency of your brain to make snap judgments and statistical predictions is a very good thing.  It occurs in many different areas of your brain and it reduces by many magnitudes the amount of mental resources required to function in your every day life.

The downside of this is that your thoughts tend to fall into ruts.  Thoughts travel easily along well worn neural pathways.   You get stuck inside a path and can’t easily get out of it.

You can’t think outside the box if you  keep sitting in the same box.  Imagination uses some of the same visual circuits as perception.  In order to imagine new ideas you need  create new visual wiring in your brain.  You need new and loosely connected patterns to help trigger new ways of stringing ideas together.

Seeking out new experience does exactly that.  Children squeal with delight at novel experiences because their immature brains are desperately trying to make sense of the world.  They instinctively act in a way that produces discovery and learning.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could get some of that delightful attitude back into our adult lives?  Even more, there is evidence that novelty seeking is a key to long term well-being and brain health.  See Todd Kashdan’s book Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life.

Since we are visual creatures and since visual circuits are used in imaginative thinking, novel visual experiences are very important to creativity.  The richer the experience the better.   Here are some ideas on things you can do to increase novelty in your life.

1. New experiences involving both vision and movement.  Your brain loves physical movement as long as that movement is attended to and is not automatic.  Combining physical movement with a visual experience is ideal, so do something that makes you keep your eyes open.  Whether it is dance, yoga, sports, martial arts, or something else, novel movement with focused visual attention is great for your body and brain.  Be sure and change it up frequently.  Play different sports, learn new dance moves, etc.
2. People, people, people.  There have been a slew of studies showing the mental and physical benefits of social involvement.  For novelty, go further out into your social networks.  Engage more with people you know who are not your friends or regulars in your inner circle.  Going even further and meeting and socializing with brand new people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds is a fantastic way to experience novelty.  Your same old friends bring the same old things – lovely as they may be.
3. Physical is better then virtual.  Brain scans show that you have a richer pattern of neuronal activity when viewing an actual physical object than you do when viewing it on a two-dimensional screen.  I am not opposed to computer stimulation (that sounds bad), but obviously being there and experiencing it in the real world is better than watching pixels flash on a two-dimensional plane.
4. Change up your environment.  Doing the same thing in the same room with the same furnishings is not conducive to creativity.  Novel surroundings boost the creative juices.  So instead of sitting in a bland office, talk a walk in the woods to do some thinking.  Get out your laptop and do some work on a beach, a park, or in a different room.  Change your furniture and decorations around.  Do things in a variety of places.
5. Drive, walk, and exercise using different routes.  Just travelling a new route and seeing something different can trigger a new connection in your brain.
6. Diversify your reading material.  Read fiction and non-fiction, something technical and something light and breezy, thrillers, biography, philosophy, etc.  I know you can’t read everything and I personally tend to focus on narrow categories, but I’m committed to expanding my reading horizons.
7. Travel, travel, travel.  This one activity can introduce you to so many novel experiences visually, intellectually, and socially, that it may be hard to beat.  If you can afford it, actually live for a while in different locations.  Even if you don’t have time or means to travel far, you can travel out of your neighborhood or city almost any time you want.
8. Natural is better than artificial.  I admit this is just a personal bias, but I have to believe our brains do better in a natural environment for which they have been sculpted than in an artificial one.  I know there have been some studies showing the benefits of natural sunlight and green spaces, but mostly this is just an intuition of mine.
9. Vary everything.  Whatever it is you do, look for ways to vary it.  The more variation the better.  Look for the mysterious or the things you have never noticed before, even in the mundane.  Just stop and smell the roses for once.  You’ll be amazed what you see for the first time if you just stop and look.
10. Think Laterally.  This is a great way to generate novel ideas.  Check out this Wikipedia article on lateral thinking, especially the tools section.  Lateral thinking generally involves trying to put random and unconnected or exaggerated ideas together.  It’s a way to challenge your default modes of thought.

Please add your own ideas on how to stimulate creativity through novel experiences.  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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This is the second part of my article on The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t–and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger by Daniel Gardner.  If you have not read Part I of this article, please do so: The Science of Fear – Part I.  Part I describes the reasons behind our fears and Part II will discuss relevant risk numbers and how they relate to current events.

How Likely Is It?

Most of our exposure to dangers or risk in the media leaves out a crucially important factor.  What is the likelihood of it actually happening to you?  If you are told taking a new kind of birth control increases your risk of breast cancer by 20% compared to an existing type, that may sound bad but you have learned nothing useful.  If the existing risk is 0.10% and the risk of the new type is 0.12% (increasing from 1 in 1,000 to 1.2 in 1,000), that is essentially irrelevant if there is any advantage of taking the new type.  For example, fewer side effects or greater convenience.  In either case this risk is very low and the difference is probably less than the margin of error anyway.  You simply cannot make reasonable decisions about behavior without knowing actual baseline risks.

What is a Significant Risk?

In addition to knowing the actual risk you have to decide if that risk crosses any kind of threshold and what if any behavioral change you should take in response to it.  If you don’t take the time to understand the actual situation, you are doomed to be ruled by irrational fears.  Some risk is worth a response and some is not.  It depends upon the likelihood of the event happening and the cost of altering behavior in response.  You aren’t going to get that from media stories or what other people think.  Your caveman brain is simply not equipped to intuitively deal with risk in our modern and connected world.  Here is my personal view of various levels of risk.

• 25.0% (1 in 4) If I am at 25.0% risk of something dangerous, I consider that an enormous risk that requires action.  If I live to be very old, say 100, my lifetime risk of cancer is probably somewhere around 25.0%.
• 1.0% (1 in 100) Let’s say my annual risk of some danger is 1%.  To me that’s a pretty significant risk and if there are things I can do to reduce it, I will.  High mountain climbing might fall into this category.  I’ve read that around 3% of Everest climbers die on the attempt.  Even if I was capable of climbing Everest I wouldn’t because that risk is too high.  But there are people to whom that risk is worth it.  It is still relatively low and 97 out of 100 will come back alive.
• 0.1% (1 in 1,000) This is getting to the point where I personally don’t expend much thought about it.  Obviously if there is an easy way to avoid it without much cost or crimping my style, then I would.  Things like violence (not murder but assault) at school fall into this range.
• 0.01% (1 in 10,000) This is the level where some risk management experts (or legal institutions) starting talking about de minimis.  This means too insignificant for concern.  This level is de minimis for me.  This is in the range of the annual risk for dying in a car accident in the U.S.  I wouldn’t avoid driving anywhere at any time as a result of this risk and most people I know don’t either.  But, I fasten my restraints because they are no cost to me to do so and they also reduce the risk of injury which is far more likely than death.
• 0.001% (1 in 100,000) or 0.0001% (1 in 1,000,000) These are so microscopically unlikely I wouldn’t waste 1 second of my life worrying about them and I don’t think anyone else should either.  And yet you may be surprised at what falls into these categories or are even more unlikely.

Risks

32.0% – Rate of overweight children in U.S.
3.0% – Risk of death from climbing mount Everest
2.0% – Rate of women aged 50 having breast cancer
0.016% – Annual U.S. risk of childhood cancer
0.013% – Annual U.S. risk of death in a car accident
0.010% – Annual U.S. risk of death from the flu
0.0047% – Annual U.S. risk of being murdered
0.0028% – 2009 death risk from swine flu
0.0001% – Annual U.S. risk for accidently suffocating in your own bed
0.0001% – Annual U.S. risk for dying in terrorist attack
0.00007% – Annual U.S. risk of teenager or child being abducted by a stranger and killed or not returned
0.00006% – Annual U.S. risk of being murdered at school (e.g. Columbine)
0.0000013% – Annual worldwide risk of shark attack

Factoids To Make You Think

• There are probably 1,000,000 naturally occurring chemicals in foods and 50% of them are carcinogenic in lab tests
• If terrorists took down a commercial airliner in the U.S. every single week and you took a plane trip once a month, you would still be more likely to die driving to the airport than on the airplane.
• If you bought a lottery ticket on Monday, you would be 2,500 times as likely to die before the Saturday drawing than you would be to win the drawing.
• You are 30 times as likely to be killed by lightning than by a shark

What do you think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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I grew up thinking my unconscious mind regulated my breathing and heart rate and other autonomic functions.  I assumed that my thinking was done only at the conscious level.  I was clearly wrong.

One of the most amazing and at the same time unsettling ideas emerging from research in the neurological and psychological sciences in recent decades, is the power and the pervasive nature of automatic unconscious (or nonconscious) thinking.  It’s amazing because we have an incredible thinking and problem solving machine operating beneath the conscious level of our awareness.  It’s unsettling because it is becoming apparent that some, and probably many, of our decisions are made by unconscious processing before we become consciously aware of them.  That is a topic for another time.

Some Complex Decisions Are Better Made Unconsciously

Your conscious mind can only manipulate a very limited number of chunks of information in working memory.  It has limited processing capacity.  This is not the case for the unconscious mind.  It is a massive parallel processing machine that performs amazing feats that we have not yet been able to replicate with computers.  The unconscious mind also has a much higher processing speed than the conscious mind.  Scientists have estimated the bits-per-second of each, but I can’t remember where I’ve read them or what the numbers were.  I do remember the conscious mind’s processing powers were tiny in comparison.

As strange and counter-intuitive as it may sound, this means that decisions in which a large number of variables or units of data must be compared and manipulated are going to overwhelm the limited capacity of your conscious mind.  The general rule then is to leave the more complex decisions, those with a lot of variables, to the power of your unconscious mind.  Simpler serial or logical decisions with fewer variables are better suited to the conscious reasoning process.

The last time I bought a car I thought my head was going to explode.  I kept trying to decide between two cars that both had their different advantages and disadvantages.  It was difficult to compare the weight of the various factors, and there were simply too many variables for me to get a clear handle on what to do.  I finally went with the gut feeling I had been having all along and I never have regretted it.

An Experiment in Choosing the Best Apartment

Imagine this.  Four fictitious apartments are assigned 12 attributes each.  Things like “has an attractive look”, “is fairly large”, “has a bad landlord”, and “is in a noisy” neighborhood.  These attributes had been pretested and set up in a way that there was a clear choice on the best apartment (a lot more positive attributes) and a clear choice on the worst (a lot more negative attributes).  The other two apartments were neutral.

The subjects of the experiment were then presented the attributes of the apartments one at a time.  After all the attributes of the four apartments were presented, they were asked to make their choice for the best apartment.  They were divided into three groups.  One group was asked to make an immediate decision.  The second group was given time to think about their decision before making it.  The third group was given the same amount of time to complete a distracting task and then they were asked to make a decision.  The distraction task was an intensive working memory task to ensure the subjects couldn’t be consciously thinking about the apartment.  These groups were labeled “immediate”, “conscious”, and “unconscious” respectively.

The bottom line results were that the “unconscious” group consistently produced the best results.  For some reason, pondering the decision and consciously trying to pick the best apartment was not much better than the immediate group that had no time to think about it.  Why would this be so?  You would think that the conscious group’s unconscious mind would also be working on the problem during their conscious thinking time and thus they would get additional benefit from having both minds working the same problem.  With more power on the problem shouldn’t the conscious group produce the best results?

Articulation of Reasons Can Lead to Bias

There is a lot of evidence from other experiments that translating complexity into verbally articulated reasons can cause bias in our minds.  This bias my override the unconscious conclusion.  When we are reasoning consciously, we tend to favor those factors that can be easily articulated and thus we give them more weight than they deserve.  This leads to bad decisions.  Couples who simply report their feelings about the status of their relationship and rate it as “good” are much more likely to still be together six months later than couples who listed the reasons for their relationship status and also rated it as “good”.  The latter are obviously are not able to verbally articulate the true state of the relationship.  The unconsciously generated feeling was simply more accurate than the verbally articulated reasons.  Ladies take note!  Your relationship chatter is not necessarily a good thing

The same thing happened in an experiment on choosing art.  People who just go with what they feel they like, pick differently than those who are asked to list the reasons for their choice.  The reason givers are more likely to be unhappy with their choice later.  Bottom line is that giving reasons often impacts your choice for the worse.  It causes you to emphasize that which can be verbalized over that which can’t.

Focus groups cannot pick television show winners because by articulating their reasons they are biasing their choices.

In the apartment picking experiment there were further trials to try to tease out what was going on in the unconscious mind that allowed it to make a better choice.  It turns out that it seemed to be able to better separate the positive and negative attributes.  Over the time period when it was working on the problem, the unconscious mind was able to increase the polarization of the positive and negative attributes and thereby make a better decision.

You actually make decisions with unconscious processing a lot more often than you realize.  Your unconscious mind often (but not always) communicates its answers to you through feelings.  People who have lost the ability to feel emotions through brain injury are paralyzed by their conscious reasoning.  They can’t make a decision because there are simply too many factors to consider.  They may labor over what others might consider simple decisions for hours and never get anywhere.  So even when you think you are making a rational decision, you are often just rationalizing an unconscious feeling after your unconscious mind has already decided for you, usings reasons of which you are not consciously aware.

What Does All This Mean to You

Should we then just give up conscious thinking?  Of course not.  The conscious reasoning powers you have are excellent for serial and logical deductive thinking.  They just can’t handle the massive parallel processing of the unconscious mind.  Further, the conscious mind often needs to overrule the mistakes and errors of the unconscious.  When looking for my new car, I felt really good about a $125,000 dollar Mercedes, but my conscious mind eliminated that option from consideration.  It would have given my bank account a bad feeling!

Experts in the field believe that in the case of complex decisions where there are a lot of variables, you need to give yourself a goal, such as to choose a new car, and then consciously become informed of the relevant information.  Then you stop thinking about the decision and do something else while your unconscious mind evaluates.  Later, maybe the answer will just pop into your head, but if not you are going to have feelings about the right choice.  Learn to read those feelings and go with them.  If you try to reason it out you become susceptible to the verbal bias I described above.

By nature I am a very logical and rational person.  It is very hard for me, and I think for a lot of other people, to believe that some decisions can be better made unconsciously.  However, the experimental evidence is piling up.  Furthermore, most people just don’t realize the critical part that unconsciously generated feelings play in most of their day-to-day decisions.

The skill that is going to make the difference in improving your decision making is knowing when to employ the various methods.  I don’t have the answers, but I think the coming years are going to reveal a great deal about the amazing abilities of our mysterious minds.  If you get out ahead of the curve, you are going to be the better prepared to deal with our increasingly complex world.

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Most people I know are fairly responsible with their monetary situation.  I suspect most of you reading this blog have somewhat reasonable control of your finances.  And yet, there are other currencies you deal in every day and to which you pay far less attention and over which you have far less control.  This is a risky game you are playing because some of these currencies are actually more important than money.

Your Attention

Whatever you focus your attention on expands.  It collects interest far more rapidly than money.  As one simple example, when you pay attention to celebrity gossip you are telling your brain celebrity gossip is important and you automatically attract more of it into your life.  It’s not some mystical attraction, it is simply the fact that your brain’s alert system will notice more of it and draw your conscious attention to it.  You get interested in the stories.  The headlines in the checkout stand will jump out at you and you may pick up the magazine and browse it.  Your ears will pick up on the TV news coverage of celebrities and their trivial lives.  You will be drawn toward conversations at work or in social situations that are focusing on celebrities.  It’s a vicious cycle and you need to stop it.  You think it is harmless but it is not.  Your non-conscious mind is thinking about it.  Wouldn’t you rather that super-computer in your head be focused on more creative and important issues?

Another example.  You start complaining about something at work.  Your co-workers join in and you all start thinking of more examples.  You put emotion into your negative thoughts.  Your brain is now on alert and it notices more and more examples of your miserable work life.  You think about it more and more and these negative situations become even more important.  You are just feeding the beast and allowing it to grow to the point it consumes you.  And you thought it was just some harmless complaining at the water cooler.

A Recent Story

Here is a personal example that has a positive ending.  A while back I was browsing a table of new biographies in a Barnes and Noble bookstore.  I noticed two new biographies of Ayn Rand.  I hadn’t read any of her writings for decades, but one of the biographies looked fascinating and I decided to buy it.  I was immediately absorbed in the fascinating story of her troubled and brilliant life.  It took me back 30 years to a time when I first discovered her books and was drawn deeply into her ideas.  In the days after I read her biography I found myself going to my bookshelves and pulling out my really old copies of her books and reading some of the material.  I didn’t really want to spend my time doing that because I already knew exactly what she had said.  I had focused my attention on the subject of Ayn Rand and her ideas started filling my conscious and non-conscious thoughts.  I had told my brain that the subject of Ayn Rand was important.

While I disagree with Ayn Rand in some significant ways, one of the things that drew me to her in my youth was her incredibly passionate belief that ideas matter and that they matter a lot.  To this day I have never encountered another person that has held that belief so deeply or so brilliantly articulated the practical impact of philosophy and ideas.  That’s the good part of this story of my brief time travel back into the world of Ayn Rand.  It reminded me of the importance of ideas.

From that point on I have spent more time thinking deeply and reflectively.  It reawakened in me a passion for philosophy and deeply critical thought.  I find myself now reading some books that are much more likely to light a fire in me than what I had been reading.  I had been focusing on things that were of a more immediately practical nature.  I was not wasting my time on the practical; these ideas were interesting and useful, but they didn’t get me out of bed in the morning or get me excited about life.

I had been paying attention to the practical side of life and thus the practical grew in importance.  I was neglecting some of my most deeply held values; the things that mattered most to me.  So simply paying attention to one book, created a course correction in me that is making my life more satisfying right now.

I started a book yesterday afternoon that is absolutely fascinating, The Age of American Unreason (Vintage) by Susan Jacoby.  It’s about the current state of the anti-intellectual American culture; its causes and its consequences.  I only halfway through it but I’m totally enjoying it and it’s really making me think.  Yesterday afternoon I also bought a new 600 page book I found at B&N called  The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism by Howard Bloom.  I’ve read the author before and he is a big thinker.

What’s the point of me telling you all of this?  What you pay attention to matters and it matters a great deal.  It matters much more than you think.  Even when you are not consciously aware of it, the biggest and most powerful part of your brain is cranking away on what you tell your brain is important.  Your non-conscious brain decides what is is important based upon what you are pointing your attention towards.  What you are paying attention to now in some degree determines what your non-conscious mind will be paying attention to in the future.

“Your attention is the strongest currency at your disposal.  If you squander it, your life will result in one big overdraft.  If you invest it in things that you value, you will collect interest big time – and be interested along the way.” – Alan Cohen

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Working memory is that part of the brain where you hold items in conscious attention.  It’s the scratch-pad where you manipulate maps in conscious reasoning.  It is a critical component of all kinds of intelligence (IQ, EQ, etc.)

The problem with working memory or your conscious mind is that it is very resource intensive, it is very small, and it is easily overwhelmed by distractions and emotions.  You’ve probably heard the average person can hold seven pieces of data in working memory at once.  That’s probably overstating the case because you can hold seven numbers in working memory at once if you constantly repeat them.  You cannot hold seven complex ideas in working memory at once.  They compete with each other for use of limited circuits.

A lot of new research is showing that cognitive effort depletes your mental resources and you perform significantly worse on subsequent tasks.  Make one difficult decision and your ability to make a second difficult decision is reduced.  All conscious thinking uses up these resources and the more conscious effort it requires the more the resources are depleted.  Will-power and self-control may not seem like the same thing as solving a complex problem, but they too rapidly deplete your brain’s thinking resources.

People who expend effort on a cognitively challenging task have measurably lower levels of blood glucose.  Restoring the blood glucose levels restores performance.  So one solution is to drink sugary drinks, but then that has a lot of other long-term and even short-term disadvantages.

The best solution is to learn optimize your use of your limited mental resources.

How To Optimize Your Working Memory

• Save your conscious attention for your most important tasks

  In this case, less is truly more.  If you use up mental resources on the unimportant, you will have fewer available for the important even if you have the time. So much in the personal development world emphasizes time, when time may not actually be the most important factor. So don’t think when you don’t have to think.  Remember that the next time you are agonizing over what to wear, which movie to see, which restaurant to choose, etc.

• Perform your most important and difficult tasks when your brain is well rested

  Do your most mentally challenging tasks first.  If you spend 30 minutes processing email before you think about prioritizing your day, you will have spent a great deal of mental resource reserve on a relatively simple and probably unimportant task.  Do the most important and most difficult tasks first, even though your brain will want to do the easiest tasks first.

• Get things out of your head

  If you are holding ideas in your head, in working memory, you are using up valuable resources that could be better spent on comparing or manipulating those ideas.  This is why mind maps, lists, or any other physical representation of an idea works.  Instead of using your brain’s resources to hold those ideas, you are holding them out in the physical world.

• Visualize where possible

  A picture is worth a thousand words and this is surely true in regards to mental resources.  Your brain is a visual machine and you can hold ideas more efficiently in pictures than in words.

• Simplify

  Strip out the essential elements of complicated ideas.  Getting down to just a few core concepts makes it much easier to manipulate them in your mind.

I have more to say on this, but I feel like I’m probably overwhelming your working memory so this article will be continued…

Part II can be found here:  Optimizing Your Working Memory – Part II

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A significant amount of memory loss occurs within the first few of hours after being exposed to new information.  If you want to recall what you learn there are some things you can do to help.

Learn something related to what you already know

Learning something with purpose or that has meaning to you and can be integrated with something you already know, is much more easily recalled than learning random or unconnected facts.  This is why we forget most of the useless facts learned in school.

Before and after sleeping

The twenty minutes immediately before you go to sleep and the twenty minutes immediately after you wake up are especially good times to learn something new.

Learn in chunks of about twenty minutes

Your Hippocampus needs time to consolidate what it has learned.  If you cram in too much information, the ability to consolidate it into long-term memory decreases.  After about twenty minutes and no longer than forty minutes, take a five minute break and do something completely different.  For example get up and walk around and let your brain consolidate what you have learned.

Learn elaborately encoded information

Simply stated this means the more parts of your brain involved in in learning something, the more easily it is recalled.  Think about an experience that involves sights, sounds, and touch.  Such an experience might produce a vivid memory whereas memorizing a list of words will not.  The multi-sense experience is much more elaborately encoded by your brain.  We are visual creatures and so visualizing anything you want to learn will help.

Repetition is key to long-term memory

Re-expose yourself to the information in deliberately spaced intervals.  There is no conclusive evidence on the best time intervals but there are clues.  After the first day, the review sessions can be significantly compressed.   Here is a possible plan that I have cobbled together from various sources:

First exposure
10 minutes – quick review
90 minutes – 2nd exposure
90 minutes – 3rd exposure
1 day – review
3 days – review
6 weeks – review
6 months – review
1 year – review

While there is no formula that is conclusive, repetition before the material has time to decay is critical.  There is even an interesting software program based upon this called SuperMemo.  I’ve never used it.

Some other helpful tips

• Consider putting what you have learned into a mind map.  I tried this with a novel once and I still remember a lot of that story.
• Discuss what you have learned with someone else.  Explaining something to another person is a fantastic memory enhancer.
• Be selective.  Selecting important information to learn and reviewing it periodically is better than spending the same amount of time drinking from a fire hose.  Less is more.
• If possible, expose yourself to the material in multiple ways. Read it, listen to it, and watch a video about it.  A paper book and an audio book are great compliments to one another.  Read it silently and then read it aloud.  Write summaries, draw pictures, visualize pictures, or draw a mind map.
• Learned information is recalled better in the same environment in which it was originally learned.  If you learn something in your recliner, you will recall it better in the same recliner than on the beach.  Something learned while you are sad is more easily recalled when you are sad.
• Preview the material.  Read the summary of a book or document, glance through the chapter headings, read the first and last paragraphs of each section, read the first sentence of paragraphs, skim, etc.  Try to get the main ideas before beginning.
• Review the same way you previewed.
• Fast rereads are great for reviews.  Since you are already familiar with the material you can read it with comprehension much faster on subsequent exposures.
• Highlight important points as you encounter them and then use those for review.
• Paraphrase in your mind as you learn.
• Visualize in your mind as you learn.
• Relate what you learn to your own real-life experiences.
• Concentrate intensely during learning sessions.

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