Your brain on a slow website…

How the Internet is ruining your brain

 

Paradox of choice

On why less is more… Psychologist Barry Schwartz (the one wearing the shorts) takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. Try this great TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Do one thing at a time…

Do one thing at a time (well!) or multi-task, that’s the question. Watch this interesting CNBC video clip in which Tony Swartz talks about how to get stuff done whilst balancing your energy needs.

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000081194

Left brain, right brain…

If you want to know the latest on the way in which the hemispheres of the brain go about their business watch this fantastic RSA animation. Psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ (but probably not divided in the way you think!) has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society.

Click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dFs9WO2B8uI

Five things you should stop doing in 2012

It’s the time of year for making lists. And then losing them. And then making more lists and ignoring them. And it’s almost the time of year for making resolutions. So what are you going to decide to do, or to undo in 2012? As a starter here’s a list from Dorie Clark  in a seasonal article in the Harvard Business Review.

Stop…

1. Responding like a trained monkey.
2. Mindless traditions.
3. Reading annoying things.
4. Work that’s not worth it.
5. Making things more complicated than they should be.

I’m particularly attracted to her first point. She’s talking about emails and the way in which we get continually sidetracked by waves of incoming nonsense. What are we doing? I spent many a happy hour at university messing about with different sorts of ‘reinforcement’ schedules and fooling various rats (and the occasional pigeon) into behaving like a complete turkey! Yep, variable reinforcement schedules (read: emails of varying degrees of urgency plopping into your inbox at unpredictable intervals) make us all behave like Pavlov’s pet dog.

So let’s get a grip and stop it. If you must, check your email every 90 minutes or so. Strangely things will proceed as normal: the sun will rise, the Earth will rotate, politicians will continue to irritate you etc. There, I feel better already. Happy Christmas and a less monkey (rat, pigeon and dog-like) New Year!

Photo credit: Michael Elliott/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Wilful Blindness

Peer pressure, role modeling, obedience to authority, group think, cognitive dissonance, selective attention, love… it’s a wonder we can think straight.  Well actually a lot of the time perhaps we don’t. Quite apart from the forces of social psychology messing with our minds, the plumbing of the brain itself does a great job of physically reducing the flow of what we know. Perhaps that’s not surprising as we all have to deal with about 34GB of data every day. But does all this matter? In one sense, no, because it’s what gets us through life. And you could argue it’s what makes us uniquely human. But, and it’s a big ‘but’, when it stops us seeing what we should see, and stops us doing what we should do, then it can be a major problem.  Far more damaging than courageously ’turning a blind eye’ in a sea battle (Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen), because not ‘seeing’ or acknowledging uncomfortable truths can literally lead to disaster. The sort of disaster that can end in ecological calamity, world financial meltdown, health scandals, military failure and always, ruined lives. Small things like that.

If you want to know how this can be, and how we can all be unconsciously (and consciously) wilfully blind, then get a copy of Margaret Heffernan’s new book: Wilful Blindness: Why we Ignore the Obvious at our Peril. It’s just out in the UK and is published by Simon & Schuster. You can also catch a video trailer on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCUKGK6JOJo

Royal wedding to be friends only event!

I was amused to read at the weekend that Prince William and Mrs Prince William-to-be have been ‘allowed’ to invite more than 1000 of their friends to the forthcoming royal wedding. Good thing too! I think these events should be kept small and intimate and priority be given to people you know and like,  and if absolutely necessary, your relatives. Of course it’s physically impossible to have 1000 friends (see my post on the Dunbar number: Some of my best friends are monkeys), so I would be interested to know what constitutes a royal confidant…

Brain myths #1: You only use 10% of your brain

The brain is an amazing thing and can do amazing stuff. However, and I hate to disappoint you, we do know what all the bits do. There isn’t some hidden part, which if only you could activate it, would give you super powers: super memory, super intelligence, or indeed super anything. This is of course in direct contradiction to the common belief that we only use a fraction of our brains, maybe only 10%. So where did the myth come from? One of the main suspects is the great American psychologist William James who believed that we all had ‘reserve energy’ – a bit of extra brain oomph that we could tap into if only we knew how. The other, and perhaps more credible explanation, is that early on researchers discovered that just 10% of neurons were firing at any given time. Thus it seemed that only 10% were in use, which of course isn’t the case. Even when you’re asleep or day dreaming the brain is busily and actively doing its thing. Whatever the explanation, and of course it is possible to increase the efficiency of the brain, New Age hopes of tapping a great reserve of potential, and coming over all super human, appear to be unfounded.

Some of my best friends are monkeys!

In monkey-land social contact is maintained with other members of a group through social grooming. Which is a bit like going to the hairdresser, but instead of one person checking your hair for anything interesting (or possibly moving), a whole load of people give it the once over – social groups of this sort forming little cliques within wider monkey, or actually to be more accurate, primate society. Now for the interesting bit: the number of group members an individual primate can track seems to have an upper limit; which in turn appears to be related to the volume of the brain’s neocortex.

Primates, brains, neocortex? You can probably guess what’s coming next. A clever British anthropologist called Robin Dunbar has popped the data for 38 primate genera into a statistics programme and come up with a figure for us humans – that’s the total number of people with which we can maintain stable social relationships. And the answer is a mean group size of 148*, or as a rule-of-thumb, 150. This has now passed into folklore, sort of, being regularly referred to as the Dunbar Number. Fantastic! Fancy having a number named after you. But back to the point:

What does this tell us? Putting aside that other anthropologists have produced competing numbers, for example there’s the Bernard-Killworth at 290; it can help us to understand why groups may or may not work. Think about the size of groups in businesses or military units. Perhaps it’s no surprise that an Army company contains up to 200 soldiers; and that the Swedish tax people have taken it to heart and set the maximum number of people in an office at 150; or indeed that it was picked up by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point, and forms the core of his argument on social dynamics. So maybe, just maybe, it gives us a clue, whatever the ‘magic’ number, as to why very large year groups in schools don’t seem to work; or for that matter large divisions within very large corporations; or large groups of humans doing all sorts of things.

And what of social networking? Dunbar himself is researching Facebook, and possibly his number is a defence for those who cannot claim to have 500 friends, or 1000, or 10000, or whatever’s the ‘going rate’. Something that younger, and some of the not so young Facebook users feel pressured to have. But then Facebook is like collecting stamps, people seem to feel a compulsion to try to acquire the full set!

*If you’re interested in the stats, at the 95% confidence level, the range is from 100 to 230.

Malcolm Gladwell (2000). The Tipping Point – How Little Things Make a Big Difference. Abacus

Photo credit: Michael Elliott/FreeDigitalPhotos.net