One huge frustration I have with learning Spanish — and I understand I’m not alone on this — is missing loads of what’s being said while translating one particular word.

While listening to a dialogue, my attention latches on to words I recognise and I try to retrieve the English translation. But before I find the English word, the speaker is three sentences away and talking about something else.

This is probably a consequence of the way we tend to learn second languages — that is, using our first language as a useful intermediate between a new foreign word and a meaning we already know. But it can be a detriment in comprehension, especially in the earlier stages of learning a language, when listening is far more of a conscious process.

This has nothing to do with the topic. I just find it funny. (Credit: Elephi Pelephi)

Generally I think conscious translating is a mistake. There are times where it’s OK to do this, such as when there’s a gap in the conversation, but I find it’s best to stay focused on what’s being said, not to “zoom in” on any particular word.

I’m hardly an expert and I don’t know what the more linguistically talented might think, but that’s my opinion. Just let go of the words you 50% understand, and keep listening.

The Cohort Model of spoken language comprehension, first proposed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), might explain why this works:

“According to this theory, the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with that input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. As more acoustic input is analyzed, candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process
continues until only one word candidate matches the input; the best fitting word may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.” (ref)

Here’s what happens, according to the cohort model. You hear a Spanish word, say “beber” meaning “to drink.” It sounds familiar but you don’t immediately get the meaning. So you try to translate it, probably rolling your eyes upwards as you do so. Behind the scenes, your brain is creating a cohort of possibilities as to what the word was. Maybe it creates a shortlist of Spanish words starting with “b,” plus a few others that rhyme, and looks up their associated meaning.

Perhaps the reason you stop and put some conscious effort into translating this word, is that you intuitively feel that this is a serial process, where the brain translates words one-by-one, and either gets the meaning or loses it forever — but it is not. The brain does not stop searching for the meaning of an unknown word even though it continues to listen to other words — in fact, it actually uses the input from future words to help filter down to the correct meaning of previously heard words, presumably while they are held in the phonological loop.

Have you every thought you understood what someone said, only to realise you misheard it based on something they said later? You could also deduce, then, that the brain doesn’t even have a concept of a correct word, and is always feeding back data based on probabilities; what it thinks is the most probable meaning.

So to continue the example, if you continued to listen to the speaker instead of temporarily disengaging your attention to consciously translate “beber,” you might hear “cerveza,” the Spanish word for beer and put two-and-two together. The meaning of the previous word comes to you in a flash.

Open Monitoring/Listening

This method of listening is very similar to a type of meditation called open monitoring. In this you sit and just allow any thought or perception to pass through your consciousness, being fully observant of it but not holding your attention on it.

Likewise, in open listening, as it could be called, you focus on the entirety of what is being said, rather than trying to follow the dialog word by word. By not focusing on a single word, you devote more of your attentional capacity to collecting more input.

You might also reason that the more practice one has with open monitoring meditation, the better they should be at language comprehension.

If you speak a second language let me know if you found the same when you were learning. Also, if you meditate a lot, let me know how you find language learning, or comprehending people in even your native language. Do you seem to find it easier than others to understand people with strange accents? Has this improved after your meditation experiences?

Just to expand on the previous post about the effect of action video games on attention, here’s a little more detail about the experiment in the paper.

In this test, a group of participants, all with little or no video game playing experience, were randomly assigned to two groups.

The first group (9 people) were asked to play Medal of Honor, for one hour per day, for 10 straight days. The second (8 people) played Tetris for the same time period. This is a good control condition, because it helps to cancel out improvements that might be made in, for instance, hand-eye coordination as opposed to actual cognitive improvements.

Playing this game may bring cognitive benefits.

At the end of the training, participants were giventhe enuration, useful-field-of-view and attentional blink tests described in this post. The group who played Medal of Honor performed better than the Tetris group, and this difference was statistically significant at the .05 level.

Additionally, the researchers carried out a mediation analysis, to see if the benefits on these tasks could be accounted for by game playing skill. In other words, did the people who improved the most at Medal of Honor over these 10 days also perform the best on the cognitive tasks? The results did not reach statistical significance (0.13), altough the effect was pretty strong with an adjusted r squared of 0.43. That means 43% of the variation in cognitve performance was accounted for by improvements in playing Medal of Honor.

These results suggest that playing Medal of Honor garners improvements in the attentional processing systems of the brain. However, note the limitations I mention in the previous post on this study.

Note that the version of Medal of Honor they played was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, from 2002 (the study was fromn 2003). However, it’s perfectly reasonable that the results apply to more recent versions of the game (both are first person shooters).

It’s often said that the youth of our society wastes their time playing video games; ostensibly a purely diversionary activity with no inherent merit. However, as someone with a youth misspent in this way, I have to disagree. There are many ways I feel video game-playing may serve me well in the future. For example, should powerful aliens invade our planet and challenge our species to a Street Fighter II tournament, killing all those who they defeat, I for one would fancy my chances. However on a more mundane level, research published in Nature indicated that video game brings cognitive benefits that transfer to activities other than the game itself.

Waste of time or brain trainer? credit: blindfutur3

Flanker compatibility

In this test, participants are distracted on a task by stimuli, which they have to ignore. The task becomes progressively more difficult, so it’s a good way of testing attentional capacity. When video game players were tested against non-players, they performed better on this task, suggesting they have greater attentional capacity.

Enumeration task

In this second task, squares flash on a screen briefly, and participants simply have to say how many there are. If there’s a small number of squares, you just ‘know’ how many there are. This is called ‘subitizing.’ As more and more squares are displayed you eventually lose your ability to subitize and must count the squares manually.

Video game players could subitize greater number of squares than non players (4.9 vs 3.3 on average), again this is consistent with the idea that video games bring beneficial effects — or at least, that video game players possess these benefits. In this case, the benefit is being able to focus on more distinct objects at once.

Widening the training zone

The next task was the “Useful Field of View” task, where the aim is to locate a certain target amongst a field of distracting ones. However, the twist here is that the field of view is extended to three eccentricities — 10, 20, and 30 degrees. The field of view when playing video games typically reaches around 20 degrees, so this is a good way to see whether the attentional benefits video game players have extends beyond the range of view they experience whilst playing. The results indicated that the players outperformed non-players at all ranges.

As with the previous tests, this is tricky to interpret. On one hand it could indicate that video games bring attentional benefits, and that these benefits extend beyond the normal field of vision experienced while playing. On the other hand, it could simply indicate that some people take to video game playing because they have better attentional qualities to begin with. Because this task is further from the conditions of the video game playing itself, you might reason that it is more in line with the latter. It’s impossible to say because this was a quasi experiment — there was no randomisation of group assignment.

Quick thinking – the attentional blink task

A common aspect of the games played by the participants is the need to act fast under pressure (see below for a list of games). To see if there was a difference on this ability between video game players and non-players, a variation on the attentional blink task was used.

In this task, a stimuli is displayed, followed 200-500 ms later by another. Typically, people have trouble processing the second stimuli because of fixation on the first. In the variation, participants had to detect a certain following stimuli from a sequence which included a few distractors. Again, the video game players out-performed the non-players.

Incidentally, experienced meditators also do better on this task.

Experimental task

As mentioned earlier, it’s impossible to determine cause and effect conclusively with this type of study. By selecting specific groups (players versus non-players) instead of randomising, you never know if you’re simply selecting groups who differ on the variable you’re studying to begin with. For instance, do video games attract or create people with enhanced attentional abilities.

To get around this, and experimental task was performed, where a group was told to go play an action video game, while another went off to play a puzzle game. The action video game players did better on the enumeration, useful field of view, and attentional blink tasks after training.

Video games are beneficial for attention?

While these results are consistent with the idea that video game playing brings cognitive benefits, the studies do have some limitations. Mainly, the sample size was pretty low. The enumeration task had the highest number of participants, and even that had only 13 per group. The others has only eight or nine per group.

For the quasi-experiments, this makes it even more likely that the results were due to the samples selected, despite the fact that they were highly statistically significant. For the experiment, the same applies. The significance levels were higher in the latter but that’s expected given it was only for 10 days.

Also, the transfer is fairly similar. Action video games and these tasks still involve sitting and looking at a screen. We don’t know if the results would be different in other situations in more natural settings. But overall it’s nice that by video game playing might, possibly, have benefits beyond helping me defeat an invasion by 2D beat-em-up-obsessed aliens.

Which games did they play?

In the tests comparing video game players with non-video game players, here’s a list of games that the players were into. Note that this study is from 2003!

• Grand Theft Auto 3
• Half-Life
• Counter-Strike
• Crazy Taxi
• Team Fortress Classic
• 007
• Spider-Man
• Halo
• Marvel vs Capcom
• Roguespear
• Super Mario Cart

Reference:

Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003, May 29). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534 –537. pdf

I’ve been digging into research papers again, looking for ways to enhance second language acquisition. After working through a few papers and an introductory text book, I was left thinking “When are they going to get to the part about how to learn languages better?”  Most of the research seems to be on the processes and issues surrounding second-language acquisition, rather than how to enhance it. So I went right back to the drawing board and started looking at the cognitive processes involves in language comprehension and production, looking for clues. I started with the phonological loop.

The phonological loop is the aspect of working memory that deals with auditory input. Loads of studies have been done on this which I won’t go into here, but one hugely important point is that the loop’s capacity is time-based. For example, memory of two syllable words is worse if they are longer (voodoo, harpoon) than if they are shorter (bishop).

Something I’m particularly interested in, is improving language comprehension. I often find that I can listen to something in Spanish, not understand it at all, but upon reading a transcript realise that I know all those words. I think the time-based limitation of the phonological loop might be a key to improving this.

If a person is speaking to you in a foreign language, you often find that although you’re focused on what they are saying, nothing makes sense. Then, they pause for a moment, and the meaning of the last few seconds of speech magically comes to you. It’s as though the brain is occupied with attending to the incoming speech, then when there’s a pause it takes the chance to process whatever’s in the phonological loop. Assuming this is true, there are a few things that might help with language comprehension:

1 – Increase the capacity of the phonological loop

The bigger this is, the more you can hear and keep in your working memory until the pause comes. I couldn’t find any research on actually improving the size of the loop’s capacity, but I’ll keep looking. Let me know if you know of any. Something to consider here is the difference between actual gains in the loop’s size versus the use of strategies to more efficiently store information within it (chunking, etc) — and how and if it is possible to distinguish between the two.

This is important because if capacity could seemingly be improved on some task via a strategy, but that strategy doesn’t transfer to languages, it’s a false friend, so to speak.

Presumably, tasks specific to comprehension would improve the capacity of the loop, that’s assuming that it can be improved at all. Maybe things like the n-back task, set to audio only, or simply listening to short speech clips and trying to repeat it back straight afterwards (ideally in the target language), could be good exercises.

2 – Ability to pay attention

I’ve noted previously that attention is key to memory, and it’s pretty clear how attention fits into this model. If you keep focused on what they are saying you’ll get more of what they say into your phonological loop for later processing. Then when the conversational pause comes, your brain has more data to transform into something meaningful.

3 – Speed of processing

Note that this only applies to words you don’t know “automatically.” If they said “Gracias” or “Merci,” or something in your native language, the meaning would come to you. So at the most basic level, there’s an issue of learning the language well and knowing the words well, preferably without having to do “real-time” translations via your native language. The more of the data in the PL that you just “know,” the more time your brain has to work on the bits it doesn’t already know, and also, it can use the words it does know to narrow down the range of possibilities (more on that later).

Phonological loop in language acquisition

Just to turn everything I’ve just said upside-down, another consideration with the phonological loop is that it’s not solely applied to language comprehension — in fact, it may not even be critical for that (except perhaps in the cases I’ve noted above, during the initial stages of learning a language where listening is an active — and draining — task!).  It is strongly implicated in our ability to learn languages. For example, Gathercole and Baddeley (1989) found that a children’s performance on a word-repeating task predicted their vocabulary a year down the line. So we must be careful here not to confuse correlation with causality, because, for instance, we don’t know if changing our ability on word repeating tasks would improve our language acquisition abilities. It does seem more reasonable that this would improve our ability to comprehend language, however, for the reasons I described above.

Anything you do for an extended period of time has neurological and cognitive effects. Speaking another language is one thing that seems to have a wide range of effects, one of which being performance in tasks involving reasoning about other people’s beliefs, such as the false belief task.

The False Belief Task

The false belief task had usually been applied to samples of children (and you’ll soon understand why), but Rubio-Fernández and Glucksberg (2011) of UCL and Princeton applied it to a sample of adults — after a few modifications

The task involves a puppet show (told you), where two puppets, Sally and Anne are playing with a toy. Then then put the toy in a box, and Anne leaves the scene. While Anne is away, Sally puts the toy in a different box before she returns. When Anne does get back, the participants are asked where she will look for the toy.

Monolingual children start getting this right at about age four on average. It’s part of the idea of a “Theory of Mind,” where you adopt the belief that other people have a mind just like yours, but separate, and with different knowledge to  you have they will take different actions.

However, bilingual children are better at this task, correctly guessing that Anne will look in the box where she saw it last, as opposed to where they saw Sally place it, from around age three.

The idea is that because bilingual kids have experience talking to people in one language and receiving blank stares, they learn earlier that other people have a separate mind to their own. Which is also in line with the idea that the theory of mind is just a social construct, something that people “figure out” as opposed to a module that develops.

The adult version (not what you’re thinking…)

The False Belief task. Ecological validity?

Although everybody loves a good puppet show, you might see a difficulty in applying this same task to adult bilinguals – adults are all going to answer the task correctly, regardless of their lingual status. So the researchers added an eye tracking element to the test.

Rather than using the participant’s guess as to the location of the toy as the dependent variable, they used eye movements – did the participants first look at the box where the toy actually was (using their own knowledge) before looking at the original box (reasoning about other people’s beliefs)?

Oh, and the puppet show was replaced with a cartoon on a computer (I know, I was disappointed too).

How did the adults do?

As with the children, the adult bilinguals out-performed their monolingual peers. Comparisons of gaze directions between the two groups just sneaked under the holy .05 significance level: X2(1, N = 45) = 3.94, p < .048. So did the fixation latency – the time take to focus the gaze on the correct box – at t(44) = 2.07, p < .045, as you might expect given that more monolinguals looked in the wrong place first.

The Simon Task

The researchers also used another test – the Simon Task. In this, a key is assigned for “LEFT” and another for “RIGHT.” the words LEFT and RIGHT flash up on the screen, and you have to press the right key. Only, sometimes, “RIGHT” appears on the left of the screen, and vice-versa. If you want to give it a go, you can play a Java version here.

Success in this game relies on overriding your natural instinct to press the button on the right, even when the game tries to trick you into doing so. This is called “Executive Control” in cognitive psychology, after the catch-all term “Central Executive” which is used to describe pretty much anything we don’t understand yet. See this article on working memory for more information.

As with the False Belief test, the bilinguals did better here too. Why would this be? It’s thought to be because this sort of executive control is old hat to bilinguals. They have to suppress the other language while speaking and thinking, and this transfers to other tasks involving executive control.

Combining the Two

The paper also reports a correlation between performance on the Simon task and performance on the False Belief task – so presumably, the same cognitive ability is involved in both tasks, and bilingualism is the cause of this improved ability – or something that goes hand-in-hand with bilingualism, at the least.

What’s a bilingual?

Bilinguals performed better, but at what point in second language acquisition does this effect occur? The authors note that “all participants were to some extent familiar with a second language.” So that includes people designated as monolingual. The actual criteria they used was:

1. Learned the language before age 9
2. Used it regularly for over 10 years

However, the bulk of the group achieved bilingual status much sooner, with a self-reported mean acquisition age of 3. The extent of foreign language familiarity of the monolinguals was not reported. It could be a few years at school, it could be they bought a Spanish CD and listened to it twice.

Presumably, this effect would occur no matter when in life the second language was acquired. This fits with the executive control explanation. I’m not sure how to explain these results without it, but if they did the same test on people who acquired language two after, say, age 30, and didn’t get the same results, it might be interesting to try to reconcile the two.

Conclusion

This is one of many studies demonstrating cognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. Low ecological validity, and only marginally significant results (probably due to the fairly low sample size), also necessarily a quasi-experiment (non-random group assignment by default). However, the results are in line with a lot of other evidence – although bilinguals perform worse on some tasks, on this one they seem to do better.

Reference:

Rubio-Fernández, P. and Glucksberg, S. (2011), Reasoning about other people’s beliefs: Bilinguals have an advantage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.

I saw a TED talk that made me think about resilience, and how it’s such a broad and useful concept to have in your mental repertoire. You can apply it to anything and it will give you useful, practical ideas. This example is access to food, but I think the general formula can apply to anything.

For a culture that praises individuality and “making it on your own,” we’re pretty dependent on other people and external systems. That’s not necessarily bad, but for some people it sets off an internal alarm bell – what if these external systems were to fail?

That idea is not implausible. It happened to every society that went before us and many more that once existed concurrently to ours.

Resilience

In psychology there’s an excellent concept called resilience. Some people are more negatively affected by trauma than others. These people are more resilient. Trauma and difficulties bounce off the highly resilient like bullets bounce off Robocop. Less resilient – more fragile — people are not so lucky. It takes a weaker blow to psychologically knock them down, and they have a harder time getting back on the horse afterwards. [1]

Many factors determine who is psychologically resilient and who isn’t, and I can write about that if you want. But for the moment let’s expand the idea outside of psychology and into one of the basic survival needs – food. How resilient is our access to food?

Getting Food

At the moment you work for money, then buy food with that money. This relies on:

• Having a job/money
• There being affordable food in the shop

Without either of these two things, you can’t get food.

Money

How resilient is your income? How secure is your job? What’s the economic outlook? Do you have savings? Is your currency’s value going to hold?

Shops

Shops rely on transport, which relies on fuel, which relies on the price and availability of oil. If oil prices go up, so do food prices. If your country is a net food importer, its system is fragile to the same extent as the countries from which it imports.

Assessing Food Resilience

Lots of other things could affect your access to money and your local supermarket’s access to food for it to sell. Look into them. For each one, ask yourself, “What would happen to my access to food if this happened?” For example, if oil prices went up, if you lost your job, if the government cut back unemployment benefits, etc.

Knocks to the System

Resilient systems can absorb trauma and keep going. Fragile systems crumble. Anti-fragile systems [1] get stronger through trauma.

Now that you’ve researched and thought about it, is your “access to food” system resilient? What about in five years, or ten years?

If you consider your system resilient, let me know why – Do you have a garden? Will the market provide? Are you Ray Mears?

Increasing Resilience

If you can maintain your access to food in the event of the factors you identified earlier, your system is resilient. What might this look like?

• Growing food
• Urban homesteading
• Having chickens
• Stored rations/preserving food
• Foraging skills
• Wasting less

And so on. These are resilient to wider, global problems and hence are more resilient. But each one of these are fragile to different factors. If everyone in your town learned to forage, the skill would be useless if everyone quickly stripped the land. So you might have to go through this process several times, thinking out contingencies.

I like the general process though and I think it’s worth going through these steps for a number of key areas (food, water, transport, energy, health, mental health, community, entertainment… etc).

Here’s the visual aid:

[1] Naseem Taleb has argued that these two concepts – resilience and fragility — are not opposites. The opposite of fragility, he argues, is anti-fragility – a quality whereby variance actually strengthens its possessor, as opposed to its possessor being simply immune to the negative effects of variability. A related concept in psychology is post-traumatic growth, which is a positive psychological-style approach to reaction to trauma; and a valid viewpoint I think – if you only study post-traumatic stress, that’s all you’ll find.

Piracetam is a nootropic – a compound used to improve mental performance in some way. They’re often called (and sold as) “smart drugs.” The name derives from the Greek words nous and trepein, meaning “mind” and “to turn” respectively. Or so Wikipedia says at least. You may be familiar with the concept of smart drugs as a result of seeing Face from the A-Team taking the fictional (but highly desirable nonetheless) drug “NZT” in Limitless.

Piractam: Intelligence in one gulp? (or two if you’re a wussy who can’t swallow tablets)

Piracetam is a prescription drug given for a range of reasons, but it only reached true fame and stardom after people on the internet started saying it made them smarter. Observe:

“I am not used to have this much energy and now I could do things more easily. I even started to multitask, which is close to impossible in my regular state of mind. Now, ideas are popping up spontaneously and it is no effort to execute the corresponding actions. I also feel more self-esteem, confidence and feel in The Zone: Flow. I feel attentive, centered and motivated. My eyes are more energetic, powerful, wide open and present. I have glowing blushes on my cheeks, a smile on my face and I feel happy, it IS just great!!!” (source)

Don’t get too excited. I’m in the skeptical camp on this one, especially when it comes to spectacular reports like this. And yes this does come from experience, of this any many many other smart drugs (but more on that another time).

Effects on cognitive disorder

Clever marketing for the Limitless film. Sadly, it’s not actually available! (photo credit)

A good few studies have observed beneficial effects on people with age-related cognitive disorder, such as improved performance on memory tests. It might also reduce the deterioration that people normally experience when its taken over longer periods. According to one meta-analysis, 60% of patients taking piracetam saw improvements, while only 30% of those taking placebo saw improvements.

This is well enough, but note that you can’t simply generalise results observed on clinical populations to healthy populations and expect the same results. In other words, just because it helps people with lower than normal cognitive function see improvements, doesn’t mean it will help people with normal function get even better. This is a general rule that you can apply to any intervention or treatment – the jury is out until it has been tested empirically. Whether or not piracetam actually works in healthy individuals is worth a separate post in itself, so I’ll leave that for now. But there are reasons to be skeptical, as we’ll see.

Other Clinical Uses

Not that you care, but piracetam also has shown itself to be a beneficial treatment for vertigo, cortical myoclonus, dyslexia, and sickle cell anemia, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Dosage

The dose given therapeutically and in research varies depending on the condition. For cognitive impairment, 2.4g and 4.8g per day are common doses used in tests. For cortical myoclonus doses up to 24g per day are reported.

Safety

Piracetam is often noted as being one of the least toxic compounds ever discovered, if not the least. No toxicity has been found in animal studies after administering 10g per kilogram of the stuff. Which, for the average self-experimental nootropic user, probably amounts to more than he can afford. Some side-effects have been noted, less than 2% report nervousness, weight gain, depression and other symptoms (that’s less than 2% for each one), though I’m not sure what the severity of this was.

It is not recommended in people with renal disease, since that’s the way its excreted, and it’s not recommended for pregnant or lactating women. If you’re a pregnant or lactating man, well there’s no evidence for your particular case but if I were you I wouldn’t risk it.

Taste

Disgusting.

Pharmacodynamics and other more technical stuff

Piracetam influences a range of neurotransmitter systems (cholinergic, serotoninergic, noradrenergic and glutamatergic) and yet has no affinity for any of the receptors in these systems.

Think of receptors as locks and neurotansmitters as keys. When enough keys go into the locks, an electrical signal is passed along the neuron until it reaches the next synapse. Piracetam’s “key” doesn’t fit any of the locks in the systems where these neurotransmitters operate, yet still seems to have an effect on them. So it somehow works indirectly to this end.

It may be that piracetam increases the number of receptors, or how efficient they are. Your money’s on the latter though, since membrane fluidity affects receptor binding, and that’s the likely way that Piracetam works.

As noted earlier, Piracetam may have better (or perhaps may only have) effects where there’s reduced membrane fluidity to begin with. Another example of this is its ability to decrease membrane fusion and damage, which has been observed in studies of long-term changes in the brain due to alcohol use (in rates).

Mechanism of Action

Piracetam is a GABA derivative but its mode of action is thought to be completely different. In fact, exactly how piracetam works is unknown, though if you had to bet, put your money on its ability to restore cell membrane fluidity. That’s cells in general, not any localised area, so this idea fits with piracetam’s apparent Jack-of-all-trades effects.

The lipid bilayer of cells can vary in state from a more fluid state where the phospholipid chains are moving more, to a crystalline state where the tails of the lipids are straight, extended, and tightly packed. However, the membrane still keeps its general shape. This fluidity is important for loads of other processes, like receptor binding. When fluidity is worse, so are neurotransmission, neuroplasticity and neuroprotection. These are three things you generally want more of if you want to be Limitless.

That said, some evidence suggests that piracetam has a greater effect on membrane fluidity at times when normal fluidity is compromised, or perhaps even only at these times. For example, during ageing. For instance one study found increases in fluidity in old mice, but not younger ones with normal fluidity to begin with. If you’re skeptical about mice studies, another study found the same thing in Alzheimer’s patients.

Bradley Cooper definitely wasn’t taking this stuff in those oddly transparent tablets, but it does have some uses. Whether its useful as a nootropic isn’t completely clear (unlike NZT, which is completely clear). Certainly not in comparison to other methods of cognitive enhancement.

References

I got 90% of this from Bengt Winblad’s excellent 2005 review Piracetam: A Review of Pharmacological Properties and Clinical Uses, CNS Drug Reviews, 11(2) 169-182.

Learn more.

Biofeedback is a process where biological or neurological (in which case it would be neurofeedback) systems are monitored by a device, and information is fed back from the device to the individual (or a doctor stood next to said individual). This allows us to monitor, regulate, investigate and learn about various bodily functions, processes and states.

This is used medically of course but I’m more interested here in the increasing use of biofeedback by self-help enthusiasts. For example, say a guy wants to regulate his stress level. He might use a biofeedback machine measuring galvanic skin conductance, heart rate, or something like that. The machine will beep or flash in accordance with his measured stress levels. This allows the guy to learn how to control his stress levels – he can try deep breathing, muscle relaxation, mediation; anything, and see the results in the device. Using the biofeedback machine, he’ll find a way to reduce his stress level, which he can then apply in his life.

The best thing, is that this is scientific, and quantitative. He doesn’t have to take the advice of gurus or rely on folklore, nor does he have to make ‘guestimates’ about what therapies work best for him, which might be blinded by what he wished would work. He’ll know what technique is the best and by how much.

Biofeedback Machines

Matt Ward demonstrates an ear-mounted biofeedback device and Wing Chun Kung Fu at the same time. (Photo Credit).

I could refer to them as biofeedback devices. That might be more accurate…but it’s just… not as cool! I like the term ‘biofeedback machines’, makes them sound like The Terminator or something.

No matter how cool that sounds, some biofeedback self-monitoring gadgets you are quite familiar with. Here are a few of the more common ones:

• Blood pressure monitor
• Heart rate monitor
• Pedometer (OK… walking is not a biological system exactly, but it can tell you by proxy a lot about these sytems, your habits, and perhaps some psychological function of how lazy you are..or not! So it’s in the same spirit from a self-help point of view)
• Electrencephalogram
• Electrodermal response machine
• Electromyogram
• Polygraph (lie detector)
• Thermometer

Biofeedback is used by medical professionals (obviously), personal development enthusiasts, athletes, peak performance coaches, and hobbyists. Anyone who will benefit from more accurate, quantitative data about themselves will benefit from biofeedback.

Here’s a quick introduction video to biofeedback from the University of East Carolina:

Why the interest?

He simply could not look more like an evil genius. (photo credit).

I’m a compulsive record keeper. It started when I was about 14 and got a set of weights. I created my own system of recording workouts (I still use a similar system today), and after that I was recording all kinds of nerdy things, and it wasn’t long before I got interested in biofeedback. I’m not the most hardcore self-tracker – I know someone who has detailed records of themselves and their family covering large stretches of time – but what I lack in intensity I make up for in general interest.

More comprehensive introduction

I’ve what you’ve seen and read so far has piqued your interest, check out the following video series for a more comprehensive introduction:

Told you it was comprehensive.

Fun Stuff – Brain to Twitter Interface

Researchers at the university of Wisconsin have developed a way for people to send tweets using only the power of their minds (well, mind power and some sophisticated neurofeedback technology…).

This technology has massive potential. For one thing, it would allow quadriplegics and other physically disabled individuals to carry a number of functions they would not ordinarily be able to do. If neurofeedback can send a tweet, it’s not a great step to be able to control the lights in your house, change the radio station, write an email, and so on. Although the technology is in its infancy, this is some serious headway that’s being made! Plus it’s just… cool.

You can follow the Tweets of the lab here. The ones in all caps were send using the brain-twitter interface!

Yes.

Some people just have that “Get up and go,” don’t they??? This goes by many names – self-control, grit, motivation, drive, persistence, work-ethic. When it comes to succeeding in a particular pursuit, this thing is a pretty important factor, too. One study found that self-reported grit was more important than IQ in predicting a number of outcomes in eighth-grade students:

Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework.

It’s a pretty common trait among successful people, too. Will Smith is a pretty successful guy by most standards. Why is that? Here’s what he has to say about success:

Why are some people driven like this, while others are happy to tread water? Will Smith is clearly a very competitive guy with a huge work ethic. Where other people would be happy to take a day off, he keeps on working. Where other people slow down, he speeds up. Sounds exhausting! What is behind such a huge amount of effort?

Genetics

I don’t believe that this is a fixed trait, because different people in different cultures and environments will react differently. But I do think genetics play a role. Many traits studied by psychologists have a strong genetic component, according to studies of twins. So maybe the traits that lead to being driven also develop more easily in people with a certain set of genes. I’ve never believed the idea that “All people are created equal.” Clearly, some people are born with better aptitudes in different areas than others. We’re not all born with the same mental blank slate, onto which we can develop in different directions.

Intrinsic Motivation

I’ve talked before about the difference between intrinsic motivation (something you do for its own sake) versus extrinsic motivation (something you do for a reward). Could it be that lack of drive is simply a symptom of doing something for a reward, as opposed to doing it for the pure pleasure of doing it?

Michael Jordan talks in his autobiography about how the massive amount of effort he put into training was fun. For him, getting up early every day to practice free throws was scarcely an effort. Not that it’s right to say he has no work ethic — of course not — only that what seems on the outside to be a strong work ethic and “forcing” of behaviours is sometimes less so from the inside.

The key thing to keep in mind here is difficulty. In the video above, Will Smith mentions the idea of talent versus skill, of honing your craft for thousands of hours until you’re a master. This gels with Ericsson‘s work on deliberate practice, and the well-known (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell) idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach mastery, regardless of the starting skill level. Deliberate practice is different to just doing the activity. It is doing it at the outer limit of your ability. It’s working on those hard, frustrating aspects that actually take effort. If you find a pentatonic scale difficult but could jam along to “She Loves You” all day long, then working on the former contributes to your 10,000 hours but the latter does not.

If your craft is something that naturally appeals to you, and you enjoy, so much the better, but you’ll still have times you don’t want to practice, or you’d rather relax, or where you’ve reached a plateau that is hard for you to progress past. Therefore, to the extent that skill level plays a role in success, it stands to reason that grit, persistence, and work ethic is going to play a role in success regardless of intrinsic motivation. As beneficial as it may be, don’t make the mistake of thinking that intrinsic motivation is necessarily synonymous with “high” motivation. I read books for intrinsic reasons, but I don’t always want to read.

You could say therefore, that success can stem from something that you’re intrinsically motivated to do, but either doesn’t require high levels of skill, or you already have high levels of skill in. As long as it’s not something mundane like eating. If you can find something like that, you’re home free, so it’s worth considering if any activities like this exist for you.

However, there is a trap here. If you’re looking for external success via something you’re intrinsically motivated to do, it could very easily switch to something you’re extrinsically motivated to do when you start seeing it as a path to external rewards. This is particularly dangerous, because as Dan Pink notes, motivation for activities only tends to be increased by external rewards when these are rote, boring, repetitive tasks. Ability on tasks that require creative thought or effort tends to be stunted by the promise of rewards. Maybe that’s why a musician’s second album is usually worse than the first?

Purpose / Meaning

Maybe some people have a greater sense of purpose behind them, and this provides the motivation for them to keep going even through difficult times. Survival is one such purpose. It’s hard to imaging Chinese factory workers doing 18 hour days in terrible conditions for any reason other than to survive. If they had a few million in the bank, that would seem like an absurd course of action.

Being anchored to a purpose might keep people going. When they feel like they want to take a break, they remind themselves of what they are trying to do, and they suddenly feel the urge to continue. This makes sense to me. I think our bodies keep energy in reserve, even when we feel very tired, just in case something of high importance becomes salient. Many a times I’ve been walking down the street, tired and hunched, when I see a pretty girl walking the opposite way. Isn’t it funny? I suddenly find the energy to walk upright and stick my chest out a bit!

I imagine this as a kind of evolutionary reserve power store, just in case something comes up that might influence our ability to survive our reproduce. But because our brains are adaptable, and self-programmable, we can “install” a number of rules so our brain learns other occasions it should access our reserve power. The ability to build a sense of purpose might be one such thing. Of the top of my head, I can think of one study that backs this up, where people who reviewed their core values did better in a self-control task than people who didn’t.

The need for success itself might serve this role for some. Why would Will Smith rather die than get off a treadmill before you? You could imagine some negative motivations behind this, like not wanting to feel like a failure, or status consciousness taken to such an extreme level that people would rather try to beat everyone that simply deal with that issue. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Competition can be a tool, something that you use to motivate yourself but deep down understand is essentially meaningless. Beyond competition, the desire to contribute and to serve might provide that purpose. There are many examples of people being willing to put themselves through hell, even to die, for a purpose. This is something we’ve been reminded of in recent years but the mechanism has always existed.

If this is correct, the action step here is to install a purpose into yourself, to find the meaning behind what you want to do. There are two ways. One is to determine your values, beliefs and convictions, and pick your direction based on them. This makes sense but is very difficult. If you ask yourself “What do I value?”, “What do I believe?”, it would be hard to know if the answer is “real,” and not something that has been pushed into your head from one of the 10 zillion sources we’re bombarded from in daily life. How “deep” do you have to go to find your true purpose, if there is such a thing, and where does it even come from?

The other way is to take your direction, and integrate your values into it. This strikes me as a temporary solution at best since the two probably won’t fit together very well. It’s unlikely you be pursuing a path that’s in line with your core values and not know it on some level. The reverse is probably true as well, if you’re going in a “wrong” direction there’s probably a little niggling feeling that pops up occasionally (but you bash it back down with the perks of the job).

Have I missed anything?

What do you think about this? Why are some people more driven than others? This isn’t an extensive list, just a few ideas – what have I missed?

Also, what do you think about the “how” side of things. How does one install a sense of purpose for instance?

Here’s another question – can the lack of purpose, motivation and genetic propensity be overcome through “techniques?” If you set goals, go over your values, plan your time, etc., is that enough?

As a long-term bachelor, I might be a little bit biased about this, but I recently got the idea that marriage is an unnatural and unfulfilling strategy for most people. On further reflection and reading, I thought, why stop at marriage? and included monogamy generally.

I thought about this for a while and came up with a phrasing for my hypothesis:

“Marriage/monogamy goes against our nature, and unless it is enforced externally, will end in failure except in the odd occasional case.”

I’m going to explore this topic and report the findings here, although smaller facts and stuff will go in the Q&A section before being compiled.

Which group are you in? (Credit: GEEKSTATS)

Now first, let me define the terms:

• Marriage/lifelong monogamy - When I use these terms I’m talking about life long/long term commitment to a single partner. So if one partner cheats, then by my definition, that’s not monogamy (see failure, below). I’m not sure how serial or short-term monogamy fits in, that might be a kind of exception. But certainly, this idea of “The one”, “true love” and all that, is what I’m referring to here, the very kind we’re brainwashed with in movies and songs all year round. And don’t think the old “There are lots of ‘ones‘” argument counts, because even if you accept that there are many compatible people out there, that line still implies lifelong commitment to one of them.
• Unnatural – Unnatural, against our nature; these are slippery terms, and it’s not necessarily safe to talk about human nature outside of a cultural context. For instance, it’s in our nature to gorge on fat and sugar when it’s available. For a tribal culture in the Savannah, this is excellent; it helps you get those crucial calories. But in a society with easy access to junk food, people get fat. Likewise, what I’m proposing is that it’s in our nature to seek multiple sexual and/or romantic partners, and that this causes problems in a society that puts monogamy and “true love” on a pedestal.
• Enforced externally – Through law, superstition, social stigma, or other forces.
• Failure – As you know, mono means one. With poly we have two terms – polygamous (multiple marriages), and polyamory (multiple partners, no marriage). If someone in a marriage cheats, that’s polyamory, and a point in favour of the hypothesis. Divorces generally are a point in favour, but that’s a pretty deep topic for just now. Also, I say marriages may work if enforced, but if an enforced marriage is not a fulfilling one for both parties, I’m also classing that as failure, because if it wasn’t enforced it probably would end (and if enforced marriages are unsatisfying, that’s a point in favour of the unnatural argument above).

Answers to some expected questions you might have:

Mongamy, polygamy, marriage, blah blab blah. Aren’t you just splitting hairs/arguing over semantics?

No. I’ll explain why later.

My parents/grandparents/friends/pet albatrosses have been in a committed relationship for all their lives monogamously and harmoniously. Ha! Take that mister! You’re wrong!

Firstly, if you know of someone who has been in a committed, loving, lifelong, monogamous relationship (that is, no affair by either party), GREAT. I’m NOT saying it never happens, nor am I saying it’s not a beautiful thing when it does happen. I’m just saying, these cases are outliers, and the cases where there wasn’t some external enforcement of the relationship are rarer still.

Secondly, I could be wrong, which is why I’m going to look into it and write about it on the blog as I do.

Finally, I’m NOT saying marriages that aren’t monogamous can’t work, nor that a marriage in which one partner cheats is unsuccessful by definition. Quite the opposite in fact, as you’ll see…

You asshole. You have threatened my belief system and I am deeply offended. What gives you the right to question the status quo like this?

If you’re offended or upset by what you’re read so far, I strongly suggest you don’t read this blog from now on; I might turn out to be right!

I have data/opinions/a story in support of/refuting this hypothesis, would you like me to share it with you?

Yes please, either email me or leave a comment.

A few quick thoughts based on yesterday’s post, namely – the normal weight for women, the most attractive BMI, and flaws with the BMI system.

The normal weight for women

What’s the ideal weight for women? Obviously this depends on your height – if you’re 7′ tall your ideal weight is different than someone who is 5′ tall. That’s where the idea of Body Mass Index (BMI) comes in – it takes your height into account when working out your ideal weight. So there is no ‘normal’ weight for women, however those in the know say a BMI in the ranges below is healthy. Keep this in mind for a moment:

The most attractive BMI

Since the last post was focused on overweight, we only glossed over the most attractive BMIs reported by the participants. Look at graphs (a) and (g) again from yesterday:

We’ll use (a) and (g) as the example here as these represent the most extreme socio-economic difference of all the graphs – (a) is industrialised Britain, (g) is rural Malaysia. Now, in Britain we see the ideal BMI in terms of attractiveness is 20, while in Malaysia it’s around 24. Why a higher score for Malaysians? The theory is that more overweight people have access to more resources in order to become overweight in the first place. Thus, you’d expect a little higher BMI to be more attractive. Similar results have been found in other poorer countries, such as Ghana. For Brits, if you look at the first picture above, you can see that the most attractive BMI correlates with the ideal health in Britain. Keep this in mind also.

Limitations of BMI

BMI was developed over 100 years ago, so it’s a shame we haven’t come up with something better. The problem is that it doesn’t take body composition into account. For example, I’m fairly lean, but my BMI indicates that I am slightly overweight. If Arnold Schwarzenegger had taken a BMI test in his heyday the results would say he was overweight (6’2”, 240 lbs = BMI 30.8). Compare the male 30 BMI image above to Arnie below:

Not quite the same thing, is it?

So while BMI can be a useful, quick, tool, that doesn’t need any special equipment, extensive examination or invasive procedures, it’s maybe not the best thing to use in empirical research, and maybe the correlations with health aren’t as accurate as they could be (which is crucial to the theory in question, which sees BMI as a mate-selection factor as a proxy for health). So just as BMI seems to have surpassed WHR (waist-hip-ratio) as the evolutionary attractiveness research statistic of choice, maybe something taking body fat percentage into account will offer even greater predictive validity.

In a previous post, I mentioned the idea that there are some aspects of female physical attractiveness that are universal – the waist to hip ratio, and certain aspects of the face, such as symmetry. Other things, like body weight, are less fixed, and opinions will differ over time and culture. Have a look at that article for some examples and pictures.

Now there is research disputing one aspect of this – the waist to hip ratio. The old perspective was, if a woman is overweight, she’s less attractive, but if she keeps a desirable waist to hip ratio, this is assuaged somewhat (the waist to hip ratio in question is 0.68, aka the hourglass – again look at the above link for pictures).

The new perspective is that waist to hip ratio isn’t actually that important, and in fact it’s a proxy for determining body weight. The test of this is the usual take people into a room, show them photographs, and ask them to rate the attractiveness of the people in them. In this study, Viren Swami and Martin Tovee tested five groups of participants, two based in Britain and three in Malaysia. The latter is a useful place to test these ideas, because they have the same race of people living in very different environments, from industrialised to rural, with shades of grey in between.

By the way, they weren’t specifically looking for the answer to “Do men like overweight women” as I’ve named the post here – the theory is that people in poorer areas tend to find heavier women more attractive, because the extra weight is an indication they are rich and able to afford plenty of food, and/or can afford to pay people to do their labour for them.

Here are the results, which I hope they won’t mind me reposting in the name of science dissemination:

As you can see, the theory holds up. Look at the bottom graph, the peak of the curve is further to the right than in the richer, industrialised participants (the British, for example). Kota Kinabalu is referred to as semi-industrialised, ans you can see the peak is somewhere between where is is in the rural and industrialised groups.

Back to the initial question – do men like overweight women? Let’s take a look at the data. The participants had to rate the photographs on scales of 1-9, so what cut of point would you consider attractive? It’s hard to say, and that’s a problem with this sort of study – the results can only give meaningful feedback relative to other results collected under the same conditions. Let’s be conservative and use the half-way point – 4.5. A BMI of 26 is considered slightly overweight – see this image:

So connecting the dots, we see that in Britain, slightly overweight women are just hitting the 4.5 mark, beyond that the curve is tailing away. In rural areas, however, things are different. There, a BMI of 26 gets an attractiveness rating of a little over 5, roughly equivalent to someone with a BMI of about 20 in Britain (20 being roughly what Beyonce is, if celebrity websites can be believed).

If you’re a lady with a BMI of 26, there’s how you become as attractive as Beyonce – move to rural Malaysia!

Stick thin tanned models on the “Cucumber and Cocaine” diet have not always been considered the pinnacle of human female attractiveness. Generally speaking, in poorer countries (and times), heavier women tend to be viewed as more attractive. This is thought to be because in poor countries, resources like food are scarce, and if a woman is large, it must indicate that she has good access to resources.

If you’ve been following these recent articles on dating and attractiveness, the methodology will now be familiar to you. Participants were shown a series of photographs of women, for each of whom the weight and other essential statistics were known. In this test, the faces of the women were screened out, so that men were focused only on the body.

Males on a college campus (the favourite place for psychologists to do their work) were approached either going in or coming out of the canteen. They were asked how hungry they were on a 1-7 scale, and then shown the photographs.

Don’t let him have it!

So what were the results? As you may have guessed, hungry men found the heavier women more attractive. Furthermore, there was an impact on body shape, with hungry men finding less curvaceous shapes more attractive than satiated men. Interestingly, another study found the same result, with the additional finding that men who are financially dissatisfied also preferred heavier women. I wonder if larger women are getting laid more in this financial recession?

So if you’re a larger woman, try not to take your dates on a meal with you, but if you do, make sure he pays a lot for it!

Ref:

Swami, V. & Tovee, M.J. (2005). Does hunger influence judgments of female physical attractiveness

Women wearing red might, might be seen as more attractive to males on average. Likewise, men wearing red might be more attractive to women.

Same deal as the study on the men – women were shown pictures of men, and their shirt was photoshopped from white to red for different participants. So half the ladies saw white shirt guy, half saw Mr red shirt. Then they were asked how attractive the men were on a scale of 1-9. Indeed, Mr red shirt achieved higher ratings – 6.79 versus 5.67 for white shirt guy.

A few criticisms, some of which they had covered but are useful to bring up as you know what to look for should you ever read a psychological research paper. In the first study, only 20 participants took part – that’s not a particularly large sample to generalise from. Luckily, the paper replicated this effect with more and larger samples, so we’re good here. Also these were all undergrads, aged 18-25 typically – is this an age thing, or do older women prefer red too? What about women in different countries? Does the effect hold elsewhere? Well experiment four replicated the effect in China, although again with 18-25 year old undergraduates.

Wearing red and having a red background to the photo both worked. Obviously carrying a big red box around is not an optimal solution – I recommend clothes when outdoors.

So some limitations were covered, but the main one of course is that because this is a controlled lab experiment, all we have is a relative difference in the ratings of the two conditions, without any idea whatsoever of how this maps onto real world effects. What does an attractiveness increase of 1 point on a 1-9 scale mean? Does it mean he gets one more date per week, per month, per year, etc? How does that one point increase interact with other things? For example, if women think he is one point higher in red, but he hates red and thinks he is 4 points lower, does that self-consciousness override the benefits?

One thing we can be fairly safe in saying is, you have a slight advantage if your online dating profile shows you wearing red, or if it has a red background.

ref