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Psychology

Mind Wandering

Hard to write when it’s hot, the weekend is looming, and vacation is not quite around the corner but beckoning from the recesses of my mind…..

My mind starts to wander, engaging in pleasant fantasies about what I’ll encounter in August, what adventures I might have and what new sights wait to be photographed. Will the future unravel from mysterious heaps like this?

Which tells you right there that your daily essayist is a happy(ish) person, since mind wandering into the future is associated with a positive outlook on life, while mind wandering into the past is more often encountered with people who are unhappy.

By rough estimates we spend about 25% of our waking day with wandering thoughts, that state where we are meant to focus on one thing, but find ourselves all of a sudden thinking about something altogether different. Not in any goal directed fashion either, but just drifting about. The strange thing is that for some time you are not aware that your thoughts have taken a path of their own, but when you realize it you are perfectly able to pinpoint what you have been thinking about.

Slovenia, hah! Balkan anti-fascist memorials hunt. International Graffiti Festival. Viennese Apple Strudel. Pack rain coat yes or no?  All while really trying to focus on the blog.

Mind wandering can be consequential and not just for lost time on the job – car accidents happen during that state just as often as with drunk driving. I wouldn’t want the flight traffic controller to engage in mental time travel either. So not an entirely good preoccupation. There is, however some reason to believe that mind wandering enhances creativity; you can stumble, researchers speculate, on previously unlinked ideas that pave the path for novel insights. It certainly does relieve boredom, which is another basically good thing.

So how do you keep yourself on task? Active engagement with whatever you are doing seems to be helpful. (Not just passive reading but re-wording concepts and structuring them for my YDP then should do the trick for me…) Training in mindfulness, whether through brief breathing exercises or longer concentrated practice also improves your ability to stay focused.

If you want to read in great detail about it, go here (before your mind wanders….): https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/schooler/jonathan/sites/labs.psych.ucsb.edu.schooler.jonathan/files/pubs/middle_way.pdf

 

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Spotting Spot

Many argue such a thing as an “educated eye” exists and makes for being a better eye witness, a better referee, a better chess player or better at judging dogs at dog shows. True or false?

In the courtrooms, for example, judges and juries are especially likely to accept the witness’s report as accurate if the witness is a police officer. It is believed that police have “educated eyes,” with the result that they can recognize faces that they viewed only briefly or at a considerable distance or in the dark after years of night shifts.

On the one hand, this ignores that there are optical properties of the eyeball and functional properties of the photoreceptors which are the same for all of us and don’t change or improve with use for any particular profession. All of us simply can’t see very well in the dark or at far distances.

At a different level, though, it is possible to have an “educated eye”—or, more precisely, to be more observant and more discerning than other people.

For example, when looking at a complex, fast-moving crime scene, police officers are more likely to focus their attention on details that will matter for the investigation—and so will likely see (and remember) more of the perpetrator’s actions (although, ironically, this means they’ll see less of what’s happening elsewhere in the scene).

In the same way, referees and umpires in professional sports know exactly what to focus on during a game. As a result, they’ll see things that ordinary observers would miss. (Fans at the FIFA World Cup in Russia right now might disagree, but trust me.)

 

The mechanisms are similar to what I described yesterday for auditory input: expectation guides your attention and your ability to interpret or parse a scene.  For visual inputs you can only see detail that is landing on your foveas; what lands on your foveas depends on where exactly you’re pointing your eyes; and movements of the eyes (pointing them first here and then there) turn out to be relatively slow. As a result, knowledge about where to look has an immense impact on what you’ll be able to see.

It’s also true that experience can help you to see certain patterns that the rest of us miss. Consider the dog experts who serve as judges at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. These experts are sensitive to each dog’s overall form, and not just the shape of the front legs, the chest, the ears, and so on, with the result that they can make more discerning assessments than an ordinary dog-lover could.

Although all of us can enjoy one of the funniest movies ever made, dogs and all –

Experience can also help you to see (or hear or feel) certain combinations that are especially important or informative. One prominent example involves experienced firefighters who sometimes have an eerie ability to judge when a floor is about to collapse—allowing these professionals to evacuate a building in time, saving their lives and others’. What explains this perception? The answer may be a combination of feeling an especially high temperature and hearing relative quiet — a combination that signals a ferocious fire burning underneath them, hidden under the floor that they’re standing on.

 

In short, then, people can have “educated eyes” (or ears or noses or palates). This “education” can’t change the basic biological properties of your sense organs. But knowledge and experience can certainly help you to see things that others overlook, to detect patterns that are largely invisible to other people.

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Hidden Messages

Happy 4th of July – where you will be bombarded with messages about the state of our nation. Let’s look at a different kind of message, though: You have probably heard periodic reports  of “secret messages” contained within pop music – often messages that can be revealed only by playing the music backwards. The messages are claimed to have content that is upsetting or offensive to many people – messages about Satan (thus today’s photographs of hellish creatures), or drug use, or sexual activity. If you take the time to do the quick exercise below exposing you to this music, you will be truly astonished (and laugh!). At least I was/did when I tried it out.

Visit this website: It lets you hear something that might or might not contain a hidden message.

http://jeffmilner.com/backmasking/stairway-to-heaven-backwards.html

First, select  the sound clips and play it forwards. Try at that point to guess what the hidden message is.

Then play the clip backwards. Now can you guess what the hidden message is?

Then, as the crucial step, click on the button to reveal the lyrics that are supposedly hidden in the backwards clip, and play the clip again. Now can you hear the hidden message?

So: Is the message really there, because you can hear it? Probably not.  You can only hear it when someone explicitly suggests to you what the message is which provides a powerful demonstration that your perception can be guided by expectations and knowledge – so that you can hear things with that guidance that you can’t hear at all otherwise.

Perception, then, is not just a relatively passive process where you are simply exposed to sounds, and they flow into your ears and you hear. Perception is much more active than that. You interpret. You fill in. You add. Of course, the ‘balance’ between the input and your activity shifts. The clearer the input, the more you rely on it. The LESS clear the input, the more you supplement. Likewise, the stronger your expectations and assumptions, the more you rely on them. The WEAKER your expectations and assumptions, the less you rely on them.

The bottom line, though, is NOT that perception is hopelessly and inevitably subjective. When the input is clear, you rely on the input! But, when the input isn’t clear, you do need to be alert to how much your expectations can bias what you see and hear.

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Facts, ignored.

# Stay Special

I listed some psychological research yesterday for claims that child/ parent separation has lasting, harmful effects. We might as well continue with psychology for the rest of the week, offering what I hope are a few interesting psychological tidbits.

My sister and I have an ongoing joke between us that refers to my childhood desire to be a famous Hollywood star rather than holding any number of other potentially interesting roles in life. Man, did I miss the bus. That aside, what is it about that longing to be famous? My best speculation has to do with my lifelong preoccupation with mortality, a preoccupation I have surely earned, given the frequent encounters with that crap starting at an early age. That, or a deep streak of narcissism….

If mortality concerns you, you want to have something that lasts beyond your mere existence, I guess. Fame, in other words. And so, any time I get a photo into an exhibit, my beloved sister exclaims:”NOW you are famous! You can rest!”

As a scientist, and a person living in an environment where science is under daily assault, one might want to remember how you put a claim to a test. Is it factually true? Is the evidence weak and ambiguous or indisputable? How precisely must a hypothesis be worded, to make it testable? All matter if we want to be able to trust findings.

Consider the claim “No matter what day of the year you pick, a famous photographer was born on that day.” A search on Google reveals, for sake of argument, that Friderike Heuer is the only photographer born on March 19. Does this observation support the initial claim, because Heuer is famous? (After all, hundreds of people have seen her art or read her blog.) Or does it contradict the claim, because Heuer isn’t famous? (After all, most people have never heard of her.) Both of these positions seem plausible, and so your “test” of this claim about birthdays turns out to depend on opinion, not fact: If you hold the opinion that Heuer is famous, then the evidence about the March 19 birthday confirms the claim; if you hold the opposite opinion, the same evidence doesn’t confirm the claim. As a result, this claim is not testable—there’s no way to say with certainty whether it fits with the facts or not since an essential element in your claim lacked precision – fame had to be defined. (Note that I did not ask to evaluate the hypothesis that Heuer IS famous – you didn’t think I’d be going there, would you now?)

Many feel that scientific facts, even if derived with the appropriate processes, no longer matter, in a political world that has moved beyond facts. Some argue that trying to use facts to convince those who adhere to lies is even counterproductive – see the attached below.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/02/counter_lies_with_emotions_not_facts.html

It is certainly a huge burden for the scientific community who did and does worry about getting the facts right to now having to think about ways of overcoming public resistance to those very facts (although not for the first time in history.) Figuring out how to do that is obviously essential for subsequent action that protects our and the world’s well-being, whether we think environmental harm, or disease control, resource distribution or multiple other areas. Maybe someone famous will figure it out.

 

 

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What Country is this?

Today I will let the pictures speak for themselves, mostly. They were taken at Saturday’s rally to protest the separation of children from their families as a result of the Trump administrations’ policies on immigration and asylum.

Over 250.ooo people marched across the cities of the U.S., some 5000 here in PDX, to give voice to their disgust and anger – you wouldn’t know those number if you read the conservative media.

 

 

 

 

Senator Ron Wyden, who is really rising to the occasion, gave an impassioned and clever speech, leading the crowd in 0 – 10 scoring of Trump’s zero-tolerance and other policies with resounding shouts of ZERO.

Signs ranged from outraged to funny, offered by imploring 7-week olds to raging grannies and grandpas.

 

 

 

As always, a sense of shared purpose and solidarity gave rise to smidgens of hope.

For those of you interested in the science behind the claims that separating infants from their mothers and fathers has life-long consequences, as expressed not only in attachment disorders but also in neurophysiological changes that can affect a range of psychological developments, I refer to the articles below.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/how-mother-child-separation-causes-neurobiological-vulnerability-into-adulthood.html

 

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/06/neglect.aspx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then there is this about stolen adoptions: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/01/separated-children-adoption-immigration/

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Maman

After reading that the Red Cross has been denied access to the migrant detention camps and that a Betsy deVos-linked evangelical agency is rumored to place the separated newborns and toddlers for adoption, I decided to give myself permission not to read and write much about politics this week. My – and your – sanity probably once again depends on it.

I have moral support for my chosen state of not-knowing, if only for a few precious days, from an unexpected source: a scientific argument in favor of willful ignorance. The argument, developed by two researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in the context of data collection and dissemination through Artificial Intelligence, in a nutshell is this:

People often decide to remain ignorant because they know that knowledge can be dangerous. It can corrupt judgment – just think of personal medical data, your sexual preferences, your religion – known to hiring agencies or insurance companies or your favorite internet troll. Do you want them to be known? It can instill fear – do you want to know your likely day of death or chance of developing Alzheimers, which many AI programs are statistically predicting in ever more accurate fashion?

Motives for willful ignorance then center around two themes: impartiality and fairness, for one, and emotional regulation and regret avoidance, for another.  Detailed description of the argument can be found in the link attached below.

http://nautil.us//issue/61/coordinates/we-need-to-save-ignorance-from-ai?utm_source=Nautilus&utm_campaign=3d24b9bbbd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_06_22_07_57&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_dc96ec7a9d-3d24b9bbbd-61805813

Speaking to the issue of impartiality: many women artists have taken to apply for exhibitions with initials for first name, or aliases in general, so their gender remains unknown – a precaution in an art world that is still very much a male domaine and known to exclude the second sex. (I use that phrase to remind us of de Beauvoir’s pathbreaking analysis of facts and myths about women, written in 1949 and just as applicable today.)

 

But this week their names will be available to us, at least those I chose for presentation.

The first shall be Louise Bourgeois, and her 1999 spider sculpture titled  Maman. I think I wrote about Bourgeois here two years ago, but I always find myself going back to this marble and steel miracle, grandiose in scale and hauntingly contradictory in effect. Most people shy away from arachnids, find them disgusting if not threatening. The artist’s associations, though, are couched in love, admiration and pragmatism. They stress the purpose of protection and yet the sculpture emanates a power closely linked to fear. The ambiguity is breathtaking.

“The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

“…..my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider. She could also defend herself, and me…” Louise Bourgeois.

My photographs are from 2012 at the Hamburger Kunsthalle celebrating the artist’s 100th birthday.

Below are alternative sites from the web – Maman sure likes to travel…..

 

 

 

 

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Courage

My father died 16 years ago in June. I have been thinking about him a lot lately because I coincidentally came across articles or TED talks that featured amputees who publicly discussed the choices they made in life after the assaults on their bodies. They also publicly display their protheses, which are streamlined, light, robotic looking extensions that allow for a lot of movement.

In 1942 when my father lost both of his legs in the war, just turning 20 years old, it was a different story. There was shame attached to having the protheses visible; equally important, the artificial limbs were made first of wood, then some heavy plastic, all of which needed to be carried and tied on with a heavy leather cone with multiple belt buckles, that was hellishly hot and air tight. The things made noise, too, squeaking and grinding, increasing the embarassment. Amputees were often shunned in a country that tried to forget about its history and the war, for which they were visible reminders.

Standing all day at a lab bench early in his career as a chemist was in itself an athletic feat, one for which he paid dearly with nightly blisters on the parts of his legs that attached to the protheses. But he would not be stopped. He had been in a major league handball team before the war. Physical activity had to be continued – and so he figured out what he could do. I learned to play table tennis from my father. I saw him horseback riding, and later, when we would spend winters skiing in Switzerland, he would actually go curling. A SPORT WHERE YOU HAVE TO WALK/RUN/CROUCH ON ICE.  In summers in Holland he would go before dawn to the North Sea and swim, before anyone could see him putting the wooden legs off and on. And he rode his bike. Determined. Unstoppable.

Nowadays there are at least possibilities for those who went through these traumas to receive help, or find and work with those who share the experience. If a team like the one described below had existed in the 1950s my father would have probably joined.

This All-Amputee Softball Team is Changing the Way We Think About Treating Trauma

The physical consequences of the amputations and the decades of pain meds needed to be able to function on a daily basis made his last years particularly difficult, independent of the PTSD. I wish he had had someone at his side like the palliative care physician featured in the TED talk below. It would have made a difference, I believe.

It is only with hindsight that I am able to understand the full extent of courage it took to lead the life he led without ever becoming hard. I try to remember that every time I become upset over some little chickenshit, as they say in polite company….

Photographs are bikes in Alkmaar and Bergen aan Zee, NL.

 

 

 

 

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Seeing Red.

You might think I am referring to this in our last entry to a week of colors:

Which would not be a bad guess in general, but today the color RED is brought to you by LOVE.  My love for humanity in general

 

 

 

and my love for one human being in particular who was born just this week 30 years ago.

He introduced me to Zbigniew Herbert and one of my favorite poems of his expresses the idea of moral necessity as perfectly as the concept is embraced by my incredible 30-year-old.  Happy almost Birthday, mein Süssen!!!! Keep the spark alive.

The Envoy of Mr. Cogito

TRANSLATED BY BOGDANA CARPENTER
Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust
you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony
be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important
and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win
they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography
and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn
beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I
beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you
be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star
repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap
go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes
Be faithful Go
Zbigniew Herbert, “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” translated by Bogdana and John Carpenter, from Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Ltd.
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Pink Cheeks. Black Lashes.

Sometimes I wonder if there is a correlation between drab times and the amount of colored cream or powder humanity applies to its faces. I sure found a lot of pink when walking through PDX and approaching these young beauties with requests for photographs. I was also aware last time I visited NYC how many young men were dripping with mascara.

No drab times for the make-up industry though, which has finally figured out a way to make half of the population which was so far unreachable become consumers of beautification products. Check out the short video below and see for yourself how young men are starting to buy and apply make-up.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-42869170/male-make-up-korean-men-have-started-a-beauty-revolution?ocid=socialflow_twitter

It would have been amusing were it not for the prejudiced protestations of the protagonist that he was not gay, just into make-up, and for my fear that the peddling of useless goods is just another way of emptying people’s pockets, now young boys’.

For someone whose currency of felt appreciation has changed across the years from being smiled and whistled at to the number of replies to a blog segment, make-up plays no longer any role. But I understand the need of youth to soothe self doubts and insecurity. I have certainly nothing against gender equality, going in both directions.

I just hope that the horrific pressure towards being normatively beautiful that girls have experienced forever, is not going to be there for boys now as well.

One day you worry about pimples, the next day you feel too fat. And body image troubles have now reached young men in frightening numbers as well.

 https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/general-information/research-on-males

 

  • In the United States, 20 million women and 10 million men will suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, or EDNOS [EDNOS is now recognized as OSFED, other specified feeding or eating disorder, per the DSM-5] (Wade, Keski-Rahkonen, & Hudson, 2011).

Worries about a focus on external beauty today has been brought to you by the color PINK.

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True Colors

For a year now we have seen a governmental strategy of “Facts be damned, let falsehoods do the job.” Last week’s debate around the Ryan/Nunes memo was just another instance of this political manipulation.

Psychologist have long asked why it is that rumors and innuendo, selective presentation of facts and cherry picking are so phenomenally successful in lodging in people’s brains and influencing their beliefs. There are many reasons. One key reason, though, is that we don’t interpret pieces of information independently. Instead, we form an impression based on the first info, use that to guide how we think about the second piece of info, which often strengthens our initial view. We then use that as a guide in thinking about the next piece of info which again strengthens our views and around and around we go.

As a result our ideas are sticky. And in particular this pattern means that you will easily accept any news, no matter how thin, if it fits with your view. But you get our your hammer and your magnifying glass and are ready to beat up any piece of info that challenges your view.

The link below is one of the best comprehensive articles on the issue (full text can be downloaded as PDF) spelling out how we are influenced and also suggesting mechanisms how to disrupt this influence.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1529100612451018?journalCode=psia

The authors, highly respected in the field of cognitive psychology, suggest the following remedy:

Technocognition: the idea that we should use what we know about psychology to design technology in a way that minimizes the impact of misinformation. By improving how people communicate, they hope, we can improve the quality of the information shared.

Here is a summary of the approach from a Guardian article linked to below.

“The authors propose a number of ideas to help bring an end the post-truth era. One key idea involves the establishment of an international non-governmental organization that would create a rating system for disinformation. There are already some similar examples in existence – Climate Feedback consults climate scientists to rate the accuracy of media articles on climate change, and Snopes is a widely-respected fact checker. The challenge would of course be to convince conservatives to accept a neutral arbiter of facts, and continue accepting it when information they want to believe is ruled inaccurate.

These independent rulings could then be conveyed via technology. For example, Facebook could flag an article that’s based on false information as an unreliable source, and Google could give more weight in returning factually accurate news and information at the top of its search results lists.

The study authors also suggest that inoculation theory techniques could help dislodge misinformation after it first takes hold. This involves explaining the logical fallacy underpinning a myth. People don’t like being tricked, and research has shown that when they learn that an ideologically-friendly article has misinformed them by using fake experts, for example, they’re more likely to reject the misinformation. The authors also encourage teaching people – particularly students – how to identify misinformation techniques and the other strategies used to create the partisan echo chamber. Younger Americans are already less susceptible to the conservative media bubble. The median age of primetime Fox News viewers is 68, and Alabamans under the age of 45 voted for Roy Moore’s opponent Doug Jones by a 23-point margin. Teaching them how to identify misinformation techniques will help inoculate younger Americans against the corrosive effects of the partisan media bubble.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/dec/27/fake-news-is-a-threat-to-humanity-but-scientists-may-have-a-solution

Alas, this approach will NOT work if other things do not change. For one, the current tribalism has its own exclusionary panorama of news sources. If I only watch station X and that news outlet refuses to participate in some weighted information stream, nothing will change. More importantly, though, even if we were able to get the facts across, and have them accepted by a wider public regardless of political leanings, they might not change policy and decision making of governmental agencies if going against the interest of the economic elites. People show their true colors, then, when it comes to profit.

Today brought to you by YELLOW, my closest approximation to capitalist gold….

 

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