Mindframe

Granted, when you think about all the things that are slowly killing you, things like second-hand smoke, the chemicals in your food, and the guy in the cubicle next to you with the annoying laugh probably come to mind before your office chair or the sofa in your living room. Think again says, James Levine, an endocrinologist at Mayo clinic and author of the article “Killer Chairs” in November’s issue of Scientific American . Levine cites the results of 18 studies over a period of 16 years involving 800,000 people. Among other things, they found that the average person spends 13 hours a day seated. That means in a normal 16 hours of wakefulness, we are only physically mobile about 3 of those hours (similar to the brown bat). With the advent of personal pedometers like the FitBit or Nike’s Fuel, more and more of us have discovered what Levine is talking about.  Someone with an office job finds it pretty tough to get in the recommended 10,000 steps (roughly 5 miles a day) wit...

Whatever happened to Sigmund Freud? Of course, the answer is that he died, but not before taking modern science down a fifty-year rabbit hole.  Freud came of age in the early 1900’s, a time when science was first beginning to wrap its mind around brain function, including dreaming. The big question in 1895: what is the essence of dreams? Freud thought he had the answer. To him, it was all about wish fulfillment of repressed feelings. He saw dreaming as the “royal road to the unconscious.”  Saul Mcleod of simplypsychology.org explains that Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream—the actual story—versus its latent content, the symbolism. Through the process of condensation, you transform a wish, perhaps strangling your sister-in-law, into a dream about strangling a small dog. In this way, you lessen your own guilt regarding deeply held negative feelings about your sister-in-law. (Freud’s example, not mine.) Secondary elaboration occurs whe...

What is the evolutionary purpose of sleep? Doesn’t it seem like a huge concession to spend a third of your life inactive? Or is it an amazing strategic adaptation from the days before indoor lighting, when productivity went down once the sun set, and danger came in the form of fast and powerful predatory animals? Jerome Siegel, a UCLA neuroscientist, suggests the latter. He says that for our ancestors, staying awake and mobile during the evening hours would actually have been evolutionarily maladaptive. We are not the brown bat, who can avoid predators by sleeping 20 hours a day and still manage to hunt blind at night via sonar. It's been argued that the way our bodies recharge during our evening REM cycles—not just regaining energy but rebalancing the immune system and performing brain maintenance—is just another example of evolution piggybacking on an existing adaptation and making the most of it. We aren't equipped for echolocation, so this is what we got instea...

Memory is a fickle thing. There are times when the important information you need, like an email password, remains just out of your grasp.  But you’re equally likely to recall a jingle for a product that’s been obsolete for decades, a product you never even purchased or liked. Forgetting: the older we get, the scarier it seems, what with the threat of Alzheimer’s and dementia hovering out there like the ghosts of senility future. But what if the act of forgetting wasn’t just part of the normal degradation of memory but actually intrinsic to the act of remembering?  What if in order to remember something, you had to forget a little of it? It flies in the face of how we conceptualize memory, as stored information slowly disappearing like cookies from the cookie jar. But University of California scientists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork have helped alter our perception of how memory and learning work. In one experiment, people were given a series of poetry lines to learn...

In last week’s post , we learned how Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow test demonstrated that preschoolers with a willpower strategy fared much better later in life across a wide spectrum of circumstances than their counterparts who “ate the marshmallow.” So are the marshmallow eaters among us doomed to a life of constantly giving into our temptations? Not necessarily, says Mischel. Willpower, or more accurately, a strategy for maintaining one’s willpower, is a skill that can be developed and practiced at virtually any age. The clues to building your own willpower system can be found in Stanford’s Bing Nursery preschoolers, who tested and proved many methods during the original marshmallow experiment. The next time you need to reach for some self-control, you might consider using one of the following as a template. Out of sight, out of mind Among the marshmallow resistors, pushing the marshmallow to the far end of the table and/or closing their eyes was a po...

Although he didn’t realize it then, when Walter Mischel and his team turned their attention to preschoolers at the Bing Nursery School on the campus of Stanford University in the 1960’s, he unleashed a tidal wave in cognitive science, which is still being felt today. The experiment was pretty straightforward. A preschooler was seated at a table and presented with a single treat of some kind—a cookie, a piece of candy, or—most famously—a marshmallow. The child was told that the supervisor would soon be leaving the room. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow until the supervisor came back, they would get a second marshmallow. If they instead ate the marshmallow, there would be no opportunity for another.  Mischel was conducting a basic test in postponement gratification, and whether five year olds were able to demonstrate any kind of strategy for self-restraint, the willpower necessary not to gobble up that first tempting marshmallow. As you might imagine, ...

General Patraeus, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Jonah Lehrer, Tanya Harding: an incomplete list of those who, at the peak of their careers, and the peak of their honors and accolades, fell from grace. The names and details may change, but scandals are forever. No matter what, you can rest assured that someone somewhere is about to take a tumble in the eyes of their local community—or the public at large. Yet each time it happens, many of us are stunned. Those we saw as the embodiment of a myriad of virtues—courage, self-restraint, fair-mindedness, perseverance, and humility—fail to live up to the ideal.  It can feel almost like a betrayal: just who are these individuals, and how did they manage to dupe us?   A more realistic question might be, “Why do we believe virtuous traits are immutable? Why are we convinced that, once demonstrated in one arena, a quality will apply across the board to a variety of very different circumstances?” Tiger Woods shows amazi...

General George B. “Little Mac” McClellan was the Union force commander during the Civil War. Beloved by his men, and a stickler for training, you’d think it might be him that we remember over Ulysses S Grant, former Union general and later the 18th President. But Lincoln eventually made Grant the Northern army’s leader for a single, rather important reason: Grant was willing to engage the enemy. McClellan, despite an overwhelming number of troops and material, appeared to be allergic to battle. McClellan’s strategy seemed to be waiting for just the right moment when the perfect nexus of geography, troop force, weather, and adequate supplies would present itself.  History tells us that early in the war it never did—or more importantly, that it never does. Which brings me to glucose, the energy our brains and bodies run on. As a resource, it’s something our system tends to be stingy with.  Most of us expend energy only when we deem it absolutely necessary. Not a whole l...

In January of 2013, I wrote a post on one of neuroscience’s most famous cases. New details make it necessary to retell the story. It’s the tale of railroad foreman Phineas Gage. Imagine a beautiful day on September 13, 1848 in the Vermont countryside. It’s about 4:30 in the afternoon. James K. Polk, ‘young hickory’, is the current president and the Civil War hasn’t ripped the country apart yet. The hottest thing in modern technology? The railroad train. To that end, a Rutland Burlington railroad crew is finishing up a long day of drilling holes several feet deep into the stubborn concrete granite. Now the work of tamping explosive charges down into the holes has begun. When the explosives are discharged, the granite will be blown apart and the next section of track can be laid. It’s dangerous and deadly work if you’re a tamper. Mistakes are almost always fatal.  Five foot six Phineas Gage is a compact but strong tamper. He’s had his tamping rod engraved with his initials...

When it comes to Carol Dweck’s concepts of mindset, northwestern Alabama might not be the first region that leaps into your mind. And yet sitting on the north bank of the Tennessee River is an unlikely success story, almost a perfect illustration of just how much can go right when growth-minded attitudes are in place.   Growth mindset, of course, is the attitude that skill and intelligence can always be improved with effort. It frames challenges as opportunities, failures as lessons to be learned, and success as a result of pushing oneself. On the other hand, fixed mindset holds talent as something inborn and innate. The prospect of failure is a terrifying specter lurking over every risk, threatening to show you were never that great after all.  Even if you're familiar with these ideas, the story of Muscle Shoals, Alabama is a beautiful illustration of the importance of attitude.   In 1965, songwriter and musician Rick Hall opened up a recording studio ...

When you hear the term "spaced learning", you might think it has to do with learning that takes place while you're "spaced out.’   But spaced learning is the less-than-catchy phrase used to describe a scientific breakthrough in memory acquisition. Learning is fundamentally about sticking something into your memory for retrieval later. During a learning episode, information first moves into your short-term memory and creates a new neural pathway. If that pathway is repeatedly stimulated, it triggers the brain to transfer the information into your long-term memory. The neural pathway acts as both conduit and code for that information upload. Therefore, repetition is key to long-term learning. This process has been well known in the scientific community for some time. But what if there was a way to speed up learning, to learn an entire history module that would normally take a month, in about an hour? In his  Scientific American article " Making Memor...