Blog on mind and brain research and advice

Answers to the Memory Quiz

September 15, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Here are the answers to yesterday’s Memory Quiz. It’s important to bear in mind that no one is immune from widespread memory distortions. We integrate things that really happened with things that are generally true. The only way you can confirm whether or not a memory is true is to obtain corroborating evidence. In many cases, that isn’t possible; so you can rarely have complete certainty.

The more confident you feel about a memory, the more likely it is to be factual.
False
Confidence is a feeling. Your level of confidence bears no direct relationship to the accuracy of your memory. You can feel as confident about a false memory as you do about a real one.
–
False memories are rare occurrences.
False
False memories are not uncommon. They can be induced intentionally or accidentally. We all have them, so when someone claims a false memory as a true one, we shouldn’t automatically assume that person is lying.
–
You remember the things that have a strong emotional component.
True
Strong emotion—positive or negative—is one of the criteria your brain uses to decide that something is worth storing in long-term memory.
–
The more details you recall, the more likely it is that a particular memory is accurate and/or true.
False
The amount of detail associated with a memory is unrelated to its accuracy. A false memory can have a great amount of detail associated with it. Your brain can’t tell the difference.
–
The more often you recall a memory, the more opportunities you have to alter it.
True
Every time you recall a memory, you put it into a “plastic” state, thereby exposing it to disruption and alteration. You reconstruct it when recalling it and again when storing it.
–
Something you’re really interested in is more likely to be stored in your long-term memory than something you’re not interested in.
True
You can remember all kinds of things that might be inconsequential to other people (sports statistics, song lyrics, movie plots, your grades) if those things are important to you.
–
You tend to recall so-called flashbulb memories—extremely vivid, powerful, and significant memories—with greater accuracy.
False
You may believe you have greater recall of flashbulb memories—that they’re somehow indelibly imprinted in your brain—but lots and lots of evidence indicates that the details you recall about such incidents are no more accurate than the details you recall about anything else.
–
The best way to get accurate information from people is to ask them open-ended questions.
True
If you ask people closed—or leading—questions (What color was her hair? or Wasn’t she a brunette?) you’re more likely to get incorrect answers. So it’s best to ask fewer questions and allow people to relate the story in their own way.
–
A confession is a reliable indication of culpability because people rarely confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
False
There are numerous examples demonstrating that the techniques used by law enforcement to induce confessions are very successful in getting people to not only confess to crimes they didn’t commit, but also to come to believe they did, in fact, commit them.
–
When you try to suppress a specific memory, you’re likely to develop other memory deficits that seem unrelated.
True
The system for targeting memory suppression has been described as “kind of dumb.” When you try to suppress a particular memory, you’re likely to end up suppressing associated memories, too.
–
Your recollection of a memory can be influenced and altered based on the circumstances you’re in when you recall it.
True
Where you are, who you’re with, how you feel, the state of your mood (and mind), how long ago the event occurred—all of those things and many more can affect your recollection of your memory. We also edit our memories, without being aware we’re doing so, to reflect our current beliefs and biases.
–
Eyewitness testimony is reliable.
False
Eyewitness testimony is reliably unreliable for many reasons. For one, if you’re the eyewitness, the memory of the event is part of your autobiographical memory and subject to all the same distortions. For another, what you recall will be, in part, determined by the questions you’re asked and the way they’re asked.
–
You don’t remember much from before the age of three because your brain hadn’t yet learned how to encode long-term memories.
True
It isn’t until around age seven that concepts critical to the storage of long-term memories (including using a calendar, understanding the days of the week and seasons, and developing a sense of self) have been learned.
–
You have equal recall of the beginnings, middles, and endings of what you remember.
False
You have better recall of beginnings and endings—especially of endings—than you do of what happened in the middle. You’re likely to base your feelings about an event on how it ended.
–
There is no evidence for repressed memory.
True
The idea behind the concept of repressed memory is that traumatic memories are automatically banished to the unconscious and “forgotten.” But the reality is that, with some exceptions, traumatic memories are more likely to be remembered than to be forgotten because remembering them is important to our survival.
–
Mindfulness meditation may make you more susceptible to developing false memories.
True
Mindfulness can lead to confusion about the source of a memory: did it actually happen to you or did you imagine it happening? Misattributing the source of a memory is the basis for the development of false memories.

How did you do?

Take the Memory Quiz

September 14, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Here’s a quiz you can take to find out how much you know about making and accessing memories. Daniel Schacter, author of The Seven Sins of Memory, contends that the problems we experience with memory are “by-products” of adaptive and useful aspects of the human mind. If we can better understand how memory works and what its purpose is, we can better appreciate the process of memory-making. That might help us avoid getting into arguments with other people based on whose memories are right and whose are wrong. To a great extent, they’re all wrong.

Check in tomorrow for the answers.

The more confident you feel about a memory, the more likely it is to be factual. [–] True [–] False
–
False memories are rare occurrences. [–] True [–] False
–
You remember the things that have a strong emotional component. [–] True [–] False
–
The more details you recall, the more likely it is that a particular memory is accurate and/or true. [–] True [–] False
–
The more often you recall a memory, the more opportunities you have to alter it. [–] True [–] False
–
Something you’re really interested in is more likely to be stored in your long-term memory than something you’re not interested in. [–] True [–] False
–
You tend to recall so-called flashbulb memories—extremely vivid, powerful, and significant memories—with greater accuracy. [–] True
[–] False
–
The best way to get accurate information from people is to ask them open-ended questions. [–] True [–] False
–
A confession is a reliable indication of culpability because people rarely confess to crimes they didn’t commit.[–] True [–] False
–
When you try to suppress a specific memory, you’re likely to develop other memory deficits that seem unrelated. [–] True [–] False
–
Your recollection of a memory can be influenced and altered based on the circumstances you’re in when you recall it. [–] True [–] False
–
Eyewitness testimony is reliable. [–] True [–] False
–
You don’t remember much from before the age of three because your brain hadn’t yet learned how to encode long-term memories. [–] True [–] False
–
You have equal recall of the beginnings, middles, and endings of what you remember. [–] True [–] False
–
There is no evidence for repressed memory. [–] True [–] False
–
Mindfulness meditation may make you more susceptible to developing false memories. [–] True [–] False

Reward Stickers
and the End of Civilization

September 7, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

If you listen to the dire warnings of the anti-reward-stickers faction, you’ll discover that giving kids reward stickers—or any kind of reward for that matter—is likely to turn them into anti-social schmucks who send their parents off to assisted living as soon as they can get away with it. Someone really said that. That’s because the kids will inevitably become “reward addicts,” which means they’ll need more and more of the reward to be satisfied. And eventually, they won’t be able to function without it.

No one is arguing that rewards don’t work. In fact, experts in the field frequently comment that they work “too well.” But the fact that they work isn’t good enough. One individual with a Ph.D. actually wrote this: “If I went to the doctor with a sore knee, one solution that would end the pain would be to amputate my leg. There is no doubt the solution would work. But it is still the wrong answer.” (Well, there is some doubt the solution would work, given that phantom limb pain is real and a real possibility.)

I’ve written and talked about rewards a lot, so I’m not going to go into the why of them again, except to say that the brain runs on rewards and we can’t change that. Rewards activate memory and learning circuits in the brain. You can figure out the implications. What I want to do is address some of the misguided thinking about rewards (including reward stickers) and behavior change.

Desired Outcome

What both the fellow with the hypothetical sore knee and the rest of the anti-reward folks seem to be missing is a clear definition of their desired outcome. In addition to being painful, a sore knee usually has some negative impact on mobility, so the desired outcome for treatment would include a return to normal function, thus eliminating amputation as a possible solution—and this particular example as a viable refutation of rewards.

So determine what your desired outcome is, and then decide whether or not rewards will help you get it.

Maybe you’re a busy person who wants to pursue your interest in Italian Renaissance art. You might decide that taking a class or spending a certain amount of time each week exploring the subject will help you achieve that outcome. In that case, you could set up a system to reward yourself each time you complete an assignment or spend your weekly allotment of time on your pursuit. Rewards can help you follow through and keep you on track. They can’t help you improve your talent or taste in art or sustain your interest in the subject.

Or maybe you’re a parent who wants to get your kid to develop a bedtime routine that doesn’t involve screaming, crying, or begging. You could set up a system to reward him or her for completing specific tasks. Rewards can definitely help with that, especially if you start small (with one task) and add new tasks one at a time and your kid is into the reward. But rewards can’t get him or her to love getting ready for bed, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to.

Intrinsic Motivation

All of the experts opining on the subject seem to believe that (1) kids should be intrinsically motivated to do the right thing—meaning whatever it is the adults want them to do—and (2) being intrinsically motivated will affect their behavior (i.e., will cause them to, in fact, do the right thing).

There should be a collective hysterical burst of laughter right about now. I’m an adult. You’re an adult. We can’t even get ourselves to do things we’ve decided we want to do when we’re crystal clear about the benefits of doing them and the consequences of not doing them. Why would we expect kids to behave better than we do?

Intrinsic motivation is a tricky concept, anyway, because it’s tied up with should. I should want to do this because it’s the right (healthy/ appropriate/ considerate/ responsible, etc.) thing to do. And you should want to do it, too. Some people are more bound by what they should do than others. They follow the rules. Whether they’re adults or kids, they generally cause less trouble. From the outside, they appear to be intrinsically motivated, but they’re not. The point is that I can’t tell what your motivation is for doing something and you can’t tell what my motivation is.

And being intrinsically motivated is no guarantee that anyone, adult or child, will follow through. Motivation and action are not one and the same, much to the disappointment of people who’ve paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to get motivated. Adding extrinsic motivation to the mix doesn’t conflict with the intrinsic motivation. It provides an extra boost and can help you deal with System 1’s siren calls of distraction and immediate gratification.

A couple of weeks ago, I described my current reward sticker routine for completing the same four tasks once in the morning and a second time before going to bed. They’re all things I want to do (am intrinsically motivated to do) and that I was doing more often than not. But since I wasn’t doing every single thing twice every single day, I decided to try the gold stars. That was my desired outcome, by the way: to do the four things twice a day. Period. And I would know I did them by the number of stars on my calendar. The extrinsic reward stickers have been just the boost I needed to get to—and so far to stay at—100% completion.

Maybe you’re intrinsically motivated to do a particular thing. If you are doing it, congratulations! But if you aren’t following through to your satisfaction, add an extrinsic reward to the process.

Maybe your kid wants to learn to play an instrument (is intrinsically motivated), but doesn’t always feel like practicing. Add an extrinsic reward for following through on the practice schedule and see if that increases his or her practice time.

For both adults and kids, reward stickers are easy. You get a visual record of a series of successes that encourages you to keep the chain intact. But you can use anything that works.

Behavior change is not easy, for kids or adults. But it’s important to recognize that the concepts we have about how we should go about changing behavior need to be balanced against how our brain actually operates. Our brain wants a treat. So we can decide what kind of treat to give it or we can let it choose its own treats. See Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips.

5 Characteristics of Innovative Thinkers

August 31, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Innovative thinking doesn’t require an innate talent or special technique. It isn’t limited to artists or inventors or any other group of people. If you want to develop your innovative thinking skills, focus on these five characteristics.

1. Be Curious

Curiosity prepares your brain for learning and long-term memory. It also activates the brain’s reward system. When you’re curious about something, you anticipate discovering more about it. And your brain treats the answer or the new knowledge the same way it treats any kind of reward—by releasing hits of dopamine.

Curiosity increases activity in the hippocampus, which involves the creation of memories. When there is a higher level of interactivity between the reward system and the hippocampus, your brain is more likely to remember the new information—as well as incidental information you encountered along the way.

Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it. –Dr. Matthias Gruber, UC Davis

2. Be Passionate

When you’re passionate about learning something, creating something, or solving a particular problem, working on it doesn’t feel like work no matter how effortful it might be. Passion is motivating. It keeps you engaged and helps you through the rough or confusing spots, so you’re more likely to keep going instead of getting bored or giving up. Obsession isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you’re passionate about something, you spend more time working with or thinking about it, which expands your capacity for innovation and creativity within that area.

The more different kinds of experiences you have and the more you learn, in general, the more opportunities you give yourself to discover what you’re passionate about. This isn’t the same thing as “finding your passion.” You can be passionate about several things at the same time or about different things over the course of your life.

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks. –Yo-Yo Ma

3. Be Willing to Fail

The unconscious part of the brain is risk averse, but while avoiding risks can get you incremental gains, it won’t really get you innovation or invention. It’s true that just because you can imagine something, that doesn’t mean it’s possible or viable. On the other hand, you won’t know until you try.

The occurrence of failure is less important than how you respond to it. If you treat it as feedback (information), there is always something you can learn from it to help you decide what to do next. If you treat it as evidence that there’s something wrong with you or your idea or course of action, you’re unlikely to get anything out of it.

And the failure to solve a problem can actually be the key to its eventual solution:

Failure to solve a problem stimulates your brain to store a special, easily retrieved memory of the problem. This memory energizes all of your associations to the information in the problem, sensitizing you to anything in your environment that might be relevant. —John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor

There are no guarantees in life. If you can learn to live with uncertainty and recognize failure as feedback, you’re actually more likely to succeed.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. –Thomas A. Edison

4. Take Action

I’ll let Tim Ferris take this one: “Not yet!” one might say (and I have said often). More research, more preparation, more interviews, more… procrastination. Let’s call it what it often is: a forgiving term for a terrible habit. To create anything remarkable, it takes not one giant leap after perfect prep, but many baby steps in the right direction once you have barely enough to get started. To start something big, you have to first start something small.

The keywords here are “start something.” When you take action, you get more information in the form of feedback and you learn things you wouldn’t have learned if you simply continued thinking about your project. Taking any action can have unexpected results and undesired consequences. Although you can anticipate that such things might occur, you can’t plan for them because you won’t know what they are until after they happen.

An excellent motto to adopt is create and adjust. Until you begin actively creating, you have nothing to adjust.

5. Use Both Parts of Your Brain

Creativity and innovative thinking involve both parts of the brain—the conscious and the unconscious. Sometimes you need to apply focused (System 2) attention, which is linear, logical, effortful, and slow. But attempting to sustain System 2 attention is counterproductive. Sometimes you need unfocused (System 1) attention, which is associative, non-logical, runs in the background, and is fast.

Too much logical, linear thinking is as bad as too little. After framing the problem or situation and considering possible solutions, turn it over to your unconscious for a while and see what it comes up with. Let your mind wander instead of keeping it on a tight leash. Research indicates that if you take a break from a problem and come back to it later, you’re more likely to be able to solve the problem than you would be if you continued working on it without the interruption.

Habits: Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips

August 24, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A couple of years ago, I noticed that instead of following the same route (taking the same streets) to and from a particular grocery store, my habitual route was somewhat circular. After paying attention a few times, I realized that the route I’d ended up with involved more right turns than left turns, which meant it was ever so slightly faster. (If you know me, you know even the illusion of faster matters.)

A habit is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition. Habits are acquired or learned over time. You can suddenly discover, as I did, that you have a habit you weren’t even aware of.

I may have consciously thought about making that initial right turn a few times at first, but I never think about it now. I’m satisfied with this habit, so I have no need to think about it unless I encounter an obstacle along the path. Goals, which I wrote about the value of last week, require ongoing System 2 intention from beginning to end. You’d be hard-pressed to complete a goal while your mind is otherwise occupied.

But habits only require System 2 attention until System 1 takes them over. That means that once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is initiated by your unconscious (System 1), usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Your response is automatic rather than intentional or volitional.

Some other examples of habits are:

playing an instrument, if you’re trained
raiding the refrigerator in the evening
brushing your teeth before going to bed
biting your nails
eating the entire bag of potato chips every time
checking your email first thing in the morning

The word “habit” often elicits another word: “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Habits Are Immune to Your Opinion

Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

Your brain creates behavioral habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) has one imperative, which is survival. However, it is only concerned with the short term: get out of the way of that bus right now! The fact that eating an entire bag of potato chips every time may have long-term negative consequences for your survival is of no concern to System 1. Up till now, eating the entire bag of potato chips has worked out fine. You’re still here. The status quo is status quo.

Maybe your cholesterol is becoming a growing concern. Well that’s conceptual; there’s no immediate crisis. Acknowledging and evaluating information about your cholesterol and deciding whether or not to change your diet requires System 2 attention. And then actually changing your diet requires more System 2 attention. In the meantime, System 1 continues running it’s program—in this case your habit of eating the entire bag of potato chips each time.

You think, What’s wrong with me? I know better. Or worse, and even less productive: I must be trying to sabotage myself. But the fact that you have information or that you know better has no direct or immediate bearing on your habit, which runs automatically whenever it is cued or triggered.

We experience this confounding situation over and over again because we tend to assume that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. You decide what you’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition.

You may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while your mind is somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if you’re familiar with the route. You don’t need to pay conscious attention to your driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. You can zone out and your unconscious will generally get you to your destination just fine.

Your unconscious is doing exactly the same thing once you open the bag of potato chips. It’s getting you to your destination of eating everything in the bag. You don’t need to tell it to do that. But if you want it to not do that, you’re going to have to tell it over and over again until it rewrites the chip-eating program. You’re going to have to practice.

Repetition and Perseverance:
Practice, Practice, Practice

You would expect that the more a musician practices her instrument or the more dishes a chef prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

When a musician shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Without her habit of practicing, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Changing or starting a new habit is no different. A musician or a chef wouldn’t expect to execute with complete skill the very first time. And the best musicians and chefs continue to hone their skills by practicing. So if you want to master not eating the entire bag of potato chips every time instead of just wishing it were so, all you have to do is keep practicing until it becomes automatic.