Neural Biology

With the thoughts you'd be thinkin'
You could be another Lincoln
If you only had a brain
- Dorothy to the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz

My latest commuting lecture series is Biology and human behavior : the neurological origins of individuality by Professor Robert Sapolsky. It's fun to listen to but I have mixed feelings about not watching it on DVD.

1. Reason to watch DVD: The professor makes frequent references to displays, "as you can see on the right...". Fortunately most (all?) charts are in the course book.

2. Reason not to watch DVD: The professor is very entertaining but visually distracting. (see image).

With each lecture Sapolsky introduces a new part of our mental anatomy and explains what can go wrong with too little or too much information to the brain.

The Great Courses webpage says,
"The course opens with an introductory lecture and then proceeds to Modules I and II, which start at the level of how a single neuron works. You build upward to examine how millions of neurons in a particular region of the brain operate. The focus is on the regions of the brain most pertinent to emotion and behavior.

Modules III, IV, and V explore how the brain and behavior are regulated. First, you cover how the brain regulates hormones and how hormones influence brain function and behavior. Next you examine how both the brain and behavior evolved, covering contemporary thinking about how natural selection has sculpted and optimized behavior and how that optimization is mediated by brain function. Then you focus on a bridge between evolution and the brain, investigating what genes at the molecular level have to do with brain function and how those genes have evolved.

Module VI examines ethology, which is the study of the behavior of animals in their natural habitats. The focus in these lectures is on how hormones, evolution, genes, and behavior are extremely sensitive to environment.

Finally, Module VII explores how the various approaches—neurobiology, neuroendocrinology, evolution, genetics, and ethology—help explain an actual set of behaviors, with a particular focus on aggression. The final lecture summarizes what is known about the biology of human behavior and probes the societal implications of having such knowledge."

Bottom Line

The human brain & body are amazingly complex.

Names!

People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world.
- Barbra Streisand song

One of the hardest things to remember is a person’s name. My wife and I once sent a Christmas card to an old friend and used the wrong first name for her new husband. Research shows that even after 50 years you can remember many of the faces from your High School Year book but the names are a distant memory. The reason is that names have no meaning. You may recall relevant personal facts like a friend’s hometown or job because these are talking points and something you can relate to. But there is rarely any cosmic meaning to whether a person is named Joe or John.

So in order to remember a name you must assign it some meaning. I once knew a fellow train commuter named George. To remember the name I linked it to the cartoon and song “George of the Jungle”. When I saw the person I’d think of the song and the name. Another example. For some reason I kept forgetting the name of musician Jethro Tull whose music I like. So I linked the name to the phrase, “For whom the bell tolls” and that reminds me of Tull and then I can remember Jethro.

Many websites teach that the way to remember names is repetition:

When you are first introduced to someone, use their names several times when you talk to them. “Hi, Jim, nice to meet you. So, what do you do for a living Jim? Do you have any kids, Jim? Jim, it was great to meet you!” If you don’t catch their name when it was originally told to you, ask for it again and then use it.

I’m skeptical. There are many things in school I learned via repetition that are now gone. On the other hand, I do remember things that used memory aids like HOMES for the names of the Great Lakes. Or “A rat in Tom’s house might eat Tom’s ice cream” to spell arithmetic. If Jim mentioned above were slender I might link him to “Slim Jim”. But be careful never to let it slip out and say it aloud!

I have an uncommon last name so when I introduce myself to people I often say, “Kibble, as in Kibbles and Bits”. I hope this helps them to remember me.

Bottom Line

Each of us has different responses to stimuli. I tend to forget what I hear and remember what I see. At meetings I take notes so that I can see the words that must be recalled for later. Likewise names are more meaningful to me when they are written down and spelled. Perhaps I should imagine people wearing their name as a nametag or written on their forehead?

See http://www.43folders.com/2006/07/10/remember-names for more ideas.

How to Remember, part 2

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out … It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."- Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

As promised yesterday, there is another memory trick for memorizing a list that does not rely on a story chain. Have you ever wondered why people say, “In the first place” and “in the second place?” The tradition is over 2000 years old.

In ancient Greece, the Athenians (for awhile) had a democracy and any male could speak before the legislative body to propose a law. Those who succeeded in politics were the frequently the best at public speaking. And so in Athens around 300 BC we find the first schools that teach rhetoric and speaking skills. One method taught was to picture your speech laid out in the rooms of your house or at significant stopping points along some route. You picture your first key point in the first room or place. Your second talking point in the second place, etc.

To use yesterday’s grocery list as an example:

I visualize a cabbage as the doorknob of my front door. The hallway is filled with carrots growing. Then I see the kitchen with leeks hanging from the ceiling. The living room is filled to the ceiling with beets. There is a cow in my backyard. The back gate has loaves of bread impaled on it.

It helps to make the pictures outrageous so you’ll remember them. It also helps to have a Greek style house where you can walk through rooms in a circle around the central courtyard. In my house I reached a dead end rather soon and had to step outside.

There is also a variation on this technique that ties a new list to an ordered list you already know. The most common example is the song, “This old man” since the images and numbers are so tightly linked with rhyme:

1. Thumb
2. Shoe
3. Knee
4. Door
5. Hive
6. Sticks
7. Heaven
8. Gate
9. Spine
10. Over again (or big fat hen?)

Now I would imagine the grocery list as follows:

I stick my thumb in the cabbage. It’s stuck there
My shoe is filled with carrots.
My knee has swollen so it looks like a beet. (I’m moving the leeks to #6)
There is a steak nailed to my door dripping juice
Honey from a hive is pouring onto a slice of bread
The sticks look just like leeks.

If someone asks what is the fourth item on the list, I think: 4 = door. What’s on my door? Oh, yes, a juicy steak.

Bottom Line

This technique of linking items to places or a well-known list is more difficult than story telling but it has advantages. You could recite the list backwards or recall any single item from the list upon request. And forgetting one item won’t break a chain causing you to forget everything following it. The disadvantage comes when trying to memorize more than one list at a time. Having multiple items in your rooms or nailed to a door will get confusing. And how will you separate one list from the other? Rooms in different houses? By some secondary key like color, scent, or sound?

How to Remember

cam•bist (kam'bist)
—n.
1. a dealer in bills of exchange.
2. an expert in foreign exchange.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on why we forget, today I’d like to examine ways to remember. Way back in college, a dorm mate asked fellow residents to take a series of memory tests for his class project. The goal was to remember a list of 10 items with three different methods. I did very well since I had read a book on memory tricks and used them. Another friend of mine, Joe, got 10/10 on the first pass with no “tricks” and did worse on attempts 2 and 3 when asked to use specific memory methods. So while these methods do work, they also require some practice.

The human brain remembers facts poorly but stories and songs quite well. I’m amazed that anyone can remember the entire Iliad or Odyssey but it was passed down orally for generations before being written down. So memory trick #1 is to create a story that unites your list.

When driving in to work today I experienced a flood of ideas for blogs posts and did not want to forget them before reaching my desk to write them down. So I made up this simple story:

“I lost the KEYS to the SCHOOL. It was over a YEAR AGO. So long in fact that I’ve forgotten the NAMES of the people involved. So much THYME gone by.”

This translates as:

• Lost Keys and why we forget (yesterday’s post)
• First Day of School advice
• Retrospective of my first blog topic (Rule of 3’s) from a year ago
• How to remember Names (which became this post)
• Substituting dried herbs for fresh

Sometimes a visual story can help to liven up boring items like a shopping list:

The CABBAGE rolled off the table and was impaled upon a CARROT. It LEEKED a red fluid like BEET juice or perhaps blood from a STEAK. I mopped it up with some BREAD.

Who knew a grocery list could be so violent?

Bottom Line

The story method is easy to use (if you’re creative and like making up stories). The drawback is forgetting the start of the story or missing a link somewhere in the middle and losing your train of thought and half the story.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss a different technique that handles items independently and not as one long chain.

Aside

The dorm I referenced above was the Honors College floor at Bryan Hall of Michigan State and many of the residents had excellent memory skills. For example, John Paola was the National Spelling Bee Winner of 1977. One day as we passed in the hall I asked, “John, can you spell ‘cambist’?" He immediately stopped and shouted, “How do you know that?” I explained that his name was in “The Book of Lists” along with his winning word. Today Spelling Bee winners can be found on the Internet.

Why We Forget

"Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind
Memories, sweetened thru the ages just like wine,
Memories, memories, sweet memories" - Elvis song

As much as we want to remember things, it appears that the brain is really designed for being forgetful and unobservant. The opposite condition, perfect recall, can in fact be overwhelming and a detriment to survival. Many Idiot Savants have amazing gifts of memory but at the cost of being autistic. And so evolution favors forgetting.

The flaws in our memories and observations are detailed in a book I’m enjoying called, “Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average” by Joseph T. Hallinan. Here are some of the anecdotes from just the first CD:

• A researcher made a film where a man walked into an empty classroom and sat down. The scene cut to a close-up of him, seated, looking around. What most viewers failed to notice was that a different actor was used for the close-up shot.
• The human eye has a very small zone on the retina for detailed vision. The vast majority of what we see is peripheral. We are fooled into thinking we have great vision because the eye is rapidly moving about taking three shots a second that get stitched together in the brain as one image.
• This means that a lot of detail about us is not observed – the brains fills in the gaps with what we expect to see.
• This trait works against us when it’s our job to find the rare occurrence: a radiologist looking for tumors on an X-ray or an Airport Security guard looking for gun as the luggage is scanned. They miss on average 25-30% of the items they are trained to look for. The brain has a built-in quitting threshold that makes the snap judgment all is normal and there is nothing interesting to see.

It turns out there is a lot we don’t know about memory and recall. My brother-in-law is working with lab mice in an attempt to locate where memories are formed in the brain and to physically detect the brain change where a memory is stored.

Bottom Line

While the facts above may be interesting (and clutter the brain) of what use are they?

It turns out that most of the time, what we do and what we see are subconscious. We walk, drive, eat, etc. on autopilot as we focus on a conversation or a phone call. Those tasks we do under autopilot make a very fleeting imprint on the brain and are soon forgotten.

A common example of this is forgetting where you left your keys. You walk in the house (autopilot) while thinking about the kids or the bathroom and set down your keys on the first empty space you pass. Then you forget about the keys because there are other more important things to think about.

The solution to this is to make your key dropping habit a conscious act.

1. Try to pick one location you always use.
2. When you don’t use that location, then pause one second as you set down the keys to visualize yourself where you are standing in the house, look attentively at the surface where you are placing the keys, and make up a story like “I’m putting my keys on the dining table because I need to run to the bathroom.” This should be a deeper impression on the brain and aid in recall.

Cognitive Biases

“Hell is paved with good intentions.” – Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153)

This week my commuting time “book” is “Way With Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion” by Michael Drout of Wheaton College. He is an entertaining speaker and I’ve been enjoying his explanations of logical fallacies and the ways we are fooled by words and false arguments.

In addition to being fooled by others, sometimes we also fool ourselves. This is called Cognitive Bias and is the topic of the blog Putting Obama on the Couch by James Pethokoukis. He states, “Team Obama is filled with dedicated, hard-working folks trying to do the best job they can. But how to explain a series of puzzling economic decisions”?

Pethokoukis lists five psychological pitfalls that might explain the White House’s actions.

1 Anchoring Bias
This means relying too much on past results and choices. Mutual Funds are required by law to remind you “past performance is no indicator of future results.” In Obama’s case Pethokoukis thinks the White House is “hewing” to the original campaign agenda -- healthcare reform, green technology, when the looming global depression trumps alls. Old plans should be set aside to focus on the most urgent problem – the economy.

2. Attention Bias
This means ignoring the facts and data that do NOT support what you already believe in. How often has a spouse or friend accused you of not listening to news you don’t want to hear? Pethokoukis points out that Obama is cherry picking facts in order to argue against tax cuts. A broader look at historical data shows that tax cuts do stimulate the economy.

3. Overconfidence
Sometimes we can be just too full of ourselves. In Obama’s case his team was 100% certain of the impact of various spending multipliers or the exact number of jobs that will be saved or created by the “stimulus” before the exact details of the stimulus were actually determined by congress. In essence they were arguing that it really didn’t matter how we spent the $800 billion; the economy would be saved by the sheer size of the bailout.

4. Wishful Thinking
This is closely related to items 2 and 3. We convince ourselves that what we want must be true (overconfidence) and then looks for facts to back it up (Attention Bias). Pethokoukis accuses the White House of wishful thinking by projecting very optimistic growth and recovery from the stimulus package. There is no contingency planning for the stimulus failing or having only a modest impact on the economy.

5. Planning Fallacy
This means underestimating the difficulty or length of time for some task. It is extremely common during project planning and the frequent curse of computer software (and Politicians). When asked for an estimate a programmer sees in his or her head the “best case” scenario (Wishful Thinking). They don’t envision incompatibility issues across different web browsers, a bug in a vendor’s software library, a bug in Microsoft’s operating systems, security restrictions, late hardware delivery, disk crash, etc.
I attended a class in Estimation Techniques by Construx Software which taught that one should ask for a best case and worst case estimate on each task and use the average. Some tasks will work first time and others go way over time budget so expect a balance in the middle. The first time I used this a programmer was insulted. “I’m a professional,” he said and “knew how to estimate correctly.” Still he complied and I planned the project deliverables by averaging the best and worst times. In the end this programmer had to work overtime to meet the deadlines as obstacles pushed many tasks into the worst case estimates.

Bottom Line
As thinking human beings we are each subject to the Cognitive Biases listed above. Sometimes our mental blind spots can be deadly. Suppose your car breaks down in a remote area. Would you stay with the car or hike to civilization? Experts recommend you stay in or near your car. When the car is found you will be rescued. But if you are Wishful in thinking a town might be nearby and Overconfident in your hiking and wilderness skills, you might leave the car and become lost in the woods or incapacitated with a sprained ankle, snake bite, hypothermia, heat stroke, or dehydration. Now rescuers must search hundreds of miles of wilderness to locate you before you die.
When making life impacting decisions, be humble in your abilities, look at opposing facts, consider the worst cases, and think about what might happen if you are wrong.

Excerise your Brain

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.”
- Woodrow Wilson, US president

From Scientific American, Six Ways to Boost Brainpower,

1. Physical exercise boosts blood flow and brain growth. Exercise also improves sleep that is essential to the brain.
2. Diet: Although the brain is mostly made of fat, eating the wrong kind of fat will slow you down. Saturated fats = bad, Omega-3 fats (nuts, fish) = good. Too many calories may also make the brain sluggish. Suggested brain foods include walnuts, blueberries and spinach.
3. Stimulants: substances that boost the body will also give move energy to the brain. Caffeine is the drug of choice by millions to wake up the brain. Use in moderation please; too much caffeine will cause jitters, anxiety and insomnia. 100 cups of coffee in one day can be fatal.
4. Video games: improve mental dexterity, while boosting hand-eye coordination, depth perception and pattern recognition.
5. Music: It can treat anxiety and insomnia, lower blood pressure, soothe patients with dementia, and help premature babies to gain weight and leave the hospital sooner. The motor cortex, cerebellum and corpus callosum (which connects the brain’s two sides) are all bigger in musicians than in non-musicians.
6. Meditation: Although the brain’s cells typically fire at all different times, during meditation they fire in synchrony. Expert meditators also show spikes of brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that has generally been associated with positive emotions and big boosts in immune system functioning.

Bottom Line
Despite what you learned in school during the Stone Age, adult brains can grow new neurons. Not as fast of course as during youth but an old dog can learn new tricks.