A Trolley Named Desire

September 14th, 2011 · No Comments · brain-related, Language learning, Motivation, Social Learning, Uncategorized

OK, everybody knows the little trolley  thought experiment, right? It even has a Wikipedia page, which I shall now quote liberally from:

A trolley  is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher [or workers working on a track in the less dramatic version I first  heard]. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?

And so most people say they would indeed flip the switch and sacrifice one for the safety of the five. But then comes the second version (the description of which at Wikipedia  is under the rather blunt  heading “The fat man”:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

And most people recoil at the thought. Hmm, smile the ethical philosophers, you do realize that the two scenarios are identical, do you not? Killing one saves the five. But there is a difference and an important one that keeps bringing people back to this problem. Michael Sandel uses it to start his wildly-popular course on Justice (available online here, BTW).   The difference between the problems makes you think. I am not alone in the reaction I had, judging from the opinions of Sandel’s students and the tabulated results of people answering the questions. I originally felt that the difference between just flipping a switch and actually running up to and grabbing, hoisting, and possibly forcing  a bewildered obese person over the bridge railing was enough difference to make me take a less active role in the second scenario.

But this morning, while reading David Eagleman’s engaging Incognito on the train to work, I read about the neuroscience take on the problem (also listed on the Wikipedia page as I discovered later). Eagleman introduces  Joshua Greene and Jonathon Cohen, who have done a lot of research on neuroethics, much of it in Greene’s Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard. According to them and the neuroscience perspective, the difference is that interacting with the fat man up close activates the emotional networks of the brain . The brain, Eagleman explains, is a “team of rivals” and two large groupings of rivals are the emotional and rational systems. In fMRI screenings of people considering the two trolley problems, the first scenario causes areas of the brain connected to rational thinking to be more active and the second scenario activates areas involved with motor planning and emotion.

Cognitive or emotional? Advertisers know the difference between these two systems well. And so do politicians. But in education, the cognitive is still everything. The  phrase that suddenly grew larger for me on the page this morning, the one that makes all the difference, is ”personal interaction.” In re-thinking the classrooms of language lessons in Japan, I wonder if this is not the key issue. I think creating a cacophony of social/personal interaction to activate the emotional parts of the brain might be a goal for these classes, though  rational minds might recoil at such an approach. It seems fair to say that affect is woefully under-addressed in courses, coursebooks, and pedagogical literature (the latter probably because of the difficulty of doing research). There is this book, now 13 years old and counting, but much of the literature seems concerned primarily with reducing learner anxiety in the classroom. But in terms of neuroscience, 13 years is  a lifetime ago…Jane Arnold, the editor of Affect in Language Learning,  says on her website that” she is convinced that when teaching is affective it becomes more effective” but there seems to be little in the way of literature that really demonstrates that. I guess I’ll just need to keep looking.

 

 

Tags:

Investigative Journalism on Memory: Joshua Foer Goes Moonwalking With Einstein

September 9th, 2011 · No Comments · Books, brain-related, Memory, Uncategorized

As just another aging baby boomer with a dementia-distorted parent and a career in language education and a propensity to misplace items on mental shopping lists, interest, awe, and fear of memory are never far from the tip of my tongue. I have thought about it, read about it, and studied it. But Joshua Foer’s book–squarely aimed at that large group of memorywarts like me–includes a dollop of how-to to in a book that is part narrative and part meander through a palace of memory.

As a recent graduate and an aspiring science writer, young Mr. Foer covered the World Memory Championships and the American Memory Championships and, being convinced by the participants themselves that there is more learnable technique than anything else, decided to give it a go. His account of his introduction to competitive memory and his training for the US Memory Championship that he eventually wins provides the  narrative structure for the book. Along the way, however, he slides in asides related to memory–the importance of knowing facts in learning, expertise training, an introduction to memory misfits, etc. Most of these will not be new to most readers I suspect. But they are interesting enough and there are enough nuggets  to be found along the way that as a refresher course in introductory memory and a collection of memory-related magazine articles they are pleasant enough. His journalistic style makes the content easier to read and remember than Baddeley. He also goes into detail on how to use the method of loci and some of the techniques used by memory champs to do amazing things. Readers can decide how far they want to go in trying some of the techniques–a few can be done with the book closed on your lap for a bit, but some will require serious effort and practice–but this is a book that encourages you to try these things out for yourself.

Reading the book won’t improve your memory; it will put memory in perspective for you, though. And it will start you off with some powerful techniques that you can use to practice your way to improvement–not for everything, but for some things–and for me that was worth the price of admission.

But if you are just after the techniques for improving memory, there are print and web resources galore. The techniques everyone uses have mostly been around since the Middle Ages and it seems literally hundreds of people are making a living off  re-packaging them. Do a quick web search on the method of loci to find out as much as many “experts” know in a very short time. Foer is set apart by the fact that he has a science background and is a relatively good writer, but there are dozens of similar books on the market, most of which are probably extremely similar. One interesting and comprehensive  website I did find is by Fiona McPhersona, a memory expert (author/researcher) with an strong interest in practical application. It  is called Mempowered. It covers both the mechanisms of memory and techniques for improvement. And there is something here for all memory hopes and worries.

Tags:

Pragamatic Chaos: The Physics of Culture

August 24th, 2011 · No Comments · Culture, Presentations, Technology, Uncategorized

Sometimes things cluster. They appear close enough together that patterns emerge. Today I would like to introduce a cluster of items that I’ve recently come across courtesy of Yahoo movies, TED, and the BBC.

Let’s start with Yahoo movies, where I regularly go to watch the previews for upcoming movies that I will mostly never see. I feel each chew of my lunch with my headset on as I run through tw0-minute introductions to horror flicks, kid movies, chick flicks, made-to-be blockbusters, and occasionally very interesting movies whose titles I hopefully will recognize in a year or so when they show up for rental here in Japan. Among the few previews I watched a few weeks back was Moneyball, more because it was there than because it stars Brad Pitt, is about baseball, or is the story of Billy Beane–a list with two didn’t-really-cares and one didn’t-know. But to my surprise, the topic and the movie grabbed my interest. Because of this:  Sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is the use of empirical statistical evidence to evaluate past success and predict future success. In my understanding of baseball, it is a game of statistics, and so a movie based on a book based on a  team that uses a new statistical approach to get phenomenal results with fractional investments made me interested in the topic of how someone could effectively use more stats, different stats, in a world driven by stats, and make a big difference. It is a merging of cultural self-awareness and math that allows for the seeing of things that are there but had not been noticed, because people lived with a different culture and because they didn’t do/ read the math. The stats people watched had been based on old thinking about the game, knowledge and norms amassed over generations–prevalent and flawed, or at least incomplete.

And then yesterday a BBC article steered me toward a TED talk. Skim the article but watch every moment of the presentation. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Kevin Slavin begins to explain the physics of culture. The talk is mostly about Wall Street and the algorithms they use to play the market and the infrastructure being built to give those algorithms a few milliseconds headstart to do their job, but his comments about culture and algorithms brought me back to Moneyball and how things people think of as esoteric (and by esoteric I mean knowable only by a select group that does not include many people and all machines) are knowable, convertible into algorithms, and effective on you. Did you know that 70 % of choices made on Netflix are the result of suggestions made by an algorithm, one called Pragmatic Chaos? Or that algorithms are helping to decide what movies get made at all?

This is a challenge to culture and I do not mean big “C” culture, but rather the way we view what culture is, who creates it, and what it means for all of us. The BBC article sounds practically ominous:

…our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe. Their weapon of choice – the algorithm. Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. From the web retailers – calculating what books and films we might be interested in, to Facebook’s friend finding and image tagging services, to the search engines that guide us around the net. It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world.

In typical hyperbolic  fashion this confuses the point with the fear. It is not only about our electronic worlds, and if we have overlords it is by virtue of not understanding ourselves and our own culture(s) very well, not because some new type of insidious new electronic overlords have recently been put in place.

Tags:

What do Teachers Need to Know About Culture?

May 17th, 2011 · No Comments · Culture

Starting this year, I am part of a team that is including culture in training sessions for Japanese senior high school teachers of English. I’m not unfamiliar with the topic, having taught a content course at junior college called Anglo-American culture for eight years. But it still was hard in the beginning to come up with content for our sessions. We wondered what exactly  high school teachers need to know about culture.

Recent visits to some high school classes have made me think that the answer to that last question is “lots.” In all of the classes, there was a definite focus on the isolated utterance, strings of words held together by grammar plucked from the communicationosphere and duly explained, and manipulated in drills. High school teachers have an almost gravitational attraction to grammar from what I’ve seen. There seems to be a strong tendency to conceptualize language as (man, I am tempted to write “merely” here) a collection of grammar and lexis; one that that must be taught in order. Compared to many other language education settings, the junior and senior high school system in Japan possesses a level of comprehensiveness and order that I am in awe of. The approach followed focuses on discreet items pulled from textbooks that are far too advanced for the level of users. It is mechanical. And here is where culture rears its head. First, such language is often similar to the model diagrams we find in applied linguistics textbooks or psychology textbooks, all boxes connected by lines or arrows to show relationships and processes, a shorthand for the messy biological reality taking place in living breathing organisms. We get so focused on the abstract that we forget that language is communication, and communication is context, and context means people, and people means culture. Culture influences how people make sense of social situations and how they approach communication opportunities. Culture influences the action chains or scripts people follow as they navigate situations and interact with others. So an understanding of how culture influences thinking and language use is essential, what is often called deep culture (see Joseph Shaules’s book for an excellent introduction, or visit his website), but that is not all that comes to mind.

It is a sad truth in Japan (and probably most places) that language education is not incredibly successful. After six years of instruction, most learners cannot adequately introduce themselves, ask for or give basic directions, understand an opinion and voice their own, etc. etc. But they have been exposed to a comprehensive list of grammatical structures and a very long list of “essential” vocabulary. An entire conversation industry and pages of courses in university and college catalogs are devoted to simply getting people to remember, re-learn, or  try to use the contents of those six years of lessons. Which brings up the second culture point I want to mention: the culture of teaching situations. There is a clear cultural separation between two “camps”, the serious, comprehensive camp of Japanese junior and senior high school teachers of English, and the looser, more eclectic eikaiwa (or English for use) camp. It is, of course, a false dichotomy, but I think in cultural terms, there is enough difference to constitute looking at these as different cultures. And a book I read by accident helped me to see that. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner specialize in culture and business and they provide some important insights into culture just with their approach. I ordered one of their books,  Managing People Across Cultures, thinking it would be a collection of tidbits on how to get people from different countries to work well together, but it is much more than that Actually, they have some earlier books that explain their theories more comprehensively, but the book I ordered deals more with the application of those theories in a business setting. In widening that idea of culture to look at the cultures of organizations and the people who work for them, this book helped me to see culture in a different way. It made me think that this is another important learning point about culture that I think our teacher participants might benefit from knowing. It is contained in this quotation from the book:

Culture is the pattern by which a group habitually mediates between value differences… Cultures can learn to reconcile such values at ever-higher levels of attainment, so that better rules are created from the study of numerous exceptions. From such reconciliation come health, wealth, and wisdom. But cultures in which one value polarity dominates and militates against another will be stressful and stagnate. (pg. 23)

The shift of thinking here is important. There is a focus on cultures within an enterprise, rather than a focus on specific national cultures, to be sure, but this has much wider applications. There is  a conceptualization of cultures as being interconnected. We are connected by our differences and our similarities. The differences and similarities can  be leveraged if we just are able to see them for what they are. By reconciling cultures within an organization  we thrive; if we push our cultures on others, we deny ourselves the chance to thrive. Ultimately, culture learning means living with the reality of cultural patterns that may or may not be different, understanding who we are and where we are going as individuals and as parts of a greater whole. This lesson applies to small groups of individuals, larger groups like teams and classes, and huge groups like cities or nations.

Tags:

Understanding the Modular You: Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite

April 4th, 2011 · No Comments · Books, brain-related, Motivation, Social Learning, Uncategorized

hypocrite

This reatively short and very entertaining book packs a message that can change the way we look at people and the minds that make us who we are. Robert Kurzban is an evolutionary psychologist. And in one long breath, here is his message: the mind is modular and it makes no sense to talk about “you” or “me” because there is no conscious, single, controlling ”you” or “me” running the show inside our heads, and when”you” and “me” talk, it is basically my “press secretary” talking to your “press secretary,” one of many modules of our mind, modules that act with their own rhyme and reason and don’t necessarily talk to each other and aren’t necessarily aware of each other, but do act in a way that is in accordance to the goals for which the module was genetically selected for. Got that? Basically, it means that there are lots of parts of “you” and they do what they were designed (selected) to do, usually without regard for other parts of “you.” Behavioral inconsistencies can be explained through understanding this modular specialization structure of the brain. Deep down, I think we already know this. This is why people on diets lock their fridge doors at night, why George Reckers and Elliot Spitzer walk(ed) a different walk from their public talk, etc. But Kurzban’s theory–and he repeatedly states that it is an exploratory theory– is a way of conceptualizing how the mind can manage to be so blatantly contradictory, and as such it has great explaining power. People can hold very strong beliefs, impossibly contradictory beliefs, often for no reason. People can say one thing and do another, they can waffle between patience and impulsivity, have overinflated and unrealistic views of themselves (almost everyone, for example, believes themselves to be an above-average driver),  and hold others to high moral principles that they prefer not to apply to themselves. Seen through Kurzban’s evolutionary psychology spectacles, the selfish little modules trying to gain advantage any way they can form a logical–if depressingly dispicable–portait of the organisms we are.

Human_eyesight_two_children_and_ball_with_retinitis_pigmentosa_or_tunnel_vision

Aside from being an interesting and  entertaining read, this hand-grenade of a book may eventually shake a lot of long-held belief fruit out of the trees that social psychologists and behavioral economists have been feeding from for years. For example, the notion that motivation and  preferences are fairly constant (two that have long bothered me personally), are debunked pretty thoroughly here. Quoting LIchtenstein and Slovic (2006b): preferences “…are labile, inconsistent, subject to factors we are unaware of, and not always in our own best interests. Indeed, so pervasive is that lability that the very notion of a ‘true’ preference must, in many situations, be rejected.” What this means, is that things like motivation and preferences are more complex than we think they are now; different modules of the brain work differently “depending on context, state, and history,” and they–”we”– aren’t aware of it. So instead of constant motivations or preferences held by an individual, we should probably think of people as collections of independently-acting modules, each module  ”…designed to bring about certain states or affairs.” Motivation is a design to bring about a goal, but it is better conceptualized as a bunch of design goals located in a bunch of modules. The L2 Self may be not much more than a handful of sand. Actually, I don’t think the implications of Kurzban’s theory go that far, but at the least, we have to acknowledge that we are only looking at a small part of an individual whenever we look at him, no matter how closely.

Tags:·

Jesse Schell: Games and Authenticity: When Games Invade Real Life

February 9th, 2011 · No Comments · Activity Theory, Games, Presentations, Technology

jesseSchellDICE2010

In the previous post I wrote about Jane McGonigal and her views on how gamers can save the world. Well, Jesse Schell, game designer, teacher, and author, has a slightly different take on the increasingly prominent role that games will play in the future in a spring 2010  DICE talk (available here via TED). He draws a line from the recent spate of reality-fudging games like the Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, and Mafia Wars (indeed he takes Facebook games as his starting point) to a future where game-like point systems are in place for everything from brushing your teeth longer to taking public transport to getting to work on time.

Schell’s vision of the future seems more plausible than McGonigal’s and in that sense it is more frightening. But both actually  see their visions as ultimately leading to improvements–using gamer energy and ideas to solve problems in the case of McGonigal, and using increased monitoring by sensors to improve personal behavior in the case of Schell. Interesting ideas and interesting optimism. Of course, one might succumb to a moment of skepticism and point out the many weapons that were meant to end wars or gifts to mankind that ended up causing more problems than they helped, or refer people to the darker versions of state and/or corporate control contained in books such as 1984. But it’s probably better to be optimistic about the future since we (collectively) don’t exactly have the option of whether to go there or not.

Tags:

Jane McGonigal’s Thoughts on Gaming

February 4th, 2011 · 1 Comment · Games, Motivation, Presentations

Global gamers

On February 3rd, Jane McGonigal appeared on The Colbert Report. This woman has an opinion that you might be interested in. Because it is weird. Count. Er. Intu. Itive. Interesting. Weird. She is a game designer and wants the world to play more games and thinks that if people play more, this will contribute to solving the world’s problems. Let’s unwrap this a bit, starting with some statistics she points out in her TED talk of March, 2010.

People in the world play 3 billion hours of games each week.

World of Warcraft players have logged in 5.93 million years of game play to date. The average WoW player plays for 21 hours a week.

The average young person “in countries with strong gaming cultures” will spend 10,000 hours of time playing games by the age of 21.

Let that soak in for a moment. Then think about this: 10,000 hours roughly equals the total amount of time we spend in school K-12. Gaming, she says, represents “a parallel track of education.” And 10,000 hours is a term widely being used as a rough estimate of how many hours of effortful study are required for mastery of a skill (I first heard of it in Scientific American’s The Expert Mind written by Philip Ross in August 2006, but if you Google “10,000 hours of effortful study”, you’ll see how widely used this number has become).

Back to Jane. She says, gamers are getting good at or have developed a bond with 4 things:

  • Urgent optimism (or extreme self-motivation to tackle obstacles immediately, coupled with a belief in success)
  • Weaving a tight social fabric (playing games together builds trust)
  • Blissful productivity (gaming is actually “hard work” and gamers are willing to do it)
  • Epic meaning (the feeling of working towards meaningful goals–i.e., save the world)

Gaming creates “super-empowered hopeful individuals.” How can these people and this energy, this time, and this skill be put to use in improving the world? That is her question. She thinks it is possible and she is working on it now. By getting people to play games about life-connected issues, you can effect change. She thinks that challenging immersive experiences can be life-changing. Here is her TED talk. And here is Evoke, one of the games she helped develop.

Jane McGonigal’s blog

Edward Castronova’s blog (Indiana University professor of Telecommunications with a focus on games and social issues)

Tags:

BBC’s Brain Story

January 19th, 2011 · No Comments · brain-related

brain_story

An excellent 6-part documentary on the brain called Brain Story is available to watch on the web. Though it was made about ten years ago, apparently it has never been broadcast on the BBC. Here’s the link for the first part. Other parts are linked to that page.

Tags:·

Motivational Effects that Defy 3: The Placebo Effect

January 4th, 2011 · No Comments · brain-related, Motivation, Uncategorized

This is the 3rd post in a series on motivational effects that concern expectations. In previous posts I looked at the Hawthorne effect and the Pygmalion effect. My interest in these was raised when I learned of them while searching for the possibility that people had looked into the Placebo effect in education.This time I would like to look at the Placebo effect, the one that originally got me interested in this trilogy.

badscience

So there I was, happily making my way through Ben Goldacre’s wonderful oughtta-read Bad Science, in which he is gleefully ripping into little shreds the reputations of detox artists, brain gym evangelists, homeopathic medicine promoters, and other quacks and hacks, when right in the middle of his book I come across a chapter on the placebo effect. In that chapter he takes us on a tour of this “fascinating, misunderstood… and counter-intuitive aspect of  human healing”. You can hear him sum up much of the chapter here in 5 minutes: sugar pills have effects, 4 sugar pills have more effect than 2, ‘brand’ placebo pills have more effect than generic ones, and a placebo injection or operation has more effect than a placebo pill because it is a more dramatic intervention. But there is more: what a doctor says and what a doctor believes when providing care can affect the outcome; and a placebo diagnosis of expectation of improvement can affect that improvement.

And the more people look for the placebo effect in the medical world, the more they find it; and the more they begin to look for the mechanism through brain imaging studies, etc., the more it begins to reveal itself. Here is a documentary showing some dramatic examples and some studies into the possible mechanisms at work. Fascinating stuff, but it’s time to make our segue back to the world of education.

One study that Goldacre recounts in his chapter  concerns a certain group of housekeepers at a hotel. They were divided into two groups and one group was told about the benefits of exercise and had pointed out to them the fact that they were sort of super-exercisers because of the line of work they were in. Four weeks later, both groups reported that they were doing the same amount of work (or “exercise!”), but the group that had received the information about the health benefits of their work now showed a decrease in weight and body fat, and an improvement in hip-to-waist ratio (Crum & Langer, 2007). This is mind-boggling. And it got me thinking about whether such Jedi mind tricks might be able to work in education. The beauty of Crum and Langer’s experiment is also sort of a stumbling block: they didn’t do anything beyond point something out. In an educational setting this would be difficult to replicate, since the teachers would be teaching, and the students would have lots of ways to adjust performance.

The closest thing I could find (and if you know of anything else, I’d love to hear about it) was an experiment on changing performance by changing mindsets. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and Dweck (2007) found that just informing junior high school students that the brain is like a muscle and that academic “exercise” can bring about improved academic ability got them to improve their academic performance. Even just a one-shot lecture by some university experts was enough to make a difference and make them believe in the “growth mindset”. Readers of the previous two posts in this series might now be wondering whether this experiment represents the Placebo effect, the Hawthorne effect, or the Pygmalion effect. To be honest, things are getting pretty blurry for me as well. We could argue that the researchers haven’t really done anything for the learners. That is, they haven’t made changes in the curriculum or run extra lessons with them. They have, however, pointed out an opportunity for improvement and–importantly–an expectation of success.  And they’ve definitely shown an interest in their improvement. I mean, the students would of course infer that these university researchers wouldn’t be there if they didn’t think they had something that would be effective, right? I think it might not be wrong to say that the same underlying mechanism–whatever that is–is at work in all these effects. Someone is watching you, someone is interested in your performance, someone believes you can do better.

Taking this idea further,  believing and higher expectations, coupled with a more rigorous curriculum can lead to significantly better performance. Anecdotal evidence suggests it can, anyway. Heath and Heath in their book Switch report on the success of a first grade language arts teacher in Atlanta who motivated her class and dramatically improved their performance on standardized tests by telling them that they would be reading like third graders by the end of the school year. That is, they were told and convinced that they would be not just  successful first graders,  and not even second graders, nope, they were going to advance to the level of third graders! And they did. At the end of the year, 90% of the class was reading at the 3rd grade level or higher. Perhaps we all need to push the envelope a little, while at the same time communicating our expectations of success. Certainly this is an idea worthy of more classroom research and larger-scale research.

I love the Placebo effect. I love the fact that it has been subjected to rigorous testing and found to hold true. The fact that it remains a little mysterious only adds to its charm. No doubt there are explanations for the phenomena and one day they will be widely known and appreciated, but for now it is enough to know of it and have some fun with it. It can be dangerous, too, for placebo side effects have been observed and the dangers of pigeon-holing learners must be acknowledged as well. But for teachers, deftly making use of our authority and making assertions that can lead to improvement is part of our job. Doctors don’t always understand why something gets better and teachers don’t always know how something gets learned. Understanding the Placebo effect and making it work for us is one of the things we can do. It comes with the position.

Sept. 2011 Update.

A recent Brain Science podcast interview with Fabrizio Benedetti looked at placebo effects. Dr. Ginger Campbell and Dr. Benedetti discussed what placebo effects (notice the ‘s’) are and are not, what other effects they can be confused with, and the mechanisms that are at work behind the effects. Here is a quote from episode:

  I would say that the take-home message for clinicians, for physicians, for all health
professionals is that their words, behaviors, attitudes are very important, and
move a lot of molecules in the patient’s brain. So, what they say, what they do in
routine clinical practice is very, very important, because the brain of the patient
changes sometimes. As you said, of course, there is a reduction in anxiety; but we
know that there is a real change. There is a real change in the patient’s brain
which is due to—in a single sentence, we can call it the ‘ritual of the therapeutic
act.’
The ritual of the therapeutic act is very complex. In the ritual of the therapeutic
act there is a doctor; in the ritual of the therapeutic act there are drugs, there are
syringes. Sometimes there are very complex machines, like an MRI machine, for
example. All these social and sensory stimuli constitute what we call the ‘ritual of
the therapeutic act;’ and the ritual of the therapeutic act communicates and tells
the patients that a therapy is being performed. And this is very important
because it induces expectation in the patient. So, absolutely, it is very, very
important for a clinician.

Audio, transcripts, references, and notes are available at the podcast’s website. Dr. Benedetti is the author of two books on this topic, Placebo Effects, and The Patient’s Brain.

 

Crum, A., Langer, E. (2007). Mind-set matters: Exercise and the placebo effect. Psych Science 18, no. 2 (Feb). Pg 165-71.

Blackwell, L. A., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Theories of intelligence and achievement across the junior high school transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78, 246-263.

Tags:

Better Mood, Better Learning

December 30th, 2010 · No Comments · brain-related, Games, Motivation

A study recently published in Psychological Science suggests, unsurprisingly, that people in a happier mood (after listening to peppy music or watching a funny video of a baby) perform better on tests that asked them to classify stimuli from rule-described categories. Positive moods also had a beneficial effect on strategy selection. According to the journalist take on the study, creativity is enhanced by watching viral videos, which may be why workers are so prone to dash off to YouTube land so regularly while at work… The researchers actually made use of YouTube videos for the study, but I think the implications of this go much deeper. Interest (Hidi & Ainley, 2008) and mood are important for learning. They are important for motivation and they seem to have an effect on cognitive processing. The results of this research may point to one of the reasons that people rate their learning higher in entertaining classrooms.

This paper was a product of the Catagorization Lab (Mindalab) at my old alma mater the University of Western Ontario. Some of their other interesting papers can be found here.

January 4th update:  Another  paper mentioned in the year-end issue of the Economist, showed similar effects. Oswald, Proto and Sgroi (2010) (available online via Andrew Oswald’s  page) showed both the positive effects of positive affect and the negative effects of being sad or depressed. The positive affect boost to productivity was 12%.

Nadler, R.T., Rabi, R., & Minda, J.P. (2010). Better mood and better performance: learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science, 21 (12).

Tags: