A new product is about to hit the market, and I think you’ll want to take notice. It’s called the “Super Novum.” Shaped like a slightly overlarge motorcycle helmet, the user places it on her head and pushes just one button to get things started. She doesn’t know it yet, but she has just given her brain an amazing advantage over all the other brains walking around out there. Some of the features she’ll experience include greatly reduced selective attention—no more missing the details! Broader framing—nomorementalmyopia! And information that challenges her beliefs can drive on in for an objective evaluation—no more confirmation bias! Plus, the Super Novum comes in a variety of colors and patterns to match its user’s unique personality.

Even if such a device existed, I wonder if we’d really want it. Would it be worth short-circuiting parts of our brains to avoid the sorts of certainty foibles discussed in this chapter? Probably not. A better question might be, if the brain craves certainty, then why not simply give it what it wants? Why not abide the urge to feel “right” if that’s what makes the brain happy?

Before I try to answer those questions, I want to tell you a brief story about my wife, who likes jumping out of airplanes. Just before we got married, she decided that her urge to leap from a perfectly stable plane had been put off long enough.We found a reputable skydiving outfit in northern Virginia, so that she could kick off what was sure to become a lifelong passion for death-defying sports. From my perspective, this was just short of insanity. “So you’re going to step out of a plane at 12,000 feet?” I recall asking—the reality of the situation finally hitting me—as we were reviewing the liability disclaimer forms (with statements like, “You acknowledge that engaging in this activity can result in your sudden death.”). For her, everymoment leading up to the jump was sheer ecstasy. Not that she wasn’t nervous (I think only a zombie wouldn’t have some nervous reaction before jumping thousands of feet above sea level), but the exhilaration of doing what she’d wanted to do for so long—to take on one of her ultimate challenges—outpaced her anxiety by a furlong. She went on to have a successful jump, and I managed to watch the whole thing without closing my eyes.

We have to appreciate that our brains weren’t born yesterday. We have mechanisms to warn of threats and guard against instability because they have worked for a very long time. We wouldn’t be here without them. In the same way that any sane person feels apprehension about jumping out of an airplane, our brain puts the organism it controls on alert when danger looms—be it tangible or intangible. But we have to know when to override the alarm and take the less comfortable path anyway.

Research conducted by a joint American and Italian team of psychologists found that people with less need for “cognitive closure” were typically more creative problem solvers than their counterparts. In other words, those who are able to work past their brain’s appetite for certainty—its need to shut the closure door to preserve stability—are more likely to engage challenges from a broader variety of vantage points and take risks to overcome them. Jumping out of the airplane even when our brain is shouting “Stop!” is sometimes exactly what we need to do. That’s the energy that fuels scientific discovery, technological advances, and a range of other human pursuits.

Which is not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t also listen to our brains. It’s not always advantageous to act against our neural inclinations. Sometimes a narrow frame is right for the situation, and sometimes disallowing new information is necessary. We have to dance with our instincts to figure out when to leap or when to stay on the ground. That’s the challenge of being human—of having a big brain capable of greatness with hard-wiring evolved for survival.

To continue the conversation…

• To read full transcript of Live Q&A with David DiSalvo on the latest cognitive science of how our minds work, you can Click Here.

– David DiS­alvo is the Author of What makes  your brain happy and why you should do the opposite (Prometheus Books; November 2011). David is a science, technology and culture writer whose work appears in Scientific American Mind, Psychology Today, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Mental Floss and other publications, and the writer behind the well-regarded science blogs Neuronarrative and Neuropsyched. He has also served as a consulting research analyst and communications specialist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several public and private organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

Transcripts of previous Live Q&As with Book Authors:

• Dr. Gary Small on Enhanc­ing Mem­ory and the Brain
• Alvaro Fer­nan­dez on “Men­tal Cap­i­tal­ism” and Cog­ni­tive Fitness
• Dr. Paul Nussbaum on Meditation and Neuropsychology

Taking a position in any argument—large or small—is slippery business for our brains. We can have every intention of honestly pursuing an answer, yet still fool ourselves into thinking our method is objective when it is, in fact, anything but. Cognitive science has helped decipher this enigma with research on the theoretical mental structures our brains use to organize information, called schemata.

Aschema (singular form of schemata) is like a mental map of concepts that hangs together by association. For example, your schema for “school” contains associations between “teacher” and “books” and “subjects.” Each of those have additional associations; “subjects” is linked to “math” and “literature,” for example.  Cognitive science suggests that as schemata develop, the parameters for what information can be included tighten.

The reason for this is very practical:  We make judgments based on the linkages in our schemata. If the information didn’t hang together in a structured way, and if certain pieces of information were not excluded from the map, we’d find making even basic judgments extremely difficult.

Imagine that you’ve been in the workforce for about ten years and are interviewing for a job. The interviewer tells you about the job’s duties, the work schedule, the location, the wage, and other pertinent details. All this is important, but what’s equally as important is what you brought into the room with you. Your schema for, let’s call it “career,” includes a host of linkages that have developed with time that you draw upon to make judgments. Is the company you are interviewing with compatible with your career? Does the schedule fit, does the wage fit, does the size of the company fit, does the commute time fit? You may reasonably change your mind about any of these things, of course, but the point is that you did not enter the room as an empty bucket ready to be filled. You entered with a pre-established schema for “career” that serves as the platform for your judgments.

And therein lies the rub. Pre-established schemata guide our attention to evaluate new information, but they can also guide our attention to selectively ignore information inconsistent with the schemata.

To understand why, we have to go back to what makes the brain happy. When a well-established schema is called into question by new information, the brain reacts as if threatened. The amygdalae fires up (threat response), and the ventral striatum revs down (reward response). This is not a comfortable place for the brain. The supercharged clay in your head doesn’t like being on guard—it likes being stable. Ambiguity, which might result from considering the new information, is a threat.  We can either allow that threat to stand by considering the inconsistent information, or block it by dismissing or ignoring it. Or we might subcategorize the information and store it away as an “outlier” case; something that can’t be entirely ignored, but does not challenge or change the existing schema.

Cognitive science researchers are especially interested in how our brains maintain pre-established schemata. Successfully plumbing the depths of religious belief, for example, appears to hinge on understanding the ways our brains seek stability. Indeed, belief in general appears to have much to do with the brain’s penchant for homeostasis— defined by renowned physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon as “the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition.”

We humans are prone to divide belief positions by value.  Believing in God is more important than believing 2 + 2 = 4.  But neuroscience research has shown that in the brain, all belief reactions look the same, whether the stimulus is value-laden (like religion) or neutral (like math).  Whether the value we’ve assigned to a belief is—from our subjective vantage point—high or low, the brain wants the same things: stability and consistency. We seldom realize it, but very nearly everything we do is colored by this drive.

More on this next week…

• On Sunday, December 4th: second excerpt, on Your Brain — Capable of Greatness, Hard-wired for Survival.
• On Friday, December 9th, 11am Pacific Time/ 2pm Eastern Time: Live Q&A with David DiSalvo on the latest cognitive science of how our minds work. You can Register Now by Clicking Here.

– David DiS­alvo is the Author of What makes  your brain happy and why you should do the opposite (Prometheus Books; November 2011). David is a science, technology and culture writer whose work appears in Scientific American Mind, Psychology Today, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Mental Floss and other publications, and the writer behind the well-regarded science blogs Neuronarrative and Neuropsyched. He has also served as a consulting research analyst and communications specialist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several public and private organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

Transcripts of previous Live Q&As with Book Authors:

• Dr. Gary Small on Enhanc­ing Mem­ory and the Brain
• Alvaro Fer­nan­dez on “Men­tal Cap­i­tal­ism” and Cog­ni­tive Fitness
• Dr. Paul Nussbaum on Meditation and Neuropsychology

A study in the journal Psychological Science investigated this dynamic, but from a different angle: researchers wanted to know if observing someone else exert self-control boosts or reduces one’s own self-control. Participants were asked to either take on the perspective of someone exerting self-control, or merely read about someone exerting self-control. They were also asked to take on the perspective or read about someone not exerting self-control.

The results: participants who took on the perspective of someone exerting self-control were unable to exercise as much self-control themselves; those who merely read about someone exerting self-control didn’t experience the energy drain. In other words, getting into the shoes of someone making the effort wore participants out as if they were doing it themselves.

On the flip side, participants who read about someone exerting self-control experienced a boost in their own self-control, compared to those who read about someone not exerting self-control. Reading resulted in a contagious effect rather than a vicarious one.

The difference between these results boils down to degrees of psychological separation. Taking on perspective reduces psychological separation, and the more that gap closes the greater the vicarious effect. Reading about something provides more of an opportunity to increase psychological separation, which reduces the chances of vicarious effect.

The implications of these findings are very practical. For instance, if a group of people are working on a project, and certain members are exerting an especially high degree of effort, this study suggests that other people in the group will experience vicarious energy depletion. An entire group’s energy could be affected by the exertion of one or two members.

Another example, mentioned by the study authors, are situations involving police officers, hospital staff and other emergency workers, whose ability to maintain self-control is essential to their jobs. It’s easy to see that if they experience vicarious depletion, anything from small breakdowns to catastrophic outcomes could result.

All of this leads me to believe that “self-control” is at least half misnomer. Social influences seem to affect us more than we know. On the other hand, regulating psychological distance–not something easily done–is a genuine application of self-control. If the pendulum swings too far in either direction, we either become wishy washy emotional sponges, or hardened crustaceans.

– David DiS­alvo is a sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy writer whose work appears in Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Mind, Psy­chol­ogy Today and Men­tal Floss, among other mag­a­zines and web­sites. His book, ten­ta­tively titled “What Makes Your Brain Happy” (Prometheus Books) is sched­uled for release in late 2011. Fol­low his blog here.

The duo’s new book, The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, is every bit as engaging as the original study was innovative.Using the invisible gorilla study as a jumping off point, the authors go on to explain why so many of our intuitions are off the mark, though we’re typically convinced otherwise. I recently had a chance to chat with Dan Simons about the study, the book, and why we’re usually in the dark about how our minds really work.

DiSalvo: What gave you and Chris Chabris the idea for the invisible gorilla study?

Simons: Our study was actually based on some earlier research by Ulric Neisser conducted in the 1970s.  His studies were designed to tease apart whether people focus attention on regions of space or on objects.  He wanted to see whether, if people were focusing on one part of a scene, they would automatically notice if something unexpected passed through that “spotlight” of attention.  To do that, he made all the objects partly transparent so that they all occupied the same space and could pass through each other. He found that people often missed an unexpected event.  But, the strange, ghostly appearance of the displays gave people a ready excuse for why they missed the unexpected event. Oddly, no one followed up on those studies, so we thought we’d give them another look and see whether people would miss something that was fully visible and easy to see.  We did our study as part of an undergraduate class project in a class that I was teaching.

Why the gorilla suit?

We were looking for something dramatic so that if people missed it, they would be surprised when we showed it to them again.  We also wanted something that would have some humor value to it.  Fortunately for us, Jerome Kagan, an eminent developmental psychologist at Harvard, happened to have one in his lab.

I remember the first time I watched the YouTube video of the study and was completely dumfounded when the question, “Did you see the gorilla?” flashed on the screen.  As researchers, I can imagine getting that reaction from people is like hitting a home run.

It surprised us the first time we ran the study – we didn’t expect it to work as well as it did.  It’s still a thrill to present the video to an audience and have people miss it.  Our intuition that we’ll notice something as visible as a gorilla is a hard one to overcome.  It took me years before I could trust that some people in almost any audience would miss it.

What do people tell you about their reaction afterwards?

Normally people can’t believe that they missed it.  On occasion, they’ve accused us of switching the video. The intuition that we would notice makes it jarring for people to realize that they didn’t.

And that’s really the point, right, that we can’t know what we are missing until our attention is refocused on it?

That’s a big part of it.  We can easily miss what’s right in front of us, but we don’t realize that we can.  Part of the problem is that we’re only aware of the things we notice and we’re not aware of the things we didn’t notice.  Consequently, we often have no idea what we’re missing.

Hence the myth of multi-tasking.

It depends on what you mean by multi-tasking.  If you mean simultaneous attention shared across multiple tasks, then yes, it’s a myth. We typically cannot do two things simultaneously.  We can perform multiple tasks one after another—a sort of serial tasking.

In the case of the first meaning, simultaneous attention across multiple tasks, why do you think so many of us are convinced we can do it?

I think a lot of people confuse these two possible ways of doing multiple tasks.  Because we can do one task and then another, switching back and forth among them, we falsely believe we can do two at once.  That confusion happens in part because we don’t realize how impaired we are when doing two things at once.  We’re too distracted to notice that we’re distracted.  That has dramatic consequences.  For example, we can’t talk on the phone while driving because that requires doing two tasks at once rather than sequentially (and both require attention).

Where does the intuition originate?

Our intuitions are based on our experiences. The problem is that our daily experiences frequently support incorrect intuitions about how our minds work.  We only are aware of the things we’ve noticed and we aren’t aware of the things we’ve missed, so we assume that we always notice things.  We don’t notice when we’re distracted by multitasking, so we think we aren’t distracted.  The same sort of principle explains many of our mistaken intuitions.

But why wouldn’t we develop an intuition from our experience that we can’t parse our attention?

Our experience is tied to our awareness.  We are aware of what we notice, not of what we miss, so we develop an intuition based on noticing. The principle applies to multi-tasking: we are aware only that we are accomplishing multiple tasks, because our daily life demands it, but we aren’t aware that we’re not really doing them at the same time. As a result, we mistakenly assume that we can do two things at once.  Given that we rarely encounter evidence to contradict our awareness — normally, there’s nobody around to point out the gorilla — we don’t learn when our intuitions are wrong.

We see people all the time who know very bad things can happen from, as one example, texting while driving, but they still do it.

That’s true, but most people could drive much of their lives without having an accident. And the longer they go without having an accident, the more they are deluded into thinking they can drive and text safely.  Fortunately, accidents are rare, but when they happen, they are catastrophic.  Knowing that we have these limits and taking them to heart can save our lives.  We learn best from our own experiences, but in this case, you shouldn’t wait to experience the consequences of distracted driving for yourself.

I can’t help but notice how so much of what we’ve been discussing runs counter to the conclusions of one of the most popular non-fiction books out there: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Many people I’ve talked to who have read that book are convinced that we should trust our instincts instead of thinking things through.

The idea that intuition, gut instincts, and rapid decisions are a panacea for all of our decision making problems is really dangerous.  Unfortunately, that’s the message that some people have taken from Gladwell’s book.  Intuitions can be quite useful for some types of decisions, especially those that involve an emotional preference —who do you find most attractive, what ice cream tastes best—but they can lead us dangerously wrong when they are based on assumptions about how our minds work.  Gladwell is an incredible storyteller, but some of the conclusions he reaches in Blink are problematic.  Our work, and the work of other cognitive scientists, shows again and again that the intuitions people hold about how their minds work are often wrong.  When you dig deeper into the material he covers in Blink, you see that many of the featured examples are of expert pattern recognition, and that’s a very different thing than simply trusting intuition or instinct.

Like the example of a quarterback acting decisively without having time to think?

Yes, that’s expert pattern recognition.  Peyton Manning studies films for many hours in preparation for each game, and he has done that for years.  Then, in a game situation, he recognizes the pattern really quickly, and that leads him to find the open receiver readily.  That said, even expert pattern recognition is far from perfect.  If you let Manning analyze the films at a leisurely pace, he’ll find things he missed during the game.  The same principle applies to most experts.  They can make reasonably good decisions quickly and seemingly based on intuition — they’ll outperform novices with only a glance.  But given more time, even the experts often would make better decisions.

Yet the takeaway for many people is that “thinking” is a hindrance.

Thinking takes work, and the idea that we could go with our gut and do better is really appealing.  Unfortunately, it’s often not true.

What can we expect as a follow up from you guys? Can you top the gorilla study?

It’s hard to top having people miss a gorilla.  I do have a new paper that just came out in the new open-access journal I-Perception.  It talks about a new demonstration that I’ve called “The Monkey Business Illusion.”  It’s on YouTube now.  Basically, I wanted to see if people who knew about the original gorilla video would be immune to this sort of failure of awareness.  Try it for yourself!

– David DiSalvo is a science and technology writer whose work appears in Scientific American Mind, Psychology Today and Mental Floss, among other magazines and websites. His book, tentatively titled “What Makes Your Brain Happy” (Prometheus Books) is scheduled for release in late 2011. Follow his blog here.

While the debate over intelligence rages on many fronts, the battle over the importance of heredity rages loudest. It’s easy to see why. If the camp that argues intelligence is 75 to 85 percent genetically determined is correct, then we’re faced with some tough questions about the role of education. If intelligence is improved very little by schools, and if the IQ of the majority of the population will remain relatively unchanged no matter how well schools perform, then should school reform really be a priority?

More to the point, if our genes largely determine our IQ, which in turn underlies our performance throughout our lives, then what is the role of school? For some in this debate the answer to that question is simply, “to be the best you can be.” But that seems little comfort for those who aspire to “be” more than what their IQ category predicts they will.

Those on the other side of this debate question whether heredity plays as big a role as the strong hereditarians claim. And for the role it does play, they question whether hereditability implies immutability. Heredity of height, for example, is about 90 percent, and yet average height in several populations around the world has been steadily increasing due to non-genetic influences, like nutrition. If such a strong hereditary trait can be radically altered by environmental factors–and height is but one example of this–then why is intelligence different?

It is not, argues the camp that might best be described as intelligence optimists. For them, the pessimism that colors the strong hereditarian position isn’t only discouraging, it’s dangerous. Too much is hanging in the balance for pessimism about the potential of our children to prevail.

Richard Nisbett is a champion of the intelligence optimist camp, and with his latest book, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count , he has emerged as the most persuasive voice marshalling evidence to disprove the heredity-is-destiny argument. Intellectual advancement, Nisbett argues, is not the result of hardwired genetic codes, but the province of controllable factors like schools and social environments–and as such, improving these factors is crucially important. In the thick of controversy, he was gracious enough to spend a few minutes discussing his book with Neuronarrative.

In Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count , you counter the arguments of strong intelligence hereditarianism, but in a sense you’re countering heritability dogma overall. What led you to take on this challenge?

My only complaint was with the heritability of intelligence per se. I just had the strong intuition that intelligence, and certainly IQ scores, were heavily influenced by the environment and by gene-environment interactions. My research indicates that in fact heritability, especially for adult IQ, is substantially less than frequently assumed.

One of the topics you discuss in the book is that drawing inferences based on correlations often produces misleading results. What’s an example of this in the case of intelligence?

The correlation between identical twins reared apart gives an overestimate of heritability because the environments of identical twins reared apart are often highly similar. But the main contradiction of heritability estimates lies in the fact that adoption produces a huge effect on IQ – much bigger than could be explained if you believed the conclusion of heritability estimates based on sibling correlations.

You discuss the importance of early childhood education and provide some compelling statistics on the IQ-boosting effects of preschool. Why in a nutshell is early education so essential?

This is speculative at this point, but here goes. It is beginning to look like the IQ deficits of poor minority kids begin extremely early and have to do with rearing techniques. Parents of such kids don’t talk to them much and don’t do things that would stimulate intelligence. At any rate, we know of several socialization practices that correlate substantially with IQ, and for all those practices parents of poor minority kids are on the low side.

If a child doesn’t receive quality early education, will he or she still be able to bridge the gap later on?

We do know that interventions as late as early adulthood can have a big effect on IQ and academic achievement. College reduces the IQ gap between blacks and whites from one standard deviation (SD) to .4 SD. Just telling junior high school kids that their intelligence is under their control can produce a gain in GPA. You can put a great deal of educational effort in at middle school and junior high ages and produce marked IQ and academic achievement gains.

You mention that children with greater self-control tend to have higher intelligence. How are these linked, and is it reasonable to conclude that increasing self-control raises intelligence?

This is speculative. We know there is a correlation between self-control and intelligence, especially between self-control and both ACT achievement and SAT scores. What we don’t know is whether this relationship is causal. I don’t doubt that it is, but I can’t prove it.

We now know that the brain isn’t a static entity, but rather possesses remarkable plasticity – even, to a degree, well into adulthood. In light of this, and your own research, is it possible for adults to still boost their IQs?

We know that you can increase fluid intelligence even in adults by some kinds of computer-game-like programs. But that work is in its infancy. We know also that the hippocampi of London taxi drivers is 25 percent larger than normal – due to an increase in the spatial relations requirements of the job.

I took away the sense from reading the book that you’re a hopeful realist. If we could begin making changes to our educational system today, what do you think are the most important things we can do to create a brighter future for our kids?

Really effective intervention with parents of low socioeconomic status infants to help them with socialization practices, really good pre-K, KIPP-type elementary and middle school.

I am hopeful, for sure. In principle you could have all these things for the bottom third of socioeconomic status families for less per year than the bailout of AIG. But I hasten to say that we don’t really know how well any of the programs shown to be effective in demonstration projects would scale up.

The book: Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count

– David DiSalvo, a freelance writer and research wonk who has written and lectured on topics involving public health, air and water quality, branding, education, energy efficiency, healthcare and social marketing. More info here. You can follow him on Twitter

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Related reading

- Training Attention and Emotional Self-Regulation — Interview with Michael Posner

- Can Intelligence Be Trained? Martin Buschkuehl shows how

- Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nurture