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Z Is for Zombie Systems

April 26, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

What could zombie systems (also known as alien subroutines) and blindfolded cup-stacking possibly have to do with behavior change? Quite a bit, as it turns out. But first, what exactly are these zombie systems and alien subroutines? According to David Eagleman in Incognito:

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.

Eagleman uses the terms interchangeably. He says the term zombie emphasizes the lack of conscious access, while alien emphasizes the foreignness of the programs.

Some alien subroutines are instinctual, while some are learned; all highly automated algorithms become inaccessible zombie programs when they are burned down into the circuitry.

Cup-Stacking Smack-Down

Cup-stacking, at least as performed by Austin Nabor, is an example of a highly automated algorithm—and thus a zombie system.

Nabor has been practicing all the moves involved in cup-stacking regularly for several years. As a result, physical changes have taken place in his brain to hard-wire cup-stacking. He can now perform it automatically without thinking about it, which is why he can do just as well when he’s blindfolded as he can when he can see what he’s doing.

In the video (link above), 10-year-old Nabor faces off against David Eagleman mano-a-mano, as it were, and hands him a resounding defeat. Eagleman said of the contest that he wasn’t even an eighth of the way through his routine when Nabor finished. During the competition, both were fitted with skull caps to monitor electrical activity in their brains. Instead of burning more energy to complete his complex cup-stacking routine speedily and flawlessly, Nabor’s brain used considerably less energy than Eagleman’s brain used to perform the routine much more slowly. In fact, Eagleman described Nabor’s brain as serene.

Eagleman’s brain burned more energy because he had to think about what he was doing and conscious thought burns more energy than zombie systems and alien subroutines burn.

When a professional baseball player connects his bat with a pitch that is traveling too fast for his conscious mind to track, he is leveraging a well-honed alien subroutine.

Your brain rewrites itself based on the things you repeatedly practice, such has hitting a ball with a bat, driving, or swimming. Some of those things could be classified as skills while others might better be classified as habits. Whether they are skills or habits, once they become “etched into the circuitry of the brain,” you lose conscious control over them. Your brain doesn’t particularly care what skills or habits (good or bad) are turned into zombie systems. The purpose of the process, as Eagleman says, is to free up resources, allowing the conscious you to attend to and absorb other tasks.

Because you lose conscious control of zombie systems and they run automatically, it’s quite difficult to change them—to put it mildly.

Learning to Ride the Backwards Bicycle

Engineer Destin Sandlin, creator of the website Smarter Every Day, was challenged to ride a bicycle that had been modified so that when you turn the handlebars to the right, the wheel turns left, and when you turn the handlebars to the left, the wheel turns right. Watch him try—and fail—to ride the bike, and then offer to pay other people if they are able to ride the bike 10 feet.

“Once you have a rigid way of thinking,” Sandlin says, “you cannot change that, even if you want to.” Riding a bicycle, for most of us, is a hard-wired zombie system. Since we don’t have conscious control over the bicycle-riding algorithm, knowing that the bicycle has been altered has no effect on our ability to modify the algorithm—at least not right away.

It took Sandlin eight months of regular practice to learn how to ride the backwards bicycle. However, he noticed that the old pathway was still there and minor distractions, such as a cell phone ringing, could cause his brain to “jump back on the old road it was more familiar with.”

Sandlin’s young son, on the other hand, who had been riding a bicycle for three years, required only two weeks to get the hang of the modified bicycle.

When Sandlin attempted to ride a normal bicycle again after having more or less mastered the backwards bicycle, he couldn’t do it at first. But after about 20 minutes, his brain slipped back into gear, and he was able to remain upright. Think about that when you’re struggling with changing a habit you’ve had for years or maybe even decades. It takes a great deal of repetition and persistence to master a replacement behavior but very little provocation to revert back to the old path.

Consciousness on the Sidelines

Having the knowledge, information, or even will to change your behavior are all System 2 (conscious) processes. They’re certainly useful and even desirable. But a habit is a System 1 (unconscious) zombie system that is not immediately responsive to your conscious intentions or attentions.

In fact, those System 2 processes can sometimes get in the way. Eagleman says:

Not only do we run alien subroutines; we also justify them. We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our idea. As an example…I mentioned that thoughts come to us and we take credit for them (“I just had a great idea!), even though our brains have been chewing on a given problem for a long time and eventually served up the final product. We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.

Essentially we come up with conscious explanations for unconscious systems we have no access to. When we think we understand something, but we don’t, we’re likely to also think we know what to do about it. But we don’t.

If your brain is running an alien subroutine or a zombie system you don’t want it to run, you have to make like Destin Sandlin and practice the new routine over and over and over again. And you have to be prepared to have your brain “correct” you back to your old behavior at the least provocation.

When that happens, it’s far more productive to get back up on the horse—or bicycle—than it is to create a story about it.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

O Is for Obstacles

February 8, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

An obstacle is something that blocks your path or prevents or hinders your progress. If there’s one thing that’s certain in life, it’s that things won’t always go the way you want them to or according to your plan. Like many people, you may think that’s always a bad thing. But obstacles and setbacks are part of life. They don’t mean anything in and of themselves. That doesn’t mean they don’t have an effect on you, but you’re the one who imbues them with meaning.

Obstacles can be external or internal. The external ones can range from a traffic delay on your way to an important meeting to an uncooperative family member or co-worker to serious illness or a natural disaster. My temperament is such that it’s easy for me to experience life itself as one giant obstacle. In Enneagram terms, I resist impact from the environment and there’s a lot of environment to go around. So I have considerable experience coming to terms with the nature of obstacles, including the fact that my attitude is not always helpful. Maybe you can relate.

A few other ways you can be your own biggest obstacle are by:

failing to get all the information or acting on unverified assumptions
dropping the ball (not following through on something)
communicating or behaving in a manner that results in an undesirable outcome
having unrealistic expectations of yourself and others

Of course the major obstacle, at least when it comes to behavior change, is your own brain, which is intent on maintaining the status quo. If you fail to recognize this particular obstacle, you’re in for a rougher ride than you need to be as you try to figure out why you keep doing what you’re doing when what you want to do is something entirely different.

One Interesting Thing about Obstacles

Imagine reading a story or watching a movie in which the protagonist faced no obstacles. Would you read a novel or enjoy a movie like that? People who write for a living are betting you wouldn’t. A rule of thumb for writers is there should be some element of conflict on every page. The more conflict, the better. The more obstacles the characters have to deal with, the better.

When something goes wrong in your life, just yell: “Plot twist!” and move on. —Anonymous

Conflict and obstacles make things interesting because they’re unexpected. They also force you out of your comfort zone. You can be proceeding through life on autopilot (System 1), driving along a familiar route, when suddenly you notice a mudslide has closed the road ahead. System 1 calls on System 2: What should we do now? If what’s on the other side of that mudslide is something you really want or someplace you really want to go, you’ll try to figure out another way to get there. Which brings us to…

One Useful Thing about Obstacles

I’m not going to claim obstacles are opportunities or tell you they’re gifts or blessings in disguise. You can interpret them that way if you like, but obstacles are just obstacles: things that get in the way of what you want to do or where you want to go. I’m also not going to insist that obstacles (or overcoming obstacles) make you stronger or tougher because maybe they will and maybe they won’t.

There is one significant benefit obstacles can provide, however, although not everyone benefits equally. Experiencing an obstacle can help you think globally—step back and see the bigger picture—not just about the obstacle you’re facing but in regard to other unrelated situations or unrelated tasks. As a result, you’re more likely to come up with creative solutions in a variety of different settings.

The basic cognitive processes elicited by obstacles help people to find more creative means towards their goals. —Janina Marguc, University of Amsterdam

But there are two caveats.

First, in order to reap this benefit, you have to be motivated to follow through with what you’re doing. If you’re not already motivated, you’ll be more likely to see an obstacle as an excuse for slacking off or giving up than as a spur to action or invention.

Second, you’re more likely to think globally as a result of encountering an obstacle if you have what is referred to as low volatility. Art Markman, Ph.D., writing in Psychology Today says:

People who are not that volatile tend to engage with a task and stick with it even when it gets difficult. Those people who are highly volatile tend to skip from task to task to task.

For the latter group, encountering an obstacle does not make them more likely to think globally. That makes sense, given that volatile means excitable, unpredictable, or irresolute. If you’re highly volatile, you prefer to move on rather than stick around feeling uncomfortable or temporarily discouraged.

But even if you tend toward high volatility, you can make it more likely you’ll achieve a goal or create or change a habit if you do the legwork up front to make sure you really want what you’re going after—that your desired outcome is extremely desirable. The more motivated you are, the less likely you’ll be to give up in the face of an obstacle.

The most practical and realistic approach to take when you want to achieve something is to assume the path ahead won’t be a smooth, straight line. Then you can figure out ahead of time how to respond to the twists, turns, and bumps you’re bound to encounter.

If you get as many of your ducks in a row as you can, you’ll be in a better position to deal with the obstacles you will inevitably encounter. And if you encounter one that’s an actual deal-breaker, it will be easier for you to identify it as such, stop beating your head against that particular boulder, and scrap your plan without guilt or regret. That’s worth a little upfront effort, isn’t it?

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

K Is for Know-How

January 11, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Knowledge and know-how have a lot in common, but they’re not the same thing. You can read a book, watch a DVD, or listen to a lecture and gain knowledge—maybe even a lot—but that knowledge is theoretical until you actually apply it. Memorizing a camera’s instruction manual, for example, won’t give you the know-how to use your camera effectively, easily, or creatively in a wide range of situations. To be able to do that, you need hands-on experience and practice—the more practice, the better.

You probably know how to do a lot of things you didn’t always know how to do.

Drive a car
Operate a computer
Search the internet
Use a smartphone
Purchase airline reservations and board a plane
Order food in a restaurant
Speak in front of a group
Assemble furniture using an Allen wrench
Knit a scarf

Learning how to do all those things—at least to do them well, with confidence, or in some cases, safely—involves actually doing them, not just knowing what to do or how to do it. Drivers’ education, when I took it, included both classroom learning and operating a vehicle with an instructor in the passenger seat. A few of my classmates who demonstrated great proficiency in the classroom didn’t do so well on the road. I still remember one of a series of near-misses with Susan N. behind the wheel. Our instructor frantically gestured for her to pull the car over and park it, after which he got out and strode up and down the sidewalk for several minutes, repeatedly rubbing his hands over his face.

And if you think you can sit right down and knit a scarf using, say, the garter stitch (a relatively easy knitting project), after having watched someone else do it or reading the pattern instructions, you’re in for a surprise when you try manipulating the yarn and needles for the first time.

Getting to Carnegie Hall

We expect that in learning how to do something that involves a procedure, a sequence, or the use of tools or equipment we will need to practice doing it in order to master the activity. In fact, we expect to spend the majority of our learning time not on theory, but on practice.

But we don’t approach changing our behavior the same way. We seem to think that having knowledge or information is enough—or more accurately, should be enough. When it turns out not to be, we don’t rethink our approach or beliefs. We decide there’s something wrong, either with the knowledge and information or with us.

I think one of the reasons for this is that we don’t recognize that the same mechanism of action is involved in almost all behavior change. So putting the practice time in will eventually pay off not just in one area, but in many areas. It’s similar to learning how to play the piano. Mastering playing the piano doesn’t just give you the ability to play one song or one type of music. Yes, playing improvisational jazz is different from playing classical sonatas, but the underlying mechanism of action is the same. The piano skills you develop are transferable.

Theory and Practice

Mastering the art and science of change involves both theory and practice, too. In the realm of theory, you need to understand some things about the brain, including:

The difference between System 1 (the unconscious) and System 2 (consciousness)
Why your brain keeps “correcting” you back to your old way of doing things
How your brain creates habits, with or without your participation

You also need to know how to make use of the way your brain is wired or how to work around it when you need to. That involves developing various tools, including:

Setting goals and following through on them
Keeping your attention focused on your intentions
Making use of rewards to activate memory and learning circuits

That’s a lot of information to absorb. It’s a lot of knowledge to process. But it’s not enough.

Even if you know everything there is to know about how the brain works in regard to behavior, and even if you understand the reasons for and the absolute best ways to use goals, habits, intentions, and rewards, if you don’t engage in regular and deliberate practice, you won’t be able to master the art and science of change.

When clients begin my Goals, Habits & Intentions course, I always tell them the most valuable thing they’ll get from the course is coming face-to-face with how they get in their own way. If you really want to master behavior change, you need to develop the kind of self-awareness you can only get when you’re in the midst of trying to change something. For example:

How do you respond to feedback?
What do you do when faced with obstacles, delays, and distractions?
What beliefs and assumptions do you have about yourself and the way the world works that you don’t know you have?

Regular and deliberate practice is the only way to fully grasp the tools and make them your own. Regular and deliberate practice combined with knowledge and information helps you develop the know-how to master making the changes you want to make in your life and to help others do the same.

Change is not easy. It takes a lot longer than you think it will or than you want it to. It can be messy and discouraging, too. In his book Mastery, George Leonard says:

To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so—and this is the inexorable fact of the journey—you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

That’s the challenge. But once you really get the hang of it—once you develop the know-how—you’ll have it for the rest of your life.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Do You Object to Being Typed?

June 8, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

I’m preparing to present the second annual Enneagram Panel at my upcoming Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain), so I thought I would respond briefly to a few of the objections people have expressed about being typed.

#1: I Don’t Want to Be Boxed In

Some people strongly resist being typed. They believe they are unique and that assigning a label to them diminishes them somehow. They think typing puts them in a box. But typing doesn’t put people into boxes; it identifies aspects of the boxes we’re already in—and from which we can’t completely escape.

Each of us looks out at the world from within our own model of the world (our box), which influences what we pay attention to, how we interpret and react to events, the meaning we assign to them, and much of what we think, feel, do, and say.

Learning about your Enneagram type can provide you with a window into your personal model of the world. It can also help you understand others while developing the self-awareness that’s essential for creating positive and sustained change. Knowing your type doesn’t diminish your uniqueness. In fact, it can actually help you expand and reshape the box you’re in.

#2: Typing is Just another Term for Stereotyping

The premise is that stereotyping equals categorizing, and categorizing people is a bad thing. However, categorizing is a function of the unconscious part of your brain (System 1). You can’t stop your brain from categorizing, which means your brain (i.e. you) is already stereotyping other people. (Reacting based on stereotypes is a separate issue.)

You wouldn’t want to stop your brain from categorizing. Being able to make quick assessments is essential to your survival. If you were roaming the savanna as your distant ancestors did, you wouldn’t want to have to wait until a lion was in your face to determine whether or not it was in fact a lion. You’d want to be able to make a quick assessment based on general features, take action, and fill in the details later.

In the case of a lion, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And that’s the basic operating principle of the part of your brain that runs you. It wants you to survive and categorizing is a thinking shortcut that increases your chances of survival. The lion’s brain makes the same kinds of quick assessments. So does your cat’s or dog’s brain.

Since your brain is always categorizing anyway, wouldn’t it be preferable to have those categorizations be based on something (informed) rather than be random or arbitrary?

#3: Type Doesn’t Explain Everything about a Person

It’s absolutely true that type doesn’t explain everything. In fact, over three years ago, I published a blog post on my Enneagram website in which I wrote:

As comprehensive a tool as it is, the Enneagram can’t and doesn’t explain everything there is to know about us. It is not the personality equivalent of a Theory of Everything.

But that’s no reason to avoid it.

You have a capacity referred to as mentalization that allows you to understand your own mental states or thought processes and to attribute mental states—beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. to yourself as well as to others. You can also recognize that others have beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. that are different from yours.

Learning more about the mental states of other people actually increases your ability to understand both them and yourself. And the Enneagram is the best tool I’ve found for knowing myself at a deeper (rather than a superficial) level and for understanding where other people are coming from.

Occasionally I wonder if the real resistance some people might have to being typed is a fear of being found out—of actually being understood. But there are no good or bad types. You can be highly self-aware or pretty much asleep-at-the wheel no matter what type you are. You have to decide what you want to do with the information.

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.