Category Archives: Psychology

The Organized Mind – Daniel J. Levitin

“We need to learn how our brains organize information so that we can use what we have, rather than fight against it.”

Around 80% of Americans surveyed remember where they were on September 11^th when they watched horrifying images of an airplane crashing into the first tower, and then, about 20 minutes later, a second plane hitting another tower. All of these, Levitin points out, are false memories. Clips of the first plane took 24 hours to reach broadcast television, so if you have any memory of seeing it on the day, it’s a false one.

Why does it matter? Levitin argues that without understanding the structure of how our brain works, we will be unable to organize our thoughts or our lives, or even understand when we can’t rely on our own memories. Knowing that when we try to remember something, our brain puts it in a rehearsal loop that prevents new memories from being formed, for example, tells us to carry something with us to take notes, whether smartphone or index card, so that we can avoid the loop. This reflects his most fundamental lesson: that though our brains are amazing, they are also limited, and the more we can shift the burden of organization to external devices, the better off we’ll be. In 2011, Americans took in the equivalent of 175 newspapers worth of information beyond what they did in 1986 (5 times as much), so whether you start taking notes in your smartphone, carrying index cards around with idea per index card, or just installing permanent hooks for your keys next to your doorway, it’s worth some thought.

It’s a great idea for a book, and it’s stocked full of interesting facts (who knew that in the 1800s lobster was so plentiful that they were ground up and fed to prisoners, and that servants would demand to be fed it no more than twice a week? We really screwed up that fishery). Unfortunately, it’s not as strong on insight. It’s interesting to know the different filters our mind uses to decide what to pay attention to, but the bottom line is focus on what you’re doing and turn off email and Facebook, which isn’t really a shock. It can also feel a bit repetitive: after the first half, he seems to run out of clear links between biological architecture and organizational plans, and the book wanders a little. Still, if you’re looking for interesting facts and fun ideas to try to organize your mind, the book makes for an extremely entertaining, not to mention informative, read. A good choice for the summer.

Disclosure: I read The Organized Mind as an advance reader copy, courtesy of Penguin – it is available August 19th. You can get a copy (and see more reviews) here.

Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions – Gigerenzer

“The breakneck speed of technological innovation will make risk literacy as indispensable in the twenty-first century as reading and writing were in previous centuries.”

Understanding and dealing with risk is essential in almost every aspect of the modern world; medicine, transportation, education, public policy, even game shows. Most of us do pretty badly at it; despite the fact that you’re more likely to die driving 12 miles than flying from New York to Washington, we feel more worried in the airplane than on the drive to the airport. The response of policymakers has been to argue the need for experts to save us from our biases. Risk Savvy disagrees: what we need, Gigerenzer argues, is risk education. Understanding probabilities is something that can be learned, and must be if we are to function in the world.

Gerd Gigerenzer is best known for his work arguing that though it’s easy to criticize instinct and human decision making as being biased and flawed, in reality those biases actually work better than being unbiased would in the majority of situations. We aren’t broken, leaky beta versions; rather, we operate with a well-designed and effective ‘adaptive toolbox’ one that allows us to successfully navigate a wide variety of situations with considerable success and a minimum of effort.

Gigerenzer is a top academic doing very interesting work in psychology, and I think his academic work makes some great reading. Unfortunately, this book is not that. He’s oversimplified his work, and as a result it often feels like a linear combination of other pop behavioural economics books, rather than a new addition to the field. He has some great examples of his points and some great stories, but nothing new to add to them. Still, some of the facts are really good. Consider the disparate policy approaches between mad cow disease and child proofing scented lamp oil bottles, despite the fact they kill similar numbers of people, or that reading to a 8-16 month year old child boosts their performance on language tests by 7 points, while watching TV reduces it by 17 points. Not world shaking, and not illustrating anything you didn’t already know, but interesting. Still, if I were you I’d stick with some of his earlier books.

How the Mind Works – Steven Pinker

“The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life.”

Books bemoaning how irrational people are have become increasingly popular in recent years. We believe that after a series of sixes a dice is ‘due’ for a different number, or that basketball players can have ‘hot hands’; we are incapable of properly updating Bayesian probabilities, such as when we calculate the likelihood of actually having a disease given a positive test; and when Kahneman asked people whether a young woman active around issues of discrimination and social justice was more likely to be a bank teller or a bank teller active in the feminist movement, they said the second, a logical impossibility.

With such dismal news, one might be forgiven from assuming human intelligence is something to be pitied. For that reason, How the Mind Works is a welcome change. In it, Pinker argues that though we certainly do have inborn biases and weaknesses, many of them make sense from an evolutionary perspective, even providing an evolutionary advantage. Most events do demonstrate reversion to the mean, for example: dice or basketball players might not be due for a change, but weather is. More broadly, Pinker uses the computational theory of the mind to explain human reason, emotion, the senses, consciousness, social relations, humour, and in the final chapter, the meaning of life. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize when it was published in 1997.

As with all Pinker books, it is filled with amusing anecdotes, illustrative examples, and incisive analysis. Still, I found it less compelling than his others, though that’s partly due to personal taste rather than inherent quality: I preferred the focus of Blank Slate, which covers some of the same material but with particular emphasis to societal implications, rather than the descriptive approach given here. It also shares significant content with some of his other books, including the Language Instinct and Better Angels. That said, if you’re interested in an overview of the computational theory of the mind, or are hoping to brush up on your knowledge of cognitive psychology, the book is useful and entertaining.

Scarcity – Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

“Scarcity captures our attention, and this provides a narrow benefit: we do a better job of managing pressing needs. But more broadly, it costs us: we neglect other concerns, and we become less effective in the rest of life.”

Angry Birds, the game in which you lob birds at obstacles, has been phenomenally popular. Angry blueberries, a game created by the authors in which you lob blueberries at obstacles, has been somewhat less popular, but shows an interest result. Some players are given three blueberries per round, others six. People with more blueberries do better, of course, but they do a lot worse per blueberry!

Scarcity, the authors say, focuses the mind. We have finite mental capacity, and when we are forced to focus it, we do much better on that task, but much worse on every other task. They worry that the modern obsession with time management and efficiency makes time a scarce resource. That may help us schedule, but makes us sloppy in other areas, and vulnerable to any sort of unexpected demand on our time: something comes up, and it ripples through our entire week, making everything stressful. A little more slack in our schedule isn’t just wasted time a management consultant can help us fill: it’s a shock absorber, making our work schedule antifragile.

As with most good behavioural books, it does have a lot of fun studies though: pill bottles that beep and then send text messages when they haven’t been opened that day, gift cards for savings, and others. In the end, I’m not sure the book tells us anything any other behavioural economics book doesn’t. Introducing scarcity, though it makes for nice sound bites, doesn’t really add much to the analysis, despite their hard work attempting to use it to explain things.

If your bookshelf is looking scarce, however, you can get a copy here!

Deceit and Self Deception – Robert Trivers

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – The Brothers Karamazov

One of a number of debates that rages among biologists, social scientists, and various other disciplines is the role of evolutionary theory in explaining behaviour. Almost everyone respects the power of evolutionary theory to describe humanity, but the trick lies in using it properly. Evolutionary biologists like Trivers or Steven Pinker use it widely, and point out that many of the criticisms of their work seem to consist of dislike of the conclusions, not critical argument. There may or may not be difference between the sexes, they say, but disapproving of them doesn’t make them nonexistent.

More sensible critics, however, have a legitimate source of concern. Choose any behaviour, and a reasonable sounding justification from evolution can be concocted to explain it. Of course, such explanations can’t be tested, and it’s usually pretty easy to come up with multiple, conflicting explanations of any such behaviour. Given that, evolutionary explanations may be cute and fun, but it’s not clear they’re much use for anything.

In Deceit, Trivers makes a fairly simple argument: that we have evolved to deceive ourselves, and that such self-deception helps us deceive others and improve our lives. The rest of the book is stories and anecdotes illustrating that point, from the animal kingdom, from politics, and from human behaviour. In West Africa, for example, there are five species of poisonous butterflies. One species has evolved to mimic them: all of them. The mimetic females lay five different kinds of eggs, each of which will mimic a different poisonous species. That way, instead of doubling the frequency of a single poisonous species and making it worthwhile for birds to learn to tell the difference, in any given forest the frequency of each mimic matches the frequency of the model. Some caterpillars, in contrast, curl up like ant larvae and wait to be taken in the nest and fed: once there, they emit the scent of newborn queens, to ensure they get more food than the real ant larvae.

The book is entertaining and has some engaging anecdotes, but you already know the main thesis: it comes as no surprise to anyone who reads fiction that we deceive ourselves, given the essential role it plays in much great literature. If you’d like a deeper look, though, you can get the book here.

David Suzuki

Not a book review today, I’m afraid – a talk review instead!

I happened to attend a talk by David Suzuki this morning, the Canadian academic, media personality, and environmental activitist. He’s a strong proponent of environmental sustainability and preserving our forests, waters, and other natural resources, instead of exploiting them into oblivion. To achieve this, he’s currently launching an attempt to change the Canadian constitution to guarantee access to a healthy environment, as is true in 110 other countries, as well as unite with other groups to change the Canadian culture more generally.

I’m very sympathetic to his aims: we need to do a far better job protecting the environment than we currently do, and let me say I enjoyed his talk generally: he’s very funny and makes some good poings. What I found striking, though, was that I just don’t believe his solutions will work. Constitutional change in Canada is a morass of unpleasantness, evoking as it does divisions over language and culture, and past attempts to change it in any way have failed: no matter how popular his suggestions might be, opening up a constitutional reform will lead to a huge argument with no consensus likely.

More generally, though, I think he falls into a common error in environmentalist thinking. To me, environmentalism actually makes more sense as a right wing issue than a left wing: ideals of conservation and Christian stewardship have a long history on the right. The left, however, having decided the right is evil, simply dismiss them out of hand, and in so doing lose the opportunity to find allies that could really make a difference. This morning, a young guy identified himself as Christian, and asked how Suzuki’s arguments could motivate Christians to save the environment. Rather than engage, Suzuki insulted Christianity and shut him down, managing to change what was a supporter into an annoyed and defensive critic. Christianity and the environmentalist movement surely have their differences, perhaps particularly over science, but dismissing others motivations to achieve your goals seems narrow-minded at best. Even business has more in common with the environmentalist movement than the environmentalist movement seems to recognize: what environmentalists call sustainability business calls preservation of capital, and both see them as the highest possible good. I’m always amazed they can’t seem to see that in each other.

I think it’s true of a lot of our causes in general: we identify with a side, and so we fail to reach out to others who, though on opposite ‘sides’, might easily agree with us on a given issue. The far left and the far right have a lot in common on issues of government intervention, environmental activism, and even decentralization of power, but they’re so busy hating each other they never get anything done. It seems a shame.

The Art of Happiness – Epicurus

“Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” – Epicurus

What do the theory of atoms, utilitarianism, atheism, egalitarianism, Thomas Jefferson, and Karl Marx’s doctoral thesis all have in common? All were influenced by the writings of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher from around 300 BC, who has the rare distinction of being both enormously influential and almost entirely non-extant: all that survives of his extensive writings are three brief letters, two groups of quotes, and some fragments.

Somewhat oddly to modern ears, in order to talk about happiness Epicurus spends considerable time talking about astronomy, the weather, and death. Epicurus argued that pleasure is “freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation:” mental agitation is caused by fear of the gods and fear of death. He turned therefore to science as the only way to eliminate these fears and achieve a happy life.

His empirical attempts to use science to explain eclipses, earthquakes, weather, phases of the moon, and other phenomena as natural events, not bad omens, are actually extremely impressive given it was the 4^th century BCE. He correctly explains eclipses and rainbows, for example, and suggests an infinite, eternal universe filled with ever moving atoms making up matter: on the other hand, we’re reasonably sure that earthquakes are not caused by wind getting stuck in the ground. His also suggests that death is the end of all sensation, and since we cannot experience pain or pleasure without sensation, death should not be feared.

With the science out of the way, his recommendation is simple: avoid pain and enjoy pleasure. In practice though, he recommended as simple a life as possible, limiting wants so that you could be just as happy poor as rich. If this sounds a bit Buddhist, it’s because it likely was; several Greeks had traveled to India, including some who likely influenced Epicurus. Friendship, he believed, was the biggest single ingredient of happiness; many physical pleasures might be pleasurable in the short term, but in the long term caused more pain than pleasure.

Given how little exists, reading Epicurus is hardly going to take you long, and there’s significant room for interpretation, as the bastardized Epicurus-unapproved modern connotations of Epicurean suggests. Still, if you’re looking for the roots of the empirical method in science, some perspective on religion and death, or just some thoughts on happiness, he’s worth a look.

The Blank Slate 2 – Steven Pinker

Having reviewed The Blank Slate earlier this week, I’d thought I’d share a few choice quotes.

On the influence of genetics:

“Familiar categories of behaviour – marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on – certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.”

“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”

“‘Nature is a hanging judge,’ goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”

On the modern emphasis on culture:

“Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.”

“The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.”

The Blank Slate – Steven Pinker

“Yes, science is, in a sense, “reducing” us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three-pound organ. But what an organ!”

Where else can you find out, to misquote Tolstoy, how unhappy families are all unhappy in the same way? (Evolutionarily speaking, parents want to allocate resources amongst their children equally. Children want a 2:1 ratio: they share half their genes with a sibling, but all their genes with themselves. The two groups disagree. So much for Tolstoy). Or that herding cultures are the most prone to honour violence? (They are both far from law enforcement and have assets that are easy to move and steal – they have to be prickly, as the Hatfields and McCoys found out). Or even that studies of boys raised as girls generally show that subjects display traditional ‘male’ behaviour?

Yes, it’s another Steven Pinker book, this time The Blank Slate, with opinions on how we think about children, fine art, morality, nihilism, and feminism. In it, Pinker argues that we vastly underestimate the importance genetics plays in human nature. We like to assume everything is culture because that means it’s under our control, but that simply isn’t the case. The dislike of evolutionary biology, he argues, stems from confusing ‘is’ and ‘ought’: people object to some biological imperatives, and so argue they are false. But genetics are not destiny, and simply because someone has a predisposition for selfish behaviour doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be criticized if they submit to it, or lauded if they overcome it. Parents should not abandon their children just because genetics explains half their variance, after all.

Pinker’s careful to stay in the middle; he certainly doesn’t deny the role of environment, but only wants the role of genetics to be recognized as well. I found the first third of the book a bit slow, in part perhaps because the nurture-is-all argument is less popular than it was, but the rest focused on his analysis of the implications of the science for morality, politics, and various social movements: all was excellent.

Pinker is always fun to read, definitely one of the wise we so like here at Subtle Illumination, and this book is no exception. Still, I wouldn’t start with it: I think Better Angels, for example, is even better. If you’re looking for a nice overview of evolutionary biology’s implications, though, The Blank Slate is a great start. If you do pick it up, though, I recommend reading it with someone else nearby; Pinker is at his best when excerpted and read out loud, if only to test the reaction of the listener and provoke yourself to think.

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“More than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years.”

A personal injury lawyer attends a speech opening a new modern art sculpture in Chicago. While most of the audience dozes, he appears to follow the speech with rapt attention, his lips moving rapidly. When a companion asks him why after the speech, he admits to calculating the total personal injury claims that will arise from children climbing the statue. Is this lawyer lucky, able to transform everything he sees into something relevant to his own life and skills and so enjoy it? Or unlucky, deprived of the opportunity to grow by focusing only on what he already knows (and also somewhat morbid)?

I started Flow with some trepidation. The concept of flow is impressively widely referenced, but I worried that trying to stretch a simple idea into a full book might be trying to make money from it without adding value. Flow, by the way, is the happiness and energy we get when are absorbed in activities that match our skills to difficulty (see above graph). To be truly happy, by this logic, we need lifelong learning to keep upping the difficulty of our activities: passively watching TV cannot bring happiness. Whether what we do is history, philosophy, mountain climbing, or welding, we can find flow in it if we are careful to set goals, watch for feedback, and immerse ourselves in it.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, as the book focuses on what lessons the concept of flow can give us for how to optimally experience life. Most of that, of course, is still fairly obvious (try to get flow in your own activities!), but the author has some excellent off the cuff remarks. He argues, for example, that one of the reasons young people struggle today is that they no longer have challenges or responsibilities commensurate with their abilities: unable to reach flow through schoolwork, they turn to alternate sources of enjoyment, like delinquency or drugs. He worries that the change in professions from hunting/gathering to farming to industrial has seen a steady decline in the simplicity of finding flow in one’s work, as feedback and goals become abstract and delayed in time (Shop Class as Soulcraft would agree). Similarly, I’m not sure many of us have a ready answer as to whether the personal injury lawyer is lucky or not.

The book is by no means life changing, and a lot of the content is available in other places (I’m looking at you, Marcus Aurelius). Still, it was quick and more engaging than I had expected, and though simple we can probably all use more structure in how we think about finding meaning and pleasure in our work and our leisure.

You can pick up a copy here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list and work on feeling flow while reading!