Beliefs Archives - Page 11 of 24

The Seductive Lure of Online Brain Games

January 8, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

You may have heard that Lumosity has agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission to the tune of $2 million in response to charges of deceptive advertising:

The FTC alleges that the defendants claimed training with Lumosity would 1) improve performance on everyday tasks, in school, at work, and in athletics; 2) delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease; and 3) reduce cognitive impairment associated with health conditions, including stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, ADHD, the side effects of chemotherapy, and Turner syndrome, and that scientific studies proved these benefits.

This didn’t surprise me since I’ve been following various researchers’ attempts to substantiate the many claims made by such companies. I was also aware that in 2014, a group of 70 cognitive scientists and neuroscientists issued a statement warning consumers of the hype over brain games:

We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling scientific evidence to date that they do. The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the signatories below, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxieties of older adults about impending cognitive decline. We encourage continued careful research and validation in this field.

A large percentage of the population is concerned about cognitive decline. And they’re willing to pay for what appears to be an easy and even enjoyable quick fix. Quick fixes have become increasingly desirable in the internet age, so the concept of using your electronic device to play games devised by someone else to keep your brain in top form is brilliant marketing, if nothing else. It’s a mini, no-stress, workout for your brain.

The jury is still out as to whether brain games offer any long-term effectiveness. One thing that is known is that improving your performance in a particular game leads to improved performance in that particular game. In that regard, computerized games are no different from playing Scrabble or working crossword or Sudoku puzzles. The more crossword puzzles you work, the better you get at working crossword puzzles. The more Sudoku puzzles you complete, the easier the “challenging” puzzles become. That’s just how the brain works. The more often you attempt any task, the quicker and easier it is to do it. Practice may not make perfect but it definitely makes better.

According to David Z. Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University:

[I]f you find that people get better in one test of reasoning, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re smart; it means they’re better on one test of reasoning.

In fact, there’s some indication that just playing video games is better than so-called brain games at improving short-term memory capacity and reasoning.

If you like the experience of playing—and getting better at—computerized brain games (and paying for the pleasure), then go ahead and continue doing it. But computerized brain games are unlikely to have any far-reaching or long-term effects on your cognitive abilities.

And, as an article in Scientific American points out, they take up time that could be put to better use. I’ve been saying for some time now that the two things you can do to grow new neurons and increase the number of synaptic connections in your brain (thus expanding your mental model and your cognitive abilities) are:

Move! Engage in physical exercise.
Learn! Study something new and challenging.

That’s it. Do those two things every day and you will not only be doing something effective to forestall cognitive decline, you will also become healthier and potentially even higher-functioning than you already are.

Power Up:
Fake It till You Become It

December 25, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

It’s difficult to make the kind of difference you want to make—in the world, in your immediate sphere, or even in your own life—if you lack the power to do so.

When stated directly, it seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yet, so many people who want to make a difference, or who just want to be effective, shy away from the very idea of power. Quite a few of them are women, but not a hundred percent of them.

What struck me the most during my collaborative group’s follow-up discussion on the subject of power this week was the extent of the mixed feelings that were expressed about being powerful. After listening to the comments and then doing a bit of research, I’ve concluded there’s a widespread tendency to conflate power itself with the use—and especially the misuse and abuse—of power. But power and the use of power are not at all the same thing. So this is likely the result of the unconscious part of the brain (System 1) taking one of its shortcuts, thereby sacrificing accuracy for speed.

Power is like water. Water is essential for life on this planet. A person usually can’t go for longer than three days without water, for example, and annual rainfall is critical for crops. Having enough water to sustain life is good. But tsunamis, tidal waves, floods, and hurricanes are not good. So both too little water and too much water can lead to negative, sometimes devastating, consequences. And when water is coming out of a firehose that’s being used to put out a fire, it’s good. But when water is coming out of a firehose that’s aimed directly at you, it’s bad.

Similarly, power unchecked is often power that’s misused or abused. But power kept too much in check is useless. If you want to be effective, you need to be powerful. In fact, a good working definition of power is: the ability or capacity to act or do something effectively. I can’t imagine there’s anyone reading this who wouldn’t be happy to be more effective.

Besides, powerful people tend not only to be more assertive and confident, but also more optimistic. And they tend to be better at abstract thinking.

If you don’t feel powerful or you’re making a concerted effort to avoid giving the impression of being powerful, you may unwittingly be expressing your powerlessness (which is probably not your intention). That’s because our bodies give us away. Whether subtle or readily apparent, nonverbal communication has a profound effect not just on the person or persons who might be observing us, but also—and most importantly—on us.

Posing for Power

Research by social psychologist Amy Cuddy reveals that sitting or standing in what she calls “low-power” poses can decrease your testosterone level by about 10 percent and increase your cortisol level by about 15 percent. Lower testosterone and higher cortisol will alter the way you feel about yourself—and not in a good way.

On the other hand, sitting or standing in “high-power” poses can increase your testosterone level by about 20 percent and decrease your cortisol level by about 25 percent. In effect, more power = less stress, which makes sense. [Please note that if you’re female, your testosterone level will not rise to the same level of a male. It will increase as a percentage of your own baseline level.]

You don’t have to go out and strut your stuff in front of the world every day. That isn’t even a good idea. What matters is whether or not you perceive yourself to be a powerful (effective) person. And you can increase your self-perception by altering your levels of testosterone and cortisol, which in turn will affect the amount of confidence you have in yourself, which is what others will then perceive.

Pick one of the high-power poses and stand or sit in it for two minutes. That’s it. If you’ve been ambivalent about experiencing and/or expressing power, you may find adopting one of these poses awkward or even uncomfortable. You may think it’s silly. Do it anyway. There are things you want to do in the world and for yourself. You’re up to something. If you want to be effective, if you want to able to translate your intentions into reality, you need to empower, rather than disempower, yourself.

Is What You See All There Is?

December 11, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

rainbow eye

As you move through the world, you probably have the sense that you’re aware of whatever there is to be aware of as it is. This applies not only to the sensory world, but also to events, situations, interpersonal interactions—actually to everything that exists or occurs within your world. But the capacity of conscious attention is much too limited for this to even be possible. The 11,000,000 bits of information being processed by the unconscious part of the brain at any given moment need to be considerably (and swiftly) condensed and summarized into the 40 bits you can process consciously.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, Incognito

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)*

Your brain maintains a model of the world that represents what’s normal in it for you. The result is that you experience a stripped-down, customized version of the actual world. To a great extent, each of us really does inhabit our own world. But it would be incorrect to say that we create our reality; rather, our brain creates our reality for us.

Much, if not most, of what you do, think, and feel consists of automatically generated responses to internal or external stimuli. And it isn’t possible to consciously mediate all of your responses. It wouldn’t even be a good idea to try.

In addition to helping you navigate the world, your mental model gives rise to your sense of the way things should be. It generates expectations (that are either confirmed or denied), assumptions, biases, etc. that determine what you pay attention to, what you perceive (even what you are able to perceive), how you interpret and respond to what you perceive, and the meaning you make of it all. Your mental model is the result of your genes and your experiences, of both intention and accident. Your brain has been constructing your particular model of the world since your birth, and it is continually updating and modifying it—most of the time entirely outside your awareness.

But while the contents of your particular mental model determine what you think, feel, do, and say, you can’t search them—or follow a bread-crumb trail backward through them—to find out precisely which aspects (and when and how they came to be) give rise to any specific facet of who you are and how you react now.

The significance of your mental model in your life can’t be overstated. Although you aren’t consciously aware of it, your mental model circumscribes not only every aspect of your present experience but also what is possible for you to do and be. It determines what you see and how you see the world, both literally and figuratively, as well as how you see yourself.

But…Your Brain Can Get It Wrong

System 1, the unconscious part of your brain, uses associative thinking to develop and maintain your model of the world. However, there are some problems with associative thinking. For example:

It sacrifices accuracy for speed.
It doesn’t discriminate very well.
It takes cognitive shortcuts (aka cognitive biases).

Your mental model can—and sometimes does—lead to erroneous conclusions and inappropriate responses. It’s the job of consciousness (System 2) to check the impulses and suggestions it receives from System 1, but consciousness is slow, lazy, and easily depleted. Most of the time, it’s content to go along with System 1, which means it’s susceptible to cognitive biases. By definition, cognitive biases are distortions or errors in thinking. They actually decrease your understanding while giving you a feel-good sense of cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias is the easy acceptance of information that validates what you already believe. It causes you to selectively notice and pay attention to what confirms your beliefs and to ignore what doesn’t. It underlies the discomfort you feel around people who disagree with you and the ease you feel around people who share your beliefs.

Information that confirms what you already believe to be true makes you feel right and certain, so you’re likely to accept it uncritically. On the other hand, you’re more likely to reject information that is inconsistent with what you already believe or at least you hold inconsistent information up to greater scrutiny. You have different standards for evaluating information depending on the level of cognitive ease it generates.

Evidence has precious little impact on any of us if it conflicts with what we believe simply because the cognitive strain of processing it is too great. To a very real extent, we don’t even “see” conflicting evidence. While total commitment to our particular worldview (mental model) makes us feel more confident, it narrows—rather than expands—our possibilities. That means it limits our powers of discernment, our ability to increase our understanding of the world around us, and our creative potential. It closes the world off for us instead of opening it up.

The often-quoted statement is true: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. If we want to live fuller lives, if we want to be more effective or useful or loving in the world, we first need to recognize that our greatest constraints are imposed by our own mental models.

It’s important to remember that what you see is not all there is.

*Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

You’re Not Sabotaging Yourself

November 13, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Following right on the heels of a lack of will power, the number two reason people come up with for not following through on what they set out to do is self-sabotage. This is a catchall phrase that seems to refer to any behavior that is inconsistent with one’s conscious intentions or goals. As such, it’s completely meaningless.

You may routinely do things that you regret doing:

Overeat when you’re trying to lose weight
Sleep in when you want to go to the gym
Fail to study for an exam you want to pass
Put less than your best effort into a project that matters

But that doesn’t mean you’re sabotaging yourself.

Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition of sabotage: “the act of destroying or damaging something deliberately so that it does not work correctly.” Dictionary.com defines it as “any underhand interference with production, work, etc….as by enemy agents during wartime or by employees during a trade dispute.” Vocabulary.com says sabotage occurs “when you ruin or disrupt something by messing up a part of it on purpose.”

What these and all other definitions of the word sabotage have in common is the element of deliberateness. Sabotage, by definition, isn’t accidental or an unfortunate side-effect. It is intentional. So in order for us to be sabotaging ourselves, we would have to be engaging in counterproductive behavior on purpose.

This gets dicey right off the bat because we’re told our counterproductive (self-sabotaging) behavior originates in the unconscious. It is “hidden from our everyday thoughts,” according to one self-help author. But if we do something because we’re “unconsciously compelled” to do it, as a psychologist wrote, then it can’t possibly be intentional or deliberate.

Yes, it’s true—and inevitable—that we have competing or conflicting beliefs, goals, and intentions. In Incognito, David Eagleman says:

Brains…are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. As Walt Whiteman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle.

When the hostess at a party offers chocolate cake, you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave the rich energy source of sugar [System 1], and other parts care about the negative consequences, such as the health of your heart or the bulge of your love handles [System 2]. Part of you wants the cake and part of you tries to muster the fortitude to forgo it.

Brains can be of two minds, and often many more. We don’t know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several little sets of hands on the steering wheel of our behavior.

This is relatively straightforward and in no way implies that the part of our brain that craves sugar, System 1, has an intention to undermine System 2’s attempts to manage our health. The brain just doesn’t work that way.

Eagleman proposes that the brain is best understood as a team of rivals and adds:

Remember that competing factions typically have the same goal—success for the country—but they often have different ways of going about it.

How we frame a problem determines where and how we go about looking for its solution. If we view our counterproductive behavior as resulting from self-sabotage, we’re likely to divert our attention to trying to figure out why we’re sabotaging ourselves. But we don’t have direct access to the unconscious, which is where our so-called sabotage originates, so even if we were sabotaging ourselves we could never actually get to the bottom of things.

We harbor mechanical, “alien” subroutines to which we have no access and of which we have no acquaintance. Almost all of our actions—from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee—are run by alien subroutines, also known as zombie systems.

Looking back into the past to find the trail of breadcrumbs that leads to the behavior of today amounts to a whole lot of wheel-spinning. It can’t succeed, and even if it could, it wouldn’t make any difference in regard to solving the problem at hand: getting our behavior to line up with our conscious intentions.

That’s because it isn’t the unconscious part of the brain that’s the problem; it’s the conscious part. If we don’t know what we want, we don’t have a clear direction. If we aren’t fully committed to what we set out to do (or claim to be setting out to do), we have no urgency. Without both direction and urgency, our best laid plans are dead in the water.

We can retrain System 1 to do more of what we want it to do and less of what we don’t want it to do. But that requires repetition and persistence. Lots of repetition. And lots of persistence. It isn’t easy—and it isn’t as sexy as searching for our inner saboteur—but it’s both straightforward and effective.

Self-sabotage is nothing more than a good cover story.

Freedom from Choice

November 6, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

You always have a choice. At least that’s what many people believe. No matter what happens, you can choose how to respond. And if you want things to be different, all you have to do is make different choices.

It’s a highly appealing belief to hold, yet you may have found that making a different choice is often tantalizingly out of reach, even when you know exactly what you want to do differently. So what’s going on? If you don’t make a different choice, does that mean you really don’t want to? Does it mean you lack self-control or will power? Does it mean you’re trying to sabotage yourself?

If you believe that you could make a different choice but don’t, why don’t you?

When you fail to make a different choice, you’re forced to explain yourself—at least to yourself. The result is often the beginning of a vicious cycle of rationalization, excuse-making, or self-blame that can drag on for years or even decades. This is a waste of time and totally counterproductive to changing behavior.

The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more the answers tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and move toward the details of the biology. —David Eagleman, Incognito

The truth is that you don’t always have a choice. In fact, you rarely have a choice. You keep doing the same things you’ve always done because that’s how your brain is wired. It conserves precious energy by turning as many behaviors as possible into routines and habits. Once those routines and habits are in place, they’re extremely difficult to disrupt. When faced with a familiar situation, you will most likely do what you’ve always done in that situation, even if you want to do something else.

Minute by minute, second by second, the unconscious part of your brain is absorbing and processing an unbelievable amount of data, all but a small fraction of which you’re not consciously aware of. So at the moment you’re faced with that familiar situation, your unconscious has picked up on signals, made connections, and initiated the usual response all before you can consciously consider doing something different. When it comes to routines and habits, consciousness is simply no match for the speed and anticipatory responses of the unconscious brain.

Letting Go of the Illusion

It’s hard to give up our illusions about choice. We want to keep our options open instead of locking ourselves in. We want to be spontaneous. And we prefer to believe we’re exercising conscious choice, no matter how ineffective or detrimental those choices may be. As a result, we often refuse to make a commitment, even to something we really want or that really matters to us.

We repeatedly put far more trust than is warranted in our conscious brain’s ability to override our unconscious brain’s programming. We’re convinced that next time we’ll do things differently.

The reality is that keeping our options open really means leaving the outcome to chance. Yes, there’s a slim possibility that when the moment comes we’ll make a different choice. But the odds are not on our side. The unconscious operates automatically and at a much faster speed than the conscious part of our brain.

When we blame our inability to effect change in our lives on a lack of self-control or will power, our only option is to work on developing those mental muscles. That can be done, to a limited extent, but the source of the problem is not the lack of self-control and will power but our reliance them.

The situation is not hopeless, however. We’re not entirely at the mercy of the unconscious part of our brain. We do have a say in the matter. We can learn how to use both parts of our brain to our advantage instead of letting the unconscious have its way all the time.

But that requires changing the way we think about choice.

The concepts of freedom and choice seem to belong side by side. After all, what is freedom if not freedom to choose? The idea that we could be free, experience freedom, without also having and exercising the ability to choose is difficult to contemplate.

But Krishnamurti believed otherwise.

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

Decide Now so You Won’t Have to Choose Later

Changing behavior requires that you do something different ahead of time instead of counting on doing something different in the moment. Determine how you want to respond in a familiar situation when you have some distance from it and can think clearly about it instead of when you’re in that situation. And then make a pre-commitment. A pre-commitment eliminates the need to make a choice in the moment because you’ve already decided what you’re going to do.

Formulate a clear and specific intention.
Come up with a way to keep your attention focused on your intention.
Assume you won’t be perfect out of the gate. Your unconscious brain is stubborn and set in its ways. With perseverance, however, your desired response will become the automatic one.

By giving up your so-called freedom of choice, you greatly increase the likelihood you’ll do what you’ve decided you want to do in order to have the life you want to have.

Posing for Power

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)*

But…Your Brain Can Get It Wrong

Letting Go of the Illusion

Decide Now so You Won’t Have to Choose Later

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