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Javier E

How to Remember Everything You Want From Non-Fiction Books | by Eva Keiffenheim, MSc | ... - 0 views

  • A Bachelor’s degree taught me how to learn to ace exams. But it didn’t teach me how to learn to remember.
  • 65% to 80% of students answered “no” to the question “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?”
  • the most-popular Coursera course of all time: Dr. Barabara Oakley’s free course on “Learning how to Learn.” So did I. And while this course taught me about chunking, recalling, and interleaving
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  • I learned something more useful: the existence of non-fiction literature that can teach you anything.
  • something felt odd. Whenever a conversation revolved around a serious non-fiction book I read, such as ‘Sapiens’ or ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ I could never remember much. Turns out, I hadn’t absorbed as much information as I’d believed. Since I couldn’t remember much, I felt as though reading wasn’t an investment in knowledge but mere entertainment.
  • When I opened up about my struggles, many others confessed they also can’t remember most of what they read, as if forgetting is a character flaw. But it isn’t.
  • It’s the way we work with books that’s flawed.
  • there’s a better way to read. Most people rely on techniques like highlighting, rereading, or, worst of all, completely passive reading, which are highly ineffective.
  • Since I started applying evidence-based learning strategies to reading non-fiction books, many things have changed. I can explain complex ideas during dinner conversations. I can recall interesting concepts and link them in my writing or podcasts. As a result, people come to me for all kinds of advice.
  • What’s the Architecture of Human Learning and Memory?
  • Human brains don’t work like recording devices. We don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.
  • we store new information in terms of its meaning to our existing memory
  • we give new information meaning by actively participating in the learning process — we interpret, connect, interrelate, or elaborate
  • To remember new information, we not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what we already know.
  • Learning is dependent on memory processes because previously-stored knowledge functions as a framework in which newly learned information can be linked.”
  • Human memory works in three stages: acquisition, retention, and retrieval. In the acquisition phase, we link new information to existing knowledge; in the retention phase, we store it, and in the retrieval phase, we get information out of our memory.
  • Retrieval, the third stage, is cue dependent. This means the more mental links you’re generating during stage one, the acquisition phase, the easier you can access and use your knowledge.
  • we need to understand that the three phases interrelate
  • creating durable and flexible access to to-be-learned information is partly a matter of achieving a meaningful encoding of that information and partly a matter of exercising the retrieval process.”
  • Next, we’ll look at the learning strategies that work best for our brains (elaboration, retrieval, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing) and see how we can apply those insights to reading non-fiction books.
  • The strategies that follow are rooted in research from professors of Psychological & Brain Science around Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel. Both scientists spent ten years bridging the gap between cognitive psychology and education fields. Harvard University Press published their findings in the book ‘Make It Stick.
  • #1 Elaboration
  • “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”
  • Why elaboration works: Elaborative rehearsal encodes information into your long-term memory more effectively. The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better because you’ll be generating more cues. And the more cues they have, the easier you can retrieve your knowledge.
  • How I apply elaboration: Whenever I read an interesting section, I pause and ask myself about the real-life connection and potential application. The process is invisible, and my inner monologues sound like: “This idea reminds me of…, This insight conflicts with…, I don’t really understand how…, ” etc.
  • For example, when I learned about A/B testing in ‘The Lean Startup,’ I thought about applying this method to my startup. I added a note on the site stating we should try it in user testing next Wednesday. Thereby the book had an immediate application benefit to my life, and I will always remember how the methodology works.
  • How you can apply elaboration: Elaborate while you read by asking yourself meta-learning questions like “How does this relate to my life? In which situation will I make use of this knowledge? How does it relate to other insights I have on the topic?”
  • While pausing and asking yourself these questions, you’re generating important memory cues. If you take some notes, don’t transcribe the author’s words but try to summarize, synthesize, and analyze.
  • #2 Retrieval
  • With retrieval, you try to recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory. While retrieval practice can take many forms — take a test, write an essay, do a multiple-choice test, practice with flashcards
  • the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ state: “While any kind of retrieval practice generally benefits learning, the implication seems to be that where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results.”
  • Whatever you settle for, be careful not to copy/paste the words from the author. If you don’t do the brain work yourself, you’ll skip the learning benefits of retrieval
  • Retrieval strengthens your memory and interrupts forgetting and, as other researchers replicate, as a learning event, the act of retrieving information is considerably more potent than is an additional study opportunity, particularly in terms of facilitating long-term recall.
  • How I apply retrieval: I retrieve a book’s content from my memory by writing a book summary for every book I want to remember. I ask myself questions like: “How would you summarize the book in three sentences? Which concepts do you want to keep in mind or apply? How does the book relate to what you already know?”
  • I then publish my summaries on Goodreads or write an article about my favorite insights
  • How you can apply retrieval: You can come up with your own questions or use mine. If you don’t want to publish your summaries in public, you can write a summary into your journal, start a book club, create a private blog, or initiate a WhatsApp group for sharing book summaries.
  • a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in
  • #3 Spaced Repetition
  • With spaced repetition, you repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals.
  • The harder it feels to recall the information, the stronger the learning effect. “Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval,”
  • Why it works: It might sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is essential for learning. Spacing out practice might feel less productive than rereading a text because you’ll realize what you forgot. Your brain has to work harder to retrieve your knowledge, which is a good indicator of effective learning.
  • How I apply spaced repetition: After some weeks, I revisit a book and look at the summary questions (see #2). I try to come up with my answer before I look up my actual summary. I can often only remember a fraction of what I wrote and have to look at the rest.
  • “Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”
  • How you can apply spaced repetition: You can revisit your book summary medium of choice and test yourself on what you remember. What were your action points from the book? Have you applied them? If not, what hindered you?
  • By testing yourself in varying intervals on your book summaries, you’ll strengthen both learning and cues for fast retrieval.
  • Why interleaving works: Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it, again, facilitates forgetting.
  • How I apply interleaving: I read different books at the same time.
  • 1) Highlight everything you want to remember
  • #5 Self-Testing
  • While reading often falsely tricks us into perceived mastery, testing shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Self-testing helps you identify knowledge gaps and brings weak areas to the light
  • “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.”
  • Why it works: Self-testing helps you overcome the illusion of knowledge. “One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.”
  • How I apply self-testing: I explain the key lessons from non-fiction books I want to remember to others. Thereby, I test whether I really got the concept. Often, I didn’t
  • instead of feeling frustrated, cognitive science made me realize that identifying knowledge gaps are a desirable and necessary effect for long-term remembering.
  • How you can apply self-testing: Teaching your lessons learned from a non-fiction book is a great way to test yourself. Before you explain a topic to somebody, you have to combine several mental tasks: filter relevant information, organize this information, and articulate it using your own vocabulary.
  • Now that I discovered how to use my Kindle as a learning device, I wouldn’t trade it for a paper book anymore. Here are the four steps it takes to enrich your e-reading experience
  • How you can apply interleaving: Your brain can handle reading different books simultaneously, and it’s effective to do so. You can start a new book before you finish the one you’re reading. Starting again into a topic you partly forgot feels difficult first, but as you know by now, that’s the effect you want to achieve.
  • it won’t surprise you that researchers proved highlighting to be ineffective. It’s passive and doesn’t create memory cues.
  • 2) Cut down your highlights in your browser
  • After you finished reading the book, you want to reduce your highlights to the essential part. Visit your Kindle Notes page to find a list of all your highlights. Using your desktop browser is faster and more convenient than editing your highlights on your e-reading device.
  • Now, browse through your highlights, delete what you no longer need, and add notes to the ones you really like. By adding notes to the highlights, you’ll connect the new information to your existing knowledge
  • 3) Use software to practice spaced repetitionThis part is the main reason for e-books beating printed books. While you can do all of the above with a little extra time on your physical books, there’s no way to systemize your repetition praxis.
  • Readwise is the best software to combine spaced repetition with your e-books. It’s an online service that connects to your Kindle account and imports all your Kindle highlights. Then, it creates flashcards of your highlights and allows you to export your highlights to your favorite note-taking app.
  • Common Learning Myths DebunkedWhile reading and studying evidence-based learning techniques I also came across some things I wrongly believed to be true.
  • #2 Effective learning should feel easyWe think learning works best when it feels productive. That’s why we continue to use ineffective techniques like rereading or highlighting. But learning works best when it feels hard, or as the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ write: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”
  • In Conclusion
  • I developed and adjusted these strategies over two years, and they’re still a work in progress.
  • Try all of them but don’t force yourself through anything that doesn’t feel right for you. I encourage you to do your own research, add further techniques, and skip what doesn’t serve you
  • “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”— Mortimer J. Adler
qkirkpatrick

Sparrows don't just sing the same old song - The Hindu - 0 views

  • A sparrow’s song may sound simple, consisting of little more than whistles and trills. But to the sparrows, those few noises can take on vastly different meanings depending on small variations in context and repetition, researchers have found.
  • n humans, the ability to extract nearly endless meanings from a finite number of sounds, known as partial phonemic overlapping, was key to the development of language
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    Researchers have found that Sparrows communicate through their whistles. The sounds have different meanings depending on small variations in context and repetition. Lesson on language.
Javier E

A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.
  • If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.
  • The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life.
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  • If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.
  • The list goes on. If you didn’t read de Tocqueville, you probably don’t understand your own country. If you didn’t study Gibbon, you probably lack the vocabulary to describe the rise and fall of cultures and nations.
  • The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. These resources often fail to get shared because universities are too careerist, or because faculty members are more interested in their academic specialties or politics than in teaching undergraduates, or because of a host of other reasons
  • What are you putting into your mind? Our culture spends a lot less time worrying about this, and when it does, it goes about it all wrong.
  • my worry is that, especially now that you’re out of college, you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain.
  • the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.
  • The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.
  • After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks.
  • I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent.
  • I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.
  • the whole culture is eroding the skill the UCLA scholar Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy,” the ability to deeply engage in a dialectical way with a text or piece of philosophy, literature, or art.
  • “To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape.”
  • I can’t say that to you, because it sounds fussy and elitist and OK Boomer. And if you were in front of me, you’d roll your eyes.
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    Or as the neurologist Richard Cytowic put it to Adam Garfinkle, "To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape."*
Javier E

What's the secret to learning a second language? - Salon.com - 0 views

  • “Arabic is a language of memorization,” he said. “You just have to drill the words into your head, which unfortunately takes a lot of time.” He thought, “How can I maximize the number of words I learn in the minimum amount of time?”
  • Siebert started studying the science of memory and second-language acquisition and found two concepts that went hand in hand to make learning easier: selective learning and spaced repetition. With selective learning, you spend more time on the things you don’t know, rather than on the things you already do
  • Siebert designed his software to use spaced repetition. If you get cup right, the program will make the interval between seeing the word cup longer and longer, but it will cycle cup back in just when you’re about to forget it. If you’ve forgotten cup entirely, the cycle starts again. This system moves the words from your brain’s short-term memory into long-term memory and maximizes the number of words you can learn effectively in a period. You don’t have to cram
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  • ARABIC IS ONE of the languages the U.S. Department of State dubs “extremely hard.” Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are the others. These languages’ structures are vastly different from that of English, and they are memorization-driven.
  • To help meet its language-learning goals, in 2003 the Department of Defense established the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language.
  • MICHAEL GEISLER, a vice president at Middlebury College, which runs the foremost language-immersion school in the country, was blunt: “The drill-and-kill approach we used 20 years ago doesn’t work.” He added, “The typical approach that most programs take these days—Rosetta Stone is one example—is scripted dialogue and picture association. You have a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and you have a sentence to go with it. But that’s not going to teach you the language.”
  • According to Geisler, you need four things to learn a language. First, you have to use it. Second, you have to use it for a purpose. Research shows that doing something while learning a language—preparing a cooking demonstration, creating an art project, putting on a play—stimulates an exchange of meaning that goes beyond using the language for the sake of learning it.Third, you have to use the language in context. This is where Geisler says all programs have fallen short.
  • Fourth, you have to use language in interaction with others. In a 2009 study led by Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington, researchers found that young children easily learned a second language from live human interaction while playing and reading books. But audio and DVD approaches with the same material, without the live interaction, fostered no learning progress at all. Two people in conversation constantly give each other feedback that can be used to make changes in how they respond.
  • our research shows that the ideal model is a blended one,” one that blends technology and a teacher. “Our latest research shows that with the proper use of technology and cognitive neuroscience, we can make language learning more efficient.” 
  • The school released its first two online programs, for French and Spanish, last year. The new courses use computer avatars for virtual collaboration; rich video of authentic, unscripted conversations with native speakers; and 3-D role-playing games in which students explore life in a city square, acting as servers and taking orders from customers in a café setting. The goal at the end of the day, as Geisler put it, is for you to “actually be able to interact with a native speaker in his own language and have him understand you, understand him, and, critically, negotiate when you don’t understand what he is saying.” 
  • The program includes the usual vocabulary lists and lessons in how to conjugate verbs, but students are also consistently immersed in images, audio, and video of people from different countries speaking with different accents. Access to actual teachers is another critical component.
Javier E

Life as Instant Replay, Over and Over Again - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • although I think about the Web as a real-time organism, most of the time the organism is obsessing about what happened earlier that day, or week.
  • The replay Web coexists with the real-time Web, the phrase often used to describe sites and services, like Twitter, that let people consume information as soon as it is published.
  • The rise of the replay Web is more than just a coping mechanism that helps us deal with information overload. It is shaping the way we consume, process and share information, and could potentially influence the businesses that are built on it.
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  • “Our consumption of content isn’t synchronous,” he said. “Things are interesting to a small group, a cluster of friends or on Reddit — then they die.” He continued: “Then they pick up and go massive. There are these little ripple effects all around the Web, little waves that converge in a pool and make big waves.”
  • present shock keeps us suspended in a state of constant disarray, and causes us to prioritize the recent over the relevant and the new instead of the most important.
  • The way we use technology could be reshaping our sense of time and urgency. Douglas Rushkoff, the author of “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” describes present shock as the stupefaction that overtakes people as they try to keep up with the never-ending onslaught of status updates, photo feeds and looping videos constantly refreshing before their eyes.
  • THERE are other signs to indicate a replay aesthetic is coming to the Web. For example, the latest version of the iPhone’s mobile software will include the ability to capture video in slow motion.
  • the medium of the loop — either in a GIF, a short clip posted to Vine, or Instagram photo- and video-sharing applications — has become a crucial framework for transmitting information. It mimics the way we remember — by repetition — and future tools could make use of that to understand not only how we transmit information but also how we retain it.
  • Perhaps the replay Web, by allowing us to constantly revisit and reconsider the recent past, can help us find new meaning in it.
Javier E

How a Polymath Mastered Math-and So Can You - WSJ - 0 views

  • How do you strengthen your mind as you age?
  • Physical exercise helps encourage neuron growth. Some forms of meditation improve creativity, while others sharpen focus. In one study, “reading a book for around 3½ hours a week was shown to extend the lifespan . . . by something like two to three years.” Learning a foreign language “gives a workout to the very centers of the brain that are most affected by the aging process, so it’s super healthy.”
  • “Action videogames are incredibly helpful in keeping you sharp,” Ms. Oakley says. “They’ve been shown by research—top-notch research—to make a big difference in your attentional centers.”
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  • By trial and error, Ms. Oakley had learned how to learn: “The higher I went, it started to gradually make more and more sense.”
  • “The way you learn intensively for a language is very similar to learning well in math and science,”
  • “In learning math and science through K-12, it’s long been held that practice and repetition will kill your creativity,” she says. “One mistake we make in the school system is we emphasize understanding. But if you don’t build those neural circuits with practice, it’ll all slip away. You can understand out the wazoo, but it’ll just disappear if you’re not practicing with it.”
  • In places like China and India, “practice and repetition and rote and memorization are really important parts of education.” She sees value in both methods: “There are real benefits for Western approaches—that it really does help with creativity. And there are also real benefits to Asian approaches—that it builds a solid foundation in the most difficult disciplines, math and science.
  • The best education would actually be a combination of both approaches.”
  • She defines a “mindshift” as “a change in your outlook that occurs through intensive learning”—such as her own mastery of math and engineering.
  • The book is filled with advice for people who are considering a career change or who seek to develop “an attitude of lifelong learning,” even in retirement.
  • Her progression from desultory student to respected scholar led her to a sideline in the study of learning itself. She’s published two books on the subject, “A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra)” (2014) and the new “Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential.
  • they developed a massive open online course, “Learning How to Learn,” which by some measures is the world’s most popular MOOC
ilanaprincilus06

Can neuroscience solve the mystery of how students learn? | Teacher Network | The Guardian - 0 views

  • No one knows how much knowledge students take home with them after a day at school. Tests, homework and inspections give a snapshot of learning but ultimately it’s something that you cannot see; it’s invisible and personal.
  • In recent years, a new field of enquiry has burst onto the scene with the hope of finally unlocking the secret of how learning takes place. It’s been referred to as educational neuroscience, neuroeducation and mind, brain and education.
  • They taught students about the inner workings of household objects in a physics lesson which took place inside an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scanner.
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  • Spaced learning is a teaching approach where content is intensively taught multiple times with breaks in between. It was first described by the 19th century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus: he found that repetition is crucial for learning, but memories form more readily and durably if these repetitions are spaced out rather than massed together.
  • Bishop thinks psychologists, who use human behaviour to infer how mental processes work, have much more to offer.
  • The neuroscientists discovered that repeated stimuli, with precisely timed gaps, are one of the most reliable ways to convince neurons that an event is memory-worthy.
  • Dopamine uptake in this specific context can lead to heightened emotional responses and increased engagement. Moreover, tickling the brain’s reward circuitry in this way can enhance the formation of new memories.
  • We may not need neuroscience to tell us that teenagers are unresponsive in the morning. But neuroscience can tell us why a good night’s sleep is so crucial for memory consolidation, information processing and creativity. It can also show that most teenagers have a delayed sleep-wake cycle compared with adults.
sanderk

7 Surprising Ways Cell Phones Affect Your Health - ABC News - 0 views

  • In a study published in the journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology, researchers at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey screened the mobile phones of 200 health care workers in hospitals for germs that are known to be dangerous to human health.
  • The solution to this problem may be decidedly low tech -- disinfectant spray and a paper towel.
  • Specifically, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University studied the brain waves of drivers using cell phones -- and they found that even just listening to a conversation reduced the amount of brain activity devoted to driving by 37 percent
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  • "The science tells [us] when [we're] on the phone while driving, it is a high-risk activity -- very, very risky,"
  • Even hands-free phones appear to contribute to unsafe driving
  • What they found was that when children were on the cell phones, their attention to traffic -- the number of times a participant looked right or left -- went down 20 percent. The risk of getting hit by a car, or the number of close calls, went up 43 percent
  • Our reliance on our cell phones may actually be "training" some of us to believe it is vibrating when it is not. In the case of cell phones, people are rewarded when they pick up their calls and read their incoming text messages, which causes them to pick up their cell phones more and more frequently.
  • The sores and blisters that some experience from too much texting and typing have earned monikers such as "BlackBerry thumb." And while the sore thumbs may seem like a new phenomenon, medical experts say there is a rational explanation for this modern-day nuisance.
  • These sorts of injuries, known as repetitive strain injuries or a repetitive motion disorders, are sometimes minor. But they can also lead to serious medical problems.
  • According to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/noise/index.htm), about 12.5 percent of children and adolescents 6 and 19 years old and 17 percent of adults between 20 and 69 years of age have suffered permanent damage to their hearing from excessive exposure to noise. In total, this accounts for more than 30 million people.
  • Sounds louder than 85 decibels can damage hearing. Normal conversation is about 60 decibels, and stereo headphones out of our MP3-enabled devices often reach 100 decibels.
nataliedepaulo1

Parting Words - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • After eight years, few lines from Barack Obama’s Presidential speeches stay in mind. For all his literary and oratorical gifts, he didn’t coin the kinds of phrases that stick with repetition, as if his distaste for politics generally—the schmoozing, the fakery—extended to the fashioning of slogans. He rarely turned to figurative language, and he never stooped to “Read my lips,” or even “Ask not what your country can do for you.” His most memorable phrase, “Yes we can,” spoke to the audacious odds of his own run for the Presidency, not a clear political vision. He sought to persuade by explaining and reasoning, not by simplifying or dramatizing—a form of respect that the citizenry didn’t always deserve.
  • This aversion to rhetoric, like Obama’s aloofness from Congress, is a personal virtue that hurt him politically. It’s connected to his difficulty in sustaining public support for his program and his party. Even the President’s hero, Abraham Lincoln, was a master of the poetic sound bite.
  • This is the last week of the Obama Presidency. Historians will argue over its meaning and its merits. But, for democratic integrity, there’s no argument, no contest. Obama’s final speech wasn’t just a warning—it will stand as an emblem of what we have been and perhaps can be. 
Javier E

Donald Trump will win in a landslide. *The mind behind 'Dilbert' explains why. - The Wa... - 0 views

  • What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques.
  • Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”
  • His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric.
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  • “The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational,
  • what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.
  • 2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.
  • Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play.
  • Within that context, here is what Candidate Trump is doing to win campaign hearts and minds
  • 1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.
  • he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by “exploiting the business model” like an entrepreneur. In this model, which “the news industry doesn’t have the ability to change … the media doesn’t really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story,” says Adams, contending that Trump “can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose.”
  • “The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”
  • 3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.
  • “There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them.
  • 4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”
  • “If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions).”
  • “Did Trump’s involvement in the birther thing confuse you?” Adams goes on to ask. “Were you wondering how Trump could believe Obama was not a citizen? The answer is that Trump never believed anything about Obama’s place of birth. The facts were irrelevant, so he ignored them while finding a place in the hearts of conservatives.
  • 5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.
  • Among the persuasive techniques that Trump uses to help bend reality, Adams says, are repetition of phrases; “thinking past the sale” so the initial part of his premise is stated as a given; and knowing the appeal of the simplest answer, which relates to the concept of Occam’s razor.
  • 6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics — and identity is the strongest persuader.
  • “The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always reminded).”
  • : “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.
Duncan H

What to Do About 'Coming Apart' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Murray has produced a book-length argument placing responsibility for rising inequality and declining mobility on widespread decay in the moral fiber of white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans, putting relatively less emphasis on a similar social breakdown among low-status, less-educated Americans of all races
  • Murray’s strength lies in his ability to raise issues that center-left policy makers and academics prefer, for the most part, to shy away from. His research methods, his statistical analyses and the conclusions he draws are subject to passionate debate. But by forcing taboo issues into the public arena, Murray has opened up for discussion politically salient issues that lurk at a subterranean level in the back-brains of many voters, issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy.
  • The National Review and the Conservative Monitor cited “Losing Ground” as one of the ten books that most changed America. Murray’s bookseemed like a bolt of lightning in the middle of the night revealing what should have been plain as the light of day. The welfare state so carefully built up in the 1960s and 1970s created a system of disincentives for people to better their own lives. By paying welfare mothers to have children out of wedlock into a poor home, more of these births were encouraged. By doling out dollars at a rate that could not be matched by the economy, the system encouraged the poor to stay home.
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  • He contends in “Coming Apart” that there was far greater social cohesion across class lines 50 years ago because “the powerful norms of social and economic behavior in 1960 swept virtually everyone into their embrace,” adding in a Jan. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal thatOver the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.According to Murray, higher education has now become a proxy for higher IQ, as elite colleges become sorting mechanisms for finding, training and introducing to each other the most intellectually gifted young people. Fifty years into the education revolution, members of this elite are likely to be themselves the offspring of cognitively gifted parents, and to ultimately bear cognitively gifted children.
  • “Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere.”
  • Murray makes the case that cognitive ability is worth ever more in modern advanced, technologically complex hypercompetitive market economies. As an example, Murray quotes Bill Gates: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war or we won’t have a future.”
  • Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able – in Murray’s view – and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murray’s framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap.
  • Despised by the left, Murray has arguably done liberals a service by requiring them to deal with those whose values may seem alien, to examine the unintended consequences of their policies and to grapple with the political impact of assertions made by the right. He has also amassed substantial evidence to bolster his claims and at the same time elicited a formidable academic counter-attack.
  • To Murray, the overarching problem is that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s.
  • “Great Civic Awakening” among the new upper class – an awakening that will lead to the kind of “moral rearmament” and paternalism characteristic of anti-poverty drives in the 19th century. To achieve this, Murray believes, the “new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”
  • The cognitive elites Murray cites are deeply committed to liberal norms of cultural tolerance and permissiveness. The antipathy to the moralism of the religious right has, in fact, been a major force driving these upscale, secular voters into the Democratic party.
  • changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves. The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation. The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended.Mead continues:Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.The 21st century, Mead adds,must reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.Mead’s predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it his thinking, more than Murray’s, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target.
Javier E

Eric Kandel's Visions - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails
  • Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:
  • "At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."
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  • His key findings on the snail, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, showed that learning and memory change not the neuron's basic structure but rather the nature, strength, and number of its synaptic connections. Further, through focus on the molecular biology involved in a learned reflex like Aplysia's gill retraction, Kandel demonstrated that experience alters nerve cells' synapses by changing their pattern of gene expression. In other words, learning doesn't change what neurons are, but rather what they do.
  • In Search of Memory (Norton), Kandel offered what sounded at the time like a vague research agenda for future generations in the budding field of neuroaesthetics, saying that the science of memory storage lay "at the foothills of a great mountain range." Experts grasp the "cellular and molecular mechanisms," he wrote, but need to move to the level of neural circuits to answer the question, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?
  • Since giving a talk on the matter in 2001, he has been piecing together his own thoughts in relation to his favorite European artists
  • The field of neuroaesthetics, says one of its founders, Semir Zeki, of University College London, is just 10 to 15 years old. Through brain imaging and other studies, scholars like Zeki have explored the cognitive responses to, say, color contrasts or ambiguities of line or perspective in works by Titian, Michelangelo, Cubists, and Abstract Expressionists. Researchers have also examined the brain's pleasure centers in response to appealing landscapes.
  • it is fundamental to an understanding of human cognition and motivation. Art isn't, as Kandel paraphrases a concept from the late philosopher of art Denis Dutton, "a byproduct of evolution, but rather an evolutionary adaptation—an instinctual trait—that helps us survive because it is crucial to our well-being." The arts encode information, stories, and perspectives that allow us to appraise courses of action and the feelings and motives of others in a palatable, low-risk way.
  • "as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent on the modality through which it is conveyed but which can be activated by at least two sources—musical and visual—and probably by other sources as well." Specifically, in this "brain-based theory of beauty," the paper says, that faculty is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.
  • It also enables Kandel—building on the work of Gombrich and the psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris, among others—to compare the painters' rendering of emotion, the unconscious, and the libido with contemporaneous psychological insights from Freud about latent aggression, pleasure and death instincts, and other primal drives.
  • Kandel views the Expressionists' art through the powerful multiple lenses of turn-of-the-century Vienna's cultural mores and psychological insights. But then he refracts them further, through later discoveries in cognitive science. He seeks to reassure those who fear that the empirical and chemical will diminish the paintings' poetic power. "In art, as in science," he writes, "reductionism does not trivialize our perception—of color, light, and perspective—but allows us to see each of these components in a new way. Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual ideas of their art."
  • The author of a classic textbook on neuroscience, he seems here to have written a layman's cognition textbook wrapped within a work of art history.
  • "our initial response to the most salient features of the paintings of the Austrian Modernists, like our response to a dangerous animal, is automatic. ... The answer to James's question of how an object simply perceived turns into an object emotionally felt, then, is that the portraits are never objects simply perceived. They are more like the dangerous animal at a distance—both perceived and felt."
  • If imaging is key to gauging therapeutic practices, it will be key to neuroaesthetics as well, Kandel predicts—a broad, intense array of "imaging experiments to see what happens with exaggeration, distorted faces, in the human brain and the monkey brain," viewers' responses to "mixed eroticism and aggression," and the like.
  • while the visual-perception literature might be richer at the moment, there's no reason that neuroaesthetics should restrict its emphasis to the purely visual arts at the expense of music, dance, film, and theater.
  • although Kandel considers The Age of Insight to be more a work of intellectual history than of science, the book summarizes centuries of research on perception. And so you'll find, in those hundreds of pages between Kandel's introduction to Klimt's "Judith" and the neurochemical cadenza about the viewer's response to it, dossiers on vision as information processing; the brain's three-dimensional-space mapping and its interpretations of two-dimensional renderings; face recognition; the mirror neurons that enable us to empathize and physically reflect the affect and intentions we see in others; and many related topics. Kandel elsewhere describes the scientific evidence that creativity is nurtured by spells of relaxation, which foster a connection between conscious and unconscious cognition.
  • Zeki's message to art historians, aesthetic philosophers, and others who chafe at that idea is twofold. The more diplomatic pitch is that neuroaesthetics is different, complementary, and not oppositional to other forms of arts scholarship. But "the stick," as he puts it, is that if arts scholars "want to be taken seriously" by neurobiologists, they need to take advantage of the discoveries of the past half-century. If they don't, he says, "it's a bit like the guys who said to Galileo that we'd rather not look through your telescope."
  • Matthews, a co-author of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging (Dana Press, 2003), seems open to the elucidations that science and the humanities can cast on each other. The neural pathways of our aesthetic responses are "good explanations," he says. But "does one [type of] explanation supersede all the others? I would argue that they don't, because there's a fundamental disconnection still between ... explanations of neural correlates of conscious experience and conscious experience" itself.
  • There are, Matthews says, "certain kinds of problems that are fundamentally interesting to us as a species: What is love? What motivates us to anger?" Writers put their observations on such matters into idiosyncratic stories, psychologists conceive their observations in a more formalized framework, and neuroscientists like Zeki monitor them at the level of functional changes in the brain. All of those approaches to human experience "intersect," Matthews says, "but no one of them is the explanation."
  • "Conscious experience," he says, "is something we cannot even interrogate in ourselves adequately. What we're always trying to do in effect is capture the conscious experience of the last moment. ... As we think about it, we have no way of capturing more than one part of it."
  • Kandel sees art and art history as "parent disciplines" and psychology and brain science as "antidisciplines," to be drawn together in an E.O. Wilson-like synthesis toward "consilience as an attempt to open a discussion between restricted areas of knowledge." Kandel approvingly cites Stephen Jay Gould's wish for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."
Javier E

How 'ObamaCare' Went from Smear to Cheer - Politics - The Atlantic Wire - 3 views

  • Friday's effort strikes us as a pretty smart, if overdue, campaign strategy to try to make a mark on a term that has undoubtedly entered the lexicon, whether the campaign likes it or not.
  • why shouldn't they use "Obamacare" to describe the bill? There's nothing immediately or obviously pejorative in the word. In fact, given the bill's very long actual name, we're kind of appreciative for an easily recognized alternative. The problem for Democrats is that conservatives really effectively claimed the term and attached it in the public's mind with negative sentiment. As Kiran Moodley wrote in a piece for The Atlantic last year on the term, conservatives, through repetition, were able to link the idea to  government intrusion and the larger Obama agenda. "Obamacare" became more than an innocent shorthand: It became a rallying cry.
Javier E

The Age of Niallism: Ferguson and the Post-Fact World - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Ferguson gets some facts wrong. Ferguson gets some facts right, but frames them incompletely. Why the outrage? Because he's treating facts as low-grade and cheap materials that are meant to be bent, spliced and morphed for the purpose of building a sensational polemic. Even more outrageous is that his bosses didn't mind enough to force him to make an honest argument, or even profess embarrassment when its dishonesty came to light.
  • it's not just Ferguson. There is an epidemic of Niallism -- which Seamus McKiernan of the Huffington Post defined as not believing in anything factual. It's the idea that bluster can make untruths true through mere repetition. 
  • We live in a post-truth age. That's the term David Roberts of Grist coined to describe the way the way lies get amplified in our media ecosystem.
Javier E

Valley of the Blahs: How Justin Bieber's Troubles Exposed Twitter's Achilles' Heel - NY... - 0 views

  • I think the number of followers you have is often irrelevant. What does matter, however, is how many people notice you, either through retweets, favorites or the holy grail, a retweet by someone extremely well known, like a celebrity. That validation that your contribution is important, interesting or worthy is enough social proof to encourage repetition. Many times, that results in one-upmanship, straining to be the loudest or the most retweeted and referred to as the person who captured the splashiest event of the day in the pithiest way.
  • It feels as if we’re all trying to be a cheeky guest on a late-night show, a reality show contestant or a toddler with a tiara on Twitter — delivering the performance of a lifetime, via a hot, rapid-fire string of commentary, GIFs or responses that help us stand out from the crowd. We’re sold on the idea that if we’re good enough, it could be our ticket to success
  • more often than not, it translates to standing on a collective soapbox, elbowing each other for room, in the hopes of being credited with delivering the cleverest one-liner or reaction
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  • Increasingly, I’ve found myself retreating to smaller groups, where the stakes are lower and people are more honest and less determined to prove a point, freer to joke and experiment, more trusting in one other and open to real conversation.
  • Twitter is starting to feel calcified, slowed down by the weight of its own users, cumbersome, less exciting than exhausting. It may be why less public forms of communication — messaging applications like Snapchat, GroupMe, Instagram Direct and even old-fashioned e-mail threads and Google groups — are playing a bigger and bigger role in the most meaningful interactions during my day online.
  • even if the company were to snap to attention and give its community something other than Twitter lists and block or unfollow buttons to help users tailor their feeds, it most likely wouldn’t be enough. We, the users, the producers, the consumers — all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation — are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.
Javier E

I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria - Salon.com - 0 views

  • Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation.  They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable rage. They used to be the brave men and women who took on America’s challenges, tackling the ’60s, the Cold War and the Reagan years — but now many are terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.
  • I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.
  • My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.
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  • What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.
  • I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it.
  • I do not blame or condemn my father for his opinions. If you consumed a daily diet of right-wing fury, erroneously labeled “news,” you could very likely end up in the same place. Again, this is all by design. Let’s call it the Fox News effect. Take sweet, kindly senior citizens and feed them a steady stream of demagoguery and repetition, all wrapped in the laughable slogan of “fair and balanced.” Even watching the commercials on Fox, one is treated to sales pitches for gold and emergency food rations, the product cornerstones of the paranoid. To some people the idea of retirees yelling at the television all day may seem funny, but this isn’t a joke. We’re losing the nation’s grandparents, and it’s an American tragedy.
Ellie McGinnis

Obsessive Thoughts: A Darker Side of OCD - Olivia Loving - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Compulsive tics steal most of the limelight when it comes to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Comparatively less attention, meanwhile, is given to the obsessive thoughts that characterize the other half of OCD.
  • For example: A woman, distraught by visions of murdering her child, wakes up several times in the night to check on her daughter.
  • It is easier for them to understand repetitive hand­-washing than, say, the fear of murdering your parents. Abstract pamphlet language—"recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses or images"—doesn't necessarily register in a non­sufferer's mind as graphic or violent.
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  • But the worry that "something bad will happen" is not an ephemeral, occasional threat for OCD sufferers.
  • "Most people don't understand OCD at all, to begin with. Secondly, most people tend to get 28too distracted by the content of the obsessions. The content is irrelevant,
  • Obsessions fuel compulsions.
  • "If you listen carefully, patients will ask constantly agonize over their obsessions, asking, 'Why am I having these thoughts; how do I know that I wouldn't do this; why would I be thinking it if I didn’t want to do it?'"
  • "Most violent and dangerous people don’t sit there having these inner dialogues," he added.
Emilio Ergueta

Facebook has totally reinvented human identity: Why it's even worse than you think - Sa... - 0 views

  • Our Facebook profile pictures have symbolic weight, strengthened through the repetitive labor of association. Have you ever changed your Facebook profile picture and not really liked it — but then, after a while, decided it was awesome?
  • It may not be as cool as we imagined it in sleek ’90s sci-fi, but we really are creatures existing in multiple dimensions, transcending space and time with our cybernetic reach. And who controls where your body ends and begins as this unholy fusion of man and machine? Those technologies through which you interface, of course, offering you the shape of your digital self, such as the Facebook profile.
  • Facebook has redefined the standard of what information should be immediately known about you as a person. It was a slow process, where it gradually increased the “About” fields, but now when I meet someone, it is somehow appropriate for me to see their exact age, residential history and entire résumé of work experience and education.
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  • The question of what should be done with you is much easier to answer when we can definitively say what you are.
  • The crux of the issue boils down to this: Is Facebook’s normalization of hyper-transparency and information-oriented mode of self-definition conditioning young people to be submissive toward institutionalized forms of subject formation? Does it quell unrest in response to those power structures invested in telling you who and what you are? Will the young people of the future question social values if they are trained from a young age by technological demands to express their person in a corporately constructed template?
Javier E

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump's Tongue - The New York Times - 2 views

  • The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.
  • The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns
  • The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use
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  • He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.
  • Mr. Trump appears unrivaled in his ability to forge bonds with a sizable segment of Americans over anxieties about a changing nation, economic insecurities, ferocious enemies and emboldened minorities (like the first black president, whose heritage and intelligence he has all but encouraged supporters to malign).
  • “ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,”
  • “He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border — not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’ ”
  • And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.
  • The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight.
  • “Such statements and accusations make him seem like a guy who can and will cut through all the b.s. and do what in your heart you know is right — and necessary,
  • And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric.
  • “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information.
  • He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists, and repeats discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
  • In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies
  • This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan,
  • “His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,”
  • “If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s — it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.”
  • “And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,”
  • Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals
  • Mr. Trump, by contrast, is an energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating with his audiences. There is a looseness to his language that sounds almost like water-cooler talk or neighborly banter, regardless of what it is about.
  • he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary
  • It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil
anonymous

Magnetic brain stimulation alters negative emotion perception: A new study in Biologica... - 0 views

  • A new study published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging reports that processing of negative emotion can be strengthened or weakened by tuning the excitability of the right frontal part of the brain.Using magnetic stimulation outside the brain, a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), researchers at University of Münster, Germany, show that, despite the use of inhibitory stimulation currently used to treat depression, excitatory stimulation better reduced a person's response to fearful images.
  • "This study confirms that modulating the frontal region of the brain, in the right hemisphere, directly effects the regulation of processing of emotional information in the brain in a 'top-down' manner,"
  • In depression, processing of emotion is disrupted in the frontal region of both the left and right brain hemispheres (known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, dlPFC). The disruptions are thought to be at the root of increased negative emotion and diminished positive emotion in the disorder. Reducing excitability of the right dlPFC using inhibitory magnetic stimulation has been shown to have antidepressant effects, even though it's based on an idea -- that this might reduce processing of negative emotion in depression -- that has yet to be fully tested in humans.
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