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Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views

nymag.com/...-acknowledge-our-progress.html perception threat progress human psychology bias perspective pessimism
shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • ft of recent books have been full of the need for renewed rage against the oppression of women. The demonization of “white men” has intensified just as many working-class white men face a bleak economic future and as men are disappearing from the workforce. It is as if the less gender discrimination there is, the angrier you should become.
  • You see it in the gay-rights movement too. I get fundraising emails all the time reminding me how we live in a uniquely perilous moment for LGBTQ Americans and that this era, in the words of Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Charlotte Clymer, is one “that has seen unprecedented attacks on LGBTQ people.
  • Might I suggest some actual precedents: when all gay sex was criminal, when many were left by their government to die of AIDS, when no gay relationships were recognized in the law, when gay service members were hounded out of their mission, when the federal government pursued a purge of anyone suspected of being gay. All but the last one occurred in my adult lifetime. But today we’re under “unprecedented” assault?
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  • a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear.
  • We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines.
  • lthough modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.
  • We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context.
  • When blue dots became rare, purple dots began to look blue; when threatening faces became rare, neutral faces began to appear threatening … This happened even when the change in the prevalence of instances was abrupt, even when participants were explicitly told that the prevalence of instances would change, and even when participants were instructed and paid to ignore these changes.
  • We seem to be wired to assume a given threat remains just as menacing even when its actual prevalence has declined:
  • “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”
  • This study may help explain why, in the midst of tremendous gains for gays, women, and racial minorities, we still insist more than ever that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic era.
  • whatever the cause, the result is that we steadfastly refuse to accept the fact of progress, in a cycle of eternal frustration at what injustices will always remain
  • We never seem to be able to say: “Okay, we’re done now, we’ve got this, politics has done all it reasonably could, now let’s move on with our lives.” We can only ever say: “It’s worse than ever!” And fe
  • picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.
  • The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands
  • Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.
  • over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade
  • Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room
  • I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence
  • Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system
  • On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war
  • Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.
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How to Remember Everything You Want From Non-Fiction Books | by Eva Keiffenheim, MSc | ... - 0 views

medium.com/...non-fiction-books-df17096d517f books reading learning notetaking memory long-term
shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • 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
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Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...29language-t.html language reality perception experience Whorf
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 10 - Cached
  • it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language.
  • some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie.
  • For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies.
  • Javier E on 28 Aug 10
     
    Fascinating follow-up to Sapir-Whorf.
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Opinion | How Trumpism May Endure - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-capitol-lost-cause.html
shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • One hundred and fifty years after the emergence of the Confederate Lost Cause ideology, a new Lost Cause invaded the U.S. Capitol with the incitement of the president of the United States.
  • Trumpism has already become a lethal Lost Cause. It does not quite have martyrs and a cult of the fallen in which to root its hopes and dreams.
  • All Lost Causes find their lifeblood in lies, big and small, lies born of beliefs in search of a history that can be forged into a story and mobilize masses of people to act politically, violently, and in the name of ideology.
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  • Mr. Trump’s Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms.
  • The Confederate Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history. It emerged first as a mood of traumatized defeat in the 1860s, but grew into an array of arguments, organizations and rituals in search of a story that could win hearts and minds and regain power in the Southern states.
  • It assumed the character of a religious movement in endless sermons about the noble fallen soldiers who defended home, hearth, their women and their God.
  • Crucially, the Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on battlefields.
  • The Trumpian Lost Cause has quite different origins, of course. It does not derive from sacrifice of blood and treasure in war. On its face it is not a response to the military conquest of a society.
  • historian Greg Grandin describes how a growing sense of alienation, grievance and inequality led millions of largely white Americans to embrace the simple but clear story Mr. Trump told them.
  • Whether Trumpism can ever attain the staying power of the Confederate Lost Cause is unclear. It may flame out in a few years like the bad TV show it has always been.
  • the shock of Trumpists’ inevitable attack on the American experiment on Wednesday, Jan. 6, hit like a thunderbolt. They will be back.
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How a second language can boost the brain - 0 views

knowablemagazine.org/...econd-language-can-boost-brain language
shared by caelengrubb on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The cognitive benefits of bilingualism can begin from experiences very early in childhood and can persist throughout life.
  • The first main advantage involves what’s loosely referred to as executive function. This describes skills that allow you to control, direct and manage your attention, as well as your ability to plan
  • The brain is made up of cells called neurons, which each have a cell body and little branching connections called dendrites.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Executive functions are the most complex brain functions — the most “human” functions that separate us from apes and other animals.
  • Bilingualism promotes the integrity of white matter as you age. It gives you more neurons to play with, and it strengthens or maintains the connections between them so that communication can happen optimally.
  • These myths about bilingualism date back to studies in the US and the UK from the First and Second World Wars. They were seriously flawed studies involving children from war-torn countries: refugees, orphans and, in some cases, even children who were in concentration camps.
  • Not every bilingual person is going to have a healthier brain than every monolingual person. We’re talking about general, population-level trends.
  • A bilingual brain can compensate for brain deterioration by using alternative brain networks and connections when original pathways have been destroyed.
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5 key facts about language and the brain - 0 views

www.medicalnewstoday.com/...324529
shared by caelengrubb on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Language is a complex topic, interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and ar
  • While other animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences
  • As Homo sapiens, we have the necessary biological tools to utter the complex constructions that constitute language, the vocal apparatus, and a brain structure complex and well-developed enough to create a varied vocabulary and strict sets of rules on how to use it.
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  • Though it remains unclear at what point the ancestors of modern humans first started to develop spoken language, we know that our Homo sapiens predecessors emerged around 150,000–200,000 years ago. So, Prof. Pagel explains, complex speech is likely at least as old as that
  • A study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that committed language students experienced growth in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with learning and spatial navigation, as well as in parts of the cerebral cortex, or the outmost layer of the brain.
  • In fact, researchers have drawn many connections between bilingualism or multilingualism and the maintenance of brain health
  • Multiple studies, for instance, have found that bilingualism can protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
  • Being bilingual has other benefits, too, such as training the brain to process information efficiently while expending only the necessary resources on the tasks at hand.
  • Research now shows that her assessment was absolutely correct — the language that we use does change not only the way we think and express ourselves, but also how we perceive and interact with the world.
  • Language holds such power over our minds, decision-making processes, and lives, so Broditsky concludes by encouraging us to consider how we might use it to shape the way we think about ourselves and the world.
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Why the modern world is bad for your brain | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ized-mind-information-overload smartphone social media multitasking communication
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
  • Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.
  • But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.
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  • When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.”
  • Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
  • Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
  • The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted.
  • Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
  • His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.
  • Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.
  • If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.
  • All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.
  • This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right now?
  • A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar;
  • But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
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'Brain fog': the people struggling to think clearly months after Covid | World news | T... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...ink-clearly-months-after-covid Covid-19 brain fog memory
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Seven months later, the rollercoaster is far from over: the 36-year-old from Byron Bay, Australia is still experiencing symptoms – including difficulties with thinking that are often described as “brain fog”.
  • “Brain fog seems like such an inferior description of what is actually going on. It’s completely crippling. I am unable to think clearly enough to [do] anything,”
  • “When I get tired it becomes much worse and sometimes all I can do is lay in bed and watch TV.” Brain fog has made her forgetful to the point that she says she burns pots while cooking.
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  • “I feel like a shadow of my former self. I am not living right now, I am simply existing.”Nicholson-McKellar is far from alone.
  • “Doctors and scientists wouldn’t necessarily use [brain fog] as a diagnosis as it doesn’t exactly tell you what the problem is and what could be causing that,” says Zandi.
  • Zandi says there could be many causes of brain fog in Covid survivors, from inflammation in the body to a lack of oxygen to the brain – the latter is a particular concern for those who spent time on ventilators.
  • terms similar to “brain fog” have previously been used in connection with extreme tiredness, low mood and conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – the latter of which is thought to affect about a quarter of Covid survivors who were in intensive care.
  • The aim of the new work, he says, is to explore whether even those without neurological symptoms show markers of neurological damage, and to what extent any processes are ongoing.
  • “I’m just existing in this haze-like frame of mind in which I’m constantly on autopilot,” she says.
  • “What we don’t know is how long it will go on for,” says Zandi. “But we have seen patients who get better and are functioning.”
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Opinion | The Mental Virtues - The New York Times - 4 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-mental-virtues.html
shared by clairemann on 14 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • First, there is love of learning
  • Second, there is courage. The obvious form of intellectual courage is the willingness to hold unpopular views. But the subtler form is knowing how much risk to take in jumping to conclusions
  • Third, there is firmness
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Fourth, there is humility, which is not letting your own desire for status get in the way of accuracy.
  • Fifth, there is autonomy
  • Autonomy is the median of knowing when to bow to authority and when not to
  • Such a person is open to learning from anyone at any stage in life.
  • The median point between flaccidity and rigidity is the virtue of firmness. The firm believer can build a steady worldview on solid timbers but still delight in new information
  • Finally, there is generosity
  • the mind is embedded in human nature, and very often thinking well means pushing against the grain of our nature — against vanity, against laziness, against the desire for certainty, against the desire to avoid painful truths.
  • Good thinking isn’t just adopting the right technique. It’s a moral enterprise and requires good character, the ability to go against our lesser impulses for the sake of our higher ones.
  • wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing how to handle your own limitations
  • Montaigne once wrote that “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.”
  • Is it possible to display and cultivate character if you are just an information age office jockey, alone with a memo or your computer?
  • Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.
  • Javier E on 14 Sep 15
     
    willing to look at things that are surprisingly hard to look at.
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The Not-So-Soft Bigotry of COVID Indifference - The Bulwark - 1 views

thebulwark.com/-bigotry-of-covid-indifference
shared by huffem4 on 19 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • s the coronavirus pandemic continues to cut a wide swath through American communities, many have started to ignore it or, worse, rationalize the country’s mounting losses as a “sad but unavoidable” fact of life.
  • the pandemic has disproportionately affected populations that are mostly out of sight and mind for the majority of Americans: elderly in care homes, minorities, farm and food workers, and prisoners.
  • More alarming is the sentiment that these deaths are a price worth paying to get the economy reopened since the elderly in nursing homes already face low life expectancies.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Blacks and Hispanics are nearly five times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than whites are, and death rates among African Americans are more than double those of whites.
  • it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the majority of America has concluded that these groups—the poor, the minority, the imprisoned, and the elderly—are the “acceptable” losses. Were the situation reversed and the white, middle aged, and middle/upper classes the primary victims of the pandemic—one of the features of the 1918 influenza—COVID-19 would be a true national emergency and there would be far less complaining about disrupted schools, work, and social life brought about by social distancing requirements and economic shutdowns.
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Can neuroscience solve the mystery of how students learn? | Teacher Network | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lve-mystery-how-students-learn school students homework sleep neuroscience psychology
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.
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How to Beat Populists When the Facts Don't Matter - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...615082 politics facts ignorance
shared by huffem4 on 22 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • The messages, constantly repeated on a wide array of radio stations and television channels, were designed to reinforce tribal loyalties and convince Law and Justice voters that they are “real” Poles, not impostors or traitors like their political opponents.
  • Some voters live in a so-called populist bubble, where they hear nationalist and xenophobic messages, learn to distrust fact-based media and evidence-based science, and become receptive to conspiracy theories and suspicious of democratic institutions. Others read and hear completely different media, respect different authorities, and search for a different sort of news.
  • This is a question about how to get people to listen at all. Just shouting about “facts” will get you nowhere with those who no longer trust the sources that produce them.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • At first, Longwell also thought that an appeal to facts could move reluctant Trump voters to change their mind. But when she played them videos that clearly showed Trump lying, they shrugged it off. In part, this was because they did not hold him to the same standards as other politicians. Instead, she thinks, they saw him as a businessman and a celebrity, someone exempt from normal morality. “They say, ‘Yes, he lies. But he’s honest, he’s authentic, he’s real,’” Longwell said.
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How Play Energizes Your Kid's Brain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...play-brain-science.html
shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • To the untrained eye, play can seem aimless, repetitive, wild or foolish. But play can offer a window into the developing mind. Piaget viewed certain kinds of play as milestones, signs that a child had reached a new stage of development.
  • nstead of simply making objects move through space, they begin to make believe. A banana might become a telephone and a pencil might take flight like an airplane.
  • That is, the ones who could imagine hypotheticals that hadn’t occurred were also the best at pretending to operate an imaginary machine with an imaginary zando.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Mulling over past “what ifs” helps us better plan for the future.
  • “That’s a very important, very distinctive human ability,”
  • That means separating actual events from possible events and pretend play helps children do that. What would happen if I could use this banana to call my grandma? What if this pencil could take flight
  • by pretending, children are practicing deciphering others’ emotions and beliefs. But an alternate hypothesis is that pretend play helps kids develop a skill known as counterfactual reasoning.
  • Open the box, they told the kids, and you’ll be able to play with the toy.
  • They asked a quarter of the children to pretend to be someone else while they completed the task — Batman or an intrepid adventurer like Dora the Explorer.
  • And the kids did get frustrated. In an odd twist, none of the keys actually worked
  • The children who pretended to be the hardworking fictional characters stayed calmer. They also spent more time trying to open the box and tried more keys.
  • For kids, of course, play isn’t about learning or planning or regulating emotions. It’s about having fun. Play may be “evolution’s way of building in an insurance policy” to learn and develop, said Dr. Feigenson. It’s so enjoyable that most kids can’t resist, and along the way they develop the skills they need to succeed as adults.
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The Year of Blur - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-year-of-blur.html
shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “The days are long, but the years are short.” Except in the pandemic, she said, “the days are long, and the year is also long.”
  • You’re not alone if you feel that 2020, perhaps the most dramatic and memorable year of our lifetimes — and that’s before Election Day — seems shuffled and disordered, like a giant blur. A dream state, or perhaps a nightmare.
  • That’s the paradox of 2020, or one of them: A year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,
  • the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time
  • there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing
  • For some who have recovered from Covid-19
  • Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.
  • Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,
  • t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually
  • If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.
  • The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.
  • In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”
  • But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”
  • “We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”
  • Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.
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Traces of Contextual Memory Are Seen in the Brain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05memory.html
shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • For the first time, scientists have recorded traces in the brain of that kind of contextual memory, the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of thoughts and emotions that surrounds every piece of newly learned information.
  • new memories of even abstract facts — an Italian verb, for example — are encoded in a brain-cell firing sequence that also contains information about what else was happening during and just before the memory was formed
  • But the report does provide a glimpse into how the brain places memories in space and time.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “It’s a demonstration of this very cool idea that you have remnants of previous thoughts still rattling around in your head, and you bind the representation of what’s happening now to the fading embers of those old thoughts,
  • They watched a series of nouns appear on a computer screen, one after another, and after a brief distraction recalled as many of the words as they could, in any order. Repeated trials, with different lists of words, showed a predictable effect: The participants tended to remember the words in clusters, beginning with one and recalling those that were just before or after.
  • This pattern, which scientists call the contiguity effect, is similar to what often happens in the card game concentration, in which players try to identify pairs in a grid of cards lying face-down.
  • remembering a fact (a broken table) recalls a scene (dancing), which in turn brings to mind more facts — like the other people who were there — and so on.
  • “When you activate one memory, you are reactivating a little bit of what was happening around the time the memory was formed,” Dr. Kahana said, “and this process is what gives you that feeling of time travel.”
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How our brains numb us to covid-19's risks - and what we can do about it - The Washingt... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-bc6a-6841b28d9093_story.html psychology science research bias pandemic risk signaling
shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Social scientists have long known that we perceive risks that are acute, such as an impending tsunami, differently than chronic, ever-present threats like car accidents
  • Part of what’s happening is that covid-19 — which we initially saw as a terrifying acute threat — is morphing into more of a chronic one in our minds. That shift likely dulls our perception of the danger,
  • Now, when they think about covid-19, “most people have a reduced emotional reaction. They see it as less salient.”
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • This habituation stems from a principle well-known in psychological therapy: The more we’re exposed to a given threat, the less intimidating it seems.
  • As the pandemic drags on, people are unknowingly performing a kind of exposure therapy on themselves, said University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic, author of “The Perception of Risk” — and the results can be deadly.
  • “You have an experience and the experience is benign. It feels okay and comfortable. It’s familiar. Then you do it again,” Slovic said. “If you don’t see anything immediately bad happening, your concerns get deconditioned.”
  • The end result of all this desensitizing is a kind of overriding heedlessness decoupled from evidence — the anti-mask movements, the beach gatherings, the overflowing dance parties
  • One of the best ways to reinforce a certain behavior is to make sure that behavior is rewarded and that deviations from it are punished (or ignored).
  • But when it comes to lifesaving behaviors such as mask-wearing or staying home from parties, this reward-punishment calculus gets turned on its head.
  • With parties, when you do the right thing and stay home, “you feel an immediate cost: You’re not able to be with your friends,
  • while there is an upside to this decision — helping to stop the spread of the virus — it feels distant. “The benefit is invisible, but the costs are very tangible.”
  • By contrast, Slovic said, when you flout guidelines about wearing masks or avoiding gatherings, you get an immediate reward: You rejoice at not having to breathe through fabric, or you enjoy celebrating a close friend’s birthday in person.
  • Because risk perception fails as we learn to live with covid-19, Griffin and other researchers are calling for the renewal of tough government mandates to curb virus spread. They see measures such as strict social distancing, enforced masking outside the home and stay-at-home orders as perhaps the only things that can protect us from our own faulty judgment.
  • But these kinds of measures aren’t enough on their own, Griffin said. It’s also important for authorities to supply in-your-face reminders of those mandates, especially visual cues, so people won’t draw their own erroneous conclusions about what’s safe.
  • “A few parks have drawn circles [on their lawns]: ‘Don’t go out of the circle,’ ” Griffin said. “We need to take those kinds of metaphors and put them throughout the entire day.”
  • “The first step is awareness that sometimes you can’t trust your feelings.”
  • For people considering how to assess covid-19 risks, Slovic advised pivoting from emotionally driven gut reactions to what psychologist Daniel Kahneman — winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his integration of psychological research into economic science — calls “slow thinking.” That means making decisions based on careful analysis of the evidence. “You need to either do the slow thinking yourself,” Slovic said, “or trust experts who do the slow thinking and understand the situation.”
  • Thousands of us are less afraid than we were at the pandemic’s outset, even though in many parts of the country mounting case counts have increased the danger of getting the virus. We’re swarming the beaches and boardwalks, often without masks.
11More

Opinion | Beyond the Brain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-beyond-the-brain.html brain behavior neuroscience psychology
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Human beings are nothing but neurons, they assert. Once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to understand behavior.
  • We will see that people don’t really possess free will; their actions are caused by material processes emerging directly out of nature.
  • Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • there is the problem that one action can arise out of many different brain states and the same event can trigger many different brain reactions.
  • we have this useful concept, “working memory,” but the activity described by this concept is widely distributed across at least 30 regions of the brain.
  • It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.
  • you may order the same salad, but your brain activity will look different, depending on whether you are drunk or sober, alert or tired.
  • there is the problem of meaning. A glass of water may be more meaningful to you when you are dying of thirst than when you are not.
  • People can change their brains in unique and unpredictable ways by shifting the patterns of their attention.
  • we are compelled to rely on different disciplines to try to understand behavior on multiple levels, with inherent tensions between them.
  • They want to eliminate the confusing ambiguity of human freedom by reducing everything to material determinism.
20More

How the web distorts reality and impairs our judgement skills | Media Network | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...internet-confirmation-bias judgement social media the internet confirmation bias
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • IBM estimates that 90% of the world's online data has been created just in the past two years. What's more, it has made information more accessible than ever before.
  • However, rather than enhancing knowledge, the internet has produced an information glut or "infoxication".
  • Furthermore, since online content is often curated to fit our preferences, interests and personality, the internet can even enhance our existing biases and undermine our motivation to learn new things.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      When we see our preferences constantly being displayed, we are more likely to go back to wherever the information was or utilize that source, website, etc more often.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • these filters will isolate people in information bubbles only partly of their own choosing, and the inaccurate beliefs they form as a result may be difficult to correct."
  • the proliferation of search engines, news aggregators and feed-ranking algorithms is more likely to perpetuate ignorance than knowledge.
  • It would seem that excessive social media use may intensify not only feelings of loneliness, but also ideological isolation.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Would social media networks need to stop exploiting these preferences in order for us to limit ideological isolation?
  • "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact."
  • Recent studies show that although most people consume information that matches their opinions, being exposed to conflicting views tends to reduce prejudice and enhance creative thinking.
  • the desire to prove ourselves right and maintain our current beliefs trumps any attempt to be creative or more open-minded.
  • "our objects of inquiry are not 'truth' or 'meaning' but rather configurations of consciousness. These are figures or patterns of knowledge, cognitive and practical attitudes, which emerge within a definite historical and cultural context."
  • the internet is best understood as a cultural lens through which we construct – or distort – reality.
  • we can only deal with this overwhelming range of choices by ignoring most of them.
  • trolling is so effective for enticing readers' comments, but so ineffective for changing their viewpoints.
  • Will accumulating facts help you understand the world?
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      We must take an extra step past just reading/learning about facts and develop second order thinking about the claims/facts to truly gain a better sense of what is going on.
  • we have developed a dependency on technology, which has eclipsed our reliance on logic, critical thinking and common sense: if you can find the answer online, why bother thinking?
  • it is conceivable that individuals' capacity to evaluate and produce original knowledge will matter more than the actual acquisition of knowledge.
  • Good judgment and decision-making will be more in demand than sheer expertise or domain-specific knowledge.
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Suppressing the reasoning part of the brain stimulates creativity, scientists find | Sc... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ve-problem-solving-study-finds electrical stimulation creativity prefrontal cortex
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Researchers have found that suppressing activity in part of the brain involved in planning and reasoning can boost an individual’s ability to think in creative ways and solve mind-bending problems.
  • We can improve very specific think-out-of-the-box [processes], but at the same time we decrease working memory processes,
  • participants who had been given small amounts of electrical stimulation were three times more likely to solve puzzles than those who had not had their brains “zapped”.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Feel like this could be a false positive...could the participant possible be blinded into believing that an electrical shock is truly doing more good than harm?
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • show that the proportion of participants who were able to solve the toughest problems for the first time after receiving their designated stimulation, were higher for those receiving negative stimulation at 32%, compared to just 5% for positive and sham stimulation.
  • suppression of activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex helps to override constraints in thinking learned from experience.
  • negative stimulation resulted in participants becoming less able to tackle one of the other types of matchstick problem – suggesting that the electrical currents had impaired participants’ working memory.
  • it is possible that people may turn to tDCS for creative inspiration, in the same way that people turn to drugs or alcohol.”
  • It would be beneficial to think ‘what exactly do I need to be creative on this task’ rather than how to improve creativity in general,”
  • “When the [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] was ‘cooled down’, the brain seems to have stopped applying old rules, and been more successful at finding new rules
  • technology could be exploited by consumers.
  • the negative stimulation would not boost efforts in cases where individuals need to keep track of a number of different things at the same time.
  • the study also offers insights into how to boost creativity without a thinking cap.
23More

What Does It Mean to Have OCD? These Are 5 Common Symptoms | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...what-is-ocd-anxiety psychology OCD mental health knowledge
shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In recent years, OCD has become the psychological equivalent of hypoglycemia or gluten sensitivity: a condition untold numbers of people casually—almost flippantly—claim they’ve got, but in most cases don’t.
  • In recent years, OCD has become the psychological equivalent of hypoglycemia or gluten sensitivity: a condition untold numbers of people casually—almost flippantly—claim they’ve got, but in most cases don’t.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      People use the term very casually - demeaning to those who actually have it?
  • Same with the pain of OCD, which can interfere with work, relationships and more.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Has more effects than just wanting things clean
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Yet the almost sing-songy declaration “I’m so OCD!” seems to be everywhere.
  • People with a common type of OCD can even have paralyzing anxiety over their own sexual orientation.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Wouldn't necessarily have considered that
  • Since absolute certainty is rarely possible, almost no reassurance clears the yes, but hurdle, and that keeps the anxiety wheels spinning.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Lack of absolute certainty increases anxiety and doesn't let someone with OCD relax
  • It’s common for people with OCD to believe that if they check the stove just once more, or Google just one more symptom of a disease they’re convinced they’ve got, then their mind will be clear.
  • “The brain is conditioned to alert us to anything that threatens our survival, but this system is malfunctioning in OCD,” says psychologist Steven Phillipson, clinical director of the Center for Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy in New York City. “That can result in a tsunami of emotional distress that keeps your attention absolutely focused.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      The brain is trying to protect you but with OCD, it goes way overboard.
  • For the person with OCD, he explains, the brain is signaling what feels like a life and death risk, and it’s hard to put a price on survival.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      the brain thinks it is helping to protect you
  • “Performing the ritual just convinces it that the danger is real and that only perpetuates the cycle.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      While it can be soothing, allowing the rituals to continue can be more detrimental
  • “It’s the moment when a panic marries a concept,”
  • If you can live with the uncertainty those dangers can cause—even if they make you uncomfortable—you likely don’t have OCD, or at least not a very serious case of it. If the anxiety is so great it consumes your thoughts and disrupts your day, you may have a problem.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      There are definitely varying degrees of OCD but many people don't actually have it
  • Medications, including certain antidepressants, are often a big part of the solution, but psychotherapy—especially cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—can be just as effective.
  • progress up the ladder of perceived danger
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Increasing the amount of fear associated with an action
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