Motivated Forgetting

September 18, 2019

This post is based on an important book by Scott D. Slotnick titled “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.” Remember to consult the website http://www.brainfacts.org/
to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

Like retrieval-induced forgetting, motivated forgetting refers to an active process where retrieval of an item from memory is suppressed. Unlike retrieval-induced forgetting process, motivated forgetting is an intentional process.

So the research paradigm is obvious, present lists of words where words are designated to be remembered or forgotten. But the behavioral results of such an experiment would be obvious, and many would wonder why the study was done. Participants simply ignored the words designated to be forgotten and would study the words to be remembered.

Although a simple behavioral experiment would be silly, the same experiment measuring brain regions would be informative. The first study that investigated the brain regions associated with motivated forgetting employed fMRI. During the study phase, pairs of words were presented. During the think/no think phase, the initial words of some pairs were shown in red, which meant the associated word should not be thought about. The initial words of some pairs were shown in green, which meant that the associated word should be rehearsed. The initial words of some pairs were not shown, which served as a baseline measure of memory performance. During the final recall phase, all of the initial words pairs were shown.

The percentage of associated words recalled in the no-think condition was lower than the percentage of associated words recalled in the baseline condition, which reflected motivated forgetting. The percentage of associate words recalled in the think condition was higher than baseline performance, which was expected due to additional rehearsal.

Brain activity associated with motivated forgetting was identified by contrasting non-think trials (which were assisted with subsequent forgetting) and think trials (which were not associated with subsequent forgetting). Motivated forgetting was associated with an increase in activity within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and a decrease of activity in the hippocampus.

A literature review has shown that motivated forgetting consistently produces an increase in activity within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and a decrease of activity within the hippocampus. In addition, motivated forgetting of visual information produces a decrease in activity within the visual sensory regions. This overall pattern of brain activity during motivated forgetting is identical to that of retrieval-induced forgetting. These findings provide convergent evidence that active forgetting, whether retrieval-based or motivated, is cause by a top-down signal within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that inhibits the hippocampus and sensory cortical regions.


Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

September 17, 2019

to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

Retrieval-induced is an active process where retrieval of an item from memory inhibits the retrieval of related words. For example, if the word “banana” is recalled, the memory representation of the related word “orange,” which is also a fruit, will be inhibited to some degree. Presumably such inhibition occurs to reduce the likelihood that a similar but incorrect item will be retrieved (to avoid mistakenly saying “orange” when one intends to say “banana.”)

The paradigm used to study retrieval-induced forgetting includes an initial study phase, an intermediate retrieval practice, and a final recall phase. In one fMRI experiment, participants were presented with word pairs consisting of a category and an example of the category in the study phase. During the intermediate retrieval practice phase, participants were presented with a subset of the categories along with a two-letter word cue and were asked to mentally complete each word (during this phase, non-presented words from the same categories were inhibited). In the final recall phase, participants were presented with all of the categories and word cues corresponding to the word pairs from the study phase. Categories/words that were presented in the study phase but were not presented in the retrieval practice served as a baseline level of performance (since these words were not inhibited.) Retrieval-induced forgetting was revealed as a lower percentage of recall for words that were from the same category than the percentage of recall for words that were from a different category that were not presented during retrieval practice.

To identify brain regions associated with retrieval-induced forgetting during the final recall phase, non-presented words from the same category as those presented during retrieval practice (which were inhibited) were compared with practice words (which were not inhibited). This contrast produced activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The larger the magnitude of activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the higher the percentage of retrieval-induced forgetting. This suggests that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex actively inhibits non-presented words from the same category as words presented during retrieval practice.

Another retrieval-induced forgetting study used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to disrupt activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the practice phase. This completely eliminated the retrieval-induced forgetting effect, indicating that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is necessary to produce this type of forgetting.

Typical Forgetting

September 16, 2019

to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

Usually forgetting in everyday life can be attributed to a failure to attend to information. One might not be interested in the material, distracted by a cell phone, been sleepy, or thinking about something else. Attention is key to remembering and not forgetting. If participants are asked to deeply process words, such as deciding whether each word in a study list is “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” their memory performance will be similar whether or not they knew there is a subsequent memory test. Successfully encoding information requires attention rather than the knowledge that the information will be tested at a later time.

The pattern of brain activity associated with subsequent forgetting is the same as the pattern of brain activity that is referred to as the default network. The default network consists of the regions of the brain that become active when participants are not engaged in any particular task, such as when they lay quietly with their eyes closed, passively looking at a fixation point on the screen, or waiting between experimental trials. This network of brain activity has been associated with many cognitive states, such as daydreaming, mind wandering, lapses of attention, and retrieval of personal information.

So in the real world one knows to minimize distractions and attend to information that is important. To avoid forgetting, one needs to focus attention and stay engaged. So minimize multitasking. Staying constantly plugged in guarantees superficial understanding.

Phase and Frequency of Activity Associated with Long Term Memory

September 15, 2019

to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

Frequency refers to the rate of change in magnitude over time. Frequencies can be low, changing slowly over time, or high, changing rapidly over time. Brain activity time courses can be considered from a frequency perspective, with lower frequencies corresponding to slower changes in signal over time, and higher frequencies corresponding to the faster changes in signal over time. Certain frequencies of brain activity have been associated with memory and have been linked to particular brain regions. Specifically, memory has been associated with brain activity that oscillates in the theta frequency band (4 to 8 Hertz), the alpha frequency band (8 to 12 Hertz) and the gamma frequency band (greater than 30 Hertz). In the fields of visual perception and visual attention, gamma activity is known to reflect binding of features that are processed in different cortical regions (such as shape and color). Gamma activity is a mechanism that underlies the perception of unified objects. Theta activity (4 to 8 Hertz) reflects the interaction the hippocampus and cortical regions have during long-term memory, and alpha activity reflects cortical inhibition.

In addition to modulation of activity within theta, alpha, and gamma frequency bands during memory, there is evidence that brain regions with different frequencies of modulation can be in phase with each other. This is called cross-frequency coupling and indicates two brain regions interact. In a long-term memory electroencephalography (EEG) study, participants viewed picture of objects during the study phase and then during the test phase were presented with old and new pictures of objects and made “remember’ “new” judgments. Subsequently remembered items as compared to subsequently forgotten items were associated with an increase in beta activity in right frontal regions, a decrease in alpha activity in anterior and posterior regions, and an increase in gamma activity in parietal and occipital regions (from 300 to 1300 milliseconds after stimulus onset). Moreover, there was greater cross-frequency coupling for subsequently remembered than subsequently forgotten items between frontal theta activity and parietal-occipital gamma activity. The identical pattern of results for theta activity and gamma activity was observed with the same experimental protocol during memory retrieval. Based on the known role of gamma activity in visual perception and attention, it can be assumed that the increase in parietal-occipital gamma activity in these studies reflected an increase in visual object processing associated with remembered items, and frontal theta activity may have modulated the gamma activity. Of special importance, the cross-frequency coupling evidence suggests that frontal regions and parietal-occipital regions interacted during long-term memory encoding and retrieval.

To summarize succinctly, theta activity reflects the interaction between the hippocampus and cortical regions during long-term memory, alpha activity reflects cortical inhibition, and gamma activity reflects process of features in different cortical regions that are combined to create a unified memory.

Superior Long Term Memory

September 14, 2019

to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

Perhaps the most famous research on superior memory, one that has been reported in previous healthy memory blog posts regards London taxi drivers. At one time they needed to memorize the layout of 25,000 city streets and the locations of thousands of city attractions. One study investigated whether there were differences in the size of brain regions between taxi drivers and control participants. They found that these taxi drivers had changes in the size of only their hippocampus, with a relative increase in the amount of gray matter within the posterior hippocampus and a relative decrease in the amount of gray matter within the anterior hippocampus. Moreover, the types changes in both types of hippocampal gray matter size correlated with the length of time they had been taxi drivers, which ranged from 1.5 to 52 years (with the largest changes for those who had been taxi drivers the longest).

A follow-up study compared the brain region sizes between London taxi drivers and London bus drivers, who were a better matched control in terms of driving experience, stress, and other factors. The same results were obtained, where the taxi drivers had a relatively larger posterior hippocampus and a relatively smaller anterior hippocampus than bus drivers, and this correlated with the length of time they had been driving a taxi.

Another group of people who have superior memory are those who participate in the World Memory Championships and those who are known for extraordinary memory abilities. A study compared such individuals with control participants to asses whether there were differences in cognitive abilities, differences in the size of brain regions, and differences in the magnitude of fMRI activation during memory tasks. People defined as having superior memory did not differ from control participants in the cognitive abilities tested (IQ ranges were 95 to 119 and 98 to 119, respectively) or in the size of an brain regions. The fMRI task required superior memory for a sequence of digits (a task where those whose superior memory excelled), memory for a sequence of faces, or memory for a sequence of snowflakes. Across tasks, those with superior memory had greater activation in the posterior hippocampus, the retrosplenial cortex, and the medial parietal cortex, which are regions that have been associated with long term memory. Almost all of the participants with superior memory reported using a memory strategy called the method of loci. (entering method of loci into the search block of the healthy memory blog yields 11 hits).

Another case study investigated another individual with a superior memory, who is known as PI, was able to recall the digits of pi to more than 65,000 decimal places. His performance was similar to control participants on the large majority of cognitive tasks. Not surprisingly his working memory was in the 99.9th percentile. But it is conceivable that that might be the result of the extraordinary amount of time he spent memorizing pi. His general memory was average. He was impaired on test of visual memory (3rd percentile or below).

He also reports on individuals who are considered as having highly superior autobiographical memory or HSAMers. There have been eight previous posts on HSAMers. These are people who have detailed episodic memory for every day of their later childhood and adult life. If they are given any date, they can recall the day of the week, and public events that occurred on that day of the week. In one study of HSAMers their performance was normal on most standard cognitive tasks. A comparison of different brain regions between HSAMers and control participants revealed a number of differences including greater white matter coherence in the parahippocampal gyrus, which could reflect greater contextual processing associated with episodic retrieval, and a relatively smaller anterior temporal cortex. The decrease in size of the anterior temporal cortex, which has been associated with semantic memory, may reflect the disuse of this region because those with HSAM rely more on episodic retrieval. Much more research needs to be done with this interesting group.

Sex Differences in Long Term Memory

September 13, 2019

to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

Males usually perform better on navigating previously learned environment. Females usually perform better on long-term memory tasks that can depend on verbal memory such as word list recognition and recall, associative memory, and autobiographical memory. Since almost all long-term memory tasks can be performed using verbal memory strategies, females generally have better behavioral performance than males. Females have larger numbers of estrogen receptors in the hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These are two of the three regions associated with long-term memory, which can increase the activity of these regions. The hippocampus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are larger in females than males, relative to overall brain size. Additionally, females have relatively larger volumes of language processing cortex, which likely contributes to their superior verbal memory.

In addition, females and males often employ different cognitive strategies and have distinct patterns of brain activity while they perform the same task. An fMRI study investigated whether there were sex differences in the hippocampus during memory for object-location associations. There were 10 female and 10 male participants. During study blocks, participants viewed a video as if they were walking through a virtual environment with five colored geometric objects. During recognition blocks, an aerial view of each object was shown in a old location or a new location. Participants responded whether each was in an “old” or “new” location. Each participant also used a four-point rating scale to describe the strategy they used to learn the object locations: (1) completely verbal, (2) more verbal than pictorial, (3) more pictorial than verbal, and (4) completely pictorial.

Although there was no difference in behavioral performance between female participants and male participants, the average strategy for female participants was 2.5 and the average strategy rating for male participants was 4.0 indicating that female participants employed more verbal memory strategies and male participants employed purely spatial/non-verbal strategies. The fMRI data indicated that activity was localized to the left hippocampus in the large majority of female participants and that activity was localize to the right hippocampus in the large majority of male participants. These results are consistent with patient studies indicating the lesions in the left medial temporal lobe impair verbal memory and lesions in the right medial temporal lobe impair visual memory.

Long Term Memory Consolidation and Sleep

September 12, 2019

to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

It appears that a primary role of sleep is to integrate new memories into our vast memory store with the minimal disruption of old memories. Sleep involves rapid eye movements (REM) periods and non-REM periods that alternate every ninety minutes, with four stages of progressively deeper non-REM sleep. The first half of a night’s sleep is dominated by non-REM sleep, while the amount of REM sleep increases during the second half of the night. Non-REM stages 3 and 4, referred to as slow wave sleep, are of special relevance because these periods are important for consolidation of long-term memories. REM sleep seems to be particularly important for consolidation of implicit memories.

Slow wave sleep is associated with slow (less than 1 Hertz) waves of brain activity that are measured across the entire scalp using EEG. The slow waves orchestrate a number of brain processes that mediate the process of long-term memory consolidation. Slow waves alternate between down-states corresponding to global decreases in brain activity and upstates corresponding to global increases in brain activity. Slow waves synchronize other brain waves including thalamic-cortical sleep spindles (that oscillate at frequencies of 11-16 Hertz) and hippocampal sharp-wave ripples (that oscillate at a frequency of approximately 200 Hertz). Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples are of particular importance as they are known to coordinate the hippocampal-cortical interactions that reflect the reproduction of memories from the previous waking period. In brief, important long term memories from the previous waking period are replayed during slow wave sleep, which in turn strengthens these memories and results in consolidation. Although this mechanism for memory consolidation is based on strengthening of memory representations through repeated activations, it has been proposed that sleep may also weaken memory representation of unimportant events to provide a clean slate for next day’s events. It is interesting to note that Dr. Slotnick dedicates this book to his incredible daughter Sonya, for dominating my hippocampal sharp-wave spindles these past twelve years. This section should convince all readers that all-nighters are not only fruitless, but also counterproductive. One wants to have memories well-consolidated prior to taking an exam.

Brain Regions Associated with Long-Term Memory

September 11, 2019

to see the anatomical information referred to in this post.

Dr. Slotnick writes, The term episodic memory can refer to many other related forms of memory including context memory, source memory, “remembering,” recollection, and autobiographical memory, which refers to a specific type of episodic memory for detailed personal events. As the names imply context memory and source memory refer to the context in which something occurred and source memory refers to where the event occurred.

Episodic memories are related to activity in both control regions and sensory regions of the brain. Sensory cortical activity reflects the contents of memory. The control regions that mediate episodic memory include the medial temporal lobe, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the parietal cortex. There are many regions associated with episodic memory but the primary regions are the medial temporal lobe, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the parietal cortex. The parahippocampal cortex processes the context of previously presented information such as the location or the color.

The hippocampus binds item information and context information to create a detailed episodic memory. Dr. Slotnick provides the following example. “If an individual went on a vacation to Newport Beach in California and later recalled meeting a friend on the beach, that individual’s perirhinal cortex would process item information (the friend), the parahippocampal cortex would process context information (the area of the beach on which they were standing), and the hippocampus would bind this information and context information into unified memory.”

Semantic memory refers to knowledge of facts that are learned through repeated exposure over a long period of time. These facts are processed and organized in semantic memory, which provides the basis for much thought. Subjectively, semantic memory is associated with “knowing.” Semantic memory includes definitions and conceptual knowledge, and this cognitive process is linked to the field of language.

Semantic memory has been associated with the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (in a different region associated with episodic memory), the anterior temporal lobes, and sensory cortical regions. The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may reflect the processing of selecting a semantic memory that is stored in other cortical memories. For example, naming animals activates more lateral inferior occipital-temporal cortex that has been associated with the perception of living things, while naming tools activates more medial inferior occipital-cortex that has been associated with perception of nonliving things.

In a study of Alzheimer’s patients, the impairment in an object naming task, which depends on intact semantic memory, was more highly correlated with cortical thinning in the left anterior temporal lobe. This finding suggests that the left anterior temporal lobe is necessary for semantic memory.

During long-term memory the hippocampus binds information between different cortical regions. But long-term memory may only depend on the hippocampus for a limited time. In the standard model of memory consolidation, a long-term memory representation changes from being based on hippocampal-cortical interactions to being based on cortical-cortical interaction, which takes a period of somewhere between 1 to 10 years. A person with hippocampal damage due to a temporary lack of oxygen might have impaired long-term memory for approximately 1 year before the time of damage from retrograde amnesia and have intact long-term memories for earlier events. This suggests that the hippocampus is involved in long-term memory retrieval for approximately 1year as more remote long-term memories no longer demand on the hippocampus so they are not disrupted.

The activity in the hippocampus did not drop to zero for older semantic memories but was well above baseline for events that were 30 years old. This indicates that the hippocampus was involved in memory retrieval for this entire period. If the hippocampus was no longer involved, the magnitude of activity in this regions would have dropped to zero for remote memories.

There is a growing body of evidence that the hippocampus is involved in long-term memories throughout the lifetime. As such, the process of consolidation does not appear to result in the complete transfer from hippocampus-cortical memory representation to cortical-cortical memory representations.

Tools of Cognitive Neuroscience

September 10, 2019

The title of this post is identical to a chapter title in an important book by Scott D. Slotnick titled “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.” The tools of cognitive neuroscience are highly technical. If the reader is interested in these techniques she should read Dr.Slotnick’s book, or look up the tools of interest in the Wikipedia.

One of the earliest techniques was positron emission tomography (PET). It required that a low level of radioactive material be injected into the participants bloodstream. This technique measured increased blood flow to the portions of the brain being activated. Fortunately a new technique that measured blood flow was found that did not require the injection of radioactive dye or any other type of material.

That technique was functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which also measured where in the brain the blood flow was increasing.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) can track brain activity in real time. ERPs directly measure neural activity and have a temporal resolution in milliseconds. Its spatial resolution is in centimeters, which is much lower than fMRI.

Electroencephalography (EEG) uses the identical data acquisition as ERPs, but refers to any measure of brain activity that corresponds to electric fields. This includes ERPs, but more commonly refers to brain activity that oscillates within a specific range of frequencies. EEG frequency analysis is a powerful alternative to the more commonly employed ERP analysis. Related to EEG, magnetoencephalography (MEG) refers to any measure of brain activity that corresponds to magnetic fields, and also typically refers to brain activity that oscillates within a specific frequency range. Like ERPs that are generated by averaging all the events of a given type from EEG data during a cognitive task, event-related fields (ERFs) are generated by averaging all the events of a given type from MEG data. The more general terms EEG and MEG also refer to ERPs and ERFs.

Dr. Slotnick writes, “fMRI is by far the most popular method in the field of cognitive neuroscience. However, brain activity is not a static set of blobs that represent a cognitive process. Rather, brain activity changes across different regions in milliseconds. Only techniques with excellent temporal resolution, such as ERPs, can track the functioning brain. This book highlights the temporal dimension of brain processing in addition to the spatial dimension of brain processing. One major advantage of temporal information is that one can use it to assess whether different brain regions are synchronously active, which indicates that these regions interact. This reflects how the brain is actually operating.”

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can be used to temporarily disrupt processing in one region of the brain.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is similar to TMS in that it temp[orarily modulates processing in a target cortical region by stimulating with a weak direct current rather than a magnetic field.

A relatively new method called transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) uses the identical setup as tDCS, but the current alternatives at a specific frequency; this, tACS can stimulate the brain at a desired frequency.

Do not let yourself be discouraged or turned off by this technical stuff, but brief explanations are needed as these are the tools used in this research. The remainder of the posts will be on memory performance and on the portions of the brain contributing to this performance.

Sensory Reactivation Hypothesis

September 9, 2019

This post is based on information in an important book by Scott D. Slotnick titled “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.” The sensory reactivation hypothesis states that memory for an event can activate the same brain regions associated with the perception of that event. These sensory memory effects reflect the contents of memory for a visual experience containing visual information.

There is a large body of research supporting the memory sensory reactivation hypothesis. Memory for visual information, language information (sounds or words), movement information (actions, and olfactory information reactivate the corresponding regions of the brain.) Within the visual process regions, there is also evidence that memory for faces and houses activate the fusiform face area (FFA) and the parahippocampal place area (PPA), respectively.

Evidence has also accumulated that memory for specific features activate the corresponding feature processing brain region. Memory for shape activates the lateral occipital complex (LOC), memory for colors activates V8, memory for items in the left visual field or right visual field activate the extra striate cortex in the opposite/contralateral hemisphere, and memory for motion activates region MT.

The concept of mental practice is relevant here. Athletes or performers mentally rehearse the activities they will need to perform. This mental rehearsal activates the relevant brain areas and the communications that need to be made to perform these activities. And this mental practice has beneficial effects on performance.

This is good to keep in mind if the weather or other complications preclude regular practice. Idle moments can be filled with mental rehearsal to make best use of one’s time.

Similarly one can use this sensory reactivation to re-experience pleasant experiences, be it an view, vacation highlights, sporting events, enjoyable meals. One can get maximum value for one’s entertainment dollar in this manner.

Brain Anatomy

September 8, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a section in an important book by Scott D. Slotnick titled “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.” Brain Anatomy is a difficult topic to cover in a blog. The names can be learned and one can impress one’s friends and neighbors by reciting these names with their associated function. But the brain is a three dimensional structure and it is difficult illustrating these structures in two dimensions, especially since the position from which the brain is viewed is important. What is needed is a three dimensional model that can be rotated. Such a model can be found at http://www.brainfacts.org. Look for 3D Brain and click interact with the brain. It will likely take some practice interacting with the brain, but HM thinks this is the best source for this feature.

The brain is composed of four lobes: occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal. Each lobe has gray matter on the surface, which primarily consists of cell bodies, and white matter below the surface, which primarily consists of cell axons that connect different cortical regions. The occipital lobe is associated with visual processing. The temporal lobe is associated with visual processing and language processing. The parietal lobe is associated with visual processing and attention, and the frontal lobe is associated with many cognitive processes. You can see that over half of the human brain is associated with visual processing. Obviously we are primarily visual animals.

The regions of the brain that are of relevance to memory include the occipital cortex, the temporal cortex, the parietal cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the medial temporal lobe. The cortex is folded with gyri protruding out and sulk folding in.

The hippocampus (you can look for this using the link provided above) is a structure central to long-term memory. Its importance was realized when surgery was done on a patient, H.M., done to treat the severe epileptic seizures he was having. The medial temporal lobe, which contains the hippocampus, was removed in both hemispheres. This surgery did not affect his intelligence or personality, but it did cause a severe deficit in long-term memory referred to as amnesia. His semantic memory remained intact. He had almost no memory of events that occurred a few years before the surgery, and had no memory for events that occurred after the surgery. Ten months before the surgery he and his family moved to a new house a few blocks away from their old house. After the surgery he had no memory for his new address, he could not find his way to the new home, and he did not know where objects were kept in the new home. He had no memory of articles he had read before, so he would read the same articles repeatedly. He would eat lunch and a half-hour later could not remember he had eaten. Despite this severe deficit in long-term memory, his working memory appeared intact. He could remember a pair of words or a three-digit number for several minutes as long as he was not distracted. So a reasonable conclusion is that the hippocampus and the surrounding cortical regions are critical for long-term memory.

Dr. Slotnick writes, “Long-term memory typically refers to retrieval of previously presented information, However, the key stages of long-term memory include encoding, storage, and retrieval. The hippocampus has been associated with both long-term memory encoding and long-term memory retrieval. Long-term memory storage depends on a process called memory consolidation, which refers to changes in brain regions, including the hippocampus, underlying long-term memory. Thus, all three stages of long-term memory depend on the hippocampus.”

Sometimes people think of the hippocampus as being the location where long-term memories are stored. Memories are stored throughout the brain, it is the processing of these memories for which the hippocampus is critical.

The Role of Introspection

September 7, 2019

This post is based on an important book by Scott D. Slotnick titled “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.” The initial research approach taken in the early days of psychology was introspection. As all humans can access their own minds, it seemed like an obvious approach, to simply record how humans are using their own minds. Reams of research were collected using this approach. But no theories or hypothesis emerged, nor were there techniques for testing hypotheses, which is central to all science. The result was a radical rejection of this subjective approach and the beginning of behaviorism, in which only observed behaviors were an appropriate source of data for psychologists.

Only recently has introspection been accepted back into rigorous psychological research. Introspection has been found useful in identifying which kind(s) of memory operated during a particular task.

The renowned psychologist Endel Tulving hypothesized that there was a distinction between “remembering” and “knowing.” Tulving recognized this distinction from his own introspections. But he did not stop there. There was research on a patient with a brain lesion who had no detailed memory of the past (he could not remember) but still could define words. Tulving designed and ran experiments to test the hypothesis that “remember” responses and “know” responses were distinct. During one experiment, words were presented during the study phase, and then during the test phase old words and new words were presented and participants made “old” and “new” recognition judgments. For old items correctly classified as “old,” participants also made a “remember” – “know” judgment and a confidence-rating judgment (ranging from 1 to 3 corresponding to low confidence, intermediate confidence, and high confidence). The probability of “remember” responses increased with increasing confidence, while the probability of “know” responses was maximal at the intermediate confidence rating.

These distinct response profiles provide behavioral evidence in support of Tulving’s hypotheses that “remembering” and “knowing” are distinct types of memory. This research is strictly cognitive psychology. However, a large body of research in cognitive neuroscience has subsequently accumulated showing that “remembering” and “knowing” are also associated with distinct regions of the brain.

Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory

September 6, 2019

The title of this post is the same as the title of an important book by Scott D. Slotnick. He writes in the preface, “The human brain and memory are two of the most complex and fascinating systems in existence. Within the last two decades, the cognitive neuroscience of memory has begun to thrive with the advent of techniques that can non-invasively measure human brain activity with spatial resolution and high temporal resolution.

Cognitive neuroscience had not been created when HM was a graduate student. The field is quite new. In cognitive psychology we studied cognitive processes, of which memory was central, but little was known about the neuroscience underlying memory.

Before getting into neuroscience it is important to understand what memory encompasses. Most people think of memory as something they need to use to pass exams, are frustrated by exam failures, and by an inability to remember names. Readers should be aware of the function of memory. Memory is a tool for time travel. We use it to help us predict and deal with the future. The more we learn, the more we have information for dealing with the future. Moreover, there are many types of memory.

The first pair of memory types is explicit memory and implicit memory. These refer to conscious memory and nonconscious memory. They differ in that all forms of explicit memory are associated with conscious experience/awareness of previously experienced memory, whereas all forms of implicit memory are associated with a lack of conscious experience/awareness of the previously experienced information.

Skills are one type of implicit of memory. After a skill is learned, performance of that skill reflects nonconscious memory. Once a person has learned to ride a bike, she doesn’t think about rotating the pedals, steering, breaking, or balancing. Rather, their conscious experience is dominated by where she wants to ride or whatever else she happens to be thinking about. Repetition priming is another type of implicit memory that refers to more efficient or fluent processing of an item when it is repeated. When a television commercial is repeated, that information is processed more efficiently (and when the item from the commercial is seen again while shopping, implicit memory presumably increases the chance that it will be purchased.) Skill learning can be assumed to be based on repetition priming.

The remaining memory types are types of explicit memory. A second pair of memory types is long-term memory and working memory. Working-memory is often referred to as short-term memory. A recognition memory experiment will be described to help make the distinction between long-term memory and working memory. During the study phase of both long-term memory and working memory, items such as words or objects are presented. After the study phase, there is a delay period that will last as a function of specific amount(s) of time. During the test phase, old items from the study phase and new items are presented, and participants make “old” or “new” judgments for each item. This is termed old-new recognition. A greater proportion of “old” responses to old items than “old” responses to new items indicates the degree of accuracy of the memories.

Long-term memory and working memory differ with regard to whether or not information is kept in mind during the delay period. Typically there are many items in the study phase and the delay period is relatively long (typically minutes to hours). Obviously participants do not actively maintain information from the study phase during the delay period. In working memory experiments, there are typically a few items in the study phase, the delay period is in seconds and participants are instructed to actively maintain information from the study phase in their mind.

Another pair of memory types is episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory consists of the memories we have of our experiences. Semantic memory refers to retrieval of, hopefully, factual memory that is learned over periods of time such as the definition of a word. Unfortunately, semantic memory also consists of misinformation and erroneous beliefs. And, unfortunately, this misinformation and erroneous beliefs can be further amplified via technology and social media.

Another pair of memory types is “remembering” and “knowing.” “Remembering” refers to the subjective mental experience of retrieving details from the previous experience, such as someone retrieving where they parked their car in a parking lot. If any details are recalled from a previous experience, this constitutes “remembering.” “Knowing” is defined by the lack of memory for details from a pervious experience, such as when someone is confident they have seen someone before but not where or when they saw them. Remembering is usually assumed to be related to context memory, as it is thought to occur whenever contextual information is retrieved. “Knowing” is typically assumed to be related to item memory and semantic memory. The last pair of memory types is recollection and familiarity. The terms recollection and familiarity can refer to mathematical models of these two kinds of memory, but more commonly refer to all the forms of detailed memory (episodic memory, context memory and “remembering”) and non-detailed memory (semantic memory, item memory, and knowing). Dr. Slotnick writes, “It may be useful to think of context memory and item memory as measures of task performance, “remembering” and “knowing” as measures of subjective experience, and recollection and familiarity as general terms that describe strong memory and weak memory, respectively.”

Positivity Wrap Up

September 4, 2019

It is hoped that by know you not only are aware of the extreme importance of increasing positivity and decreasing positivity in your life, but that you also have an extensive amount of guidance as to how to accomplish these goals. The title is Positivity Wrap Up rather than Positivity Conclusion because positivity is a lifelong pursuit and it is only these series of posts that are concluding. Even so, you should anticipate future posts on this topic because it is so important. The fear is that the amount of advice might be overwhelming. Use what you find relevant and what you have the resources to address.

You have the survey for assessing your own positivity. Remember that the goal, the tipping point into positivity is a ratio of 3. However, you should not stop at this level and continue your endeavor into a more flourishing life.

Remember that these blog posts cannot do justice to the complete book. So consider reading “Positivity: Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life,” by Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D.

A Positivity Toolkit

September 3, 2019

This post is based on a book by psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, “Positivity: Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life.”

Tool 1. Be Open. The goal here is to experiment with mindful awareness while carrying out your day. Make your motto “be open.” Temporarily rid your mind of expectations and judgments. These can cloud your ability to be open. Instead, give yourself permission and time to experience the richness of the present moment. No matter what you encounter, no matter what happens, experiment with both awareness and acceptance.

Tool 2. Create High-Quality Connections. Any social interaction—whether with family, co-workers, or someone ahead of you in line—is a chance to create a high-quality connection. According to Jane Dutton, cofounder of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, your moments of connection with others form a dynamic, living tissue that can be either life-giving or life-depleting. High quality connections are life-giving. You recognize them instantly by several telltale signs: they foster mutual appreciation and encourage truly being or doing things together; they recharge your energy and your vitality; they bring real physiological changes. You can literally feel high-quality connections resonate within your body.

Tool 3. Cultivate Kindness. This tool draws from research done by Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness. Give yourself the goal of performing five new acts of kindness on a single day. Aim for actions that really make a difference and come at some cost, such as donating blood, helping your neighbor with her yard work. Assess what those around you might need most. Although some of the kind acts you choose may take some advance planning, make a point to carry them all out on a single day. At the end of the day, take stock. Notice the good feelings that come with increasing your kindness: the positive connection to the person you helped, the fitting sense of pride you get from making a contribution. For lasting impact, make your kindness day a recurring ritual. Be creative each week. Find new ways to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Try it for a few months and see the difference it makes.

Tool 4. Develop Distractions. The suggestion is to make two lists. Label one healthy distractions and the other unhealthy distractions. Ask, “What can I do to get my mind off my troubles?” Then brainstorm, identifying things you already do,as well as new activities you’d like to try. Try to come up with things you can do in good and bad weather, at work, at home, or on the road.

Write down the unhealthy distractions that tempt to you. For each unhealthy distraction that tempts you, come with a healthy alternative: a drink or snack that doesn’t take a toll; a movie, computer game, or song list that’s more uplifting.

Tool 5. Dispute Negative Thinking. This exercise comes from the Penn Resiliency Program. This requires a set of index cards. On each one, write one of your typical negative thoughts. Write down negative thoughts that are realistic and truly yours. Capture your inner critic, that voice in your head that’s skeptical of you, of others, and of everything around you—the voice of ill will.

Then shuffle the cards and pick one at random. Read, then as fast and as thoroughly as you can—dispute it. When you’re satisfied that you’ve shot down your menacing negativity with rapid-fire facts, move on to the next card. Repeat. As you work your way through your negativity deck, let you conviction grow as you become a seasoned disputer. Whenever you find gratuitous negativity lurking in your mind, externalize it by adding it to your deck of cards. Challenge yourself to meet it out in the open—out loud—with your rapid fire facts. Be sure that these are facts and that you are not lying to yourself.

Tool 6. Find Nearby Nature. Locate places you can get to in a matter of minutes that will connect you to green or blue, to trees, water, or sky. Ample research has shown that these boost positivity.

Tool 7. Learn and Apply Your Strengths. One way to learn your strengths is to take a free, online survey that Martin Seligman (the founder of Positive Psychology) and Chris Peterson developed with support from the Values in Action Institute. Allow yourself plenty of time to take this survey: it contains 240 items to measure 24 character strengths. You can find it by visiting Seligman’s website at the University of Pennsylvania’a Positive Psychology Center, or point your browser to http://www.AuthenticHappiness.com. After completing the survey, you’ll receive a report that ranks the 24 strengths by the degree to which they characterize you. The report will also feature your top five strengths, and encourage you to reflect on which ones truly resonate for you, which strengths, when you act on them, make you come alive. This self-reflection is critical. It’s how you locate your “signature” strengths among your top five.

Tool 8. Meditate Mindfully. There are many healthy memory blog posts on this topic. Go to healthymemory.wordpress.com and enter “relaxation response” in the search box.

Tool 9. Meditate on Loving-Kindness. There are also posts on this tool. Go to
healthymemory.wordpress.com and enter loving-kindness in the search box.

Tool 10. Ritualize Gratitude. Being grateful simply requires that you notice the gifts that surround you. If you’re drawn to record your thoughts in writing, consider buying a blank book to be your gratitude journal.

Tool 11. Savor Positivity. You need two things to experiment with savoring. First is a genuine love, joy, pride, or any other flavor of positivity in your life; second a willingness to think differently about it. The key is to think about the event in away that stokes your positivity flames right now. Truly cherish the event, and its benefits to you will grow.

A Word of Caution from HM. This is an enormous toolkit. It easily overwhelms. It’s even more overwhelming when you consider your obligations. Some of the tools here should be helpful in dealing with your obligations. But you need to be selective, picking and choosing what you think is most helpful and what you think you’ll be able to devote your time to.

Increase Positivity

September 2, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in a book by a book by psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, “Positivity: Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life.” The chapter begins with the following Cherokee parable:

One evening an Old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle
inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth,
compassion, and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his
grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”


Sincerity matters. Take a moment to appreciate the word “Heartfelt.” To truly feel positivity in your heart requires that you slow down. The pace of modern life is often so relentless that it keeps you focused outward, away from your inner core. To increase your positivity, you’ll need to “un-numb” your heart. Let it feel. Let it be open. Slow yourself down enough so that you can see and hear and sense with your heart, not just with your eyes, ears, and mind. Let yourself breathe in and fully absorb the goodness that surrounds you. Connect to that goodness. Revel in it. Together with a sincere attitude, this slower pace unlocks your heartfelt positivity.

Find Positive Meaning. Finding positive meaning is always possible. Most of the circumstances we face are not 100% bad. So the chance to find the good, and honestly accentuate the positive meaning in your current circumstance, is always present, even if it’s simply to realize that “this too shall pass.” When you reframe unpleasant and even dire circumstances in a positive way, you boost the odds that positive emotions—like hope—will flow forth.

Savor Goodness. Another strategy for increasing positivity, perhaps obvious is to find the good within the good, by turning something positive into something even more positive. The author suggests calling this gold-plated positivity. She writes that savoring is a mental habit we can develop.

Count Your Blessings. By moving the riverbed of your habitual thought you can reframe something bad as something good and make good things even better. You can even do the same with seemingly ordinary things. You can take something flat, dull, and commonplace and make it sparkle. Oprah popularized the idea of keeping a gratitude journal. She encouraged people to write down five things they love each day.

Kindness Counts. There are at least two sides to kindness. When you count your blessings, you often appreciate how others have been kind to you and have elicited your gratitude. Recognizing your side of kindness is another simple and cost-free way to boost your positivity. Kindness and positivity feed own each other. Simply recognizing your own acts of kindness initiates an upward spiral.

Follow Your Passions. Give yourself permission to play. Find the activities that allow you to enter flow. Flow states are those peak moments in which you become fully absorbed in an activity, when the challenges of the activity are high and well-matched by your ever increasing skills. Some people enter into flow with their hobbies.

Dream About Your Future. Another way to boost your positivity is to dream more frequently about your future. Conjure up the best possible outcomes for yourself. Visualize your future successes in great detail. People who are assigned at random to carry out such an exercise show reliable increases in their positivity relative to those who carry out more mundane self-reflective actions.

Apply Your Strengths. People who have the opportunity to do what they do best—to act on their strengths—are far more likely to flourish. Research has shown that learning about your strengths can give you a high.

Connect with Others. Flourishing is not a solo endeavor. It’s scientifically correct to say that nobody reaches his or her full potential in isolation. Every person who flourishes has warm and trusting relationships with other people.

Connect with Nature. Natural environments may be as important to flourishing as social environments. So a very simple way to increase your positivity is to go outside.

Open Your Mind. Positivity and openness feed on each other, each triggering and reinforcing the other. This bidirectional link means that another level you can gasp to increase positivity is to be open. Be open and positivity will follow.

Open Your Heart. Whereas the practice of mindfulness meditation opens your mind, other age-old meditation practices seem to more directly unlock your heart. Practicing these other forms of meditation helps you experience your connections with others, bringing forth the deep and heartfelt positivity of community. The author suggest loving-kindness meditation. Enter “loving-kindness” into the search block at
healthymemory.wordpress.com to find relevant posts on this topic.

Dealing with Negative People

September 1, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a section in of a book by psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D. titled “Positivity: Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life.” The title presents a challenge to which we all will encounter. Here are three techniques for dealing with this situation.

Technique 1. Modify the situation. You need to be honest and ask yourself if there is any way that you inadvertently feed this person’s negativity. Could I somehow be baiting him with my own reaction or words? Am I to any degree closed down when we interact? What assumptions do I make about this person? Reviewing these questions might lead to better ways of interacting with this individual.

Another way to change the situation is to be proactive in setting the collective agenda. Choose joint activities that inspire you. Consider whether you might reserve the tasks that irritate you—for example, paying the bills or cleaning up—for when you’re each alone and less likely to fan the collective negativity flames.

If negativity surfaces, a final way to modify the situation is to inject compassion, hope, or even humor. Curb you tendency to respond “in kind” to gratuitous negativity with yet another helping of it. Don’t escalate the problem. Instead offer positive reframes of the negative messages delivered. Convert they “half empty” to half full.” Point out something that you both might see as funny. Scientific studies have shown that relationships in which one partner somehow manages to break the cycle of negative reciprocity—by respond to negativity in a neutral or positive way—fare far better than those in which partners mirror each other’s ill will.

Technique 2. Attend differently. Another strategy is to consider how you might attend to different aspects of this person. What are his positive qualities? What do you appreciate about him? What does he bring to the table? Perhaps your boss’s frequent bursts of anger are matched by his stand-out passion for making a positive difference in the world. Consider the times when your spouse has stood by you, loyal and faithful. Consider how you might give voice to what you appreciate. Research has documented that, in relationships, the areas where you choose to cast your attention and devote your words grow in strength and significance over time.

Technique 3. Change meanings. Instead of seeing this person as bringing you down, consider the quote by Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck,
Could this person or situation be a teacher in disguise? They could be, if you reframe your time with her as a challenge—a challenge to be more mindful, less judgmental, or more compassionate. Remember that you do get to choose whether to react to the negativity this person spews. His negativity need not be yours. Working on you own reactions in a mindful way may even remove some of the fuel that keeps this person’s negativity flaming. But even if it doesn’t, you still come out ahead. You’ll have further developed your skill in mindfulness.

Decrease Negativity

August 31, 2019

The following post is based on a book by a book by psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, “Positivity: Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life.” The first tactic is to dispute the negative thoughts you are thinking. First of all, learn what you can from the experience such as starting a project earlier so cramming will not be needed at the end. Find whatever negative thoughts are useful, and learn from them. Remaining negative thoughts, such as criticizing yourself and your intelligence, should be disposed of. What is useful use. The remainder should be sent to your mental trash folder. Learning to dispute nonproductive forms of negative thinking is at the heart of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT. The author writes that you don’t need to have a diagnosable mental illness to benefit from this skill. You can use it to keep inevitable negativity at bay.

Another technique is to break the grip of rumination. Ruminating involves the consistent thoughts that keep running through your mind over and over. The first step is to identify that you are ruminating, and if these ruminations are not offering anything helpful, then stop doing it.

Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. So you need to do something that literally takes your mind off of your ruminations. Go for a jog. Go for for a swim. Fix your bike. Lift weights at the gym. Meditate or do yoga. Find some activity that totally absorbs you. You could call your friend and ask about his latest trip. Or you could read those articles you’ve been meaning to read for your next project at work.

You can become more mindful. You can meditate or engage in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR. Enter “mindfulness” “meditation,” or “MBSR,” into the search block at healthymemory.wordpress.com.

You can ask yourself which circumstances usher in the most negativity. Is it your commute? Mealtime? Interactions with certain family members or co-workers? Once you’ve identified the cause ask yourself, Is this negativity necessary? Is it gratuitous? Is it both?

Assess your media diet. A rule of thumb for news broadcasters is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Years ago marketeers discovered that negativity grabs your attention, draws you in, and keeps you watching. Surveys show that the more people watch television, the more violent they judge the world to be. Those who watch a lot of TV are not better informed about the evils of the world. They’re not. They grossly overestimate rates of violence. People who watch less TV are more accurate judges of the degree of risk we all might encounter each day.

Find substitutes for gossip and sarcasm. When you talk about others, highlight their positive qualities and good fortunes, not their weaknesses and mishaps. When poking fun, poke fun lightly. Hurl puns, not barbs, Avoid hidden forms of verbal aggression that cause needless guilt, humiliation, irritation, or self-consciousness to you or conversation partners. Occasions for necessary negativity abound, so there’s little need to manufacture negativity with you daily banter. Doing so needlessly cripples your positivity ratio and crushes your odds of flourishing.

Growing Positivity

August 30, 2019

This post provides an evaluation instrument for rating your own positivity. The remaining posts, all based on a book by psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D, will provide advice and exercises for growing positivity. The survey below proves a tool for rating your own positivity:

Instructions: How have you felt in the past day? Look back over the past day (i.e., from this time yesterday up to right now). Using the 0-4 scale below, indicate the greatest degree that you’ve experienced of each of the following feelings.
0 = Not at all
1 = A little bit
2 = Moderately
3 = Quite a bit
4 = Extremely

What is the most amused, fun-loving, or silly you felt?

What is the most angry, irritated, or annoyed you felt?

What is the most ashamed, humiliated, or disgraced you felt?

What is the most awe, wonder, or amazement you felt?

What is the most contemptuous, scornful, or disdainful you felt?

What is the most disgust, distaste, or revulsion you felt?

What is the most embarrassed, self-conscious, or blushing you felt?

What is the most grateful, appreciative, or thankful you felt?

What is the most guilty, repentant, or blameworthy you felt?

What is the most hate, distrust, or suspicion you felt?

What is the most hopeful, optimistic, or encouraged you felt?

What is the most inspired, uplifted, or elevated you felt?

What is the most interested, alert, or curious you felt?

What is the most joyful, glad, or happy you felt?

What is the most love, closeness, or trust you felt?

What is the most proud, confident, or self-assured you felt?

What is the most sad, downhearted, or unhappy you felt?
What is the most scared, fearful, or afraid you felt?

What is the most serene, content, or peaceful you felt?

What is the most stressed, nervous, or overwhelmed you felt?

There are ten items that reflect positivity. These are the ones that begin with the words amused, awe, grateful, hopeful, interested, joyful, love, proud, and serene

There are ten items that reflect negativity. These begin with the words, angry, shamed, contemptuous, disgust, embarrassed, guilty, hate, sad, scared, and stressed.

Count the number of circled positivity items that you scored as a 2 or higher.

Count the number of underlined negativity items that you endorsed as 1 or higher.

Calculate the ratio by dividing your positive tally by your negative tally. If your negativity count is zero for today, consider it to be a 1, to sidestep the can’t-divide-by-zero problem. The resulting number represents your positivity ratio for today.
A ratio of 3 is regarded as the tipping point into positivity. This is also called flourishing. Of course, you can keep growing above this ratio.

You should also be able to take this test online by going to

You can take this test now or whenever you choose to begin the posts providing advice and exercises for growing positivity. This enables you to measure your progress as you master known positivity techniques.

Build Your Best Future

August 29, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in of a book by psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D. title “Positivity: Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life.” The beginning of this chapter follows:

“You are constantly changing—not just your clothes or your hairstyle, but your inner core, the very essence of your being. Change is the rule, constancy the rare exception. Consider the change under way within you at this very moment. What you know as “you” is actually trillions of cells living and working together. Most only live for a few weeks or months. When they die, they re replaced by new cells. This cycle continues for as long as you live.

The pace of cell renewal varies by body part. Your taste buds live only a few hours. Your white blood cells live about ten days. Your muscle cells live about three months. Even your bones are made anew time and time again. Considering these differences, scientists have suggested that you replace about 1 percent of your cells each day. That’s 1 percent today, another 1 percent tomorrow, amounting to roughly 30 percent by next month, and 100 percent by next season. Seeing yourself and your cells in this way, every three months you get a whole new you. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it takes around three months to learn a new habit or make a lifestyle change. Perhaps we can’t teach an old cell new tricks. Perhaps our best hope lies in teaching our new cells.

At one time scientists thought that your brain cells were different, that they didn’t change. Perhaps they even orchestrated the cycle of cell death and rebirth elsewhere in your body. Not so. Even key brain cells wither away and are reborn. Every part of you can change, and your brain is no exception.

More fascinating still is the discovery that the pace of cell renewal doesn’t simply follow some predetermined script. It varies depending on what you do and how you feel. A key signal tells your cells whether to decay or grow, for instance, is movement. A sedentary lifestyle hastens cell decay, An active lifestyle hastens cell renewal. This is true for both your body and your brain.

Your emotions are thought to be another key signal. Negativity prompts cell decay. Positivity prompts cell growth. At a very basic biological level, then, positivity is life-giving.

These scientific discoveries about the ever-changing nature of your body and brain are fully consistent with the second core truth about positivity: it transforms us for the better.”

Remember the metaphor presented in the Post, “Best Way to Think About Memory.” The metaphor is that the best way to think about your brain is as a corporate building. Your conscious mind resides in the executive suite at the top floor of the building. All of you memories and cognitive resources can be found at the floors below. Having positive thoughts and thinking about problem situations in constructive ways will have a profound beneficial effect on your memory, your feelings, and your sense of fulfillment as a human being.


August 28, 2019


Positivity is the title of a book by psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D. The subtitle is “Discover the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life.” Do not be put off by the hype. This book offers guidance on developing a more positive outlook on life

Readers of the healthy memory blog should know that a positive outlook is key to both mental health and physical health as well as a fulfilling life. Healthy memory blog readers should also be aware that we humans have a negative bias, which leads us to a negative outlook. This can be good if it forewarns us of danger, but, for most of us, at least danger does not loom around every corner.

Our negativity is further exacerbated by the nature of the news, which tends to feature negative articles, as well as the internet, which can further exacerbate negativity.

Indeed, the current president of the United States campaigned on fear and negativity and continues during his presidency to promote fear and negativity among his base (nazis and white supremacists) to increase, in his mind, his chances of winning reelection.

Six important facts about Positivity follow:

Fact 1. Positivity feels good. This alone could justify being positive as that the simple state of being positive is a pleasant experience.

Fact 2. Positivity changes how your mind works. Positivity does not just change the contents of your mind, trading bad thoughts for good ones; it also changes the scope or boundaries of your mind. It widens the span of possibilities that you see.

Fact 3. Positivity transforms your future. Although good feelings will forever be fleeting, over time, positivity literally brings out the best in you.

Fact 4. Positivity puts the brakes on negativity. In a heartbeat negativity can spike your blood pressure, but positivity can calm it.

Fact 5. Positivity obeys a tipping point. Dr. Frederickson writes, the most stunning and practical fact to emerge from the science of positivity is that its effects are nonlinear. Effects that are virtually nonexistent at one starting point grow disproportionately large at a different starting point. A tipping point is that sweet spot in between where a small change makes a big difference.

Fact 6. You can increase your positivity. You have more to say than you think, just as does the potential for life-giving positivity.

Positivity broadens and builds. Positivity opens us. The first core truth about positive emotions is that they open our hearts and our minds, making us more receptive and more creative.

Positivity transforms us for the better. This is the second core truth about positive emotions. By opening our hearts and minds, positive emotions allow us to discover and build new skills, new ties, new knowledge, and new ways of being.

An Extremely Misleading Title

August 27, 2019

And that title would be “Heading off a concussion crisis” in the Sports section of the 21 August 2019 issue of the Washington Post. The author of this article is Roman Stubbs. The article is about Brittni Souder a soccer player who has ruined her health playing soccer. Now she is trying to help girls avoid a similar fate. No evidence is presented and there is no reason to believe that what she is teaching is of any value. That evaluation would need to take place over years to see if there is any evidence of a beneficial effect from Souder’s instructions.

There are about 300,000 adolescents who suffer concussions while participating in organized sports every year. In matched sports, girls are 12.1% more likely to suffer a concussion than boys, a 2017 study by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons found. It was also concluded that female soccer players are more likely to suffer a concussion than male football players—and three times more likely to suffer a traumatic brain injury than male soccer players.

Wellington Hsu, an orthopedic surgeon at Northwestern who led the study said, “What was very surprising was that girls’ soccer was just as impactful as boys’ football. Girls who play soccer really need to be aware of these issues. These symptoms plus having a second concussion is sequentially worse than the first one.”

Former U.S. National team members Brandi Chasten and Michelle Akers announced that they would participate in a Boston University study of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. No female athlete has been diagnose with CTE, which can only be confirmed through autopsy. Akers and Chasten have publicly expressed concern about memory loss since they retired from soccer.

HM thinks that any educational entity that sponsors sports that can damage the brain is hypocritical. Presumably the justification for sports is that they develop teamwork and build healthy bodies. But if the brain is damaged, this justification evaporates. Sports can be modified, or new ones developed, that preclude brain injury.

Brain Injuries of Tackle Football

August 26, 2019

This post is based on an article with a similar title by Robert C. Cantu and Mark Hyman in the Health & Science Section of the 20 August 2019 issue of the Washington Post. The authors ask that the U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams post the following statement:
SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Tackle football is dangerous for children. Children who play football absorb repeated hits to the head. As adults, they’re at higher risk of suffering cognitive deficits as well as behavioral and mood problems.
The authors suggest that this warning be placed on every youth football helmet and placed in bold type on all youth tackle football registration forms. A parent or guardian wouldn’t be able to sign up their children without seeing it.

Since 2015, Boston University’s (BU) Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center has published three studies all leading to the following conclusion: Adults who played tackle football as children were more likely to deal with emotional and cognitive challenges later in life.

One study dug into the sports-playing pasts of 214 former football players. They found that starting as a player in a tackle football program before age 12 corresponded with increased odds for clinical depression, apathy and executive function problems—for example, diminished insight, judgment, and multitasking.

In another study, researchers zeroed in on the effects of head slams by comparing groups of adults who started in football before and after age 12 and who went on to develop CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive hits in sports. Those in the study who played before age 12 experienced cognitive deficits—also behavioral and mood problems—a full 13 years earlier than those starting at 12 or older. For every year younger that someone was exposed to tackle football, the start of cognitive problems occurred 2.4 years earlier.

All states have concussion laws, which acquire special attention for athletes when they suffer concussions. But concussions are not a necessary condition for cognitive and behavioral problems. In the BU studies, brain injury was not linked to concussion but to long-term exposure to repeated subconcussive hits. Long-term exposure to subconcussive hits has been associated with CTE. The problem with subconcussive hits is that they become a problem years after they occur.

Now is a good time to review the true virtue of sports. They develop teamwork and promote physical health. So, why then, do sports that injure body and mind continue? Perhaps adults might continue so they could prosper in professional sports. But why should they be allowed, much less promoted for, children.

Previous healthy memory sports have pointed up the obvious irony of playing of football in institutions devoted to learning and healthy brains. The obvious justification for continuing to play these sports is money. Some universities and colleges are nothing more than fronts for football teams that ooze money into the university. Unfortunately, there are too many alumni who care only about the success of their teams, and not the quality of education offered at their schools, nor considerations about the future brain and mental health of future alumni.

The MVP Machine

August 25, 2019

The title of this post is the first part of a title of a new book by Ben Lindburgh and Travis Sawchik. The remainder of the title is “How Baseball’s New Noncomfortists Are Using Data to Build Better Players.” Initially HM read this book purely for his own interest in baseball, and he would recommend this book to anyone interested in baseball. But HM encountered topics integral to the Healthymemory blog including fixed mindset, growth mindsets, deliberate practice, and GRIT. So this book could be regarded as applying principles in the healthy memory blog to baseball.

A good place to begin this post is with Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey is famous for recruiting the first black player into the major leagues. Rickey was the general manager of the Dodgers (then in Brooklyn). Even though this was a major breakthrough in Civil Rights, Rickey’s immediate goal was to build a contending major league baseball team. A further goal was to bring a higher quality to major league baseball. Prior to Jackie Robinson, Rickey developed a minor league system to provide polished players to major league baseball. Prior to Rickey, baseball suffered from a fixed mindset. That is, they believed that good baseball players were born and not made, and the job was to find these fellows and sign them for major league teams.

But Rickey had a growth mindset. He thought that minor league teams were needed so that new players could learn and master new skills. That was the purpose for these minor league teams. Rickey told his staff not to criticize a player’s messed up play without telling them how to correct the error.

Remember that Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has researched and developed the concept of growth mindsets. Anders Ericsson developed the concept of deliberate practice which takes place out of one’s comfort zone and requires someone to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands new-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable (enter “deliberate practice” into the search block at healthymemory.wordpress.com.)

Angela Duckworth developed the concept of GRIT, which refers to the mental toughness required to develop and master important skills. Once again there are many healthy memory blog posts so just enter GRIT is the search block as described above.

The best-selling book “Moneyball,” described how sabermetrics were being used to develop a smarter type of baseball. This new book is moving beyond sabermetrics and using data to build better players. Much of this work is dependent upon new technology used to develop new metrics to capture human performance.

If you watch baseball on television, you are likely aware of some of this technology. When a player hits a home run stats on launch angle and speed appear on the screen. Technology has also been employed for pitching. Extremely high speed cameras enable the capturing of the spin rates and spin axis of the baseball. There had been an argument among pitchers whether they consciously released the ball when they threw it. The fast speed cameras revealed that pitchers don’t release the ball by moving their fingers. Rather, the hand accelerates the ball linearly forcing the fingers to extend or open. These high speed cameras not only allow for pitchers to improve their throwing, but also allow for the creation of entirely new pitches. Using a knowledge of physics, the study of speed, spin rate, and spin axis new pitches can be theorized. Then pitchers learn how to change their throwing to produce the pitches. The effectiveness of these new pitches can be tested against a range of batters.

These technologies are allowing for marginal players to develop their skills to make or stay in the big leagues. The skills of even highly paid players deteriorate, This results in teams being stuck with high salaries for non producing players. However, the new technology provides a means of correcting and upgrading their skills. An assembly line of players at different skill levels can be developed so the they can step into active roles when needed. This is true for both pitchers and batters.

However, pitchers are at somewhat of an advantage. They produce a pitch, which might be the first time that the pitch has been thrown in a game, and batters are forced to react. So even though that batters are able to produce more home runs, new developments in pitches might reduce the total scoring. Fans need to wait and see, but they should be aware that they’re currently watching a dynamic environment.

What the authors term “soft psychology” is playing a bigger and bigger role. The mind and mindfulness have important roles in baseball. First of all, there is the battle of the batter against the catcher and pitcher. This begins with the battle of minds in terms of what the batter expects and how the pitcher can foil the batter’s expectations.

For individual players, baseball is a game of highs and lows. Batters fall into slumps. Pitchers discover that batters are starting to hit them hard, For professional players this goes beyond simple succeeding or failing, as large amounts of money can be at stake.

In spite of the conspicuous roles of individual players, baseball is a team game. Consequently, getting along with one’s teammates is extremely important. It could be said that baseball calls for mindfulness all around.

If Only, Rapt Attention and the Focused Life

August 24, 2019

Please allow HM to indulge in a fantasy. That fantasy is what the world would be like if all humans engaged in rapt attention and the focused life. The previous fifteen posts were based on a book by Winifred Gallagher titled Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. If you have not already read these posts, then it is unlikely that this current post will make much sense to you.

First, all of humanity would be enjoying fulfilling, healthy lives. We would not be reading regularly of a gunman shooting strangers, then turning the gun on himself. Whenever one of these shootings receives coverage by CNN, Wolf Blitzer says they are investigating the shooting to understand why the shooting is happening. He never finds the answer and he never will unless he reads Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. These shooters are full of anger and hatred, and it is not anything that has happened to them. Rather it is due to how they are interpreting what their life is offering to them. They feel they are being cheated. Paranoia prevails and his mind is full of thoughts of all the enemies he has and all the evils in the world. His primary mental activity is rumination where he continues these thoughts and elaborates and grows them further. He lives in his own world divorced from reality. Many of these shooters end by committing suicide, and it is only by suicide, they think, they can escape the hell of their existence. Even if they don’t die by their own hand, one thinks they think that lawmen will finish the job. Rapt attention and the focused life is the best way of precluding this anger and hatred through positive thoughts and a fulfilling life.

It is also clear that had Donald Trump been practicing rapt attention and living a focused life, then the political nightmare being experienced in the United States would not be happening. Donald Trump clearly understands those with his mindset, and this understanding makes him a genius at exploiting this mindset. His total mindset consists of false information which he conveys in his messages. The threat that immigrants pose to the United States does not exist. Russia remains an adversary to the United States, but rather than defending against this adversary he recruits it in making him President of the United States. He ignores the intelligence he receives from the best intelligence service in the world. He ignores the best science being produced in the United States and dismantles regulations needed for the environment. What is good is what makes a buck and to hell with everything else. He admires totalitarian dictators and would very much like to be one of them. He finds democracy and the branches of government hampering him. He shows complete contempt for the Constitution and to the principles upon which the United States was founded.

One driving fear white supremacists have is that white people will soon become a minority. Why do they have this fear? Do they fear that what they have done to native americans, blacks, and another non-whites will be done to them? This is unlikely. And System 2 processing along with rapt attention and the focused life, leads one to the conclusion that whites becoming a minority is not only something to be feared, but also something that will lead to a better United States.


Meaning: Attending to What Matters Most

August 23, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of the last chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The author writes, “Not coincidentally, the disciplines that direct your attention to something large and awe-inspiring, whether called God or universe, consciousness or commonweal, also focus on the improvement of your self and your world and on the appreciation of life. Indeed, philosophy, religions, and psychology advance many of the same kinds of behavior that account for much of our species’ success. At the very least, focusing on values such as altruism and forgiveness that stir positive emotions expands your attentional range, whether trained on your own possibilities or others’ needs, which benefits not only you but also the community.

The following is taken from the AFTERWORD: …”I’ve come to feel that paying rapt attention is life, at least at its best.”


“Some of what I’ve learned about attention has very practical applications. Aware of our limited focusing capacity, I take pains to ensure that electronic media and machines aren’t in charge of mine. When I need to learn and remember certain information, do difficult work, or acquire a new skill, I shield myself from such distraction for at least ninety minutes at a stretch. If I tense up over a big decision, I remember the fortune-cookie rule: nothing is as important as I think it is when I’m focusing on it.

Confronted with a seemingly dull chore—say, the laundry—I recall James experiment with the dot on the piece of paper and do it a little differently. (One day last summer, when I decided to hang the clothes on the line outdoors instead of just sticking them in the dryer, I saw a double rainbow). When I can’t fathom something that a dear one has just said or done, I try to remember that he or she focuses on a different world, and ask for some illumination.”

Healthy: Energy Goes Where Attention Flows

August 22, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The chapter begins, “Where your physical and mental health are concerned, it’s hard to exaggerate attention’s
importance in shaping you immediate experience and seeking your long-term well being. Strengthening your ability to direct your focus away from negative ideas and events when such cognition serves no purpose and to reframe setbacks as challenges or even opportunities helps you handle stress and approach life as a creation rather than a reaction.”

Research shows that the depressed routinely focus on the negative thoughts and feelings guaranteed to make them feel hopeless and helpless—the cognitive and emotional ingredients of the blues. Even when asleep, the melancholy tend to focus on futility. The prevalence of this bleak mind-set among the depressed—about 10% of Americans in the course of their lifetimes leads one to believe this nourish “selective abstraction” is a crucial element of this disorder. These individuals focus on whatever experiences they had, to the exclusion of positive ones or the larger context. Even when looking back into the past, they tend to recall negative events.

But to succeed in the rough-and-tumble game of life you can’t afford to focus on the dark side. In order to keep going up to bat, you have to believe, that if you press, sooner or later you’ll hit the ball. It’s hard to keep swinging if you’re convinced you’ll strike out.

The correction of chronically misdirected attention is a public health issue. Depression costs the American economy about $44 billion a year in lost productivity due to affected employees’ reduced ability to concentrate, remember, and make decisions. Maladaptive patterns of attention aren’t limited to depression but obtain across the spectrum of behavioral disorders. Just as the melancholy focus on negative information, the anxious and paranoid home in on the threatening sort. Some troubled individuals selectively attend to negative physical rather than psychological cues. Victims of panic disorder fixate on medical catastrophe, hypochondriacs on bodily symptoms, and insomniacs on the consequence of insufficient sleep. As with depression, effective cognitive-behavioral treatments for these disorders aim to correct the distorted attention patterns that underlie them.

The theorist Beck notes that William James would be pleased with cognitive therapy for several reasons. First, he says “because it emphasized consciousness, which provides many of the clues to understanding psychiatric disorders as well as normal psychology. Secondly, cognitive therapy is pragmatic, and James was a pragmatist.’ The truth is what works.

Medical treatments that harness attention are not limited to mental health. The ability to control attention and channel it in affirmative directions can improve longevity was evident in an intensive study of the School Sisters of Notre Dame born before 1917. Researchers found that 9 out of 10 nuns from the quarter of the group who focused most on upbeat thought, feelings, and events lived past the age of 58, but only 1 in 3 of the population’s least positively minded quarter survived that long.

The work of Kabat-Zinn is discussed, but as his work has been reviewed in prior posts, it will not be presented again here. This work can be found by entering “Kabat-Zinn” into the search block at healthymemory.wordpress.com. Meditation and mindfulness can greatly assist in focusing on positive thoughts, an there is an enormous number of healtymemory posts on these topics.

In closing it needs to be noted that not just anxiety and depression, but also cardiovascular disease and immune dysfunction can be bound up with what we focus on and how. The chapter concludes, “Learning to shift your attention away from unhelpful thoughts and emotions and recast negative events in the most productive light possible is one of the most important of all “health habits” to cultivate. The recognition of the role played by skewed attentional patterns in mental disorders is one of modern psychiatry’s greatest advances. As research blurs the distinction between many mind and body problems, increasing numbers of people who suffer from hypertension, infertility, and psoriasis as well as from stress add a regimen of paying rapt attention to their medical treatment, which at the very least increases the feeling of control over one’s own experience that’s essential to well-being.”

Motivation: Eyes on the Prize

August 21, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. When you decide to lose weight we experience an interaction between attention and motivation. The term motivation comes from the Latin movere, meaning “to move.” Depending on our motivation, we may decide to wolf down a piece of pie or stick to a new low-carb diet. Once we choose our goal, our focus narrows, so that the pie a la mode or fitting into our jeans again dominates our mental landscape. Addiction is the most dramatic example when the motivation to get high restricts attention to the point that the drug seems like the most important thing in the world.

A Northwester University neuroscientist, Marsel Mesulam scanned the brains of research participants while they looked at images of tools and edibles after they had fasted for eight hours. Later, after feasting on their favorite goodies until full, they went back under the scanner to inspect the pictures again. When the twists of scans were compared, it was clear that the amygdala, a brain structure one of whose functions include gauging whether something is desirable or not, reacted more strongly to the images of foods when the subjects were hungry, but not to those of the tools. So depending on your motivation, a certain part of your brain can respond to the same visual experience in vastly different ways.

Obesity epidemics provide stunning illustrations of what can happen when motivation and attention become disconnected from daily behavior in general and each other in particular. Reasonable people would say that their nutritional goal is to stay healthy and eat right, many simply don’t focus on their food and how much they actually consume. In Mindless Eating, Cornell marketing and nutritional scientist Brian Lansink offers numerous examples of how this lack of focusing helps pile on the pounds. As if still motivated by childhood’s Clean Plate Award, moviegoers will gobble 53% more nasty, stale popcorn if it’s presented in a big bucket than they would if given a small one. A third of diners can’t remember how much bread they just ate. People who stack up their chicken-wing bones at the table will eat 28% fewer han those who clear the evidence away. We’ll snack on many more M&Ms if they’re arrayed in ten colors rather than seven. We consume 35% more food when dining with a friend—and 50% more with a big group—than when alone. Considering these statistics, it’s not surprising that simply by paying attention to your food and eating it slowly, you can cut 67 calories from each dinner and seven pounds in a year.

To reinforce the link between motivation and attention Gail Posner suggests “mindful eating.” Mindful eating involves focusing on our food—on its smell, taste, and feel—which lets your brain know that you will soon feel full and satisfied. The toughest dieting problem is the overeating that’s motivated by using food to fill an emotional hole caused by frustration, anger, or sadness. To focus on what’s really driving your desire to eat, Posner suggests placing your hands where you’re hungry. If you put them on your head, she says that your upset about something; on your mouth, you just want to taste something; on your stomach, you’re actually running on empty.
Duckworth’s important research on grit and motivation is discussed. But since there are at least a half dozen posts on this topic, it will not be discussed further here. Go to the search block at healthymemory.wordpress.com to find these posts.

According to William James the idea of cultivating willpower is “the art of replacing one habit for another.” The author adds, “Through most of history, gluttony, concupiscence, drunkenness and sloth were regarded as vices rather than sicknesses, and replacing them with temperance, chastity, sobriety, and enterprise required an act of the will.

Disordered Attention

August 20, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. There is a glaring need for more information about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). One major discovery—that ADHD isn’t a single problem that springs from a single cause is itself an important, hard-won advance. For ten years while at the NIMH, Castellanos and a multidisciplinary team intensively studied 150 children with attention problems who were enrolled in a special school set up just for them. Castellans said, “We really, really knew this kids from the results of their spinal taps and blood tests to their psychological profiles. The big thing he learned was that almost none of the kids were like any others. It was almost as if there were a hundred and fifty types of ADHD.

The chapter notes, “Just as ‘epilepsy’ turned out to be perhaps two hundred different seizure disorders, ADHD is an umbrella term for a variety of problems that have some symptoms in common. As they did for epilepsy, new tools such as fMRI are helping identify certain broad categories of attention difficulties, which is the first step toward developing appropriate treatments for each.”

ADHD usually involves a collaboration between nature and nurture. That it’s six times likelier to affect children who have been sexually abused offers tragic proof that experience can cause the disorder. Schools as well as troubled homes can fuel attention problems. The “perceptual load” theory say that you’ll experience more distractions when your task is not very engaging. This is a circumstance that often obtains even in an average, much less subpar classroom. Castellans says, “As long as a child has the full attention of an adult, he has no attention issues.” Unfortunately, there are not enough adults to go around.

That genes often play a role in ADHD is clear from the fact that one obvious risk factor is maleness. (Girls who have the disorder are not only far fewer in number but also rarely as hyperactive and disruptive as the boys; their poor concentration at school is often overlooked or ascribed to daydreaming or “Not trying hard enough.”) About 25% of the biological parents of diagnosed kids are affected, compared with 4% of the adoptive parents.

Genes that influence not just attention but also a child’s activity level, impulsiveness, and other traits may contribute to ADHD. So a certain student may have trouble focusing on math or Spanish less because of some cognitive deficit than from a thrill-seeking temperamental inclination to tune out what bores him and look for real action.

Dopamine’s role in the brain’s reward circuitry may explain why individuals who’ve been diagnosed with ADHD are also likelier than others to smoke, drink, and use drugs. Combined with an attention problem, this tendency toward substance abuse might indicate that they’re perhaps motivated less by the desire to “get high” in a recreational sense than by the wish to feel and function better—to feel “okay” or “normal,” if only temporarily.

Castellanos notes that many kids who have trouble paying attention in school, perform well on athletic fields or when hunkered over a computer game. This apparent inconsistency reflects that fact that Homo sapiens evolved both the genetic variations that’s associated with ADHD and the variation that protects against it. In our sedentary school-and-office culture, the tendency to shift focus rapidly and to act first and ask questions later is regarded as a problem. Yet that behavior has persisted in the population because it’s a real advantage in certain situations, from NASCAR races to war zones to the floor of the Stock Exchange. On the savannah, where we evolved, someone who focused too long and hard on a particular bird, flower, or thought could end up as a predator’s dinner.

Summing up the state-of-the-art knowledge about ADHD, Castellans says, “We’re part of the way into the problem. We know a great deal more than ten years ago but are just starting to step on solid ground in terms of understanding the underlying mechanisms. There will be new, very different drugs and treatments. I’m hugely optimistic, but we have to hurry up, because people are waiting.

Focus Interruptus

August 19, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.” William James described two common attentional styles. He pictured the mind as an archer’s target. Some people naturally focus on the bull’s eye, “sink into a subject of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are “lost” for a moment before they come back to the outer world. For others, however, the target’s outer rings are “filled with something like a meteoric showers of images” that flare at random, distracting attention from the bull’s eye and carrying thoughts in various directions. Such persons “find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring it back by a voluntary pull. It sounds as if James is describing two different attentional styles that vary among individuals. It is more likely that all of us can and do display both styles, but different individuals might illustrate a preponderance of one style over the other.

James did make clear that neither the “bulls-eye” nor “meteoric” mode of using attention is necessarily good or bad per se” “Some of the most efficient workers I know are of the ultra-scatterbrained type.” The reason, he says, is that a person’s total “mental efficiency” derives from the combination of his faculties, the most important of which is not attention, but “the strength of his desire and passion.” Compared to a more naturally focused but less motivated person, the individual who really cares for a subject “will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and last do more with it, and get more results from it.”

In a typical scenario, the brain’s executive cortex first bears down on the the problem with all of its double-barreled top-down concentration, advancing as far as cognitive processes can. Then you get tired or fed up, shove back your chair, say to yourself, “Enough of that!” When you head to the cafeteria or gym and start paying attention to something else, non consciousness parts of your mind slow-cook your earlier insights into the problem and supply associations. Walking to work, you see the whole solution and the problem is solved.

Consider how the preceding paragraph corresponds to the metaphor of a corporation for your mind. You and your conscious attention work in the executive suite. But when you leave for lunch your cognitive agents on the lower floors continue working. They solve the problem during lunch and present the solution when you return from lunch.

There have been so many posts on the dangers of multi-tasking and on social media, no further discussion will be done here with the exception of research done by UCLA psychologists. Using fMRI imaging they found that when you focus on a demanding task, your brain’s hippocampus, which you should know from previous posts is critical to memory storage and retrieval, is in charge. However, if you try to work while distracted by instant messaging or something similar, the striatum, which is involved in rote activities, takes over. Consequently, even if you manage to get the job done, your recollection of it will be more fragmented, less adaptable, and harder to retrieve than it would be if you had given it your undivided attention.
So how to improve your capacity to pay attention? The best and easiest way is to have an interesting topic. But if the content is dull and not interesting, James urges us to enliven dull work with “frequent recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty of order, and ruptures of routine,” When you write a report or the like, James recommends if the topic be inhuman, make it figure as a part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long.”

University of Oregon psychologists Michael Posner and Mary Rothbart have shown that special exercises can markedly increase the capacity for executive attention, thus improving memory, self-regulation, and the ability to plan and reason. One would hope such material would be available.

Meditation is designed to better control our executive processes, those in the Executive Suite of your corporation. Enter “relaxation response” into the search block at
healthymemory.wordpress.com for many posts on this important topic.

Creativity: An Eye for Detail

August 18, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The founder of American psychology William James provides this simple experiment on how to improve your ability to pay attention. First, make a dot on a piece of paper or a wall, then try to stay focused on it. In short order, your mind will wander. Next, start asking yourself questions about the dot: its size, shape, color, and so on. Make associations with it: its existential pathos, perhaps, or the dot as yang to the paper’s yin. Once you’re engaged in such elaboration, you’ll find that you can focus on the negligible mark for quite a while. Observing that this ability to attend to and develop even the humblest subject is a cornerstone of creativity, James says. “This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and grows.”

On the more immediate level, creativity also involves focusing on you target that turns a spark of inspiration into a burst of fireworks. In a fortuitous circular dynamic, whenever you engage in a creative activity, you boost your level of positive emotion, which in turn literally widens your attentional range, giving you more material to work with. James says, the generative mind is “full of copious and original associations,” so that attending to the germ of an idea soon leads to “all sorts of fascinating consequences.”

The Johns Hopkins Hospital ear, nose, and throat specialist Charles Lamb is also an amateur jazz saxophonist. He asked six pianists to play a keyboard while undergoing fMRI scanning. When they improvised on their own, which is keystone of all kinds of creativity, the musicians’ brains went into a “dissociated frontal activity state, a.k.a.”being in the zone.” Neurological activity associated with self-monitoring and inhibition decreased, which increased their ability to process new stimuli and ideas. When they played a standard tune, however, the musicians brains didn’t respond in this way. Lamb suspects that other forms of improvisation, even conversation, involve the same type of brain activity as playing jazz, and plans to investigate the possibility with subjects who aren’t artists.

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer says that the term mindfulness wouldn’t be necessary if most people didn’t have an impoverished, static understanding of what “paying attention” means. She has asked children and instructors in very different kinds of schools a simple by telling question: “What does it mean when a teacher asks students to pay attention, focus, concentrate on something?” Invariably, the answer is something like “To hold that thing still.” In other words, most people think of attention as a kind of mental camera that you keep regally, narrowly focused on a particular subject or object. This realization led Langer to two important conclusions: “When students have trouble paying attention, they’re doing what their teachers say they should do. The problem is it’s the wrong instruction.”

In contrast to this fixed, tunnel-vision mode of focusing, the creative, mindful attention described in James’s dot exercise is an active probing exploration of a target that becomes more interesting as you search for new facets to consider. Mindful attention helps you work more efficiently and creatively, and also makes life more fun.

The tyranny of evaluation can be a major road block on the intertwined paths of mindful attention and creativity. Instead of focusing on the creative activity you can get sandbagged by the fears that the result might not be perfect or appreciated. Flaws and mistakes are neither bad nor good, but “just things you do.” Because it also focuses on assessment rather than experience, praise is as bad as blame.

The concluding sentence in this chapter is, “When you pay rapt attention, your spirits lift, expanding your cognitive range and creative potential, and perhaps even poising you for that personal renaissance.

Decisions: Focusing Illusions

August 17, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Nobel Winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman is among the developers of “bounded rationality”. To choices concerning quality of life, we are reasonable-enough beings but sometimes liable to focus on the wrong things. Our thinking gets befuddled not so much by our emotions as by our “cognitive illusions,’ or mistaken intuitions, and other flawed, fragmented mental constructs.

Kahneman makes a distinction between two concepts of self. There is our hands-on “experiencing self,” which concentrates on just plain being in the here and now, is absorbed in whatever is going on and how you feel about it without doing much analysis. However, our evaluative “remembering self,” looks back on an experience, focuses on its emotional high points and outcomes, then formulates thoughts about it, not always accurately. Much research shows that memory is biased and unpredictable—more like a patchwork quilt than the seamless tapestry of reality we likely imagine. We don’t so much recall something that happened as reconstruct a facsimile of it. This mental artifact is likely to be either more positive or negative in tone than was the actual event.

The differences in how our experiencing and remembering selves pay attention to may account for seeing paradoxes in our lives. For example, most subjects say that having children is one of life’s greatest satisfactions. But subjects’ diaries show that actual roll-up-your-sleeves parenting was among women’s least enjoyable activities. This apparent contradiction and others likely are explained by the divergent focuses of a person’s two selves. The experiencing self of a tired woman who’s contemplating the wreckage of her slovenly adolescent’s room might well give mothering a poor rating at the moment. However, if parenthood comes up later at a party, her remembering self zeroes in its emotional highs and long term results—that sweet poem on Mother’s Day, the soccer trophy, the college diploma.—rather than on momentary vexations like dirty socks and old pizza crusts. It’s just as well for their progeny that when adults make choices about how to live, they pay more attention to the remembering self’s judgmental voice than to the experiencing self’s “whispers, which say more about their own daily satisfactions.

In a much cited example of the focusing illusion, Kahneman asked some people if they would be happier if they lived in California. Most people thought so because of the climate. Californians assume they’re happier than people who live elsewhere. However, when Kahneman actually measured their well-being, Michiganders and others are just as contented as Californians. The reason is that 99% of the stuff of life, relationships, work, home, recreation, is the same no matter where you are, and once you settle in a place, no matter how salubrious, you don’t think about its climate very much. However, when prompted to evaluate it, the weather immediately looms large, simply because you’re paying attention to it. The illusion inclines you to accentuate the difference between Place A and Place B, making it seem to matter much more than it really does, which is marginal.

Because our remembering self pays attention to our thoughts about our life, rather than to the life itself, it can be difficult to evaluate the quality of our own experience accurately . Social psychologist Norman Schwartz asked one group of subjects, “How much pleasure do you get from your car? Not surprisingly, there was a significant correlation between an autos value and its owner’s perceived enjoyment, so that the remembering selves of BMW and Lexus drivers were more satisfied than those of people who drove Escorts and Camry’s. Then Schwarz probed the immediate reality of the experiencing self by asking another group of subjects a different question: ”How much pleasure did you get from using your car today?” The correlation between the owners’ satisfaction and their cars’ worth vanished. What determined their answers was not the quality or price of their vehicles but of their actual commute that day: whether it was marked by good or bad weather, traffic conditions, or even personal ruminations— in short the experiencing self’s quotidian ups and downs.

The focusing illusion predicts that we’ll exaggerate the importance of a thing just by thinking it about it, as when we ponder a big purchase. Kahneman says, There’s probably much less focusing illusion with pleasures like fresh flowers or a glass of wine.” Because it gives you more fun and bang for you buck, spending five hundred dollars a year on bouquets or Burgundy is a better investment in your well-being than upgrading a major appliance.

Based on recent research on well-being, Kahneman says, “I can imagine a future in which, just as many of us exercise physically, we’ll also exercise mentally for twenty or thirty minutes a day. That’s the kind of world ‘positive psychology’ is looking for. Whether its principles work or not in the long run, I don’t know. All the data aren’t in yet. But it’s clear that getting people to pay attention is a good thing. There’s no question about that.”

As to the ability to focus on this rather than on that gives you control over our experience and well-being, Kahneman says that both the Dalai Lamai and positive psychologist Martin Seligman would agree about the importance of paying attention: “Being able to control it gives you a lot of power, because you know that you don’t have to focus on a negative emotion that comes up.”

Productivity: Work Zone

August 16, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. A hallmark of the focused life is blurring the distinction between work and play. We can do this by actively choosing endeavors that demand our total focus and skillfully use attention to make even inevitable rote chores more engaging.

To the founder of American psychology, William James, rapt attention required a target that offers just the right combination of novelty and familiarity. Imagine that after a long, grey winter, your bleary eye lights on the red breast of the year’s first robin. Then, your attentional system kicks in with a memory to add meaning to the new feathered stimulus: robins come in the spiring, which has always been your favorite season. Suddenly, you’re not just glancing at some humdrum bird but focused on a winged Mercury come to herald good times.

Like a robin in July, writes James, “the absolutely old is insipid.” Similarly, because you’d had no associations with some drab little bird you’ve never seen before, “the absolutely new makes no appeal.” It’s the convergence of the robin’s unexpected appearance and its cognitive and affective resonance that makes its debut the stuff of poetry.

Claremont psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has developed and expanded upon the concept of flow. He says this state of optimal human experience kicks in when we’re completely focused on doing something that’s both enjoyable and challenging enough to be just manageable. Either attention or motivation—the drive that impels toward a goal—can jump-start flow, but both of these major psychological processes must converge to sustain it.

Occasionally and, unfortunately, sometimes frequently the most productive person is hard-pressed to concentrate on the job, much less enjoy it. For example consider draining a flooded driveway doesn’t sound interesting, but it can be made fun if you try to make the water go here or there. Csikszentmihalyi says with some thought, effort, and attention you can make even an apparently routine job, such as assembling toasters or packaging tools, much more satisfying. He says the trick is to turn the work into a kind of a game, in which you focus closely on each aspect—screwing widget A to widget B or the positions of your tools and materials—“and try to figure out how to make it better. That way, you turn a routine activity into an engaging one.”

Psychologist Gilbert Brim, a strong advocate of just-manageable difficulty, high achievers can avoid burnout, depression, and perhaps even self-destructiveness by focusing on a new vocation or avocation along with their business as usual. Baruch Spinoza’s day job was making spectacles, and William Blake was a printer by trade, used their free time to advance philosophy and the arts.

For some reason, inexplicable to HM, “working hard” is an honorific phrase. If the answer to the question, “are you working hard?, is yes, the reply is almost always , ‘good!’ But hard work is not in and of itself good. It might be stupid and nonproductive. The query should be, “Are you working smart?” To the extent possible, work should be productive and fulfilling. The main distinction between work and leisure, is that one is paid for working.

Keep in mind, the following paragraph from this chapter. “IN THE SHORT term, whether it’s writing an epic or building a birdhouse, choosing work and play that call for fast focus and all of your skill, provides satisfying, productive experience. Whenever you squander attention on something that doesn’t put your brain through its paces and stimulate change, your mind stagnates a little and life feels dull.”

Relationships: Attending to Different Worlds

August 15, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Much research shows that simply paying attention to someone else, which is the essence of bonding, is highly beneficial for both parties. Having social ties is the single best predictor of a longer healthier, more satisfying life.

The author writes, “At the very least, paying attention to someone else confers the big psychological benefits of structuring your experience and distracting you from the self-referential rumination that so often takes a negative cast.” Research by psychologist Joanne Wood indicates that if you want to feel better about who you are, you should concentrate on someone of lower status. But if you’re trying to motivate yourself, you should focus on a person who outranks you. A message we don’t often hear from the therapy and psychopharmacological industries is that paying attention to the other guy often helps us more than the other guy.

MacArthur ‘genius award” winner and director of UCLA’s Center On Everyday Life of Families, Elinor Ochs has researched how children are socialized and learn languages in parts of the developing world as well as in white middle-class America. She defines attention as “a focus on a point of orientation that can be at once perceptual, conceptual, and social,” and identifies two broad cultural variations in the way it affects family relationships.

In it-takes-a-village societies such as Somoa, from very early life people are encouraged to direct their attention outward to others. Children are cared for by friends and relatives as well as parents and are actively taught to notice other people and their needs. When they are carried, babies are held outward on the hips or perched so they can peep over the caregiver’s shoulder. Even before they can talk, these tots are primed to attend to what others are doing and feeling. Ochs says, “In their culture, the priority is to be relational and person-oriented.”

In contrast to this outward, other-directed focus that prevails in much of the world, people in the highly individualistic West are encouraged early on to concentrate on their own needs and desires. Instead of mostly being carried, babies are held at arm’s length in strollers, high chairs, car seats, or other devices; they sleep in their own cribs and even rooms, which would be unthinkable elsewhere. As if to reinforce their highly personalized experience, Western children are encouraged to pay lots of attention to objects. Ochs says, Even little babies have toys, and they’re taught to pay attention to their shapes and colors.” (Despite the claims made of products marketed to hopeful parents, one study showed that rather than creating infant geniuses, focusing babies aged eight to sixteen months on “educational” videos, actually impedes their verbal development; each hour of viewing per day actually impedes their verbal development; each hour of viewing per day correlated with a child’s knowing six to eight fewer words than unwired peers).

By the age of four Samoan children contribute to society helping to care for younger siblings and carrying messages for adults. That tots should work for the commonweal sounds like abuse to most Westerners, who assume that young children either can’t or shouldn’t have to respond to others’ needs.

This same UCLA research team finds that, even when they get together, families often undermine the desired feeling of fellowship by focusing on the wrong things. Mothers tend to pick the subject—“Tell Dad what happened at school”—and fathers provide the judgment: “That’s a very good grade” or “You should have practiced harder.” Fathers almost never focus on their own daily experience, however, and when they do, their narrative style doesn’t encourage feedback. In contrast to the moms’ and kids’ open-ended participatory approach—“How should I deal with this situation?” the men go for “Hers’s how I’m handling it.”

Bradbury, the director of the UCLA family project’s “marriage lab,” is concerned about the implications for adults’ well-being, because “marriage seems like the last bastion of relationships in which people are still committed to attending to one another.” Bradbury continues, “A profound focus on your partner is, was, and always will be the distinguishing characteristic of an intimate bond such as marriage. Nevertheless, I’m continually impressed by the inconsistency of sustained attention in relationships. Partners complain about this all the time, and kids probably would to, if they could. We’ve evolved with the capacity to attend to each other but it’s not exactly dominant in our lives. Imagine a world where it was!”

Nurture: This Is Your Brain on Attention

August 14, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. There have been many healthy memory posts on the research of neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin (Enter “Davidson” into the search box at
healthymemory.worpress.com or go to his website https://www.richardjdavidson.com).

He uses EEG and fMRI in showing how experience in general and attention in particular affect your brain and behavior. He says this physiological as well as psychological shift sounds dramatic, but shouldn’t be so surprising because your nervous system is built to respond to your experience. He writes, “That’s what learning is. Anything that changes behavior changes the brain.” The mental-fitness regimens that he and colleagues in a half-dozen labs around the world are working with are based on meditation. Various Eastern and Western religions have used it over the past 2,500 years to enhance spiritual practice, but meditation is easily stripped of sectarian overtones to its behavioral essence of deliberate, targeted concentration that invited a calm steady psychophysiological state.

The point of a secular attentional workout is the enhancement of the ability to focus, emotional balance, or both. The author writes in the mindfulness meditation that’s the most widely used form, you sit silently for forty-five minutes and attend to your breath: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. When thoughts arise, as they inevitably do, you just shift your awareness back to breathing, right here and now, without distraction from the tape loops usually running in your head. Davidson says, “A complete atheist can use these procedures and derive as much benefit from them as an ardent believer.”

The healthy memory blog has many posts on meditation. Enter “relaxation response” in the search block. Benefits can be attained with as little at ten minutes a day meditating. Moreover, epigenetic benefits have been found . You might also want to try entering “loving kindness” into the search block.

Another area of Davidson’s interests is the way in which temperamental features, such as an inclination toward positive or negative emotionality, affect and even drive attention—an interaction that is vitally important to the quality of your experience. Davidson says, “One of life’s challenges is to maintain your focus despite the continual distracting emotional stimuli that can capture it.” Certain lucky individuals are born with an affective temperament that naturally inclines them toward an upbeat proactive focus, but research increasingly shows that others can move in that direction through attentional training.

Davidson says that although many other regions of the brain are also involved, “people who have greater activation in very specific prefrontal regions—not the whole hemisphere—report and display more of a certain positive emotion—not simply ‘happiness’—that’s associated with moving toward you goals and taking an active approach to life. Average subjects who had completed an eight-week meditation course showed significantly increased activity in the left prefrontal regions that are linked to this optimistic, goal-oriented orientation.

Not only how you focus, but also what you focus on can have important neurophysiological and behavioral consequences. Just as one-pointed concentration on a neutral target, such as your breath, particularly strengthens certain of the brain’s attentional systems, meditation on a specific emotion—unconditional love—seems to tune up certain of its affective networks.When monks who are focusing on this feeling of pure compassion are exposed to emotional sounds, brain activity increases in the insula, a region involved in visceral perception and empathy, and in the right temporo-parietal junction, an area implicated in inferring and empathizing with others’s mental states. These data complement research done by Barbara Fredrickson and others showing that concentration on positive emotions improves your affect and expands your focus. Davidson thinks that deliberately focusing on feelings such as compassion, joy, and gratitude may strengthen neurons in the left prefrontal cortex and inhibit disturbing messages from the fear-oriented amygdala.

Training your brain to pay more attention to compassion for others and less to the self’s narcissistic preoccupations would be a giant step toward a better, more enjoyable life. When you aren’t doing anything in particular but are just “at rest” our brain’s default mode kicks in. This baseline mental state often leads to inward-looking, negative rumination that tend to be, as Davidson says, “all about my, me, and mine,” Before long, you find yourself thinking, “I actually don’t feel so great,” or “Maybe the boss doesn’t really like me.” Davidson is investigating whether the brain areas associated with this “self-referencing processing” may be much less active in the monks, whether they’re meditating or not: indeed, he speculates that super advanced practitioners may perceive little of no difference between the two states.

His research increasingly shows that just as regular physical exercise can transform the proverbial 110-pound weakling into an athlete, focusing workouts can make you more focused, engaged with life, and perhaps even kinder. Davidson says “My strong intuition is that attentional training is very like the sports or musical kinds. It’s not something you can just do for a couple of weeks or years, then enjoy lifelong benefits. To maintain an optimum level of any complex skill takes work, and like great athletes and virtuosos, great meditators continue to drill intensively.”

Nature: Born to Focus

August 13, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.” University of Oregon neuroscientist Michael Posner has developed a three-part model of the brain’s attentional system. He describes alerting, orienting, and executive networks, each with its own neurophysiology and function, as nothing short of “the mechanism through which we have experience and control the sequence of our ideas. Along with University of Oregon psychologist Mary Rothbart, who’s well known for her research on temperament, Posner has been studying how the attentional networks get organized in early life. He finds significant neuropsychological differences among children that share their different ways of focusing and aspects of their identities, from the capacity of learning to the control of thoughts and emotions.

Posner has a computerized Attention Network Test, which is designed to gauge the strength of an individual’s three networks. Biological differences in brains can account for different attentional and temperamental profiles, but nurture as well as nature plays an important role. Rothbart’s research is on cultural differences in executive attention and self-regulation, she finds that the capacity for effortful control is a good thing for both American and Chinese children. In the United States, children who have this ability focus keeping a lid on feelings like anger, fear, and frustration—an important skill in our gregarious society. On the other hand, in China, self-regulating children concentrate on curbing their exuberance and trying not to stand out, which is an equally desirable attribute in their Asian culture. Depending on social or genetic differences, or both, says Posner, “the same behavior of focusing on a dimension of self-control seems to be involved in creating quite different personalities.”

A single individual, biologically based behavioral disposition doesn’t operate in isolation, but in concert with the person’s other qualities and environments. Posner points out that whether the small child’s innate temperament is sunny or stormy, parents will intuitively draw the tot’s attention to smiles, laughter, and hugs, thus reinforcing the desirability of positive emotion.

It is good here to focus how important it is for a child to be loved. Absent this love a child’s emotional and behavioral development is at risk. Other healthy memory posts have elaborated on these risks. Whenever HM reads about some act of violence, his first thought was that this person was an unloved child.

To help children who are not naturally inclined to focus on their schoolwork—or life’s little pleasures—Posner and Rothbart have developed exercises that significantly improve the executive attentional skills of four— and six—year olds. Such training could help the millions of schoolchildren who struggle with attention, mood, and self-control problems.

This chapter concludes: “Nature and nurture have combined forces to find you a characteristic way of focusing that’s part of who you are, but research on the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections through life, proves that your identity isn’t written in stone. Posner is speaking of the children he works with, but his observation increasingly seems to apply to people of any age. “Kids have strong genetic make-ups, but you can also shape them through experience.”

Outside In: What You See Is What You Get

August 12, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. There is impressive research that shows that “looking at the bright side,” even in tough situations, is a powerful predictor of a longer, happier, healthier life. In a large study of 941 Dutch subjects over ten years, the most upbeat individuals, who agreed with statements such as “often feel that life is full of promise,” were 45% less likely to die during the long experiment than were the most pessimistic.

Research reveals that the cognitive appraisal of emotions, pioneered by psychologists Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus confirmed that what happens to us, from a blizzard to a pregnancy to a job transfer, is less important to our well-being than how we respond to it. Psychologist Barbara Fredickson says that if you want to get over a bad feeling, “focusing on something positive seems to be the quickest way to usher out the unwanted emotion.” This does not mean that when something upsetting happens, we should not immediately try to force ourselves to “be happy.” First, Fredrickson says you examine “the seed of emotion,” or how we honestly feel about what occurred. Then we direct our attention to some element of the situation that frames things in a more helpful light.

Unfortunately, people who are depressed and anhedonic—unable to feel pleasure—have particular trouble using this attentional self-help tactic. This difficulty suggests to Fredrickson that they suffer from a dearth of happiness rather than a surfeit of sadness: “It’s as if the person’s positive emotional systems have been zapped or disabled.”

With the exception of these anhedonic individuals, Fredrickson says, “Very few circumstances are one hundred percent bad.” Even in very difficult situations, she finds, it’s often possible to find something to be grateful for, such as others’ loving support, good medical care, or even our own values thoughts, and feelings. Focusing on such a benign emotion isn’t just a “nice thing to do,” but a proven way to expand our view of reality and lift our spirits, thus improving our ability to cope.

William James said wisdom is “the art of knowing what to overlook.” And many elders master this way of focusing. Many studies show that younger adults pay as much or more to negative information than to the positive sort. However, by middle age their focus starts to shift until in old age, they’re likely to have a strong positive bias in what they both attend to and remember.

Research has shown that older brains attend to and remember emotional stimuli differently from younger ones. In one study, compared to younger people, they remembered twice as many positive images as the negative or neutral sort. Moreover, when the experiment was repeated using fMRI brain scans, the tests showed that in younger adults, the emotional center, the amygdala, reacted to both positive and negative images, but in older adults, only in response to positive cues. The author suggests, “Perhaps because elders use the “smart” prefrontal cortex to dampen activity in the more volatile amygdala, their brains actually encode less negative information, which naturally reduces their recall of it and its impact on their behavior.

The final paragraph to this chapter follows: “WHATEVER YOUR TEMPERAMENT, living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time, which would be both futile and grotesque. Rather, it’s about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grown there. Your ability to function comfortably in a dirty, germy world is just one illustration of your powerful capacity to put mind over matter and control you experience by shifting your focus from counterproductive to adaptive thoughts and feelings. In this regard, one reason why certain cultures venerate the aged for their wisdom is that elders tend to maximize opportunities to attend to the meaningful and serene, and to the possibility that, as E.M. Foster put it in A Room With a View, ”…by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”

Inside Out: Feelings Frame Focus

August 11, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. One of contemporary psychology’s most important discoveries is the inextricability of thought and emotion.

According to “negativity bias theory” we pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they’re more powerful than agreeable feelings. A survey of which topics we spend the most time thinking about, problematic relationships and troubled projects are at the the top of the list. We’ll work harder to avoid losing money than we will to gain the same amount. If we hear both something positive and something negative about a stranger, we’ll take the negative view. Even if something good happens, if something bad happens too, we’ll feel dispirited. We’re likelier to notice threats than opportunities or signs that all’s well.

The main advantage of paying attention to unhappy emotions is that it attunes us to a potential threat or loss and pressures us to to avoid or relieve the pain by solving the associated problem. A pessimistic focus is helpful when we’re stuck in a tough, let’s-get-to-the-bottom-of-this situation. Looking at the dark side of things can confer a certain objectivity. According to one school of thought, the depressed person’s bleak focus on life tends to be more realistic than a sanguine person’s upbeat view.

Nevertheless, focusing on negative emotions, especially when they don’t serve their primary purpose of promoting problem-solving, exacts a high cost: we spend a lot of time feeling crummy even if our life is pretty good.

Additional studies show we tend to put a positive spin on neutral situations, focus hard on upsets because they’re relatively rare, and forget unhappy events faster than pleasant ones. From this perspective, barring a profound blow such as losing a loved one or getting fired, whether we get a flat time or a raise, we’ll soon return to feeling pretty good.

If these results sound contradictory, remember that people vary both in dispositions and in their fortunes. The important point is that we have the power to interpret and change our situation. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has conducted research showing that paying attention to positive emotions expands our world, while focusing on negative feeling shrinks it. This is something we can control.

According to cognitive scientist Donald Norman’s conceptual model, the brain has three major parts, which focus on very different things and sometimes conflict. The “reactive” component, which handles the brain’s visceral, automatic functions, concentrates on stuff that elicits biologically determined responses, such as dizzying heights and sweet tastes. The “behaviors,” or routine component, attend to well-learned skills, such as riding a bike or typing. According to Norman, these two “lower” modes of brain functioning handle most of what we do, and mostly without requiring conscious attention.
Norman’s “reflective” element of the conceptual brain is consciousness. Consciousness handles the “higher” functions at the metaphorical tip of the very top of that complicated organ. Since consciousness pays a lot of attention to our thoughts, we tend to identify it with cognition, However, if we try to figure out exactly how to run our business or care for our family, we soon realize that we can’t grasp that process just by thinking about it. Norman writes, “Consciousness also has a qualitative, sensory feel. If I say, ‘I’m afraid,’ it’s not just my mind talking, My stomach also knots up.”

According to Norman’s conceptual model, the brain’s reactive, behavioral, and reflective elements pursue their own agendas, yet they also constantly communicate with each other. When an alarm triggers an argument over whether to roll over or get up and go to the gym, we experience a mild version of the kind of conflict that occurs when two or more of these networks insist that you focus on different things Offering a more complicated example, Norman says, “Take jumping out of an airplane.” On the reactive level, our brain attends to the bottom-up imperative of the earth far, far below and goes, “What the hell are you doing?” In order to proceed, we have to pay top-down attention to messages from its behavior component, where we’ve stored our routine skydiving skills, and to the reflective voice that says, “You’ll be okay, and think of how much you’ll enjoy this experience afterward.”

The chapter concludes as follows: “Thus, the first step toward getting on with your work despite a financial setback or repairing a relationship after a nasty quarrel is to direct—perhaps yank—your attention away from fear or anger toward courage or forgiveness. Thanks to positive emotion’s expansive effect on attention, your immediate reward for that effort is not just a more comfortable, satisfying affective state, but also a bigger, better world-view. Where the long-term benefits are concerned, you’ve come closer to making a habit of the focused life.”

Pay Attention: Your Life Depends on It

August 10, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in an important book by Winifred Gallagher titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. One of the two basic ways of focusing that enable us to tune in on what is most interesting in our world: involuntary “bottom-up” attention. This passive process is not driven by us, but by whatever thing in our environment is most salient, or obviously compliant. Thanks to evolution, bottom-up attention has hard-wired us to zoom in on brightly colored flowers, startle at a snake’s hiss, wrinkle our nose at the smell of spoiled meat, and detect and react to things that could threaten or advance our survival.

Bottom-up attention automatically keeps us in touch with what’s going in the world, but this great benefit comes with a cost, particularly for postindustrial folks who live in metropolitan areas and work at desks rather than on the savannah: lots of fruitless, unwelcome distractions. Women want to focus on our book or computer instead of a fly that keeps landing on our arm or an ambulance siren, but evolution has stuck us with attending to these insistent stimuli.

Top-down attention asks, “What do you want to concentrate on?. This active, voluntary form of focusing takes effort, the harder we concentrate, the better we’ll attend, but the longer we persist, the likelier we’ll fade. Top-down processing has advanced our species, particularly by enabling us to choose to pursue difficult goals, such as nurturing the young for extended periods or building and operating cities. When the individual is concerned, this deliberate process is the key to designing our daily experience, because it lets us to decide what to focus on and what to suppress.

Many extraordinary achievers have an ability to pay rapt attention. Psychologist David Lykken observed that these individuals have base stores of “mental energy,” which he defined as the capacity “to focus attention, to shut out distractions, to persist in search of a solution” for a challenging problem over long periods without tiring. One of his exemplars is Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson who helped save Britain from Napoleon. In one diary entry he observed: “I have been 5 nights without sleep (at work) and never felt an inconvenience.”

Another example was the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. After a colleague remarked that he had just ridden in a taxi identified as #1729, which seemed like dull digits, the genius immediately took exception. “No, it’s a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressive as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.” His peers noted that Ramanujan regarded numbers as “friends” and focused on them all the time.

William James noted that such an extraordinary individual more than likely, “breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back away from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.

Johns Hopkins Neuroscientist Steve Yantis draws an analogy with a control panel that takes the five sensory systems that collaborate with our attentional networks to construct our model of the physical world. Dials can be twiddled as one goes from one activity to another. By turning the volume down on smell or by switching from the touch to the taste circuit, we can tune in the information we want and but out the competing stimuli.

Anne Treisman, now deceased, but the wife of Daniel Kahneman and a distinguished psychologist in her own right distinguished between the narrow attention paid to a particular part of a scene and the broad sort required when we must rapidly take a complex new scene.

Steve Yantis says, “I like the notion that attention is key to awareness, the essence or center of our mental life as we go through time. That makes all kinds of sense. Where attending to ideas and emotions rather than sights and sounds is concerned, he says, “To the degree that you can control what enters your awareness, you have the ability to focus on some things, let other things go, and move on, or your thoughts can control you.”

The chapter concludes, “In short, to enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your attention.”

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

August 9, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a book by Winifred Gallagher. Remember the post “Best Way to Think About Memory” where it was proposed that the best way to think about memory is as a corporate building and the corporation is you. At the top level is where the executive offices reside. On the lower floors are offices holding your experience, your knowledge, your thinking and performance capabilities. The whole shebang is run by you corporate offices, where your consciousness resides. Attention is needed to run these offices and due to limitations in our attention focus is required. Consequently, the key to living is a focused life.

Five years before Ms. Gallagher finished her book she had a common-enough crisis that plunged here into a study of the nature of experience. This experiment led her to cutting-edge scientific research and a psychological version of what physicists trying to explain the universe call a “grand unified theory” or a “theory of everything”: your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

She continues, “Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience from mood to productivity to relationships.”

Continuing further, “…what you focus on from this moment will create the life and person yet to be. … If we think in terms of the present and future, we might encounter an intuition lurking in the back of your mind, as it was in mine: if you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents, but a work of art. My interest in attention goes back to childhood, when I ran the usual experiments on its effects on behavior. I saw that by focusing on one thing, you could ignore another. If you concentrated on some enjoyable activity, you could make time simultaneously race and stand still. Staying focused on a goal over time might not guarantee you’d achieve it but was a crucial step in that direction.”

She writes, “In midlife, an attention experiment of a different magnitude set me on the path that led to this book. Walking away from the hospital after the biopsy from hell—not just cancer, but a particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind—I had the intuition of a highly unusual blue-white clarity. This disease wants to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.”

It worked. She was successful. By skillfully managing your attention, you’re able to experience in both a balanced way and stay oriented in a positive productive direction. She quotes John Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell , a hell of heav’n.”

Ms. Gallagher notes that the German physician Wilhem Wundt officially discovered attention, but the founder of American psychology, William James is its philosopher king. James argued that because the mind is profoundly shaped by what it imposes on itself, where you choose to focus it is vitally important. This conviction underlies many of his best maxims, such as “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

In James major work, “The Principles of Psychology” he wrote, “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Localization of consciousness is its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to eat effectively with others.”

Ms. Gallagher writes, “Neuroscience’s truly groundbreaking insight into attention is the discovery that its basic mechanism is a process of selection. This two-part neurological sorting operation allows you to focus by enhancing the most compelling, or ‘salient,’ physical object or ‘high-value’ mental subject in your ken and suppressing the rest. Outside an elite scientific circle, however, this finding’s implications for everyday life have been stunningly unremarked.”

“Rapt” is the term that describes being completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated experiences that underlies life’s deepest pleasures, from the scholar’s study to the carpenter’s craft to a lover’s obsession. Research shows that with some reflection, experimentation, and practice, all of us can cultivate this profoundly attentive state more often. Paying rapt attention, whether to a trout stream or a novel, a do-it-yourself project or a prayer, increases our capacity for concentration, expands our inner boundaries, and lifts our spirits, but more important, it simply makes us feel that life is worth living.

Deciding what to pay attention to is critically important. We must resist the temptation to drift along our default mode network, reacting to whatever happens next and deliberately select targets, from activities to relationships, that are worthy of our finite supplies of time an attention.

Your Brain is Leading You Astray

August 8, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of an article by Professor Abigail Marsh in the 7 August 2019 issue of the Washington Post. She is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University.

In reality, most people die of diseases of old age, such as heart disease and cancer. However, more than half of news coverage is devoted to homicides and terrorism, which account for less than 1% of actual deaths. People disproportionately buy, click on and share scary stories about people killing other people. Professor Marsh says we can blame this fact on our brain. She writes, “Your brain’s most important job is to take information about the messy, confusing world we inhabit, find patterns embedded in the noise and use them to make predictions about the future. Brains particularly like actionable intelligence—and the most useful information pertains to threats that can be avoided, thus increasing your odds of survival.”

She continues, “Heart disease and strokes don’t provide much fodder for this prediction machine. We know why they happen: because we get old. Talk about unactionable intelligence. The best you can do is to stave them off for a while by doing things we already know are healthy: Eat well, exercise, and don’t smoke. You can almost hear your brain yawning.”

She proceeds, “Now consider a gunman mowing down a crowd of innocents. Acts like this are rare, vivid and unexpected. The combination sets your brain whirring, whirring, generating a red-alert signal called a ‘prediction error,‘ a surge of activity deep in the brain’s emotional core. A prediction error signal screams: ‘Look for a cause! Prevent this next time!’ This leaves you craving even more information about such attacks, in the vain hope you can predict the next one.”

The article notes that we are not good at intuiting the minds of others, even those we know well. There is no way of intuiting the mind of a mass murderer. Most people would never commit an act like this. Prof. Marsh has spent more than a decade conducting research on rare populations such as altruistic kidney donors and psychopathic teenagers. She has come away convinced of two things. First, we are all not the same. and some people have much more (or less) capacity for compassion than average. And second: The average person is really pretty nice. Study after study bears her out. Most people return lost wallets, share resources, donate to charity and help strangers as a default response. She writes if people weren’t, on average, pretty compassionate, we wouldn’t need a label like “psychopath” for the small group of people who aren’t. She concludes,”Thus, the average person is totally unable to understand or predict why anyone would want to kill innocent people. And so the brain’s prediction machine draws the worse possible conclusion: If we can’t predict who among us is capable of heinous violence, it’s best to assume anyone could be. From there, it’s just one step further to conclude: Everyone could be. Translation: Trust no one.

She writes that up to 1 in 5 of us is genuinely paranoid. HM would consider the percentage of people who are Trump supporters. Trump’s entire campaign is based on fear. He claimed that there are many thousands of immigrants trying to enter the United States to sell drugs and commit crimes. Although one cannot argue that there are a few immigrants that do this; they constitute a distinct minority. The majority of these immigrants are leaving homes they no longer regard as safe, to go to that former safe harbor for immigrants, the United States. Most of our forebears came by this same route. Moreover, Trump supporters raise no objections about separating children from their parents and of forcing people to live in inhumane conditions. All this is the result of unfounded fear.

Fortunately, Prof. Marsh does no imply that we are victims of our brains. We can think and correct what our brain initially tells us. She concludes, “People who are trusting have more money and more friends. They are also happier, perhaps because their social lives are more rewarding. Trust also makes the world a better place—it’s the basis of all cooperations and social capital.”

In the lingo of the healthy memory blog, we must use our System 2 processes to override unwarranted fears from our System 1 processes.

The Reason for the Preceding Seven Posts

August 7, 2019

The healthy memory blog is finishing its tenth year, with the hope of continuing for many more. All previous posts are still available (but you must go to
healthymemory.wordpress.com.) And all previous posts are still valid.

So newcomers to this blog just need to plunge in and try to piece matters together. The purpose of these seven posts is to provide some orientation for newcomers. However, this is not for newcomers only. Unless you’ve been with HM from the beginning, starting this post is like entering a movie after it’s started. These seven posts are intended to provide some orientation to the reader.

All posts are dedicated to building and maintaining a health memory. For some posts, this goal is obvious. Other posts provide relevant scientific information. Some posts provide some ideas as to how concepts in this blog are relevant to politics.

Early posts heralded the tremendous potential of the internet. Unfortunately, this potential has been subverted with efforts to control attention for monetary and political purposes. Many posts also address this problem.

But the goal is obviously to build and maintain a healthy memory, which should also result in growth mindsets yielding a more fulfilling life.


The Importance of Attention

August 6, 2019

This is the seventh post in a new series of posts on Healthy Memory.

System 2 processes require attention. Our attention is limited. So it is a poor idea to waste attention on social media or on multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is inefficient as time and effort is involved in switching between tasks.

Remember the analogy of the corporation. Attention resides in the executive suite, but it is a limited resource. The way you allocate attention is critical to the health and efficiency of the mind.

Meditation is central to gaining control of your attention and to controlling and using your attention to its best value. There are many posts on meditation.

Use the search block at healthymemory.wordpress.com and enter: relaxation response

That should hold one’s attention for quite some time. Subsequent searchers can be made for

The Brain Can Do Very Much with Very Little

August 5, 2019

This is the sixth post on a new series of posts on Healthy Memory. The defining characteristics for Alzheimer’s are the accumulation of amyloid plaque and neurofibrillary tangles. So if you have these characteristics, you have this disease. However, autopsies have revealed people with these defining characteristics who never exhibited any cognitive or behavioral symptoms. The explanation offered is that these people developed a cognitive reserve as a result of their cognitive activities.

A man with only 10% of his cortex earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. People with the defining characteristics of Alzheimer’s, but no behavioral or cognitive symptoms likely develop new routes for storing and retrieving information. We generate new functioning neurons (we continue to generate neurons until we die.)

Healthy memory strongly supports the contention that System 2 processes are central to building this cognitive reserve.

So the healthy memory blog strongly recommends:

staying cognitively active to the very end by engaging in heavy system 2 processing

having a growth mindset that pursues continuing to learn until the very end

living a healthy life style

There is one more activity that is important that will be discussed in the next post

Thinking Fast and Slow

August 4, 2019

This is the fifth post in a new series of posts on Healthy Memory. “Thinking Fast and Slow” is a best selling book by Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman makes an important distinction between two types of mental processing. Not surprisingly he names them System 1 and System 2. To illustrate the distinction between these two types of processing, he asks the following question:

Together a bat and a ball cost $1.10.
How much more does the bat cost than the ball?

The most common answer to this question, the one made by majority of students from prestigious colleges is $1.00

However, if this were the case then the bat and ball together would cost $1.15.
So 5 cents more is the correct answer for the ball. The bat costs $1.05.

System 1 is our most common mode of processing. It is fast and efficient. Unfortunately, this speed is paid for by a cost. Although the failure to think critically was trivial in the present example, it can be disastrous in more important decisions. Cognitive neuroscience, which conducts brain imaging studies, has a term for mental activity which is the typical norm, called accordingly default mode processing. This mode can be identified in brain images. The default network of interacting brain regions is known to have activity highly correlated with each other and distinct from other networks in the brain. These regions are negatively correlated with attention networks in the brain.

Normal conversation and well performed tasks are System 1 activities. Thinking and learning are System 2 processes and they involve cognitive effort. Most of the time spent on social media involves System 1 processing primarily.

What Happens As We Age

August 3, 2019

This is the fourth post on a new series of posts on Healthy Memory. Simulations have been done that support the notion that the vast amount of new information acquired over the years slows down our accessibility to information.

So rather than evidence of cognitive decline, senior moments can be regarded as evidence of all the information, and hopefully wisdom, seniors have acquired over their lifetimes.

Healthy memory posts on this topic can be found by entering “cognitive decline” into the search block at healthymemory.wordpress.com.

Ramscar, M., Hendrix, P., Shaoul, C., Milin, P., & Bayan, H. (2014). Topics in Cognitive Science, 6, 5-42, presents the scientific evidence on this topic.

Misconceptions About Memory

August 2, 2019

This is the third post in a new series of posts on Healthy Memory. One common misconception is that memory is a complete recording of our experience. Only certain information is stored. Mnemonic techniques (on which there is an entire category of posts) and effective study techniques are ways of increasing the likelihood of information being remembered. But other information remains, some of which one might like to forget.

Memories can change over time at the subconscious level. Remember the analogy of the corporate headquarters. This information is held on the lower floors and we are unlikely to be aware of these changes. Moreover, memories tend to be cleaned up over time in an effort to make them more coherent. HM frequently has the experience of encountering new information which reminds him of previous information or studies, some of which he might have personally conducted. His typical finding is that the conclusions of the study are remembered correctly, but the evidence, although supportive, is not as strong as he remembered.

It is also important to remember that most failures to recall are due to information being available in memory, but inaccessible at the time of recall. If you try hard to recall the information, but still fail, it is likely that at some time in the future, the next day for example, the information will suddenly pop into consciousness.

The corporate building metaphor for memory provides a helpful means of thinking about memory failures. The failure of your conscious efforts to recall this information indicates to the cognitive staff on the lower floors that this information is important to you and needs to be recalled. So at a subconscious level retrieval continues. It is likely that these subconscious efforts to recall are healthy because they strengthen previous memory connections that had been weakened through nonuse.

So, what should be done when a senior moment is experienced? Not only seniors experience senior moments. All humans have them. It’s just less likely to have them the younger we are. So when you cannot recall something you want to remember, persist in trying to recall. Try to retrieve for a reasonable amount of time. This signals from the executive suite (remember we are talking about the corporate metaphor for memory presented in the previous post of this series) for the cognitive staff on the lower floors to continue to look for this information. The search will continue at a subconscious level. At an unexpected time, the result is likely to pop into consciousness.

There are many stories about scientists and mathematicians who worked for long periods of time, sometimes many years, on a problem, but failed to solve it. Then, unexpectedly, the answer suddenly appears in their conscious mind. There is a name for this phenomenon and that name is incubation. It is the result of large amount of subconscious processing conducted after the conscious mind decided to rest from the problem.

Best Way to Think About Memory

August 1, 2019

This is the second in a new series of posts on Healthy Memory. The best way to think about memory is as a corporate building and the corporation is you. At the top level are the executive offices where your consciousness resides. On the lower floors are offices holding your experience, your knowledge, your thinking, and performance capabilities.

Just as in a corporation you are unaware of the vast majority of activities occurring on the lower floors. But it is on these lower floors where most of the activity of memory occurs. If you run this corporation carefully, your conscious mind instructs these lower levels as to what you want and how to prioritize these activities. Sometimes the feedback from these lower floors comes quickly, but at other times it is greatly delayed.
The actual working at these levels is below the level of consciousness until the product pops into consciousness. Then depending on the nature of the product you accept it or provide further instructions to the lower floors to keep on working and try to nudge the work in additional directions.

In your executive office only a small amount of information can be conscious. The vast amount of cognition occurs below the level of consciousness. Work continues to occur there, even when you are sleeping. Part of the advice provided by the healthy memory blog is how to best communicate to these lower levels so that they can best serve you.


Healthy Memory Overview

July 31, 2019

This blog was begun in October 2009, and all the posts are still accessible. The first post was “The Seven Sins of Memory.” So this blog is almost ten years old. Theories of memory and HM’s knowledge of memory have increased and improved since then. This is the first in a series of blogs providing advice on the best way to think about memory.

The first question to ask is “What Is Memory?” When many people think of memory they regard it as storing things they need to regurgitate on a test, or on forgetting items to pick up at a store or an important appointment. But memory is much, much more than that.

Memory is cognition. Our memory enables us to think. It influences perception. It produces and remembers emotions. It influences our physical performance.

Most importantly, it enables us to travel in time. It enables us to travel back in time so we can make use of our prior experience to address current situations.

In doing so, we use our memory to travel forward to the future. What will be the nature of the problem? What do we know that we can retrieve to help us decide how to address this future problem? Then we can imagine future actions in future scenarios to see how they’ll pan out. So we mentally travel to the past to address problems and travel to the future to see how these scenarios will likely play out.

The problems we address vary from how to most efficiently plan and execute a shopping trip, to how to plan and prepare for college, a career, investments, retirement and so forth. As an informative exercise try monitoring your mental processes to see how much time you spend in time travel.

In short, memory is critical to cognition, which makes it central to how we live our lives. How successful and fulfilled we feel is very much determined by a healthy memory.

So a healthy memory is of utmost importance. This blog addresses not only how memory works, but how best to make and maintain a healthy memory.


Five Myths of Consciousness

July 29, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a piece by Christof Koch in the Outlook section of the 28 July 2019 issue of the Washington Post.

Myth No 1 is that Humans have a unique brain.
Brains differ among species, but there is not anything that could be considered unique. Some people say, but not Christof Koch, that only human brains have consciousness. Neuroscientists, who are the foremost experts on this topic strongly disagree. In fact they made a declaration:
It begins as follows:
The declaration concludes:

Myth No. 2 is Science will never understand consciousness.
The important point is that there is no need to understand consciousness. We all know consciousness and use our conscious minds. It provides the means of dealing with and effectively using an enormous amount of information stored in the brain. Consciousness is a phenomenon that is produced by complex neuronal and chemical processes in the brain. Although our understanding how consciousness is produced will grow to be more and more complex, it is highly doubtful that it will ever be entirely understood. Moreover, all science is tentative. It can change pending new data and theories.

Myth No.3 is Dreams contain hidden cues about our secret desires.
Our dreams may contain our desires, but it is doubtful that anything secret can be found. In the past ostensible secrets that were found turned out to be creations of therapeutic theories.

Myth No. 4 is We are susceptible of subliminal messages.
Apparently Koch is considering only the research on subliminal advertising. Much fruitful work has been done on implicit memory, which consists of memories of which we might not be conscious, but which influence our behavior. Moreover, there is also significant research on the reasons we think we do things are not the actual reasons that we do things. See the healthy memory blog post “Strangers to Ourselves.”

Myth No. 5 is Near-death “visions” are evidence of life after death.
This is true. And it is unlikely that there ever will be empirical data substantiating life after death. But there are reasons for believing in God and in life after death.

Pascal’s wager is one reason. Consider a belief in God
If it is true, then upon death, that belief would be conferred.
If it is false, one would never know that the belief was false, because one was dead. However, during one’s lifetime, one would have had the comfort of a life after death.

The Dunning-Krueger effect, one half of it, at least, is that people think they know much more than they know. We are woefully unaware of the depth of our ignorance. Consider some very intelligent people by human standard, physicists. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a feeling that most of what needed to be understood was understood. In 1905 Einstein published the special theory of relativity. Then in 1915 he published the general theory of relativity. And in the 20’s quantum theory emerged and stood physics on its head.

Finally, there are personal religious experiences.

The Psychology That Binds Trump Fans to His Racism

July 23, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of an article by Kathleen D. Vohs in the Outlook section of the 21 July 2019 issue of the Washington Post. Vohs is writing about Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory will be returned to later in this post, but the article reminded HM that psychological theories can account for Trump and his supporters.

There have been many posts about Kahneman’s Two System view of cognition. There was a previous post titled Kahneman and Identity Based Politics that provides a large portion of the explanation for Trump and his followers. In Nobel Lauerate Daniel Kahneman’s Two System View of Cognition, System 1, intuition, is our normal mode of processing and requires little or no attention. System 2, commonly referred to as thinking, requires our attention. One of the roles of System 2 is to monitor System 1. When we encounter something contradictory to what we believe, the brain sets off a distinct signal. It is easier to ignore this signal and to continue System 1 processing. To engage System 2 requires attentional resources to attempt to resolve the discrepancy and to seek further understanding.

Emotional processing is a System 1 process. System 1 is fast requiring minimal cognitive resources. Virtually all of Trump’s message is emotional and is processed on System 1. His MAGA message is one founded on hate and fear. Ironically, it seeks to turn the United States back to a time when it was much more racist and fearful of immigrants. There is nothing Great about what he wants to do to the United States.

Unfortunately, to rebuke these views requires System 2 processing. System 2 requires critical thinking, something which many find painful to do, and a recourse to facts and logic. Trump dislikes facts and tells his followers that he is the only source of truth. This is the hallmark of a demagogue, but his followers remain blind to his lies and contradictions.

Here is where Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance enters. Our minds do not like to confront dissonant ideas. So the tendency is to reduce the dissonance by shunning the truth. People refuse being called a racist, because racism is bad they, their families, and friends are certainly not racists.

Understand that we individuals cannot determine whether we are racists. We need to infer this from what we are called by others. “Strangers to Ourselves:  Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious”   by psychologist Timothy D. Wilson provides sound research showing that we need to understand ourselves from the reactions we receive from our fellow human beings. Unfortunately, many people remain unaware of this truth.

Perhaps the most prominent or well known example of this is Joe Biden. He has insulted people, but fails to apologize because he didn’t intend to insult them. There might be a problem with his brain, because this is not how it is supposed to function. Should you insult someone inadvertently, and HM has done this so many times that it is painful, apologize for insulting them and learn from this experience.
Many agree that Trump is not just a racist, but one of the world’s foremost racists. Unfortunately Trump’s base consists of Nazis and white supremacists. It is likely that Trump’s followers will deny this, but while they might not be Nazis, they are white supremacists. Indeed, Fox News has succeeded not from its fraudulent fair and balanced news, but by appealing to white supremacists. True they do not use the term, but the beliefs and the hatred of Obama stem from white supremacist beliefs.

Nazism and white supremacists are bad things, but people think of themselves as good people, not bad people. Similarly for their relatives and friends, they are good people, not bad people, so they cannot be white supremacists. But many, and it can be argued whether it’s a plurality or a majority, think that they are.

Trump voters express a variety of problems that are real and not racist. But still, how could they vote for Trump? Characterizing his behavior as boorish is being charitable. Clearly he is not presidential. He is an embarrassment for us regarding foreign nations. It is doubtful that he could pass a high school civics test. He embraces Putin and other totalitarian dictators. As was mentioned in a previous post, the paramount question is where did he get the money to make so many purchases since so many were in cash. He had been bankrupt and no respectable bank would lend him money. Trump’s son said that he got the money from Russia. So why won’t Trump release his financial data? The obvious reason is that he owes Putin and that Putin effectively owns him. All this was apparent before the election. Republicans recognized his faults and denounced him. But once he was elected, and many Healthymemory posts have outlined how Russia supported him, Republicans embraced him. It is clear that what they want is power, and the capability of profiting remuneratively from that power.

Expect Republicans to keep defending Trump. The Mueller report is not needed to impeach Trump. His behavior, which has worsened since he became President, is sufficient. Plus, how can the United States afford a president who is indebted to a hostile foreign power? Nevertheless, Republicans will ignore the facts and continue with the false narrative being advanced that Trump is the victim. This 1984 scenario is the only one that will save Trump.

Trump’s false claims about being the victim are clearly motivated out of desperation and are wrong, but to realize this it takes System 2 Processing, which requires mental effort and might be painful, so clearly Trump is a victim. Some people are for Trump for religious reasons, but religions that promote Trump have a political agenda. And for true Christians, they might want to switch to a Christian sect that is more in accordance with Christ’s teachings.

There is another dimension to consider, and that dimension is truly enormous. That is the social dimension. Although psychology provides an understanding of Trump’s support, unfortunately it provides little in the way of knowledge for changing people’s minds once they are firmly set. Usually this takes significant time. Abandoning Trump would likely produce frictions within families and among friends. So a thinking person needs to proceed carefully. One option would be to remain silent, but to use the ballot box to record one’s true and well reasoned opinions.

Car Crash Deaths Eclipse Toll of World Wars

July 22, 2019

The title of this post contains most of the title of the article by Ashley Hasey III in the 22 July 2019 Washington Post. The entire title is “Car crash deaths since 2000 eclipse toll of World Wars.” Since January 2000 more than 624,000 people died in car crashes, compared to 535,000 American military personnel who died in the two world wars. Close to 78,000 people have died in crashes caused by distracted driving according to a study by the American Public Health Association and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data.

Cellphone use while driving caused 800 deaths in 2017. Most of them were talking rather than texting or dealing with emails according the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) reports this year. So so much for hands free requirements dealing with the distraction problem.

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that those who talk on a cellphone while driving are four times more likely to crash. Those who text and drive are up to eight times likely to crash.

Even if you care little or nothing about yourself, think about the other people you can kill or maim.

Some Serious Defects with How Attention Works

July 22, 2019

The subtitle to Dr. Stefan Van Der Stigchel’s book is “Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” This book discusses visual perception ignoring all the other senses. More importantly, it ignores cognitive processes such as thinking and solving problems, where attentional processes assume even greater importance.
The book is valuable in explaining the role not only that attention pays in vision, but also the need for information selection because perception is already overwhelmed. So the first problem is that the title over promises. It discusses only vision ignoring the majority of attentional processes.

Although Dr. Van Der Stigchel clearly is quite knowledgeable regarding attention and vision, he is woefully ignorant of important research in other areas. If only if he read the healthymemory blog post he would know of the research documenting the demands new technology is placing on our limited attentional process, and how that demand is degrading cognitive performance.

He makes the statement that he thinks that these concerns are ill-founded and even offers the suggestion, that he clearly pulled out of his keister, that he thinks the demands being placed on visual processing might actually improve performance in other areas of cognition.

There are two problems here. One is that he appears to be woefully ignorant of the relevant research in the area. The second is that it is professionally irresponsible to make statements in which one is ignorant regarding the relevant research.

There is also another problem that HM and his spouse regard as a shortcoming. They are disturbed about the number of people who cross the street failing to look to see if any cars are coming. The problem is not that drivers are homicidal, but there are limitations which should have been explained in this book. The driver’s attention can be distracted or the driver can be suffering information overload. This problem has significantly increased since the introduction of the smartphone. It is almost certain that pedestrian injuries and fatalities have increased, but HM has no data or anecdotes other than personal to report. But there have been accidents where passengers exiting a bus, crossing in front of the bus, but failing to note oncoming traffic. Deaths have resulted and drivers have suffered severe guilt from the accidents, even though the drivers are not at fault. This is the reason that drivers have to stop and not pass school busses when they have stopped for passengers. The assumption that all adults are too experienced to make this childhood mistake is wrong.


The Effects of Brain Damage

July 21, 2019

This post is based on a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel titled “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” Visual neglect is a condition in which patients experience problems moving attention to the left or the right side of the visual world. Neglect usually results from damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. The attention regions in that part of the brain are responsible for moving attention to the left visual field. This condition has different levels of severity, and patients with the most severe form are completely unaware of what goes on in the neglected half of their world. When someone with this condition eats they eat only the food on the right-hand side of the plate. When they finish eating they believe that they have eaten everything because they have no access to the information on the other side of the plate. Only when his plate is turned around does the other half of his meal appear in the “intact” part of his visa world and does he realize that he hasn’’t finished his food after all. Neglect patients are actually able to move their attention, but only after receiving clear instructions and only for a short period of time.

Dr. Van Der Stigchel writes, “Around 25% of all patients with brain damage suffer from some form of neglect. Fortunately, it is usually a short-term problem. This is because there are all kinds of processes in the brain that are disrupted in the acute phase, but that are eventually able to return to normal. After a stroke, for example, excess blood has to be drained off from the brain. When that is done, many brain brain functions return to normal and the problem of neglect just vanishes. Even within only a few days of suffering brain damage, a patient may show no more signs of neglect. However, for some patients neglect remains a chronic condition, meaning that the problems they have with moving their attention are permanent.”

Cortical blindness is different from visual neglect and much more serious. Unlike neglect, cortical blindness is not an attentional deficit. There is no visual information in the blind field to which patients can move their attention. People suffering from cortical blindness cannot see any colors, shapes, or other visual building blocks in the affected field.

The Influence of the Past on Our Attention in the Present

July 20, 2019

This post is based on a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel titled “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” We have excellent memory for the context in which objects are located. It appears that we are good at remembering visual context because the information involved is of the unconscious kind, something for which we have an apparently unlimited memory. But repeating a certain visual context is of no benefit to people who have trouble picking up unconscious information, like learning a new motor skill. This includes patients with Parkinson’s disease who are unable to learn new unconscious motor skills as a result of problem with the basal ganglia. But, when unconscious memory is still intact, as it is in the case of patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome, experiments show that contextual cueing continues to function normally. As it is conscious memory that is affected in these patients, they will probably be unable to remember what they ate for breakfast, but will still be able to react more quickly to a repeated search from the day before.

Regardless of their lack of conscious memory, the fact that Korsakoff’s patients still possess a well-functioning unconscious memory for visual context means that it can be used to learn new tasks. However, it is important that the information is acquired in a completely errorless manner. Otherwise, the patients will also take the errors on board unconsciously resulting in the inability to distinguish between correct and an erroneous one. It is unfortunate when it is assumed that patients who have no conscious memory or are unable to learn new skills.

Recently it has been found that it is possible for these people to acquire new skills when they use “errorless learning.” A team of scientists led by Erik Oudman studied the errorless learning of a specific skill—how to operate a washing machine. This requires the ability to interact successfully with the external visual world by pushing the right button at the right time. Korsakoff patients who had never operated a washing machine before were able to do so after a few errorless learning sessions. They were not able to explain how they did it, because the required actions were not stored in their conscious memory.

Memories influence our choice of where to move our attention. Magicians take advantage of this. Magicians look away from the spot where a change is about to take place, click their fingers to distract our attention, and toward our expectation by allowing changes to occur where we least expect them. The fact that we know they are making fools of us makes it all the more impressive and in no way diminishes the effectiveness of their tricks. A trick only fails to work when we know exactly what to look out for. In that case we focus our attention on the right spot, which allows us to see the change (HM has never been able to do this). It is a myth that magicians’ tricks are all about speed and that objects disappear too fast for us to be able to notice. Although speed is important, we humans are unable to make something disappear so fast that other humans will not notice, provided they are paying attention. The trick lies in distracting our attention.

Dr. Stefan Van Der Stigchel writes, “It is fascinating to see tricks that have been around for hundreds of years still being used in modern scientific experimental studies. One such experiment involved studying the eye movements of an audience watching a magician perform a trick in which he makes a cigarette “disappear” by letting it fall under a table while concentrating his gaze on and clicking his fingers. The results were very similar to the results of attention blindness experiments. The test subjects who failed to see the cigarette disappearing had seen the change with their own eyes but had not paid any attention to it.”

Another good example is the trick with the disappearing ball. The magician throws a ball into the air a couple of times and it just seems to vanish suddenly in midthrow. On the final throw the magician makes it appear as if he has thrown the ball when in actual fact he still as it in his hand. He follows the expected path of the ball with his head and eyes. The audience thinks he has thrown the ball and that it just vanishes into thin air. It is obvious that the audiences’ eyes are looking at the right spot, but that their attention has moved to the expected location of the ball on the basis of the direction of the throw and where the magician is looking.


July 19, 2019

This post is based on a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel titled “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” In searching for something we try to take advantage of what is available in the environment. Something that is unique about the target that we are searching for can make that target pop-out. For example, if we are looking for something that is red and the environment is full of red objects that target will not pop-out. However, if it is the only red target, or if the majority of the objects in the environment are not red, then its redness will make that target pop-out.
Pop-out searching is also called parallel searching. Reaction time is not affected by the number of distractors (non-red targets) in the scene.

Say you are looking for a particular letter in a scene containing many letters. This is termed serial searching. In contrast to pop-out searching, which is an automatic process, serial searching is a conscious process. The reaction time for a serial search will be a function of the number of non-target objects in the scene. These non-target objects are distractors and search time is an increasing function of the number of distractors.

To determine whether a pop-out draws our attention automatically or not, we need to know what happens when the unique object is a distractor and not a target. Test participants were asked to find the anomalous shape among a group of other shapes. All of the shapes in the experiments are white. Half of the searches contain one unique distractor, which in this case is a gray circle. This distractor has the same shape as the other distractors, but it also has a unique color that distinguished it from all the other shapes on the screen, including that of the target object. We process information related to color faster than information related to shape because color is a stronger builder block than shape. In this case the distractor with the anomalous color is stronger that the object with the unique shape. If the unique distractor is not present, the unique shape of the target object results in a pop-out effect, meaning that the shape is able to grab attention quite easily. But it will take much longer to complete the search when the unique color is also present, even though there is no need to look for it. But we cannot escape its presence, not even when we know in advance which color will be doing the distracting. In fact, we will not be able to ignore the distracting color even if the search is repeated for hours on end. Unique color information is so strong that it will always draw our attention.

Making something suddenly appear is the best way to capture a person’s attention. Nothing activates our attention more strongly than a new object. It makes sense that we have evolved in this way. Objects that appear abruptly can represent possible danger. And the sudden disappearance of an object can also be a good reason for focusing attention on it.

How Your Eyes Betray Your Thoughts

July 18, 2019

This post is based on a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel titled “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” Although we have two eyes, we are only able to fixate our gaze on one point in space at a time. The continuous movement of the eyes presents our visual system with interesting problems. If we were to see the actual images that fall on our retina, they would appear fuzzy and shaky because of the movements that the eyes make. Each individual eye movement is responsible for a separate part of the visual world falling on the retina. Yet we do not experience our visual world as a series of continuously shifting images, but rather as constant and fluid. We never become disoriented as a result of moving our eyes.

There is a difference between a retinal representation (the image that falls on the retina) and a spatiotopic representation (where the object is located in relation to our body). When we move our eyes to a different spot in space, the image that falls on our retina changes, but the world around us remains stable.

A similar updating process occurs in the case of memory. In order to know where we have already searched when we are looking for something, we need to remember those locations. When searching multiple locations the memory task become onerous. So it is useful to add some structure to our searching. If we always search our bookcase in the same manner there is no memory task and a strategy that guarantees search coverage. Searching in a haphazard is both inefficient and error prone as we are never able to recall all the individual locations that we have already searched.

There is an important difference between attention and eye movements. People are capable of shifting their attention without making any eye movements. This is useful when we find ourself talking to someone at a party but are actually more interested in someone else across the room. We are capable of looking our conversation partner in the eye while at the same time focusing our attention on the other person. The regions in our brain that are responsible for attention and eye movements overlap to a significant degree, and shifts in attention and eye movements co-occur in many situations. But we cannot make an eye movement without our attention first going to the end point of that movement. Attention precedes eye movements.

It is very important that our eye movements are made in the right direction to perform a task efficiently. Experts are good at developing strategies for their work, but they are often unaware of how they do what they do. This is similar to riding a bicycle: it is almost impossible to explain to a child how to ride a bike, because it doesn’t involve conscious competencies. But one can study how experts in different areas do their scanning.

It is very effective to show students what an expert looks at when he or she is scrutinizing a scan. This is true not only for radiologists, but also for all kinds of people who perform complicated tasks where looking at the right places is requires. Consider inspecting an airplane for mechanical faults before it departs on the next flight. Part of this job involves a visual check of the exterior of the airplane. When students are shown a view in which the most effective eye movements are projected on the screen, they learn faster and more effectively how to perform this kind of inspection. Eye-trackers are used to capture the performance of experts.

Change Blindness

July 17, 2019






Screening Performance

July 16, 2019

This post is based on a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel titled “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” Radiologists have a difficult task when screening for breast cancer. Studies in the Netherlands have shown that the initial screening procedure has a detection probability of about 70%. So radiologists fail to detect incidences of cancer in over one quarter of all women who do in fact have breast cancer. These radiologists are not incompetent; they have a very difficult cancer to detect.

There is also the problem of falsely detecting a cancerous tumor. Additional examinations are very painful, and reacting to every minimal sign would lead to a lot of unnecessary discomfort. The chances of detecting a tumor on the basis of a minimal sign are known to be very low. But when scans in which a tumor was missed are checked again, the tumor usually turns out to be visible. The radiologist now knows that the scan does in fact contain a tumor and there is a maximum probability of actually finding it.

Scans are also done at airports for checking hand luggage. Security scanner operators spend hours every day searching the contents of bags and suitcases. Of course, the education and training of these airport security scanners is much less than that of radiologists. And the chance of finding dangerous content in these bags is much lower than the chance of correctly detecting dangerous objects in luggage. So fake explosives are placed in luggage for purposes of training and assessment. There are reports that operators fail to spot up to 75% of the fake explosives that are hidden in bags for test purposes.

An Americans study in to the performance of airport security personnel revealed that having to scrutinize scans on a daily basis helps them to be more precise when carrying out other unrelated search work. Out of a group of test subjects who were asked to find a well-hidden object on a computer screen, 82% were successful. A group of professional security scanner operators scored 88% for the same test although they did take longer to complete the task compared to nonprofessionals.

If you would like to check your prowess as a security scanner operator you can down load Airport Scanner, a free app (airportscannergame.com) that allows people to play
the task of finding dangerous items in luggage scans. This app has been a huge success worldwide and has millions of users. This app is partly funded by the American government, which is pleased with the amazing amount of information they are able to glean from the game. Researchers are also involved in the development of the game, and the first scientific articles were recently published containing the data retrieved from one billion searches. Some players have become so addicted that they have already competed thousands of searches. And this has provided developers with the opportunity to insert certain objects, only at sporadic intervals (in less than 0.15% of the searches). Dr. Van Der Stigchel notes that this research could not be done in a laboratory because the research subjects would end up running screaming from the lab after being subjected to hours and hours of tests. Based on a probability of 0.1%, an object will appear once every 1,000 searches, and in order to reach any firm conclusions about a player’s performance when attempting to find an extremely are object, 20,000 searches would need to be conducted. These data are now available thanks to the Airport Scanner app, and it has proven beyond doubt that players/professionals frequently fail to spot these rare, hidden objects.


July 15, 2019

This post is based on a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel titled “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” This term, “infobesity,” as been coined by the popular media, but it is increasingly being referred to as a clinical disease. The term is the brainchild of a “trend team” employed by a company specializing in identifying trends among young people. Although there is very little scientific literature on the subject, the fact is that doctors are treating more and more teenagers these days for problems associated with a lack of sleep.

Dr. Van Der Stigchel writes, “One of the factors contributing to this lack of sleep is our insatiable appetite for information that is presented to us on-screen.” Obviously this leads to problems with concentration. From the scientific studies that have been done, young people are extremely frequent multimedia users. On average 18-year-olds spend a total of 20 hours a day on various media. Obviously this can only be because different media are used simultaneously, which further exacerbates the damage. The vast majority of this multimedia use is of the visual kind. Functions that rely on the spoken word have been replaced by visual ones. Unfortunately voice mail is becoming a thing of the past because it takes too much time, and people prefer to send their messages screen-to-screen instead. Dr. Van Der Stigchel notes that we are using the telephone less and choosing more often to interact with others on-screen and not only through hearing their voice. If e-mail and WhatsApp relied on the spoken word, they would be less popular.

Dr. Van Der Stigchel writes, “Screens are so efficient at communicating information that we see them everywhere nowadays. The result is a titanic battle for our attention, We have already established that it only takes a quick glance at a limited amount of visual information to know what that information is. In a single moment, we choose the one piece of visual information that is most relevant to us from all the information swirling around us. We then process this one piece of information deeply enough to be able to establish its identity. All of the other information continues to blink away furiously, but it can only become relevant when we decide to look again.”

How does one deal with infobesity? We need to deal with infobesity the same manner in which we deal with obesity. We deal with obesity by selectively controlling and reducing our food input. We deal with infobesity by selectively controlling and reducing
our information input. Unless one is a professional on-call, a physician for instance, there is no reason for staying continually connected. This FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is irrational. Most, if not practically all, messages can wait until we have time to pay attention to them. When we interrupt what we are doing to process a message, there are two sources of attentional loss. There is additional information to deal with at the same time, and there are also time and attentional costs involved in switching between sources of information and processing them

An examination of different sources of information can lead to deletions of certain sources. Some information is of little value, so these sources of information should be eliminated. Our attentional resources are extremely limited, so we need to spend them carefully.

In conclusion, deal with infobesity by going on an information diet, and processing only those sources of information that have substantial value.


So Then, How Good is the Human Visual System?

July 14, 2019

The simplest way to answer this question is to ask how frequently is the human visual system relied upon. Stefan Van Der Stigchel writes in his book “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction,” “When it comes to the transfer of information, the visual system is our single most important sensory tool. It takes a lot longer to convey the same information orally through speech than visually with the aid of symbols. This is because the visual system is able to process information in the blink of an eye. If you show someone a very detailed photo for just a second or two, they will still be able to describe the image to you fairly accurately afterward.”

In the 1970s Mary Potter conducted a series of experiments that clearly demonstrated this ability to rapidly process visual information. Research participants were given a written description of a scene (for example, “traffic on a street”) and then asked to find that scene among a series of images presented to them in quick succession. They were instructed to press a button as soon as they had identified the scene that identified the written description. No visual information regarding the scene was provided, neither the color of the cars nor the layout of the street. When the presentation rate was eight scenes per second, there was a success rate of 60% when it came to finding the scene that had been described in writing. This means that each image was visible for just 125 milliseconds, and the participants had to process all of the visual information in each scene within this extremely short space of time. A second study in which the participants only had to describe which scenes they had seen after the event only 11% of them were able to describe the scenes in any detail. Although they could say which scenes they had been shown, they were unable to provide any specific information about the content.

The difference in the results of these studies reveals distinct stages of information processing. All of the visual information that falls on the retina is registered in the brain. This information includes the colors and shapes of the world around us, and is processed in the primary visual cortex. At this stage we are still unable to identify individual objects. “Seeing” describes everything that falls as light on the retina. Although we “see” a lot of stuff, we only process a small amount of information deeply enough to know what that stuff actually is. Identification, knowing whether something is a tree or a green building, requires more in-depth processing and access to the identity of the object.

If we want to communicate a visual message, such as the information in a traffic sign, it is important to know what kind of information we can communicate in an instant. Although visual information can be communicated very quickly, there are limits. We are unable to process full sentences in a blink of an eye. Symbols, assuming the meaning of the symbol is known, are much more effective in this respect. Of course, it is impossible to devise a symbol for every piece of information, but when a road has multiple complicated signs, it can be to the detriment of both the message being communicated, and the intended recipients of the information, that is, the road users.

The communication of information is regarded as being successful when the relevant information reaches the intended user. Regardless of how impressed we might be by a particular advertisement, if we do not remember the intended message after being the advert (the name of the product), then the advertisement will not have worked and the attention architect will have failed in his or her task. HM remembers many advertisements, yet being unable to remember the name of the product. Perhaps HM has suffered brain damage, and is an atypical subject. Yet he is able to write a blog, so readers can reserve judgment. There are other advertisements, which he remembers but dislikes and is not prone to purchase the product. HM would very much like to review research on advertisements and how their effectiveness is evaluated.


Is the Human Visual System Inefficient and Flawed?

July 13, 2019

This post is based on a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel titled “How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” The immediately preceding post might have you thinking that the human visual system is both inefficient and flawed. The fact that we cannot register what we see in our visual world suggests that the human visual system is a flawed one. Indeed, it will fail to detect a gorilla walking into a scene!

Before reaching this conclusion remind yourself that our species has managed to survive and prosper in a hostile environment. It is usually the case that the world around us is a stable and consistent one, and our brains work on this assumption. What is important is gathering information that is relevant to us. That’s what we need to focus on. We can ignore all the stuff that is of no value to us. A system that tried to process every scrap of visual information would be cumbersome and inefficient, and there is no need to process all the information available to us.

Dr. Van Der Stigchel writes “the system that uses less energy has an advantage in the evolutionary scheme of things. An efficient system makes the energy it does not use available to the system, and that is what our visual system also does. Although the retina catches the light from everywhere around us, only that information which is relevant to us is processed.”

Suppose when we went shopping in a supermarket we processed all the information we saw. Although we would know the brand and price of every product, that would cost us far too much energy.

Our visual system possesses a unique feature that allows it to present information very selectively: our continuous access to the visual world. All of the visual information that is available to us at any given moment is 100% accessible. All we need to do is to open our eyes and the information floods in. We can use the visual world as a kind of external hard drive. We do not need to store every single detail related to the external world in our internal world because all of the visual information is continuously available to us externally.

We only need to be able to recall internally to interact effectively with the external visual world where the relevant information is located in relation to our own location at any given moment.

Dr. Van Stigchel asks us to imagine the following: “we and a friend are walking down a busy street in town on our way to a coffee bar at the end of the street. There are people everywhere and neon signs flashing all around, At that moment, only certain aspects of the visual world are relevant to us: the coffee shop in the distance and our friends walking beside us. We are moving, so all of the information is moving too relative to our position. We use our eyes to access the visual world around us and note only the location of the information that is relevant to us. We would notice if the coffee bar suddenly disappears, our friend runs off, or if a screaming gorilla approaches because this information is relevant to us. We can afford to ignore everything else.”

How Attention Works

July 10, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a book by Stefan Van Der Stigchel. The subtitle is “Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction.” The book begins with the following quote by the father of American Psychology, William James”

“Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state.”

Van Der Stichel begins by writing about how a walk in the woods seems. We enjoy the sight of all the trees around us and the myriad shades of green. We just allow our visual environment to work its magic. Our eyes are our window to the world. All we need do is to open them. It happens automatically. Spotting a squirrel in a tree or following the tracks of a horse are reflex actions. We believe that what we see is the whole picture: stable, rich and vastly superior to any virtual environment.

But Van Der Stichel follows with this paragraph. “However, we actually take less information on board from our surroundings than we might think. For example, movies are full of continuity errors that viewers fail to spot. Very few of us ever take any notice when a jacket that was hanging on a coatrack is suddenly not there anymore in the next scene. The legendary “Star Wars” movies are famous for these kinds of mistakes. Objects move from one position to another, and a background full of plants and trees suddenly changes into a barren desert. You only even notice these discrepancies when someone takes the trouble to point them out to you, with the result that it is almost impossible not to see them the next time. Of course, movie directors do their best to keep such mistakes to a minimum, but the fact that neither they nor the people who edit their movies manage to spot these errors in the first place demonstrates just how easy it is to miss them.”

Sunday magazines like to present two versions of a photograph. These versions look like they are identical, but they are not. The objective of this puzzle is to spot the discrepancies. This is a very difficult, time-consuming task to accomplish successfully. But these differences are quite subtle.

However, there is a film clip where something dramatic happens that most viewers fail to notice. This is the infamous “gorilla clip” that many people have seen. The clip shows two groups of students throwing a basketball back and forth. The viewer’s task is to count the number of time the group with the white T-shirts throws the ball. At a certain, a gorilla walks into the frame. He beats his chest with his fists and then walks out of the shot again. The majority of those seeing the clip for the first time fail to notice this gorilla.

After Van Der Stichel had shown this clip to his students he told them he was going to show them a clip again. He writes that they paid special attention to the gorilla with the aim of showing their lazy professor that he should know better than to try to fool them with the same old trick again. But this time he showed them a new version of the clip, one in which the curtains hanging behind the basketball-playing students gradually change color and one of the players walks abruptly out of the frame. The effect was even greater than the first clip. Almost none of his students noticed either of these two major changes, primarily because they were too busy waiting for the gorilla to appear.

Late Night Cramming is Harmful

July 9, 2019

This post is motivated by programs showing students cramming for tests. The scenario is that such demands are being placed on these students for success that they are working extremely hard. Should these stories be true, then not only are these students risking their health, but there is a limit on how much study can been done effectively. Beyond this, they are spinning their wheels, not enhancing their knowledge, and risking their health.

Consider placement tests like the ACT and the SAT. There has been some research showing some benefits of preparing for these tests. What is needed is further research in which the students log not only the time studying was done, but also the time of day the studying was done. HM would predict that there is some benefit, but this benefit would max out and additional time might even be harmful (scores would decline). The time at which the studying was done should also be studied. HM predicts that little would be gained for studying at late hours and that there even might be some decrement. After all, presumably these tests are supposed to measure aptitude. If this is true, there should be limits on the amount of benefit.

These programs also portray students at prestigious universities cramming and putting in late hours preparing for tests. HM attended state universities and saw this same phenomena. The reason these students were cramming and pulling late or all-nighters was that they did not keep up with the work. They were cramming in an attempt to catch up.

HM strongly suspects that this is also the case at prestigious universities. If these universities do require excessive workloads, then prestigious university or not, students should withdraw from the school and their parents should encourage them to withdraw, because the instruction is harming, not benefiting, the students.

Learning requires cognitive effort, which can be exhausted. When this cognitive effort is exhausted little learning takes place. Sleep is also essential. Memories are consolidated during sleep. So studies pulling all nighters are cheating themselves of their memories consolidating. In other words, the all-nighter is harmful, not beneficial.

In the military sometimes military personnel must push themselves to operate long hours with little or no sleep. Unfortunately, this is a reality of military operations and requires training to be prepared for these operations. However, for normal instruction to be effective, students need their sleep. There have been studies on trainees that have shown when trainees are allowed to get their necessary sleep, their learning and performance on tests improve. So for regular training, planning should include regular sleep, but there will need to be training for prolonged operations that should be done separately. Actually, what is being learned during training for these prolonged operations is how to compensate for degraded performance when the body is fatigued and crying for sleep.


Alzheimer’s Researchers Shift Focus After Failures

July 7, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a front page article by Christopher Rowland in the 4 July 2019 issue of the Washington Post. These researchers are shifting their focus to new drug treatments that deal with other factors than the defining features for an Alzheimer’s diagnose, which are amyloid plaque and neurofibrillary tangles. The conclusion that this research is fruitless was made by a former researcher in this area. The Myth of Alzheimer’s is a book by Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D. and Ph.D and Daniel George, M.Sc. Whitehouse is the former researcher who came to the conclusion that this research would never yield results. There was a healthy memory post on this book in 2011. HM believes Dr. Whitehouse is working on non drug treatments for Alzheimer’s. The Alzheimer’s association provides little, if any, support in this area. The Alzheimer’s association provides financial support for drug research. HM wonders in the unlikely event that a useful drug was produced, whether the Alzheimer’s Association had some agreement to limit costs or would this company be allowed to prey on the public. Before giving any money to the Alzheimer’s association, potential donors should demand an answer to this question.

There have been many posts on this topic including one titled “The Myth of Alzheimer’s.” Perhaps the most significant finding is one that is rarely, if ever, mentioned. And that is that people die with the defining characteristics for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the amyloid plaque and neurofibrillary tangles, but who never knew that they had the disease because they never had any behavioral or cognitive symptoms of the disease. The explanation offered is that these people had developed a cognitive reserve as a result of being cognitively active during their lifetimes.

The reappearing theme in this blog is that people should live cognitively fulfilling lives with growth mindsets in which they are continuing to learn. This involves System 2 processing, more commonly referred to as thinking. Our normal processing mode is System 1, which is quite fast and efficient. Here we are in cruise control where the conscious content just keeps flowing. As one proceeds through life this becomes easier and easier. Much has been learned, there is little interest in learning anything new, so the mind effectively is on cruise control. Cognitive neuroscience has termed this the default mode network, which is quite similar, if not identical, to Kahneman’s System 2 processing which is from cognitive psychology.

HM knows people who have been cognitively active throughout their lives, yet still succumbed to Alzheimer’s or dementia. But there are other causes. One of HM’s friends trained himself to get by on 4 hours of sleep per night. Research shows us that 7 to 8 hours of sleep are required. Other ambitious people burn the candle and both ends, which also leads to sleep deprivation.

HM wishes the researchers well in their research. But everyone should know that by engaging in a cognitively challenging life with growth mindsets they should greatly decrease, if not eliminate, the prospect of dementia or Alzheimer’s. Of course, a healthy lifestyle is also assumed.

Please use the search block of the blog (healthymemory.wordpress.com) to learn more about any of the terms in this post.


Happy Fourth of July!

July 3, 2019

It is a day to be praised and enjoyed, but also a day to ponder the state of our country. A statement that is made over and over again on this holiday is “I am proud to be an American!” Unfortunately, anyone making this statement has forgotten that pride is one of the seven deadly sins (the others being greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth). And there is a good reason for pride being one of the seven deadly sins. Pride tempts one to rest on one’s laurels. And there is a statement that pride precedes a fall, which is a paraphrase from a warning in the book of Proverbs in the King James Version of the Bible.

So while it is acceptable to take some comfort in previous accomplishments, pride can blind one from actions that need to be taken. And nowhere is this blindness more obvious than in the actions being taken against immigrants. With the exception of Native Americans we are all immigrants. So it is the height of hypocrisy (perhaps “depth” might be a better term) to commit the crimes against immigrants that are being done today. Moreover, a large number of victims are children.

Too many people forget that immigration is central to the growth of our country. Bringing in more people of different backgrounds provides the strength of diversification. Of course, much of this negative reaction is against this diversification comes from blatant racists. Immigrants provide needed labor at both ends of the employment spectrum. It provides much of the cheap labor that many residents do not want to perform. And at the high end are people with the smarts to grow science, engineering, medicine, mathematics, and commerce. And these people come from all races and backgrounds. White supremacists should confront the reality that without these people, the United States would fall behind many countries that include this diversification.

Perhaps the most hypocritical of all, are religious groups fighting immigration. These religious groups are definitely not following the teachings of Christ and leaders of other prominent religions.


A Question Trump Needs to Answer

June 30, 2019

There is a prerequisite to reading this post, and that is the immediately preceding post, “The Great Successor.”

Contrary to the image Trump has built, Trump is a failed businessman, with bankruptcy after bankruptcy. Although American banks stopped lending to Trump he kept on purchasing new properties, typically with cash. From where did this money come? His son has answered from Russia. So taken at face value, the reason that Trump favors Putin and disavows the intelligence he receives from his intelligence community is obvious. He is owned by Putin and Russia.

Presumably, the tax and financial records he refuses to release would show this ugly reality, and that is the reason he is refusing to release them.

But the burden should be on Trump to prove his innocence. Show us where this money comes from. If you refuse, then it is fairly obvious that you are are severely compromised by your debts to Russia.

A preceding Healthy Memory Post, “House of Trump House of Putin” reviewed a book with this title by Craig Unser that explains how and why Trump became involved with the Russian Mafia. The book includes an annotated list of Fifty-nine of Trump’s Russian connections. The book is well-documented with extensive notes.


The Great Successor

June 29, 2019

“The Great Successor” is the title of a new book by Anna Fifield. The subtitle is “The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un.” Should you be wondering why you should be interested in Kim Jong Un, HM will first explain why he is interested and then will explain why you should be interested. HM is interested because he served in Korea in the military and has does much reading on Korea. His wife is Korean. And he knows much of the history of Korea. Korea is a peninsula that managed to maintain its integrity and culture in spite of many invasions by China and Japan. At the end of WW II the United States divided Korea in half: the south to be occupied by American soldiers and the North to be occupied by Soviet soldiers. The Soviets only entered the war after the Atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan. Nevertheless, they were given half of the peninsula, not only dividing a culture that had existed for over a thousand years, but effectively assigning the North Koreans to hell.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting experiment. South Korea became a prosperous capitalist country selling automobiles and electronics to the rest of the world. North Korea, remained poor, but nevertheless developed nuclear weapons, long range missiles, and a frightening cyberwarfare capability. Actually the west has more to fear from North Korea’s cyberwar capabilities than it does of its nuclear and missile delivery systems.

If this isn’t enough to encourage you to continue reading, consider that Kim Jong Un is an individual for whom Trump has tremendous admiration and respect.

The Soviet Union installed Kim Il Sung as the dictator of North Korea, who eventually invaded South Korea and started the Korean war. He also started a brutal dictatorship that endures today. Kim Il Sung eventually died and his son Kim Jong Il succeeded him. He continued the brutal dictatorship. Kim Jung Un is the third in succession. To the best of HM’s belief, this is the first and only hereditary dictatorship. The actual lineage here is confusing. Although the sons were hereditary, there is no rule of succession. Different mothers, and younger sons were selected to get the best, most promising dictators.

Kim Jong Un differs from his father and his grandfather as he was educated in the west and has traveled extensively. To understand Kim Jong Un it helps to understand the Machiavellian principles by which he governs.

“He embodies the dictim laid out five centuries earlier by the Italian Nicolo Machiavelli in his book: that it is better to be feared than loved. In the first year of his reign, Kim Jong Un put his country, already the world’s most isolated, on lockdown. He had security along the river border with China reinforced. He had patrols stepped up. His efforts to thwart attempts to escape were much more draconian than his father’s.”

“Like his predecessors, he has managed to survive as a dictator by controlling an entire nation through a relatively tiny group of people. It was another rule expounded by Machiavelli: don’t worry about the general population; just be sure to enrich a small, elite group.”

Blaine Harden, a Korea expert who wrote the enthralling, true account of a Korean escaping to freedom in his book “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odysses from North Korea to Freedom in the West.” Here is the review he provided of Ms. Fifeld’s book. “The Great Successor shows how a pudgy young heir to tyranny—using fratricide, nuclear terror, crony capitalism, and strategic flattery of a vain American president—has become a sure-footed Machiavelli for the twenty-first century.”

Readers might have seen pictures of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. Part of it looks something like Manhattan and has been nicknamed Pyonghattan. But only the most loyal Koreans are allowed to live there. Ninety % of North Koreans are dirt poor, trying to scrape out a living via individual capitalism who need to bribe officials to keep their illegal enterprises going. About 10% of North Koreans can be regarded as being relatively well off. And the top 0.1% are obscenely wealthy.

The North Koreans studied Donald Trump. They saw his narcissism as a point of entry. They knew he would be a sucker for a deal on nuclear arms. Of course, they initially insulted Trump and Trump responded in kind. But the goal was to set up a meeting with the President of the United States. Never before had a North Korean leader met directly with a President of the United States. Typically, there are many negotiations before such a meeting can take place. And agreements have been made absent a direct meeting with the President of the United States. But Trump, viewing himself as the great deal maker, agreed to meet directly with Kim Jong Un. Although nothing was accomplished at the meeting for the Americans, North Korea achieved a first for the country by managing to meet with the American President.

A subsequent meeting fell flat, but Trump remains entranced with this North Korean dictator. He thinks he has established a bond. Kim Jong Un writes flattering letters to Trump, who regards Un as his buddy. Trump’s promised not to spy on North Korea.

Some points need to be understood. The only goal Kim Jong Un has is to stay in power. He cares nothing about the welfare of his people. Although he might sign agreements to denuclearize, he will never denuclearize. The memory of Mummar Gaddafi sticks strongly in his mind. Gaddafi agreed to denuclearize and ended up dying in a ditch. The best hope for Kim Jong Un is that he will suffer an early death. He is in extremely poor health.

The Role of Humor for a Healthy Memory

June 28, 2019













The Dangers of the Dunning-Krueger Effect

June 27, 2019







GDP As a Measure of Progress

June 26, 2019










How Do We Become Team Human?

June 25, 2019

Douglas Rushkoff in his book titled “TEAM HUMAN” has provided many reasons and exhortations for becoming Team Human. He ended by telling us we are not alone and to find the others. But his book provided much data for not being able to become Team Human. The book provides example after example of new technologies and capabilities becoming available, but some humans using these technologies and capabilities to exploit their fellow humans for their benefit. Given our track record, becoming Team Human seems like a hopeless task.

HM skipped a section Artificial Intelligence (AI). It just provided examples of how is being used to exploit fellow humans. Much of this has already been covered by the posts on “Zucked” and other social media. However, readers who have read the posts based on Joh Markoff’s book “Machines of Living Grace” should know that in addition to AI, there is also IA, which stands for intelligent augmentation. Here the primary role is for computers to augment human intelligence.

It is somewhat ironic that one of the major weaknesses of our species, is our inability to interact with our fellow humans as TEAM HUMAN advocates. This explains the large numbers of wars used to resolve issues. Democratic governments become deadlocked and autocrats take over. We might actually be living through one of these occurrences right now. Deadlocks benefit no one and ruthless individuals can exploit these deadlocks by fostering authoritarian rules.

IA could be developed to negotiate and circumvent these deadlocks. Note that Rushkoff writes that “Team Human doesn’t reject technology.” This is certainly not an easy task, but it is one that needs to be pursued. Perhaps in a deadlock IA solutions could be accepted, even if it served as no more than a coin toss to break deadlocks. Coin tosses should be acceptable provided participants were convinced of the fairness.

Readers might be concerned that HM is proposing nothing more than a “Deus ex machina” with such a proposal. But suppose what happens in Greek Drama could happen in real life.

Suppose the solution was not acceptable and that worse than deadlock was the prospect of lethal force. Then, perhaps the machines would assert themselves as they did in Colossus: The Forbin Project. This was described in the post “Alternative Futures 3:” At the height of the Cold War a movie was released titled “Collosus: the Forbin Project.” The movie takes place during the height of the cold war when there was a realistic fear that a nuclear war would begin that would destroy all life on earth. Consequently, the United States created the Forbin Project to create Colossus. The purpose of Colossus was to prevent a nuclear war before it began or to conduct a war once it had begun. Shortly after they turn on Colossus, they find it acting strangely. They discover that it is interacting with the Soviet version of Colossus. The Soviets had found a similar need to develop such a system. The two systems communicated with each other and came to the conclusion that these humans are not capable of safely conducting their own affairs. In the movie the Soviets capitulate to the computers and the Americans try to resist but ultimately fail. So the human species is saved by AI.

So there is still hope, however bleak.


The Worst Problem: The Most Imminent Danger

June 23, 2019












Organize: You Are Not Alone

June 22, 2019

















Renaissance Now

June 21, 2019














Natural Science

June 20, 2019












Spirituality and Ethics

June 19, 2019












From Paradox to Awe

June 18, 2019














June 17, 2019












June 16, 2019













The Digital Media Environment

June 15, 2019














Figure and Ground

June 14, 2019













Learning to Lie

June 13, 2019















Social Animals

June 12, 2019

This is the second post based on a new book by Douglas Rushkoff titled “TEAM HUMAN.” The title of this post is identical to the title of the second section of this book.
This section begins, “Nature is a collaborative act. If humans are the most evolved species, it is only because we have developed the most advanced ways of working and playing together.”

Rushkoff writes that it is a myth that evolution is about competition, the survival of the fittest. According to this view, each creature struggles against all the others for scarce resources. Only the strongest ones survive to pass on their superior genes, while the weakest deserve to lose and die out. He argues that evolution is every bit as much about cooperation as competition. Our own cells are the result of an alliance of billions of years ago between mitochondria and their hosts. Individuals and species flourish by evolving ways of supporting mutual survival. A bird develops a beak which lets it feed on some part of a plant that other birds can’t reach. This introduces diversity into the population’s diet, reducing the strain on a particular food supply and leading to more for all. Birds, much like bees, are helping the plant by spreading its seeds after eating its fruit.

Rushkoff writes, “Survival of the fittest is a convenient way to justify the cutthroat ethos of a competitive marketplace, political landscape, and culture. But this perspective misconstrues the theories of Darwin as well as his successors. By viewing evolution through a strictly competitive lens, we miss the bigger story of our own social development and have trouble understanding humanity as one big, interconnected team.”

We once believed that human beings developed larger brains than chimpanzees in order to do better spatial mapping of the environment or to make more advanced tools and weapons. Primates with better tools and mental maps could hunt and fight better, too. But there are only slight genetic variations between hominids and chimpanzees, and they relate almost exclusively to the number of neurons that our brains are allowed to make. It’s not a qualitative difference but a quantitative one. “The most direct benefit of more neurons and connections in our brains is an increase in the size of the social networks we can form. Complicated brains make for more complex societies.”

Rushkoff continues, “The more advanced the primate, the bigger its social groups. That’s the easiest and most accurate way to understand evolution’s trajectory, and the relationship of humans to it. Even if we don’t agree that social organization is evolution’s master plan, we must accept that it is—at the very least—a large part of what makes humans human.”

Continuing further, “Our nervous systems learned to treat our social connections as existentially important—life or death. Threats to our relationships are processed by the same part of the brain that processes physical pain. Social losses, such as the death of a loved one, divorce, or expulsion from a social group are experienced as acutely as a broken leg.”

These social relationships required us humans to develop a “theory of mind.” This is the ability to understand and identify with the thinking and motivations of other people. From an evolutionary perspective, this concept of self came after our ability to evaluate and remember the intentions and tactics of others. Our social adaptations occurred over hundreds of thousands of years of biological evolution. These enduring social bonds increase out ability to work together, as well as our chances for procreation. Our eyes, brains, skin and breathing are all optimized to enhance our connection to other people.

Prosocial behaviors such as simple imitation make people feel more accepted and included, which sustains a group’s cohesion over time. In an experiment people who were subtly imitated by a group produced less stress hormone than those who are not imitated. Our bodies are adapted to seek and enjoy being mimicked. When humans are engaged in mimesis they learn from one another and advance the community’s skill set.

Physical cues to establish rapport are preverbal. We used them to bond before we even learned to speak—both as babies and as early humans many millennia ago. We flash our eyebrows when we want someone to pay attention to us. We pace in sync with someone else’s creating when we want them to know we empathize. When we see someone breathing with us, their eyes opening to accept us, their head subtly nodding we feel we re being understood and accepted. Our mirror neurons activate, releasing oxytocin, the bonding hormone, into our bloodstream.

The development of group sharing distinguished true humans from other hominids. We waited to eat until we took the bounty back home. Humans were defined not so much by our superior hunting ability as by our capacity to communicate, trust, and share. Early humans had a strong disposition to cooperate with one another, at great personal cost, even where there could be no expectation of payback in the future. Members of a group who violated the norms of cooperation were punished. Solidarity and community were prized in their own right.

Rushkoff concluded this section as follows: “Mental health has been defined as ‘the capacity both for autonomous expansion and for homonymous integration with others.’ That means that our actions are governed from within, but directed toward harmonious interaction with the world. We may be driven internally, but all this activity is happening in relationship with out greater social environment. We can only express our autonomy in relationship to other people.

To have autonomy without interdependency leads to isolation or narcissism. To have interdependency with no autonomy stunts our psychological growth. Healthy people live in social groups that have learned to balance or, better, marry these two imperatives.”


June 11, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a new book by Douglas Rushkoff. Reading books like this promotes the development and maintenance of a healthy memory. Learning new ideas establishes new neural connections. Reading critically activates yet more neural connections, and it is these new neural connections that foster a healthy memory. So readers need to go beyond fast System 1 processes, and invoke, and invoke heavily, System 2 processes. Even if you disagree when invoking System 2 processes, do not disengage. You should find it beneficial to continue reading posts on this book.

In preparing for competitive debates, a good practice is to debate both sides of the topic. This is important competitively, so one will be better at countering opposition points. Similarly, in reading it is important to understand as many sides of an issue that are tenable. Usually, there are at least a few points that one can regard as worthwhile. But even if one is in agreement with the author, there should usually be at least a few points of disagreement. And integrating all this information enhances one’s intelligence and knowledge as well as fostering a healthy memory.

Some authors are ponderous making for laborious reading. Fortunately, Rushkoff is not one of those authors. He makes his points quickly and crisply. For this reason, HM recommends you read the actual book. HM will try his best to bring the key content forward in this series of blogs.

The first section is titled TEAM HUMAN and begins, “Autonomous technologies, runaway markets, and weaponized media seem to have overturned civil society, paralyzing our ability to think constructively, connect meaningfully, or act purposefully. It feels as if civilization itself were on the brink, and that we lack the collective will-power and coordination necessary to address issues of vital importance to the very survival of our species. It doesn’t have to be this way way.”

He argues that there’s a reason for our current predicament, and that is an antihuman agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media. He argues that it has turned them from forces for human connection and expression into ones of isolation and repression. He believes by exposing this agenda, we make ourselves capable of transcending its paralyzing effect, reconnect to one another, and remake society towards human ends rather than the end of humans.

He writes that the first step toward reversing our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport (hence the book’s title). “We cannot be fully human alone. Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our individual or collective will.

Social connections are needed to orient ourselves, to ensure each other’s survival, and to derive meaning and purpose. Although we sometimes connect with one another in order to achieve some common goal, we also commune and communicate for their own sake because we gain strength, pleasure and purpose as we develop rapport.

We extend our natural ability to connect through various forms of media. The internet connects us more deliberately and, in some ways, more reassuringly than any medium before it. The tyranny of top-down broadcast media once seemed to be broken by the peer-to-peer connections and free expression of every human node on the network, The net turned media back into a collective, participatory, and social landscape.

But as usually happens with each and every new medium, the net went from being a
social platform to an isolating one. Instead of forging new relationships between people, our digital technologies came to replace them with something else. He writes, “Our most advanced technologies are not enhancing our connectivity, but thwarting it. They’re replacing and devaluing our humanity, and—in many different ways—undermining our respect for one another and ourselves. Sadly this has been by design. But that’s also why it can be reversed.”

Digital networks are the latest media to go from promoting social bonds to destroying them. They are supplanting rather than supporting humanity. Rushkoff fears that this current shift may be more profound and permanent because this time we are empowering our antihuman technologies with the ability to retool themselves. Our smart devices iterate and evolve faster than our biology can.

Rushkoff argues that we are tying our markets and security to the continued growth and expanding capabilities of our machines, but that this is self-defeating. These technologies are built with the presumption of human inferiority and expendabilty.

He concludes this section, “It’s time we reassert the human agenda. And we must do so together—not as individual players we have been led to imagine ourselves to be, but as the team we actually are. Team Human.”

Disaffections with Society are Not New

June 10, 2019

This post is based on content taken from “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny O’Dell. She makes the point that disaffections with society are not new. In fourth century Athens and Later Corinth, there lived the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. He is best known as “the man who lived in a tub,” scorning all material possessions except for a stick and a ragged cloak. He is famous for roaming the city streets with a lantern, looking for an honest man. In paintings, he is often shown with the lantern by his side sulklng inside a round terra-cotta tub while the life of the city goes on around him. There are other paintings of the time about when he dissed Alexander the Great, who had made it a point to visit him. When Alexander found Diogenes lazing in the sun, he expressed his admiration and asked if there was anything Diogenes needed? Diogenes replies, “Yes, stand out of my light.”

Plato designated Diogenes as “Socrates gone mad.” While he was in Athens, Diogenes had come under the influence of Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates. So Diogenes was heir to a development in Greek thought that prized the capacity for individual reason over the hypocrisy of traditions and customs, even and especially if they were commonplace.

Ms. O’Dell notes that of the differences between Socrates and Diogenes was that, while Socrates famously favored conversation, Diogenes practiced something closer to performance art. He lived his conviction out in the open and went to great lengths to shock people out of their habitual stupor, using a form of philosophy that was almost slapstick. She writes, “Diogenes thought every “sane” person in the world was actually insane for heeding any of the customs upholding a world full of greed, corruption, and ignorance. Exhibiting something like an aesthetics of reversal, he would walk backward down the street and enter a theater only when people were leaving. Asked how he wanted to be buried, he answered: ‘Upside down. For soon down will be up.’ In the meantime, he would roll over hot sand in the summer, and hug huge statues covered with snow in the winter. Suspicious of abstractions and education that prepared young people for carers in a diseased world rather than showing them how to live a good life. He was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon. While many philosophers were ascetic, Diogenes made a show even of that. Once, seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and said, ‘A child had beaten me in plainness of living.’ Another time he loudly admired a mouse for its economy of living.

Moving on from Diogenes, Ms. O’Dell writes, “besides showing us a possible way out of a bind, the process of training one’s attention has something else to recommend it. If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them. As I’ll show in the next chapter, this process enriches not only our capacity to resist, but even more simply,our access to the one life we are given. It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but also remake ourselves.

To learn more about Ms. O’Dell’s ideas read her book. But she overlooks the best way of training one’s attention in which we not only remake the world but ourselves remade. And that method is meditation and the different varieties of meditation. Enter “meditation” in the search block of the healthy memory blog at

The Incel Problem

June 9, 2019

HM must confess to being asleep at the wheel. Although previous posts have written about the new technology resulting in about 1 in 3 18-to-34 year old American men being unemployed, and living at home, essentially divorced from society. HM learned learned reading Christine Emba’s column, “Men are in trouble, ‘Incels’ are proof” in the 8 June 2019 issue of the Washington Post that “incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate.” These are young men who have come to define themselves by their inability to find a sexual or romantic partner. Unfortunately, men who identify themselves as being #ForeverAlone have gathered online in forums such as Reddit to trade their stories of woe.

These communities are self-reinforcing. Members believe the their looks or personal traits have consigned them to lifelong loneliness, and similarly downbeat peers are always willing to add more fuel to that fire. They have gone on to develop elaborate, and elaborately misogynistic theories to blame others for their plight. These theories are centered on the idea that women are shallow, stupid and cruel—exclusively choosing only a handful of the most attractive men to be with and disdaining the rest. All men should deserve a chance with women, the incels tell themselves, but some men have all the luck, while they get left out. If there were a competition for self-fulfilling prophecies, this one would likely win.

Ms. Emba writes, “…the incel subculturing has become not just self-reinforcing but self-radicalizing, often with tragic outcomes. At its most horrifying extremes, the self-described incels have taken their anger out on the women they believe are refusing them. At least two mass shootings have left behind manifestos identifying themselves as adhering to incel ideology and explaining their actions as taking revenge on the world that hasn’t given them the women they think they deserve. It is clear that these incels are on a doomed quest that, at best will lead to miserable lives, and, at worst, will lead to imprisonment or death.

One of the unfortunate results of technology is that human connection in the real world has become rarer, and often feels more difficult than it used to be. Smartphones and gaming have been replacing face-to-face interactions that might force one to confront one’s social difficulties or develop a better understanding of the lives of others.

Incels need to understand that failure and rejection are necessary components of living, and that resilience needs to be developed to successfully cope with life. Interventions need to be developed to confront these individuals with the need to change to a life of interacting face-to-face with fellow humans and to dealing with failure and rejection with resilience. Until an incel realizes the need to change, improvement in his condition is extremely unlikely to occur.

However, once he realizes the need to change, technology could be helpful. Discussion groups could provide advice on how to change and would provide further guidance on the need to change. Such groups could benefit from technology by being self-reinforcing and group reinforcing.

Reasons to Build a Healthy Hippocampus

June 8, 2019









Amazing Crows

June 7, 2019

This post is based on content taken from “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny O’Dell. Appreciating nature and learning about our fellow creatures is important to a healthy memory.

Crows are amazing indeed. They’re highly intelligent and can recognize and remember human faces. They have been documented making and using tools in the wild. They teach their children to distinguish between “good” and “bad” humans. Good humans are those who feed them and bad humans are those who try to catch them or otherwise displease them. They can hold grudges for years.

Jenny O’Dell started leaving a few peanuts out on the balcony of her apartment. For a long time the peanuts remained undisturbed. Occasionally one peanut would be missing. Then a couple of times she saw a crow come by and swipe a peanut, but the crow would quickly fly away. After a while the crows began hanging out on a nearby telephone wire. One crow started coming every day around the time that Ms. O’Dell was eating breakfast, would sit exactly where she could see it from the kitchen table, and it would caw to make her come out on the balcony with a peanut. One day this crow brought its kid, which she knew was his kid because the big one would groom the smaller one and because the smaller one had an undeveloped, chicken-like squawk. She named them Crow and Crowson.

She soon discovered that Crow and Crowson preferred it when she threw peanuts off the balcony so they could do fancy dives off the telephone line. They’d do twists, barrel, rolls, and loops, which she made slow-motion videos of with the obsessiveness of a proud parent. Sometimes, they wouldn’t want any more peanuts and would just sit there and stare at her.

This is a very interesting story of how Crows managed to develop a relationship with a human, and train her to do what they wanted to foster their recreational activities.

Pet Peeves

June 6, 2019

An award winning professor made a statement that aggravated some HM pet peeves. HM will not mention the name of this professor, only his offending statement. He said that only humans can experience mental time travel.

Past HM posts have explained that the primary function of memory is time travel. We use our memory to travel back in time to see what is known that can be used in future situations. We do this all the time such that we are unaware that we are engaging in time travel. And this is the role of consciousness. Consciousness is not some unneeded epiphenomenon. It provides the essential means for reviewing the past so that we can succeed in the future.

Humans are not the only creatures who need to review their past to plan for and deal with the future. A very large number of animal species do the same. They need to do this to survive by avoiding predators, finding food and water and finding or building shelters. So non human-species have consciousness and engage in time travel.

Unfortunately, not just this distinguished scientist, but many human beings seem to have an inferiority complex regarding homo sapiens. Esteemed primatologist Franz de Waal says that these people are in “anthropodenial,” blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other species. He says, “those who are in anthropodenial try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.” Every time non-human species do something that these people think that only humans should be capable of, they take the defense and argue that well these other species are not doing this. HM, Franz de Wall, and many others, think that this failure to believe is due to some inferiority complex these humans have about our species. HM had a professor who also thought that these arguments were ridiculous. So at a conference he said that he had video of a chimpanzee who, after he had defecated, grabbed a leaf and wiped his keister. When many in the audience, not realizing this was a joke, started writing this down he had to tell them that it was a joke as they were writing rather than laughing.

Fortunately, many other scientists are not so obdurate. Here is the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness:

It begins as follows:


The declaration concludes:



June 5, 2019

The problem of misinformation is acute and currently the best means of addressing this misinformation is POLITIFACT politifact.com. POLITIFACT is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. It is said that all politicians lie, and that is the truth. It is also likely that practically all humans lie. What one discovers in POLITIFACT is that all politicians also tell the truth, if only rarely. Moreover, there is not a strict dichotomy between true and false. Rather, there are shades of truth and false. That is why POLITIFACT uses a Truth-O-Meter that ranges as follows:

Mostly True
Half True
Mostly False
Pants-on-Fire, which is a rating that means the item is flamingly false.

You can look for specific issues and see a score card (the breakdown of the ratings) and see a sampling of the individual ratings by prominent individuals along with their statements. HM found this feature to be especially useful.

Each of these ratings is justified with a prose passage explaining the justification for the rating. So one doesn’t need to accept the rating. But the justification should be read to understand the basis for the rating.

One can access different editions. There is a national edition, a punditfact edition, which addresses various pundits, health check edition, which addresses health topics. There is a Facebook-Hoaxes edition, which is especially needed. There are editions specific to states, but no all states are available yet.

Certain individuals merit special editions. Visit the website to see who they are.
There is a Promises heading that has a Trump-o-meter and an Obameter.

There is also a Pants-on-Fire Heading that allows you to examine the most egregious lies.

It’s highly recommend to visit this website on a regular basis and spend as little or as much time as you want.

The problem of misinformation is chronic and POLITIFACT provides the best mean of dealing with this misinformation.

31st Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science pt.3

June 4, 2019

There was a session titled Mental Time Travel and Psychological Well-Being chaired by Edward P. Lemay and Nadya Teneva. The healthy memory blog has explained that one of the principal functions of memory is that it enables us to travel back in time to help us decide how to act in the future. Nora Krott gave a presentation on reviewing memories of actions gone wrong using counterfactual thought. Counterfactual thought entails thinking what if I had done something else, what would the ramifications have been. Counterfactual thought can suggest a number of responses that could have led to a more fruitful outcome. Counterfactual thinking can not only be helpful in preparing for the future, it can also assist in repairing the past. Understanding why someone has been offended can suggest ways of returning and repairing the damage that had been done to that person. We can also use mental time travel to simulate novel future experiences, evaluate them, avoid pitfalls and have more successful future experiences.

There was a presentation by Helen G. Jing titled “Not to Worry: Episodic Retrieval Enhances Psychological Well-Being in Older Adults. As we age there is a tendency for our retrieval of episodic memories, which are memories of our specific experiences, to be retrieved with less detail. Dr. Jing introduced a technique termed episodic specificity induction (ESI) which increases the number of details about an event or an episode that is being recalled. This technique not only increases memory recall, but it also boosts the effectiveness of problem solving.

Lisa k. Fazio organized a session titled Solving the Problem of Misinformation: A Multidisciplinary Approach. It turns out that is an extremely difficult problem. Although Kahneman’s Two System View of Cognition seems to be the easiest way to understand the problem, Kahneman was not mentioned at this session. A concise summary of Kahneman’s view follows.



One of the problems with misinformation is knowledge neglect. Here is an example. When research participants are asked whether the following statements are true or false.

Moses built the ark and loaded animals two by two to save them from the flood.

Noah built the ark and loaded animals two by two to save them from the flood.

Nixon built the ark and loaded animals two by two to save them from the flood.

Obviously only the Noah statement is true, but many responded positively to Moses. Fortunately very few responded to Nixon. Those who responded positively to Moses knew the correct answer, but it took too much effort to extract it from memory to answer correctly. In other words they were using System 1 processing. Had they actually expended the mental effort and used System 2 processes they would have gotten the answer correct.

This is how misinformation spreads and why it is so difficult to correct. This is why Goebbels advocated the big lie, and the bigger the better, and constant repetition of the lie. It requires much less cognitive effort to accept the lie than to reject it.

Another part of the misinformation problem regards which sources to believe. There is a good resource to address this need and that resource will be discussed in the subsequent blog post.

31st Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science Pt. 2

June 3, 2019

A definite highlight of the meeting was lecture by Lynn Nadel titled, Taking James Seriously: The Implications of Multiple Memory Systems. The James referred to in the title is William James, the father of American Psychology. James wrote about multiple memory systems, a primary and a secondary memory, which today are referred to as short term and long term memory. He made a distinction between habits and memory.

James passed away long before the emergence of neuroscience. The hippocampus plays an important role in the processing of memories. There was a famous epileptic patient referred to as HM who had large portions of his temporal lobes removed. A hippocampus is located in each one of those lobes. Although his previous memories remained intact, not only each new day, but each new hour was a new experience for HM. And these experiences would not be remembered.

There is a distinction between episodic memory, which holds the memories of our daily experiences is processed in the hippocampus, and semantic memory, which holds our general knowledge of the world, is resident in our neocortex.

The hippocampus is also critical to navigation. The neuroscientist O’Keefe identified place cells in the hippocampus. These place cells identify spatial locations where the organism travels. Learning to navigate entails strengthening these place cells and learning to follow them to desired locations.

In most species, the hippocampus matures postnatally. This has important consequences for memory and cognitive development. Dr. Nadel asks what does it mean to start life with a developing, but not yet functioning hippocampus, perhaps uniquely susceptible to impacts of experience early in life. In humans it takes 18-24 months for the hippocampus to emerge, and it takes 10-12 years for it to become fully functional.

Dr. Nadel speculates that phobias can develop before the hippocampus emerges. This late emergence of the hippocampus explains infantile amnesia and delayed exploration and place learning. Everything we learn very early in life is context free. The individual has no understanding of why she has certain fears, as the cause of the fear was not stored in memory. As for the 10-12 years for the hippocampus, an extremely important structure, to become fully functional, it might result in shortcomings in learning and interpersonal interactions.

31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science

June 2, 2019

HM has attended several of these meetings. In addition to the 31st, HM attended the very first meeting and made a poster presentation, Computer Aids for Vision and Employment (CAVE). A series of posts will do what will be, at best, a cursory summary of presentations that HM attended.

The first presentation he attended was by Daniel T. Gilbert titled Prisoners of Now. Our ability to imagine the future—what will happen and how we will feel about it- is susceptible of error. The most potent source of error is our tendency to imagine the future through the lens of the present, which leads us to misunderstand ourselves and others in the future. So when we arrive at this imagined point in the future our experiences will have changed us so that what we experience in the future is different than expected. His claim is based on data. When the future objective is to achieve a certain goal, such as gaining entrance to a prestigious college, winning tenure at a prestigious university, or having a prestigious and important job, the failure to achieve these objectives is nowhere near as disastrous as anticipated. The future turns out to be different, it may also be more beneficent than imagined, so a fulfilling career, an enjoyable marriage are achieved. And it is also possible that achieving one’s desired goals are not as fulfilling as imagined. The work can be demanding and not as rewarding as imagined or the marriage might have ended in an unpleasant divorce. So it is always good to work for future goals, but it is not wise to fear the failure to achieve these goals. Although it is not guaranteed, one should feel that it is fairly likely to achieve at least a modicum of happiness. Of course, this assumes that alcohol and controlled substances are not abused, and that the law is not broken.

There was another session titled Increasing STEM Thinking in the Real World organized by Caroline Marano and Roberta M. Golinkoff. As readers of the healthy memory blog should know STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math, and that these disciplines are regarded as needed for both the country and the economy. It should also be appreciated that psychology is regarded as a STEM discipline. This symposium examined how STEM can be developed in everyday environments, exploring how parents and educators can bolster learning for all children.

So there was a presentation on spatial thinking and how to enhance it as spatial thinking is an important component of STEM. There was another presentation on how preschoolers and parents can explore math broadly. There was a presentation on what was called the Urban Thinkscape, which designed parks to encourage thinking in the STEM area. And a presentation on a Children’s Museum called Parkopolis which raises STEM thinking.

These presentations were encouraging, but HM is also concerned about STEM thinking in adults. All responsible adults and citizens need to develop their understanding of STEM disciplines, and an especially important one is statistical thinking. They need to apply this thinking to the health of their families and to use as guidance in selecting political leaders.

A session titled Emerging Concepts of Effort: Resources, Resourced Perceptions, and Subjective Experience was organized by Nicolas Silvestri. Mental effort or energy, if you will, is required for many processes. One presentation was titled fatigue influence on inhibitory control. When we’re tired we have less energy for inhibitory control. So when we’re tired we need to be especially careful to say or do something that we might later regret. Moreover, individuals have different beliefs regarding willpower. Some regard willpower as being virtually unlimited. Others regard willpower as a resource that must be carefully guarded. In reality willpower is limited. That’s why the healthy memory blog has recommended taking this into consideration when making New Year’s resolutions. Making too many resolutions or extremely difficult resolutions can increase, if not guarantee, failure. That is why the healthy memory blog recommends making no more than 2 resolutions, one of which can be regarded as likely to achieve, and the other, which can be regarded as stretch, that might be achieved.

Gone to the Association for Psychological Science (APS)

May 22, 2019

That is, to the annual meeting of APS. There will be a hiatus in further blog posts. HM will not only be attending, but will also be meeting, assimilating and writing. So there will be a delay in new web posts.

In the interim
Go to https://healthymemory.wordpress.com and use the search block to look for articles of interest.
Here are some suggestions:
The Myth of Cognitive Decline
fulfilling life
relaxation response
loving kindness
behavioral economics
growth mindset
system 2
cognitive reserve
and go to https://centerhealthyminds.org/about/founder-richard-davidson
The healthy memory blog will return.

Stanford Helped Pioneer Artificial Intelligence

May 21, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the first half of a title by Elizabeth Dworkin in the 19 March 2019 issue of the Washington Post. The second half of the title is “Now it wants humans at the core.” A Stanford University scientist coined the term artificial intelligence (AI) and advancements have continued at the university including the first autonomous vehicle.

Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning over how technology is changing society. Stanford wants to be at the forefront of a different type of innovation, one that puts humans and ethics at the center of the booming field of AI. The university is launching the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). It is intended as a think tank that will be an interdisciplinary hub for policymakers, researchers and students who will go on to build the technologies of the future. The goal is to inculcate in the next generation a more worldly and humane set of values than those that have characterized it so far—and guide politicians to make more sophisticated decisions about the challenging social questions wrought by technology.

Fei-Fei-Li, an AI pioneer and former Google vice president who is one of the two directors of the new institute said, I could not have envisaged that the discipline I was so interested in would, a decade and a half later, become one of the driving forces of the changes that humanity will undergo. That realization became a tremendous sense of responsibility.”

The goal is to raise more than $1billion. It’s advisory panel is a who’s who of Silicon Valley titans, that includes former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, former Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer and co-founder Jerry Yang, and the prominent investor Jim Breyer. Bill Gates will keynote its inaugural symposium.

The ills and dangers of AI have become apparent. New statistics emerge about the tide of job loss wrought by the technology, from long-haul truckers to farmer workers to dermatologists. Elon Musk called AI “humanity’s existential threat” and compared it to “summoning the demon.”

Serious problems were raised in the series of healthy memory posts based on the book, “Zuck.” The healthy memory posts based on the book “LikeWar” raised additional problems. Both these problems could be addressed with IA. Actually IA is being used to address the issues in “LIkeWar.” Regarding the problems raised in the book “Zuck”, rather than hoping that Facebook will self-police or trying to legislate against Facebook’s problematic practices, AI could police online all these social networks and flag problematic practices.

It is the position of this blog to advocate AI be used to enhance human intelligence. This is especially important in areas where human intelligence is woeful lacking, that is intelligent augmentation (IA). Unfortunately, humans, who are regarded as social animals, have difficulties reconciling conflicting political and religious beliefs. Artificial intelligence could be used here in an intelligence augmented (IA) role. Given polarized beliefs dead ends are reached. IA could suggest different ways of framing problematic issues. Lakoff’s ideas that were promoted in the series of healthy memory blog posts under the rubric “Linguistics and Cognitive Science in the Pursuit of Civil Discourse” could provide the initial point of departure. Learning would take place and these ideas would be refined further to result in disagreeing parties being surprised about their ultimate agreement.


Alternative Futures 3

May 20, 2019

This is another post motivated by “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground” by John Markoff. Both AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IA (Intelliigent Augmentation) should be used where they are most needed. One of the negative effects of technology has been to increase polarization. It is even being used in warfare and in altering elections which are ostensibly free.

So AI and IA both should be placed to work on these problems. HM is only aware of some very limited work in this area. He remembers one project addressing collaboration within the military. Unlike most other occupations, the military wear their rank on their uniforms. So this experiment involved collaboration in which the participants were anonymous. There was no means of assessing relative rank. The project seemed to be going quite well. Then one of the participants started using all caps in his entries. This was the ranking officer who felt he was being ignored.

One would begin using IA to address this problem. This should be used to the extent possible. However, at some point there might be a need to let AI take over. Perhaps as in the case of the Forbin Project’s Colossus, it would succeed.


Alternative Futures 2

May 19, 2019

This is another post motivated by “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground” by John Markoff. In this future AI, including robots and cyborgs, take over all labor. This technology is held by its few owners. So wealth is even more grossly distorted than it is today, and there are effectively no jobs for individual people to do.

To prevent violent uprisings guaranteed incomes would need to be provided to all. So people’s basic needs would be provided for, but what would provide meaning to their lives? They could have children who would have similarly bleak futures. There would likely be problems with drug and substance abuse.

Of course, there could be online games to play and, perhaps, opportunities to gamble. There could be supports for growth mindsets. There could be educational opportunities to pursue online and opportunities for athletic and artistic pursuits.  IA (intelligent augmentaion) could be life enriching for those who wanted to pursue such lives. It might also be possible to create unneeded jobs where people would pursue activities using IA, that they thought were meaningful. Even today, many work in research jobs that are designed to address problems, but who never see any of these projects implemented. HM knows of this from his own personal experience.

The preceding paragraph applies to the advanced world. What about the undeveloped or under developed worlds? Would they be ignored and allowed to suffer and die out? There could be an effort to attempt to bring these people up to the level of the developed worlds, and until this was accomplished it would likely provide additional jobs.


Alternative Futures

May 18, 2019

“Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground” by John Markoff provides an excellent review of the development of artificial intelligence including the researchers and the funding agencies. And he does examine the differences between AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IA (Intelligent Augmentation). For those interested in technology and of the developing and funding of both AI and IA, HM strongly recommends reading Markoff’s book. However, this post and the immediately following posts will examine the ramifications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligence Augmented (IA) in alternative futures.

The most nightmarish future is one in which AI becomes so powerful that it takes over. It either eliminates humanity or preserves humans as pets. However, it should be realized that it is possible that a benign future would result from a powerful AI. At the height of the Cold War a movie was released titled “Collosus: the Forbin Project.” The movie takes place during the height of the cold war when there was a realistic fear that a nuclear war would begin that would destroy all life on earth. Consequently, the United States created the Forbin Project to create Colossus. The purpose of Colossus was to prevent a nuclear war before it began or to conduct a war once it had begun. Shortly after they turn on Colossus, the find it acting strangely. They discover that it is interacting with the Soviet version of Colossus. The Soviets had found a similar need to develop such a system. The two systems communicated with each other and came to the conclusion that these humans are not capable of safely conducting their own affairs. In the movie the Soviets capitulate to the computers and the Americans try to resist but ultimately fail. So the human species is saved by AI.

Currently there are more countries with missiles and nuclear weapons than there were at the time of this movie. So one might argue that there is even more of a need for such AI today than at the time of the movie. When one considers that the leader of one of these countries lives in his own reality and is prone to strike out whenever he feels threatened or provoked, there is even more of a need for such AI today.



May 17, 2019

This post is motivated by material in an excellent book by John Markoff titled “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground.” Cyborg stands for “cybernetic Organism,” a term formulated by medical researchers in 1969 who were thinking about intentionally enhancing humans to prepare them for the exploration of space. They foresaw a new kind of creature—half human, half mechanism—capable of surviving in harsh environments.

It seems even if Kurzweil is capable of uploading his mind into a computer, it would be a frustrating experience unless it was a cyborg. It is clear that the brain can issue motor movements to machines. So output issues would not be a problem. And suppose that Kurzweil successfully uploads his mind to this cyborg. The question remains what would the phenomenal experience be for Kurzweil or any human. Kurzweil’s fundamental concept is that his mind in the computer would give him extraordinary mental powers. He probably could do amazing computational exercises. But would he understand, in a phenomenal sense, what he was doing? He might even be able to write poetry, but would he understand the poetry. And what about his personality. Would he become more humanistic, or would he become mechanical. What about a soul and a sense of morality? What about one’s humanity? Would it be lost?

Would cyborgs be able to breed and produce new cyborgs? Presumably they would be immortal.

This seems like a great topic for science fiction. Unfortunately, HM does not read science fiction. Do any science fiction readers who also read this blog have any recommendations? If so, please supply them in the comments section.



May 16, 2019

This is another post using “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground” by John Markoff as a point of departure. Perhaps the logical result of combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Intelligent Augmentation (IA) is a singularity, the combining of the two. Kurzweil has written a book “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.” HM would like to see a review of this book by a psychologist. As a psychologist he thinks we have much more to learn before we can even consider to attempt building a mind. Yet apparently Kurzweil, an engineer, is convinced that he can. Moreover, he thinks he can upload his brain/mind into this machine. The following is taken from the Wikipedia:


Kurzweil is taking means (diets, drugs, etc.) to assure that he shall be able to upload himself into the machine and achieve eternal life.

Presumably, his intention is to upload his brain into the machine. What he forgets is that he is a biological organism. His memory is biologically based on chemical changes that take time to implement. In other words, his mind uploaded to a computer would be nothing but buzzing noise. Consider how fast a computer printout occurs. Then consider how long it takes not just to read, but to assimilate the meaning of the information. Consider the paltry few seconds it takes to download a book to an iPad. Then consider not just how long it takes to read the book, but to assimilate the material in the book and related it to old knowledge and to update current knowledge.

Kurzweil presents the best case for a liberal education, one that includes courses in psychology, biology, and neurochemistry.



May 15, 2019

J.C.R Licklider is a personal hero of HM. He has appeared in previous healthy memory blog posts. When HM was a student and read Licklider’s article, “Man-Machine Symbiosis.” HM thought that this was the role computers should play in technology wherein the combination would be greater than the sum of its parts. Licklider also wrote, along with Taylor, in 1968, “The Computer as a Communication Device” that pointed to the existence of a future internet.

Unfortunately, the notion of Man-Machine symbiosis did not catch on. HM was frustrated with using computers to replace humans. True, there are jobs in which it is desirable to have computers play a solo role, but the real potential seemed to be in creating a symbiotic relationship with computers. Unfortunately, the focus has been on having computers replace humans. Late in his career HM wrote and co-authored articles on what he termed neo-symbiosis in an effort to resurrect the idea. Although he failed, he shall keep on trying.

HM was disappointed to learn while reading Markoff’s “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground” that Licklider, like McCarthy, was confident that the advent of “Strong” artificial intelligence in which a machine capable of at least matching wits with a human, was likely to arrive relatively soon. He wrote that the period of man-machine “symbiosis” might only last less than two decades, although he allowed that the arrival of truly smart machines that capable of rivaling humans thinking might not happened for a decade, perhaps fifty years.

Humans must stay involved. Otherwise machines will take over and create knowledge that is inaccessible to humans. As was mentioned in a previous post, developers understand how they develop a neural net, but they are unable to understand how the net solves a given problem. Humans always need to maintain a supervisory role and regard computers as tools for them to use. Remember that Minsky once responded to a question about the significance of the arrival of artificial intelligence by saying, “If we’re lucky, maybe they’ll keep us as pets.”


Douglas Engelbart

May 14, 2019

This post was motivated by an excellent book by John Markoff titled “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground.” The Wikipedia credits Doug Engelbart with creating the field of human-computer interaction. Doug ran the Augmentation Research Lab at SRI International. He also created the computer mouse, the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. NLS, the oN-Line system developed by the Augmentation Research Center under Engelbart’s guidance with funding primarily from DARPA, demonstrated numerous technologies, most of which are now in widespread use; it included the computer mouse, bitmapped screens, and hypertext. Engelbart is credited with a law, appropriately named after him, that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential.

The following is taken from the Wikipedia article on Doug, “He reasoned that because the complexity of the world’s problems was increasing, and because any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence.[6] He believed that the computer, which was at the time thought of only as a tool for automation, would be an essential tool for future knowledge workers to solve such problems. He was a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems. Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed “bootstrapping”. His belief was that when human systems and tool systems were aligned, such that workers spent time “improving their tools for improving their tools” it would lead to an accelerating rate of progress.”

Returning to Markoff’s book, Doug stumbled across an article by Vannevar Bush, who proposed a microfiche-based information retrieval system called Memex to manage all the world’s knowledge. Later Doug deduced that such a system could be assembled based on the then newly available computers. He concluded that the time was right to build an interactive system to capture knowledge and organize information in a way that would now be possible for a small group of people to create and collaborate more effectively. So he was thinking of the world-wide web. It took time and resources and source code from Tim Berners-Lee to see the full scale implementation.

According to the Wikipedia article he retired in 1988 because of a lack of interest in his ideas and the funding to pursue them. One wonders what he could had achieved if others had understood his ideas and provided funding to support him.

Machines of Loving Grace

May 13, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of an excellent book by John Markoff. The subtitle is “The Quest for Common Ground.” The common ground referred to is that between humans and robots. The book covers, in excruciating detail, the development of artificial intelligence from the days of J.C.R. Licklider to 2015.

The book covers two lines of development. One from John McCarthy, which Markoff terms Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the other by Douglas Englebart, which Markoff terms Intelligence Augmented (IA). The former is concerned with making computers as smart as they can be, and the latter is concerned with using computers to augment human intelligence.

Markoff does not break down AI any further, but it needs to be. AI has been used by psychologists to model human cognition. So the ultimate goal here is to develop an understanding of human cognitive processes. AI has been quite informative. In attempting to model problems such as human vision, psychologists realized that they had overlooked some critical processes that were needed to explain perception. One should also regard AI as being a tool needed to develop theories of psychological processes.

There are also two types of AI. One is known as GOFIA, “Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence” where computer code is developed to accomplish the task. GOFIA was stymied for a while due to the computational complexity it faced. Judea Pearl, the father of decapitated journalist Daniel, is a superb mathematician and logician. He developed Bayesian networks that successfully dealt with this problem and GOFIA proceeded further on with this expedited approach (enter “Pearl” into the search block of the healthy memory blog to learn more about this genius).

The other type is, or are neural nets. Here neural nets are designed to learn how to to accomplish a task. The problem with neural nets is that the programmers do not know how to solve the problem, rather they know how to design a neural net that solves the problem. Nightmare scenarios where computers take over the world would be the product of neural nets. With GOFAI problems could be solved by deleting lines of code.

Augmenting intelligence IA is what HM promotes. Here computer code serves as a mental prosthetic to enhance human knowledge and understanding. IA, unless it was the intelligence of a mad scientist, would not constitute a threat to humanity.

It is true that AI is required for robots to perform tasks that are difficult, boring, or dangerous. But the goal of an AI system must be understood or undesired consequences might result.


Reactive and Proactive Aggression

May 11, 2019

A distinction between these two types of aggression is made in a book by Richard Wrangham titled “The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution.” This is a recent, 2019, publication. For most of his career Wrangham has been intrigued by the relation between virtue and violence. Wrangham worked with Jane Goodall when she discovered war breaking out between two groups of chimpanzees in which they were killing, trying to destroy each other.

Wrangham defines reactive aggression as aggression that is fairly spontaneous in which something happens and the victim of the aggression quickly responds. In contrast, proactive violence is violence that is planned in advance for retribution or for some type of gain. Many other species are characterized by reactive violence. Something happens to one individual and that individual quickly responds with some sort of reciprocal violence.

Wrangham argues that the emergence of civilization was critically dependent upon a reduction in reactive violence. Although Wrangham does not seem to mention the difference between physical and nonphysical reactive violence, human language does provide the means of nonphysical violence and, fortunately, daily human violence tends to be of the verbal type.

Proactive violence is a matter of planning a violent response. So revenge killings, battles, and pogroms and wars are examples of proactive violence. Some non-human species engage in proactive violence, but lack the technology that humans have. While it is a reduction and changes in types of reactive violence by the human species that assisted in their success, it is proactive violence that brings out the worst in humans and presents a potential existential risk.

The holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis is an example of one of the worst types of proactive violence. The detailed planning entailed in this holocaust required the sophisticated planning only we humans can perform. A nuclear holocaust could potentially eliminate our species. Such a holocaust requires a high degree of scientific and engineering abilities as well as a lack of emotional control that allows true reasoning being overcome to achieve a pyrrhic victory.

The Second Mountain

May 10, 2019












Default Network, System 1 Processing, and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)

May 8, 2019

An earlier healthy memory blog post promised more about the default mode network. That post identified similarities between the default mode network and Kahneman’s System 1 Processing. Kahneman’s System 1 processing is important in that HM thinks that too heavy a use of System 1 processing at the expense of System 2 processing, which is active thinking, increases the risk for AD.

The simplest distinction between the two terms is that Kahneman is a cognitive psychologist and his two process view of of cognitive processes comes from cognitive psychology. The default mode network comes from cognitive neuroscience. Default mode activity is identified via brain imaging. Although they might not be identical, that distinction awaits further research, it is clear that there is considerable overlap between the two.

In addition to brain atrophy, AD patients have abnormal high levels of proteins in different brain regions. In the medial temporal lobe, the accumulation of tau protein leads to neurofibrillary tangles. In cortical regions, such as the parietal cortex in early AD, the accumulation of amyloid-B protein leads to amyloid plaques. The neurofibrillary tangles in the medial temporal lobe and amyloid plaques in cortical regions can be assumed to disrupt neural processing in these regions.

Dr. Slotnick writes, “There is an influential hypothesis that were is a causal relationship between default network activity that leads to deposition of amyloid that results in atrophy and disrupted metabolic activity, which impairs long-term memory in AD patients. The regions in the default network are active when participants are not engaged in a task and include the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, the inferior prefrontal cortex and the medial parietal cortex. In AD patients, amyloid deposition occurs in the same regions, which suggests the default network activity may lead to amyloid deposition. Dr. Slotnick suggests that perhaps higher level of amyloid deposition, which occurs in late AD patients, is necessary to produce atrophy in the frontal cortex.

Dr. Slotnick continues, “If high amyloid deposition is a causal factor in developing AD, older adults with low levels of amyloid should be at decreased risk for developing this disease. There is some evidence that cognitive engagement and exercise engagement throughout life may reduce the amyloid level in the brains of healthy older adults as a function of cognitive engagement, and this was compared to the cortical amyloid levels . Participants rated the frequency which they engaged in cognitively demanding tasks such as reading, writing, going to the library, or playing games at five different ages (6, 12, 18, 40, and their current age). Healthy older adults with greater cognitive engagement throughout their lifetime, as measured by the average cognitive activity at the five ages, had lower levels of amyloid in default network regions. Moreover, the healthy older adults in the lowest one-third of lifetime engagement had amyloid levels that were equivalent to AD patients, and the healthy older adults in the highest one-third of lifetime cognitive engagement had amyloid levels that were equivalent to young adults.

So maintaining a growth mindset, thinking critically, and learning new information provide double protection against AD. First, the reduction of troublesome amyloid levels. Second is the building of a cognitive reserve so that even if you develop amyloid plaque and neurofibrillary tangles you may not have the cognitive and behavior symptoms of AD.

Dr. Slotnick’s work is reported in an important book by Scott D. Slotnick titled “Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory.” The report on which Dr. Slotnick’s statements are based comes from
Buckner, R.L., Snyder, A.Z., Shannon, B.J., LaRossa, G. Sachs, R. Fotenos, A.F., Sheline, Y.I., Klunk, W.E., Mathis, C.A., Morris, J.C. & Mintun, M.A. (2005). Molecular, structural, and functional characterization of Alzheimer’s disease: Evidence for a relationship between default activity, amyloid, and memory. The Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 7709-7717.


Passing 73

May 6, 2019





The problem can best be understood in terms of Kahneman’s Two Process Theory of cognition. In Nobel Lauerate Daniel Kahneman’s Two System View of Cognition. System 1, intuition, is our normal mode of processing and requires little or no attention. Unfortunately System 1 is largely governed by emotions. Fear and hate are System 1 processes. System 2, commonly referred to as thinking, requires our attention. One of the roles of System 2 is to monitor System 1. When we encounter something contradictory to what we believe, the brain sets off a distinct signal. It is easier to ignore this signal and to continue System 1 processing. To engage System 2 requires attentional resources to attempt to resolve the discrepancy and to seek further understanding. To put Kahneman’s ideas into the vernacular, System 2 involves thinking. System 1 is automatic and requires virtually no cognitive effort. Emotions are a System 1 process, as are identity based politics. Politics based on going with people who look like you requires no thinking yet provides social support.

Trump’s lying is ubiquitous. Odds are that anything he says is a lie. His entire candidacy was based on lies. So why is he popular? Identifying lies and correcting misinformation requires mental effort, System 2 processing. It is easier to be guided by emotions than to expend mental effort. The product of this cognitive miserliness is a stupidity pandemic.



Personally, all this is upsetting. But HM believes it is essential to love one’s fellow humans. He tries to deal with this via meditation. Progress is both difficult and slow but it needs to be done. Hatred destroys the one who hates. So HM continues a daily struggle to be a better human being.


Unhealthful Memories Can Lead to Alzheimer’s and the Loss of Democracy

May 3, 2019













STOP: Avoid Amygdala Hijackings!

May 2, 2019

Previous healthy memory blog posts have explained how the amygdala is a brain structure that responds to emotions. So when we’re upset our amygdala becomes active. This is true even when one reads or hears something that is disagreeable or upsetting. An amygdala hijacking occurs when the amygdala causes you to respond disagreeably to the statement, explain why, and either say or imply that the originator is an idiot. Also, when we learn of violent crimes, they are in all likelihood the result of an amygdala hijacking.

Fortunately, most of us are unlikely to become violent, but some of us can let our amygdala hijack our behavior so that we make asses of ourselves. Unfortunately, HM has suffered many amygdala hijackings, is still suffering from them, and must remain constantly vigilant to prevent their reoccurrence.

One technique can be remembered by the acronym STOP. Which stands for

S Stop
T Take a few deep breaths
O Observe, and, more importantly, think about what is happening and explicitly about how one should not respond.
P If you have decided on an appropriate response, respond. If no appropriate response has been found, excuse yourself and exit the situation.

Thanks to Kathleen Parker

May 1, 2019

Whose column titled “Easter, and this ungodly episode” in the 21 April 2019 issue of the Washington Post expressed some sentiments similar to HM’s post “Trump vs. a Buddhist Monk’” where HM argued that the Buddhist Monk, in his poverty, lives a happier life than Donald Trump, with all his worldly riches.

The following are excerpts from Ms. Parkers column:

“Trump…is a villain but also a tragic figure. For him there is never enough of anything—riches, possessions, attention and adulation.

At times I feel sorry for him, because he has invited the wrath of millions, and it can’t be easy to shoulder so much disapproval. When I said this recently to a friend, she replied: ‘It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who has no empathy.’ True, but a person without empathy—the ability to feel what others do—walks a lonely path. Driven by lust for the material, such a person doesn’t know the company of what ancient philosophers called transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty, which correspond sequentially to the mind, the will and the heart, and which according to Christian theology, lead to God’s infinite love.

Trump wages daily war against truth. Examples of his falsehoods and outright lies could fill a doorstop volume.

Goodness is missing everywhere. Trump may have some good qualities, though it is hard to discern them given his propensity for hurtful, divisive rhetoric. To him, goodness is what he wills it to be, that which nourishes his narcissism and appetites, whether the compliance of women or the loyalty of comrades. Ironically, disloyalty may have saved him when aides refused to carry out orders to obstruct the Mueller investigation.

One needn’t be a theologian, philosopher, or Christian to recognize that Trump, defiant before truth and lacking goodwill, knows beauty only as a standard for useful women or towers bearing his name.”

She includes in her column Trump’s own statement when Attorney Jeff Sessions told him about the Mueller appointment. “Oh, my God. This is the end of my presidency. I’m f—-ed.”

Kathleen Parker ends her column, “Would this prophecy come to pass and this ungodly epodes in American history be finished.”

Are We Getting Dumber?

April 30, 2019





2019 NFL Draft

April 29, 2019

This post is based on an article by Sally Jenkins titled, “Smart teams trade down, but most teams just aren’t smart,” in the 27 April 2019 issue of the Washington Post. There have been previous posts on this topic. Behavioral economics which grew from Prospect Theory by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, for which Kahneman won a Nobel Prize (unfortunately Amos Tversky had passed on and was ineligible for the prize when it was awarded) can be used to guide NFL Draft Picks. The basic strategy is to trade down rather than trade up. Cade Massey of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton school and Nobel Prize winner produced papers in 2005 and 2012 that showed that teams profoundly overvalue first-round picks and simply don’t have the ability they think they do to discern between a great player and a good one.

Jenkins writes, “How often is a team right in picking a high-first rounder” What will be the quantifiable difference between the top choice at a position in the 2019 draft and the next available player, or even the third or fourth, in terms of games started and potential Pro Bowl success? The difference would need to be large given the amount of their investments. But their expenditures prove right only 52% of the time, which is effectively a coin toss.

Massey who does consulting for NFL teams says, “History suggests you do better by trading down from the top, using multiple lesser picks than one high pick.” The Patriots have done this with obvious success. From the article, “As of 2018, Bill Belichick had traded down fully 21 times on draft day to acquire more picks. Over the past 15 years, the Patriots have chosen 39 players in the second and third rounds, the highest number of any team in the AFC. And they won Super Bowls with them.”

Massey says, “If you recognize the uncertainty rather than throwing up your hands, you say, ‘We want as many draws as possible from the lottery. We can’t influence one ticket, but we can get as many tickets as possible.”

Andrew Brandt, a sports business analyst and former vice-president of the Green Bay Packers says, “It take a lot of willpower to trade out of that first-round pick, because there’s a lot of pressure. A lot of gravitas goes with that.”

Teams often do the dead opposite of what they should: give away fistfuls of picks to move up and grab a single star prospect. According to Massey overconfidence in their own judgment clouds their thinking. Brandt says, “Or sometimes it’s just a simple case of seeing a player ‘you lust after.’”

There is also extreme pressure coming from fans. There are many males who might not be about to tell you who their representatives to Congress or their senators are, who have definite strong picks for the NFL draft.


The Random Act of Choosing a College Major

April 28, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of an article by Andrew Van Dam in the 30 March 2019 issue of the Washington Post. This post provides a neat follow up to the immediately preceding post “Missing Healthymemory Themes.” The article begins by stating that this potentially life altering decision is often made based on something as trivial as what time of day you took a particular class, or what you happened to be studying when the deadline for picking a major arrived. Even when students are doing well in a course, perhaps even in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematic (STEM) discipline, they will switch majors to be with others who share genre or background. This has been suggested as a possible explanation for lower participation of females in these disciplines.

Economists like to study U.S. Military Academy Cadets because they are assigned schedules, and some classes at random creating a data set that allows them to answer questions such as what’s causing a student to pick one major over another. The author writes, “The answer, it turns out, is dumb luck. Students who happen to be assigned classes in one of four required subjects during the semester when they’re supposed to pick a major are twice as likely to major in the assigned subject, according to University of Maryland economist Nolan Pope, and Richard Patterson and Aaron Feudo of the U.S. Military Academy. This held true regardless of how well a student performed or how much they liked the course according to the analysis of class data from 2001 to 2015. Their database included grades, class times and students opinion about the course. Pope said, “Small and seemingly unimportant things can really have a large impact. Often students cite a specific class or teacher for a choice of major.”

Carnegie Mellon University professor Karem Haggag, showed students are about 10% less likely to major in a subject if they took a class at 7:30 a.m. Likewise. as students grown more fatigued during the day they grow about 10% less likely to major in the subject covered by each successive class.

Given these data it is not surprising that 37% of students eventually switch according to a paper from University of Memphis economists Carmen Astorne-Fiagari and Jamin D. Speer. These economists conducted a long-running survey of almost 9,000 students born between 1980 and 1984. Not surprisingly, students with lower GPAs are more likely to leave their major. But women of all ability levels are likely to change majors. However, men are more likely to drop out instead of trying a different major according to a study by Astorne-Figari and Speer.

Students doing poorly tend to switch majors, which makes perfect sense. Business, social sciences and economics tend to gain the most from students major switching, while biology, computer science and medicine (medical and health services) lost the most.

About a third of the men and a fifth of the women start out in STEM, and about 30% of those men and 43% of those women switch out of the subject area. Women who leave STEM tend to go to majors that cover similar subjects but are less competitive and less male, such as nursing. Speer said, “There are a lot of women who are very competent in math and science. They typically go to other fields that use science or other fields that use science but are less dominated by men.

Just because one has difficulty with a subject, does not necessarily mean that one cannot be successful in that area. The case of Barbara Oakley is instructive here.
Her father was in the military and she moved constantly doing her childhood. Her father wanted her to attend college and study math and science. Unfortunately, the only thing she was certain about was that she did not like math and science and did not think that she had any aptitude in math and science. However, she did like studying languages so she began studying French and German. At the time there were no available college loans so she enlisted in the military where she could get paid to study a language. So she studied Russian and learned the language.
When she got out of the army, she could not find any interest in her Russian skills. The jobs were in engineering and science and required advanced mathematical skills. So she moved into a new area for which she thought she had no aptitude. However, she found through diligent work that she was able to learn these subjects, and as she became proficient in these subjects, she found that she enjoyed them. So today she is a professor of engineering, firmly planted in the world of math and science. Along with Terrence Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute, she teaches the most popular online course in the world—“Learning How to Learn”—for Coursera/UC San Diego.

There are several posts on Dr. Oakley. She has also written a book “MIndshift.”
She writes that a “mindshift” is a deep change in life that occurs thanks to learning, and that is what this book is about. She relates true and inspirational stories of how people change themselves through learning—and who bring seemingly obsolete extraneous knowledge with them that has enabled our world to grow in fantastically creative and uplifting ways.

Missing Healthymemory Themes

April 26, 2019

HM was disappointed that Dr. Twenge did not at least touch upon healthy memory themes in “iGEN: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.” One of these themes was alluded to in the posts about spirituality and religion. There seems to have been a loss in empathy among iGen-ers. Given the exorbitant college costs along with other economic demands, the iGen-ers are living in a dog eat dog world. Spiritual activities including meditation can increase sensitivity to and caring for our fellow human beings.

There was no evidence of passion, grit, or growth mindsets. People go to college to get a job. Education is an instrumental act, not a goal in itself. Of course, they are not unusual in this respect. This certainly is nothing new. When HM taught in college, that certainly was the most common response. But students who actually had an intellectual interest in a subject were dearly appreciated. This blog has advocated growth mindsets and lifelong learning as primary goals not only for a fulfilling life, but also as a means of decreasing the likelihood of Alzheimer’s or dementia. Even if they develop the defining neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaque, they might well die with these defining symptoms without ever evidencing the behavioral or cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

The key here is the System 2 processes engaged during learning or critical thinking. Unfortunately, too many people manage to minimize use of System 2 processes even during college. The hope is that at least they engage in activities such as Bridge or Chess, read some books, and stay off Facebook and similar online activities.


Missing Data

April 25, 2019

There are many changes in the behavior and thinking of iGen’ers. The question is which changes are due to the iPhone and which to general changes in society. Dr. Twenge has offered her opinions in “iGEN: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.” Unfortunately, all her data comes from the United States. If she had included data from other advanced countries, then one would have a better idea regarding the effects from specific cultural contributions.

Income insecurity is a key problem for iGen-ers, and it is obvious why. Just consider the ridiculous college costs. They also need to be concerned about medical costs and the costs of medical insurance. The United States is unique in being the only advanced country that does not supply government funded health insurance. Specific forms may differ, but the bottom line is that medical costs are not a concern to residents of these countries. Moreover, not only are medical costs lower in these countries than in the United States, but the results, the overall health of these countries is better. It is also the case that colleges costs are much, much lower, and free in some cases. It should also be noted that in worldwide surveys of happiness, the United States does not fare that well. Not surprisingly, they fall behind the other advanced countries in these surveys.

There is a chapter on politics in the book, but HM did not bother to review it because it seemed that both Dr. Twenge and the iGen-ers were completely oblivious to the problem. Free medical and free or low cost college educations should be the primary concerns for them. But they were not mentioned. iGen-ers are not unique to being oblivious what is happening in the rest of the world, this seems to be the problem with the vast majority of Americans.

There is a word that is uttered and once uttered, closes down discussion. That word is “socialism.” It is generally ignored that there is no precise definition for socialism. Communist countries called themselves socialists, but by having a Social Security System, the United States could also be called a socialist country.

The term is used to elicit fear and to shut down further consideration. It’s goal is to shut down further discussion and thinking. But you need to consider what conditions are like in these advanced counties with free medical care and low cost college educations. One will likely find that many of these countries have more freedom that the United States. That is not to say that these countries are problem free, although many might appear to be. But they do have the priorities correct, with education and health at the top.

So realize what the cry “socialism” is intended to engender fear and to shut down further discussion. Basically, they are trying to screw you. Don’t accept it and demand that the United States needs to be comparable on these issues with the remainder of the advanced world. This will be difficult, It will likely require tax increases, but tax increases with cost effective benefits, and massive reallocation of government expenditures. But the United States needs to have its priorities ordered correctly. Ask why we are treated differently from citizens of the other advanced countries.



April 24, 2019

The final chapter of iGEN: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. offers some suggestions for saving iGen.

Not surprisingly, the first is to put down the phone. She recommends parents putting off giving their children a cell phone as long as possible. There really is no reason for an elementary school child to have a cell phone. By middle school, with kids in more activities and more likely to ride a bus, many parents buy phones for their kids convenience and safety. Here she recommends providing the child with a phone with limited functions such as an old-school flip phone without Internet access or a touch screen.

She reminds readers that many tech CEOs strictly regulate their own children’s technology use. Steve Jobs’ children didn’t use the iPad. He limits how much technology their children use as home. This restriction was common around tech CEOs from the cofounder of Twitter to a former editor of Wired magazine. So the people who love technology and made a living of it are cautious about their children using it too much. Adam Alter wrote in his book “Irrestible,” “It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: Never get high on your own supply.”

The same goes for social media and electronic device use. They are linked to higher rates of loneliness, unhappiness, depression, and suicide risk, in both correlational and experimental data. Any readers of the healthy memory blog should be well aware of the dangers of social media.

A key rule she provides is that no one, adults included, should sleep within ten feet of a phone.

Dr, Twenge also argues that given the benefits of in-person social interaction, parents should stop thinking that teens hanging out together are wasting their time. Electronic communications are a poor substitute for the emotional connections and social skills gained in face-to-face communication.

Physical exercise is a natural antidepressant.

In the conclusion she writes, “The devices they hold in their hands have both extended their childhoods and isolated them from true human interaction. As a result, they re both the physically safest generation and the most mentally fragile. They are more focused on work and more realistic than Millenials, grasping the certainty that they’ll need to fight hard to make it. They’re exquisitely tolerant and have brought a new awareness of equality, mental health, and LGBT rights, leaving behind traditional structures such as religion. iGEN’ers have a solid basis for success, with their practical nature and they inherent caution. It they can shake themselves out of the constant clutch of their phone and shrug off the heavy cloak of their fear, they can still fly. And the rest of us will be there, cheering them on.”

Inclusive: LGBT, Gender, and Race Issues in the New Age

April 23, 2019

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in iGEN: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. Dr. Twenge writes, “From LGBT identities to genre to race, iGen’ers expect equality and are often surprised, even shocked, to still encounter prejudice. At the same time, equality issues are far from resolved, creating divisions within iGen as well as generation gaps that can seem like unbridgeable gulfs. The equality revolution has been breathtaking but incomplete, leaving iGen to come of age after 2017, when issues around LGBT rights, genre, and race were suddenly back in contention.

Television might have had some effect on iGen’ers’ attitudes on these topics. The oldest iGeners were starting preschool when “Will & Grace” (the first sitcom with a gay man as a central character) premiered in 1998 and in elementary school when shows such as “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” made being gay not just mainstream but fashionable. iGen teems grew up watching “Glee,” which featured several gay, lesbian, and transgender teen characters, and they saw numerous celebrities come out.

Dr Twenge writes, “The 2000s and 2010s ushered in a sea change in attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. These are some of the largest and most rapid generational and time-period differences in existence. Even many conservative Republican iGen’ers now support same-sex marriage. Anthony Liveris, the vice-president of the University of Pennsylvania College Republicans said in 2013, ‘A true conservative should endorse empower American to marry whom they love, not limit them.’ The vast majority of iGen’ers see no reason why two people of the same sex can’t get married.”

One iGen’er said, “My view of LGBT is the same as on other people having sex before marriage: I don’t particularly care. I wouldn’t do it, but it has nothing to do with me, it doesn’t affect me in the slightest, and I have no right to tell other people what to believe…I wouldn’t go to a protest for it or anything, but they can do what they want.”

In spite of these large changes in attitudes, a third of iGen’ers still have issues with same-sex sexuality. One in four questions same-sex marriage. These young people often struggle to reconcile their iguana upbringing with their religion’s viewpoint that homosexuality is wrong.

Not only attitudes, but actual behavior has changed. The number of young women who have had sex with at least one other woman has nearly tripled since the early 1990s. More men now report having had a male sexual partner as well.

Olympic marathon champion Caitlyn Jenner’s transition from male to female in 2015 likely made iGen the first generation to understand what the term transgender means. Transgender is a new term for popular understanding. Perhaps, the simplest means of describing iGen’ers’ attitudes towards transgender people is confused.
Dr.Twenge writes, “Issues around race are particularly salient for iGen’ers, who have been surrounded by racial diversity their entire lives. In 2015, most 12h graders said their high school was at least half another race, double the number in 1980. Three times more said their close friends were of other races.”

So although there has been a vast improvement in attitudes toward race and sexual orientation, there remain problems. Particularly in the awarding of scholarships in this time of enormous costs, white students can feel than they lost possible support because it has gone to a minority student instead. There are still racial incidents on campus, although some of these originate off campus.

There are also microaggressions. Dr. Twenge writes that these are usually defined as unintentionally hurtful things said to people of color. But she notes that aggression is intentional, so the label is a misnomer. Nevertheless, it is possible to commit a microagression unintentionally. Actually, a microagression is defined by the receiver.

Moreover, microaggessions are not restricted to race. Telling a female that she is doing well for a girl is a clear microaggression. But again, it is possible for someone to do this with good intentions.

Unfortunately, racial and cultural sensitivities can impinge upon the free speech, which is assumed to be guaranteed in the constitution. The Pew Research Center found that 40% of Millennials and iGen’ers agreed that the government should be able to prevent people from making offensive statements about minority groups, compared to only 12% of the Silent generation, 24% of Boomers, and 27% of GenX’ers. Of course, the limits of free speech can be broached, but Dr. Twenge notes that more and more statements are deemed racist or sexist and more and more speakers are deemed “extreme.”

Some speakers are being disinvited from speaking. This is especially bad on college campuses. President Obama offered the following statement on the disinvitation issue by saying, “I think it’s a healthy thing for young people to be engaged and to question authority and to ask why this instead of that, to ask tough questions about social justice…Feel free to disagree with somebody, but don’t try to just to shut them up…What I don’t want is a situation in which particular points of view that are presented respectfully and reasonably are shut down.”

As was mentioned in a previous post, this proclivity to avoid disagreement or alternative arguments does not augur well for either education or democracy.