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Human beings adapt to their environments. We draw on a range of skills and personality traits to fit into various settings. That is why we can behave one way in a social setting and then seem like a totally different human being at work. One of the enduring attractions of travel is that it takes us out of our native environments and forces us to adapt to new people, new cultures, and new ways. When we make those adaptations, we discover new facets of ourselves. As we’ll see shortly, discrepancy is the mother of all change: when we are in the same environments, we tend to draw upon the same, routine modes of thought and behavior.

A few months ago I had an attack of acute appendicitis while staying in a LaGuardia airport hotel awaiting a return flight to Chicago. When I went to the nearest emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital outside Jackson Heights, Queens, I found that I was seemingly the only native English speaker in a sea of people awaiting medical care. After some difficulty attracting attention, I was admitted to the hospital and spent the next several days of recuperation navigating my way through patients and staff of every conceivable nationality. By the end of the experience, I felt at home there. I’ve since stayed at the same airport hotel and routinely make visits into the surrounding neighborhoods—areas I would have never in my wildest dreams ventured into previously. In adapting to that environment, I discovered hidden strengths. I also overcame more than a few hidden prejudices and fears.

The greatest enemy of change is routine. When we lapse into routine and operate on autopilot, we are no longer fully and actively conscious of what we’re doing and why. That is why some of the most fertile situations for personal growth—those that occur within new environments—are those that force us to exit our routines and actively master unfamiliar challenges.

In familiar environments and routines, we operate on autopilot. Nothing changes.

When you act as your own trading coach, your challenge is to stay fully conscious, alert to risk and opportunity. One of your greatest threats will be the autopilot mode in which you act without thinking, without full awareness of your situation. If you shift your trading environment, you push yourself to adapt to new situations: you break routines. If your environment is always the same, you will find yourself gravitating to the same thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We are mired in repetitive patterns of thought and behavior because we are mired in routines: the same emotional and physical environments. Indeed, we repeat the same patterns—for better or for worse—precisely because those patterns are adaptations to our current settings.

So how can we change our trading environments? The key is recognizing that our physical settings are only a part of our surroundings. Here are a few routine-busting activities that can alert us to risks and possibilities:

1. Seek Out Divergent Views. Conversations with traders who trade differently from you—different time frames, markets, or styles—can often help cement your views or question them. Similarly, reading materials from fresh perspectives puts your ideas in a different light and pushes you to question your assumptions. I remained relatively bullish on the stock market’s longer-term picture into the final quarter of 2007. Only when I pushed myself to read informed views that clashed with my own—and consulting data that did not fit my framework—did I modify my perspectives and avoid significant losses.

2. Examine the Big Picture. It’s easy to get lost in the market’s short-term picture; how it is trading that minute, that day. I find it important to periodically zoom out to longer-term charts and place the current action into context. Indeed, some of the best trading ideas start with a big picture view and then proceed to shorter-term execution. I especially find this to be the case when looking at longer-term support/resistance, trading ranges, and Market Profile value areas. Often, shifting my field of vision will help me avoid an ill-informed, reactive trade based on the market’s last few ticks. If something seems obvious in the market, switch time frames and generate an entirely new perspective. What looks obvious from one view may well be obviously wrong from another.

3. Examine Related Views. Sometimes the action of a single stock or sector will illuminate what’s happening in the broader market; one currency cross will break out ahead of others. Are we seeing a broad fixed income rally, or is the yield curve steepening or flattening? Looking across instruments and asset classes keeps us from getting locked into ways of thinking. I find myself tracking sector ETFs during the trading day to see if stocks are moving in a single direction (trending) or are taking different paths within a range. If I see bond traders fleeing to safety or assuming risk, I can anticipate selling or buying stocks. Seeing the entire financial playing field helps keep us from becoming wedded to preconceived ideas.

4. Take the Break. Just as we take vacations to return to work refreshed, a break from the screen can help us generate fresh market views. It is easy to become focused on what is most dramatic and salient in markets. Pull back and clear out the head to help you see what’s not obvious and then profit by the time it’s recognized by others. I find breaks especially helpful following losing trades, enabling us to reflect on the losses and what can be learned from them.

In short, it’s the mental routines—the mental environment—that we most need to change to break unwanted and unprofitable patterns of thought and behavior. When you’re your own trading coach, you learn to think, but also to think about your thinking. Incorporate a fresh look at self and markets each day to inspire new ideas, challenge stale ones, and tap sources of energy and inspiration that otherwise remain hidden in routine. As with my adventure in Queens, you may find that the most exotic changes bring out your finest adaptations.

C O A C H I N G  C U E:

Many times it’s the market views we most scorn that we need to take most seriously, because at some level we’re finding them threatening. Seek out commentary from those you most disagree with and ask yourself what you would be seeing in the markets if that commentary proves to be correct. If you’re quick to dismiss a market view, give it a second look. You wouldn’t need to be so defensive if you didn’t sense something plausible—and dangerous—in the views you’re dismissing.

– Brett Steenbarger, Ph.D. is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, and the author of The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003) and Enhancing Trader Performance (Wiley, 2006). His latest book is The Daily Trading Coach: 101 Lessons for Becoming Your Own Trading Psychologist. A coach of traders and portfolio managers at hedge funds, banks, and proprietary trading firms, Dr. Steenbarger blogs at TraderFeed.com

Emerging Research and Technology for Life Hacking/ Brain Training

(click to open presentation in new window)

Description: Life hacking. Brain training. They are one and the same. The brain’s frontal lobes enable our goal-oriented behavior, supporting “executive functions,” such as decision-making, attention, emotional self-regulation, goal-setting, and working memory. These functions can be enhanced with targeted practice – such as life hacking. This session will provide an overview of the cognitive neuroscience underpinning life hacking, and review the state-of-the-art of non-invasive tools for brain training: neurofeedback, biofeedback, software applications, cognitive simulations, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, and plain-old meditation.

It was great to meet fellow bloggers and presenters, such as Shelley Batts of Of Two Minds and Chris Patil of Ouroboros, and very inquisite and throughful audience members. Getting ready to speak at ASA/ NCOA and IHRSA next week!

You can read part 1 here.

Q – In your Harvard Management Update interview, you said that “When what we pay attention to is driven by the last email we received, the trivial and the crucial occupy the same plane.” As well, it seems to be that a problem is our culture’s over-idealization of “always on” and “road warrior” habits, which distract from the importance of executive functions such as paying attention to one’s environment, setting up goals and plans, executing on them, measuring results, and internalizing learning. How can companies better equip their employees for future success? Can you offer some examples of companies who have positive cultures that encourage and reward employees fully put their frontal lobes into good use?

A – As I mentioned above, we are working and living in ways that undermine our ability to strategize, focus, reflect, innovate. Skimming, multitasking and speed all have a place in 21st-century life. But we can’t let go of deeper skills of focus and thinking and relating, or we’ll create a society of misunderstanding and shallow thinking.

To create workplaces that foster strategic thinking, deep social connection and innovation, we need to take three steps:

First, question the values that venerate McThinking and undermine attention. Recently, my morning paper carried a front-page story about efforts “in an age of impatience” to create a quick-boot computer. “It’s ridiculous to ask people to wait a couple of minutes to start up their computer,” explained one tech executive. The first hand up in the classroom, the hyper business-man or –woman who can’t sit still, much less listen – these are icons of success in American society. Still, many of us are beginning to question our adoration of instant gratification and hyper-mobility.

Second, we need to set the stage for focus individually and collectively by rewriting our climate of distraction and inattention. To help, some companies and business leaders are experimenting with “white space” – the creation of physical spaces or times on the calendar for uninterrupted, unwired thinking and connection. Executives are scheduling “quiet time” in their calendars to recapture space for reflection. One architect’s design for a major new government laboratory specifically creates spaces for focus, as well as collaboration. IBM’s global practice of “ThinkFridays” began three years ago when software engineers decided to limit email, conference calls and meetings one day a week in order to focus on their creative, patent work. Now, different teams and departments interpret “ThinkFridays” in varied ways. This pioneering initiative is fluid, flexible and workable – more so than the rigid, top-down policies that ban email one day a week.

Finally, if there’s just one action we can take to spark a “renaissance of attention,” it should be to give the gift of our attention to others. Parents and leaders, in particular, need to role model attention. As contemplative scholar Alan Wallace says, “When we give another person our attention, we don’t get it back. We’re giving our attention to what seems worthy of our life from moment to moment. Attention, the cultivation of attention, is absolutely core.”

Q – Some essential skills to thrive in the Cognitive Age seem to be attention, emotional self-regulation, working memory. These capacities are today understood to be less immutable than once thought, with emerging research opening the way for training programs that, for example, perhaps Fortune 500 companies will want too offer in the future as part of their corporate training and leadership programs, Your view?

A – Remarkably, scientists are now beginning to understand the mysteries and workings of attention and its sister skills of working memory and self-regulation. They are also discovering that attention can be trained, a finding that should revolutionize parenting, education and workplace training. In just five days of computer-based training, the brains of 6-year-olds begin to act like adults on measures of executive attention, one study by Michael Posner found. Torkel Klingberg’s work has shown that boosting short-term memory seems to improve children’s ability to stay on task. We don’t yet know how long-lasting the gains are, but practices such as meditation, computer-based exercises and behavioral therapies are proven to boost focus, awareness, working memory and executive attention. The philosopher/psychologist Williams James thought that attention could not be highly trained by “drill or discipline,” but he was wrong.

Still, there are important caveats to keep in mind. Some researchers question computer-based efforts as too narrow in scope, arguing that people must be taught attention holistically, as a life skill. No brief training regime is likely to be a magic bullet. “Part of the problem in today’s society is that people are looking for extremely quick fixes that have no vision. People are looking to lose 20 pounds for the wedding next week,” neuroscientist Amir Raz of McGill University once told me. “But attention training is a slow process.” As well, machine-based training will not be the only way to strengthen attention. Certainly, technology truly augments the human mind, and our gadgets will evolve to better help us focus and think. Yet it’s a mistake to believe that computers, or pharmaceuticals for that matter, can replace the hard, difficult work that we all face in “upgrading” ourselves.

Q – Neuroscientist Torkel Klinkgerg recently told our readers that “modern life itself may help make us more cognitively able. And emerging tools may enhance our abilities and better prepare us for the demands of the Information Age.” What are the opportunities and the risks you see ahead of us?

A – We now have easy access to reams of data, ever-expanding social networks, and limitless experiences across the planet and in the new frontier of cyberspace. The potential for learning, connection, fulfillment is great. But at the moment, we are not realizing this potential. Despite our scientific and technical achievements, we are squandering our chances to create a high-tech, yet reflective and caring society. And yet I am optimistic. In this time of flux, uncertainty, mistrust and collapse, we may nevertheless be shaken enough to reconsider our taken-for-granted ways of thinking and being. We may be ready to effect change. The task before us – to spark a renaissance of attention – is monumental, and yet it’s as crucial as greening the planet or rebuilding our financial system. For we can only meet the challenges of our day by strengthening, not undermining, our powers of attention.

Maggie, thank you very much for your time and attention.

My pleasure!

—
Maggie’s Book: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

—
Related articles and resources:

- Part 1 of the interview with Maggie Jackson

- The Overflowing Brain: Most Important Book of 2008

- Top 10 Brain Fitness Books

This is a 2-part interview conducted via e-mail: we will publish the continuation on Thursday March 12th.

Alvaro Fernandez: New York Times columnist David Brooks said last year that we live in a Cognitive Age, and encouraged readers to be aware of this change and try and adapt to the new reality. Can you explain the cognitive demands of today’s workplaces that weren’t there 30-40 years ago?

Maggie Jackson: Our workplaces have changed enormously in recent decades, and it’s easy to point to the Blackberry or the laptop as the sources of our culture of speed and overload and distraction. But it’s important to note first that our 24/7, fragmented work culture has deeper roots. With the first high-tech inventions, such as the cinema, phonograph, telegraph, rail, and car, came radical changes in human experience of time and space. Distance was shattered – long before email and red-eye flights. Telegraph operators – not online daters – experienced the first virtual love affairs, as evidenced by the 1890s novel Wired Love. Now, we wrestle with the effects of changes seeded long ago.

Today, the cognitive and physical demands on workers are steep. Consider 24/7 living. At great cost to our health, we operate in a sleepless, hurried world, ignoring cues of sun and season, the Industrial Age inventions of the weekend and vacation, and the rhythms of biology. We try to break the fetters of time – and live like perpetual motion machines. That’s one reason why we feel overloaded and stressed – conditions that are corrosive to problem-solving and clear thinking.

At the same time, our technologies allow us access to millions of information bites – producing an abundance of data that is both wondrous and dangerous. Unless we have the will, discipline and frameworks for turning this information into wisdom, we remain stuck on the surface of the “knowledge economy.” Today, half of college students can’t judge the objectivity of a website, and just 30 percent of college graduates can read a document as simple as a food label proficiently. A third of workers say they are often so busy and interrupted that they don’t have time to reflect on the work they do. I worry that we are creating new forms of ignorance, based not on a lack of information but on a lack of will or ability to wrest knowledge from the oceans of information surrounding us. Google isn’t making us stupid. And yet, are we using Google wisely?

Finally, we have developed a highly fragmented workstyle, thanks in part to the enormous influence of Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor was an efficiency guru who taught workers to chop up tasks so that each part of a project could be made to go faster. His theories, according to management guru Peter Drucker, have influenced the world as much as those of Marx or Freud. Today, the average office worker switches tasks every three minutes all day long, and nearly half of such interruptions – both external and internal – are self-imposed. Such a workstyle is correlated with stress, frustration and even lower creativity.

In this new world, we can revel in our ability to move freely across the globe, connect with millions of others instantly and tap newfound sources of potential knowledge. Yet too often, our new ways of working undermine our powers of attention, a tripartite set of skills related to awareness or wakefulness; focus or the spotlight of the mind; and executive attention, a package of higher-order skills related to judgment and planning. Our split-focus, frenetic, diffused lives undermine our powers of attention, leaving us detached, unfocused and scattered.

Q – What may the role of spending hours per day in front of a TV?

A – Today, we are exposed to far more than television everyday. YouTube, movies, animated billboards, laptops, Muzak, iPods and other devices envelop us by choice and by default in streams of visual and aural distractions, information and ads. The average American child is exposed to nearly six hours of non-print media a day. So determining the specific impact of just one type of media is difficult in this new mediated world. Still, it’s certain that this environment shapes us, and molds our incredibly plastic brains, in ways we can only begin to fathom. According to work by Daniel Anderson at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, toddlers exposed to “background television” – tv running in the background of family life – are more likely to show attention deficiencies. They play more briefly with toys, show less focus with their play, and interact less with parents.

As humans, we are born interrupt-driven. In order to survive, we need to focus on new stimuli in our environment and stay vigilant to changes around us. This is why we are prey to and delighted by quick-moving, enticing, complex media – at home and at work. In the office especially, if we’re constantly reacting to the new, new thing, we wind up doing nothing more than putting out fires and keeping our email inbox empty. We are less inclined to wrestle with the bigger, messy, problems of the day. Today, we must place ourselves back in the driver’s seat of our attention. We need to take charge of our environment and our attentional skills, and recapture time for reflection, deep problem-solving and creativity. As one top executive once told me, “thinking can’t be done in sound bites.”

Q – In your Harvard Management Update interview, you said that “When what we pay attention to is driven by the last email we received, the trivial and the crucial occupy the same plane.” As well, it seems to be that a problem is our culture’s over-idealization of “always on” and “road warrior” habits, which distract from the importance of executive functions such as paying attention to one’s environment, setting up goals and plans, executing on them, measuring results, and internalizing learning. How can companies better equip their employees for future success? Can you offer some examples of companies who have positive cultures that encourage and reward employees fully put their frontal lobes into good use?

A – As I mentioned above, we are working and living in ways that undermine our ability to strategize, focus, reflect, innovate. Skimming, multitasking and speed all have a place in 21st-century life. But we can’t let go of deeper skills of focus and thinking and relating, or we’ll create a society of misunderstanding and shallow thinking.

To create workplaces that foster strategic thinking, deep social connection and innovation, we need to take three steps:

First, question the values that venerate McThinking and undermine attention. Recently, my morning paper carried a front-page story about efforts “in an age of impatience” to create a quick-boot computer. “It’s ridiculous to ask people to wait a couple of minutes to start up their computer,” explained one tech executive. The first hand up in the classroom, the hyper business-man or –woman who can’t sit still, much less listen – these are icons of success in American society. Still, many of us are beginning to question our adoration of instant gratification and hyper-mobility.

To Be Continued…

Please remember: we will publish the continuation of this interview on Thursday March 12th. (yes, you can consider this a test of your executive functions and/ or your memory).

Book: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.

Related articles and resources:

- The Overflowing Brain: Most Important Book of 2008

- Top 10 Brain Fitness Books

The second episode, which you can watch for free via Hulu.com Here, is pretty interesting, but the best part happens in the beginning, so you only need to watch a few minutes to learn why what are called “lie detectors” are nothing but biofeedback systems that measure physiological anxiety.

Biofeedback can be a very effective training tool for emotional self-regulation and stress management, precisely because it enables a faster feedback-based learning loop. Indeed, we are seeing a growing number of applications in the market, with names such as EmWave, StressEraser, RESPeRATE, Journey to the Wild Divine, and others.

Simply, don’t believe the technology is an effective lie detector.

Caroline and I wrote an article on Paul Ekman’s work a couple of years ago – let me republish it now, given his work has made it all the way to mainstream TV!

Paul Ekman has conducted extensive research on identifying emotions through facial expressions. As part of that research, and as part of the power of discipline and training, he learned how to consciously manipulate 42 facial muscles, including many that in most of us are beyond our control, and even awareness.

In the 60s and 70s when Ekman began looking into the universality of facial expressions, all the major contemporary social scientists, like Margaret Mead, believed that expressions were culturally learned, not innate. He traveled all over the world with pictures of people making distinct facial expressions and found people in cultures everywhere, from modern to stone age, agreed on the emotion behind the expression. He then turned to studying the production of these expressions and the 43 facial muscles that can create 10,000 expressions, which form the basis of his training.

He found seven universal emotions with unique facial expression. The emotions are: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise, and contempt. At least five of these are shared with non-human primates as well. Interestingly, the smile is the easiest expression to recognize, and the easiest to identify from afar. These emotions have a specific trigger, come quickly without thought, and interact with your physiology – meaning merely making the fear expression will create a fear response in your body as well. With fear, neurons will signal your body to prepare to flee by sending blood to the large voluntary muscles in your legs. In anger, on the other hand, your brain signals your body to fight by sending blood to your hands. Try practicing on yourself: can you feel a change in your emotional state by making changes in your facial expression?

Emotions have distinct triggers and learning those triggers is an important step in understanding your own emotions and why you respond the way you do. To date, the best way to learn to recognize the the impulse that was triggered before the awareness of the emotion is contemplative practice (meditation). Also, an important point to clarify, emotions are not moods, which are longer affective experiences have an unclear trigger (you may not be sure what sparked the mood you’re in) and tend to filter your view of the environment.

Based on primary and secondary research, he found that there are seven emotions expressed in the face in universally consistent ways:
- Sadness
- Anger
- Surprise
- Fear
- Enjoyment
- Disgust
- Contempt

Even more interesting: according to his research, feelings and facial expressions influence each other. This is, not only a sad person will naturally look sad, but a person who intentionally smiles will feel more content than a person who doesn’t.

You can read his advice on how to recognize feelings in order to communicate better (opens a PDF document), focused on doctor-patient relationships but useful to everyone (including patients who may want to make sure to get their point across).

Question: from left to right, top then down, what universal feeling does each face indicate?

After reading Joshua’s most recent book The Art of Learning, I thought of a million topics I wanted to discuss with him–topics such as being labelled a “child prodigy”, blooming, creativity, and the learning process. Thankfully, since I was profiling Waitzkin for an article I was fortunate enough to get a chance to have such a conversation with him. I hope you find this discussion just as provocative and illuminating as I did.

The Child Prodigy

S. Why did you leave chess at the top of your game?

J. This is a complicated question that I wrote about very openly in my book. In short, I had lost the love. My relationship to the game had become externalized-by pressures from the film about my life, by losing touch with my natural voice as an artist, by mistakes I made in the growth process. At the very core of my relationship to learning is the idea that we should be as organic as possible. We need to cultivate a deeply refined introspective sense, and build our relationship to learning around our nuance of character. I stopped doing this and fell into crisis from a sense of alienation from an art I had loved so deeply. This is when I left chess behind, started meditating, studying philosophy and psychology, and ultimately moved towards Tai Chi Chuan.

S. Do you think being a child prodigy hurt your chess career in any way?

J. I have never considered myself a prodigy. Others have used that term, but I never bought in to it. From a young age it was always about embracing the battle, loving the game, and overcoming adversity. Growing up as a competitor in Washington Square Park helped me avoid the perils of perfectionism-it was a school of hard knocks, and those guys always kept me on my toes for complacency. On this theme, I think losing my first National Chess Championship was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, because it helped me avoid many of the psychological traps you are hinting at. That year, between ages 8 and 9 was one of the most formative periods of my life. I had felt my mortality, came back strong, and went on to dominate the scholastic chess scene over the next 8 years. On some fundamental level, the notion of success in my being was defined by overcoming adversity-and it still is.

The truth is that throughout my careers in both chess and the martial arts, I often knew that my rivals were more naturally gifted than me-either with their mental machines or their bodies. But I have believed in my training, my approach to learning, and my ability to rise to the challenge under pressure.

S. In general, do you see any disadvantages to being labeled a child prodigy?

J. Yes, there are huge disadvantages if you buy into the label. The most perilous danger, in the language of Carol Dweck, is that we internalize an entity theory of intelligence. The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity. For that reason, it is incredibly important for parents to make their feedback process related as opposed to praising or criticizing talent. Think about it-if you tell a kid that she is a winner, which a lot of well-intentioned parents do, then she learns that her winning is because of something ingrained in her. But if we win because we are a winner, then when we lose it must make us a loser.

S. If the movie of your life hadn’t been made, do you think you’d still be continuing on in chess?

J. That’s a great question. My mother would say no. I hope she is right but I’m not sure. I really loved the game so deeply, and it was a wildly intense, exciting, and spiritually rewarding process. The movie definitely had a large role in the existential crisis that locked me up and moved me away from chess. But that period of transition taught me some incredibly valuable life lessons that have defined my growth in other arenas-so just to be clear, although it caused me some pain, I would never take back that experience. My hunch is that I would have stayed in chess for much longer and would have gone much further-but I think ultimately I would have felt like a lion in a cage sitting at a chessboard my whole life.

S. Do you think if you took up chess at a later age, you could have been a world champion in chess?

J. I have no idea.

S. Do you think you will ever return to chess? And if you do, do you think you are still capable of being the world champion? Or have you missed your boat?

J. I don’t think I will ever go back to competitive chess. I’m on to new mountains. Since winning the 2004 Tai Chi Push Hands Worlds, which is where my book ends, I decided to be a beginner again, and took up the martial art Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a fiercely competitive and physically brutal sport. I am training full time and aiming for the 2010 and 11 World Championships-the biggest challenge of my life. I’ve also recently opened an educational nonprofit-the JW Foundation, www.jwfoundation.com , and am devoted to helping kids discover their shine in the learning process. My plate is pretty full beyond chess.

S. Were you a good student in school?

J. I was a cut up in classes that didn’t excite me, and I was passionate about what did.

S. Did you like learning new subjects in school? Are there any subjects you had trouble with? Or that you just didn’t like?

J. I never liked math much although I was pretty good at it. And I hated geography in 3rd grade.

On Blooming

S. What does the term “late bloomer” mean to you?

J. To be honest, I haven’t thought much about the term, but in my mind it implies that someone came into their own later in their life or process than most would consider typical for exceptional achievers. Of course this definition leaves a lot to be desired because I tend to consider the deeper aspects of the learning process to be most interesting, and they often take quite a bit of time, hard work, and suffering to penetrate.

S. Do you consider yourself a late bloomer in Tai Chi Chuan?

J. Well, I didn’t start studying Tai Chi Chuan until I was 21, so from a competitive athletic perspective, I was certainly a late starter-at a world-class level most of my rivals in Asia had trained full time since early childhood. I had a lot of ground to cover, and I did it essentially by taking my lessons learned in other arenas of life, chess to a large degree, and transferring them over into this new art. As for blooming, I’m still working on that.

S. In reading your book, it seems as though your major strength in Tai Chi Chuan is the way you put your mind into the game. You were able to beat players much stronger than you by “getting into their mind.” I find this fascinating. Why do you think you were so good at psyching people out? Was it because of your early chess experiences?

J. Sure, my chess experience taught me a lot about the psychology of competition. World-class chess players are incredibly brilliant people who have spent their lives figuring out ways to get it your head, to break you down. Usually every high level chess error is accompanied by a psychological break of sorts-to survive, you have to understand the inner game. I am always looking for where the psychological and the technical collide-that surely comes from my chess study. But frankly, I think I really got good at the psychological game after chess. Chess taught me how to be relentlessly introspective, how to unearth tells in myself and in opponents, but then I really took that foundation and put it into dynamic action in the martial arts. I work on being a heat seeking missile for dogma. If you unearth or instill a false assumption in an opponent, they are in a lot of trouble unless they feel you getting into their head and kick you out fast. Of course this eye for false constructs is an important tool in the learning process as well.

S. Do you think part of your ability to psych people out may have to do with your extraordinary intelligence compared to other players? You said something interesting in your book regarding your match with Buffalo. You say: “He was surely the greater athlete. But maybe I was the better thinker.” Is it possible that you were just smarter than Buffalo (even though he was stronger)?

J. I don’t think I have an extraordinary intelligence. Buffalo had cultivated his body his whole life, and he had that edge. I had cultivated my mind. My chance lay in making the mental game dominate a physical battle. At a high level of competition, success often hinges on who determines the field and tone of battle.

S. In your book you discuss Carol Dweck’s work on how perceptions of the fixed nature of ability can affect ability itself. I do think that Carol’s work is important and I appreciate you citing it in your book. I was wondering though: to what extent do you think so-called inborn ability determines success in learning a new craft like chess or Tai Chi Chuan?

J. I am a nurture over nature guy. While I would tend to disagree, some might argue that I was an extremely gifted chess player. Fair enough. But there is no way you could argue that I am an athlete of world-class talent. I am able to compete at the highest levels because I have cultivated an approach to learning and performance that maximizes my strengths, tackles my weaknesses through the prism of my strengths, dissolves crippling false constructs and divisive mental barriers, and allows me to express myself through my art in as unhindered a manner as possible.

S. How much do you think people can compensate for weak natural ability? It seems like a major component of your learning technique is learning how to play up your strengths, and exploit the weaknesses of others. Could you perhaps elaborate on this idea?

J. I tend to feel that there is something a bit self-destructive in believing you have to compensate for weak natural ability, because it implies that there is one ideal way to learn something and because of natural deficiencies we are forced to take a different, much longer road. On the contrary, I have found that people at the highest levels of Quality in virtually all pursuits are somewhat unusual minds-and their “brilliance” has usually evolved from working with their natural strengths. There is this terrible tendency in education to box all kids into the same mold-this is one of many problems with all these standardized tests. The paved road is often the dogmatic one (of course we cannot believe this dogmatically) and there is something wonderful about building a learning process around the uniqueness of your own inspirations.

On Learning

S. I read your book and thought to myself, “Wow, Joshua gets it. He really mastered the art of learning.” Your writing is so good and your points are so well made that it seems by reading your book that what you’ve discovered can be taught to anyone (although, as you mention, customized to each individual’s unique style). I can’t help but notice though how fast you learn things, even in comparison to others who are attempting to learn (and I assume with equal determination). To what extent do you think raw IQ contributes to your fast learning ability? Research does show that those with a high IQ can learn nearly anything at a faster rate than others.

J. Thank you for the compliment, but my guess is that I wouldn’t have a terribly impressive IQ. And I don’t learn so fast, I just have a lot of passion and throw my heart and soul into things that move me. Learning happens to have been an art that moves me and that I have worked very hard to understand.

S. Have you ever had your IQ tested? Would you be open to me testing you sometime?

J. I haven’t. I guess I might be open to it, but I tend to find these standardized tests to be somewhat limiting. My greatest strength lies in finding hidden harmonies-discovering connections where others might see chaos or disconnect. That is a way of thinking that I have cultivated for many years. It is one that was not ingrained, and that most people could develop if they wanted to.

S. To what extent do you think your fast learning rate is due to your disciplined technique to learning?

J. I would say that the depth of my learning (and it has a long way to go) is a result of passion, hard work, an introspective honesty, and beyond all else, a love for the search.

S. How much do you think passion and devotion to learning contributed to your success?

J. It would be hard for me to overstate it.

S. In what ways did your chess skills help you with Tai Chi Chuan? What skills were transferable?

J. This is a deep question that was at the core of my inspiration for writing The Art of Learning. It will be hard to answer this quickly, but, in short, all of the skills were transferable. The two arts became one in my mind and it felt like I was transferring my sense of Quality from chess over into Tai Chi Chuan. And this had nothing to do with these particular disciplines-they couldn’t really be more different-the translation process can be applied to anything. At the core of my relationship to learning is breaking down the barriers in our minds that divide our disparate pursuits. These walls are false constructs. If we cultivate a thematic eye, then growth in one area of life will immediately inform our other pursuits.

In truth, this is a big reason I took up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu-I am currently taking the essence of my chess and Tai Chi understanding, and transferring it over to a third art. This receptivity to thematic interconnectedness is a muscle I hope to cultivate for the rest of my life.

S. In reading your book, I wondered if you could become world-class at anything. You discovered that there are many similarities between Chess and Tai Chi Chuan. And it’s clear that your abilities are well suited to whatever is common across these two domains. But to what extent do you think you could take your insights into learning and use them to become an expert in any field?

J. This is an interesting question. I think my ideas could be applied to just about any field, and I would have a lot of confidence taking on most arts. I think there are obviously some things that we are weakest at, and it would be absurd to spend a lifetime in those arenas-in my case, anything related to neatness–that said, our strengths can be applied to disciplines that might seem as unrelated as possible. Just to be clear, I don’t think my approach has anything to do with what happens to be common ground between chess and Tai Chi Chuan. The connections were in my process, and that process, or anyone’s personalized variation of it, could be applied across the board.

S. In your book you describe a moment in your match with Buffalo where you say: “I reached deeper than I knew I had and won the most dramatic point of my life.” You then say: “I saw parts of myself I didn’t know about.” Could you please elaborate? In other words, can you demystify “reaching deeper” for me? Do you think most of us are capable of more than we realize?

J. Yes, I do-no question about it. Growth only really comes at the point of resistance, but that is the moment that we tend to stop. Because it hurts. Whether we are confronting our psychological foibles or our physiological limits, it is much easier to turn back from the challenge than to push through the discomfort. I think digging deeply into ourselves, pushing our limits, is a muscle that can be cultivated like any other–incrementally. If we embrace these outer limits of our ability as something malleable that can expand with training, and if we embrace the discomfort of these moments of growth, then we start to love the richness of the self-discovery. The discomfort becomes exquisite. Learning becomes life.As for that moment against Buffalo, I had lived as a competitor for over 20 years and had no idea what I could really do when pushed so far past my “limit.” Fortunately I had trained to be able to meet the challenge, even if I had no idea how big the challenge would really be. We have remarkable reservoirs.

S. What does it mean to “feel space left behind”? You use that phrase a lot in your book, but I’m honestly not 100% clear on what it really means.

J. This is an idea that applies to most disciplines. Every movement, be it mental or physical, tends to both take space and leave something behind. We are conditioned to see what something does more than what it doesn’t do. This tendency is a construct. Dogma. Training yourself to see newly created emptiness can be quite powerful.

S. In your book you say: “The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised.” Can you please elaborate a bit on this?

J. Sure. I wrote those words reflecting back on the ups and downs of my competitive careers thus far and more specifically on the 2004 World Championships, the most brutal experience of my life. I have learned that in those rare moments of truth in our lives, we have to be willing to let go of the comfort of our knowledge, our preparation, our sense of control, and we have to flow with an improvisational spirit that embraces chaos, turns adversity to our advantage, and digs into our deepest reservoirs of energy and creativity. Our relationship to the learning process, in my opinion, should be one that prepares us for that freedom under pressure-or more truly, that liberates us to live every moment with that openness to unexpected beauty. Learning and peak performance aren’t about control or memorization or perfection-they are about something much deeper, something more essentially human.

S. What role do you think intuition and the unconscious plays in the learning process?

J. A tremendously important one. A huge part of my process involves breaking down the walls between the conscious and unconscious minds, so technical growth sparks creative leaps, and perhaps more importantly, creative leaps can inform the direction of technical growth. The chapter entitled Slowing Down Time and the second to last chapter of my book in which I was training for the 2004 World Championships really go into my system for cultivating the intuition. Opening up communication between these different components of our minds is another muscle that we can all develop if we understand how.

S. What role do you think flow plays in the learning process?

J. It plays a critical role. People often make the mistake of dividing the learning process from performance psychology in their minds-as if they can learn for a lifetime and then perform at their level of ability whenever necessary. I believe this is short-sighted from two perspectives. One, the ability to perform under pressure is an art of its own that must be cultivated as a way of life. And perhaps more importantly, if we are not deeply present in the day to day learning process, then we will not be learning at a high level. The ability to enter a state of flow is one that should be integral to every aspect of our life in learning. And again, it is not so hard as long as we take it on systematically.

S. Do you think you’d ever consider taking up breakdancing? I have enjoyed learning how to breakdance and think you’d be quite good at it!

J. Thanks man. No breakdancing for me yet. One thing at a time.

– Scott Barry Kaufman has published multiple journal articles and book chapters relating to intelligence and creativity and is the editor of two forthcoming books. Interview © 2008 by Scott Barry Kaufman.

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- Interview with James Zull: An ape can do this. Can we not?

- Learning & The Brain: Interview with Robert Sylwester

- Teaching is the art of changing the brain

Dr. Klingberg has just published a very stimulating popular science book, The Overflowing Brain, that should help in precisely that direction. Given the importance of the topic, and the quality of the book, we have named  The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory  The SharpBrains Most Important Book of 2008, and asked Dr. Klingberg to write a brief article to introduce his research and book to you. Below you have. Enjoy!

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Research and Tools to Thrive in the Cognitive Age

By Dr. Torkel Klingberg

Do we all have attention deficits?

The information age has provided us with high technology which fills our days with an ever increasing amount of information and distraction. We are constantly flooded with on-the-go emails, phone calls, advertisements and text-messages and we try to cope with the increasing pace by multi tasking. A survey of workplaces in the United States found that the personnel were interrupted and distracted roughly every three minutes and that people working on a computer had on average eight windows open at the same time. There is no tendency for this to slow down; the amount and complexity of information continually increases

The most pressing concerns with this environment are: how do we deal with the daily influx of information that our inundated mental capacities are faced with? At what point does our stone-age brain become insufficient? Will we be able to train our brains effectively to increase brain capacity in order to stay in-step with our inexorable lifestyles? Or will we be stricken with attention deficits because of brain overload?

In his article “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform,” psychiatrist Edward Hallowell coins the term “attention deficit trait” to characterize the situation in which so many of us find ourselves. This is not a new diagnosis of any use to doctors, but rather a description of the mental state that information technology, a faster pace, and changing work patterns have induced. Some would call it a lifestyle.

The point of Hallowell’s term is that it illustrates how the modern work situation, with its pace and simultaneous demands, often gives us the feeling of having attention difficulties and of not quite having the capacity to do our jobs. Our brains are being flooded. But is it really the case that the information society generally impairs people’s attentional abilities? What are attentional abilities, anyway, and exactly what in our complex work situations is mentally demanding?

Cognitive Demands in the Information Age

In my book “The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory” I try to pinpoint the nature of the cognitive demands of modern life and the psychological and neural basis of our capacity limitations. One demand factor in our working lives is the incessant distractions: all the impressions that buzz around us like mosquitoes and make it hard for us to concentrate on what we’re doing. The torrent of information increases not only the volume of data we’re expected to take in but also the volume we need to shut out.

Another important demand factor is multitasking, which is the quick and easy solution for all those who want to get more done in less time. However, doing (or at least trying to do) several tasks simultaneously is one of our most demanding everyday activities. Running on a treadmill while watching TV usually isn’t too taxing, nor is chewing gum while walking in a straight line. But even such a mundane situation as talking on a cell phone while driving is not as easy as we’d like to think. Apart from the fact that it’s difficult to hold the wheel and shift gears with the same hand, or to keep our eyes on the road and on the phone’s display at the same time, there’s something in the mentally demanding task of telephoning that makes us worse drivers.

Information overload, distractions and multitasking are probably the most important factors in making the information age so cognitively demanding are.

The Role of Working Memory: challenges and opportunities

There are plenty of indications that those three factors are loading on our working memory capacity, which is our capacity to hold on to relevant information for short periods of time. The problem is that our working memory capacity is a scarce resource. The increase in information load thus meets a biological constraint in how much we can handle. A question that has always fascinated me is how this capacity constraint is wired in our brain, and if we can in some way increase this capacity, and this question is a thread that I follow throughout the book.

In the research that my colleagues and I have done at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, we have shown that training on working memory tasks, close or above the limit of our capacity, can improve our working memory. This improvement is not only confined to the trained tasks, but generalizes to other cognitive tasks requiring working memory and control of attention. We have also shown that this training improves the ability to focus in everyday life. The working memory capacity limitation is not immutable, but actually possible to stretch.

Furthermore, it is possible that the increasing information load not only is harmless, but might actually improve our cognitive abilities through improvement of working memory. The now well known Flynn effect tells us that fluid intelligence is increasing, presumably due to environmental demands on cognition. The most important cognitive demands of modern life relates to working memory, and the most important cognitive function underlying fluid intelligence is working memory capacity. The way environmental demands improves fluid intelligence might thus be through improvement on working memory capacity.

In other words, modern life itself may help make us more cognitively able. And emerging tools may enhance our abilities and better prepare us for the demands of the Information Age.

Reflections for the Future

Training our brains might thus be a way to keep up with the increasing demands of the information age. This might be especially relevant for those of us that are over 25 years of age, when working memory capacity starts to decline year by year, at the same time as the demands increase. In my book I, half jokingly, suggested that in the future we might see company-funded cognitive fitness training for employees. It was with a certain satisfaction that I recently read in SharpBrains blog about a new initiative by the USA Ice Hockey league to provide computerized cognitive training -focused on important perception and decision-making skills- to its players.

In the future we might be as aware of cognitive function as we know are obsessed with calories, diets, glycemic index and cardiovascular training, and brain training might be a part of our every day life.

– Dr. Torkel Klingberg leads the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the Karolinska Institute, which is part of the Stockholm Brain Institute. He has recently written The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory (Oxford University Press, November 2008).

Why do we talk about ice hockey in a  brain fitness blog?

Well, we recently announced this very innovative initiative, and now can offer more context:

USA Hockey and Intelligym:

- “USA Hockey, with partners ACE (Applied Cognitive Engineering) and the BIRD (Binational Industrial Research and Development) Foundation, have announced plans to develop a revolutionary product that will, for the first time ever, provide players a training tool to develop “hockey sense.”

- “To be called Hockey IntelliGym, the software-based product will furnish players with a highly effective training tool to develop perception and decision-making skills. Further, it will enable coaches to fine-tune the training program and follow-up on the progress of their players.”

- “We’re really into unchartered territory with the development of Hockey IntelliGym,” said Dave Ogrean, executive director of USA Hockey. “With the expertise of ACE and the support of the BIRD Foundation, we’ll be able to produce a product that will give our players an opportunity to improve in areas that training has never before been available.”

- “It is anticipated that the product will be available in December 2010″

Full release: here

Comment:  this initiative is very meaningful for two reasons: first, it shows how the Brain Fitness field is composed of several market segments (we cover ACE as one of the companies in the Corporate, Military & Sports segment) beyond what we can call “healthy aging”. Second, it beautifully illustrates the potential to enhance cognitive performance at all ages – to improve quality of life, driving skills, job-related skills…

For more context, read: Cognitive Training for Basketball Game-Intelligence: Interview with Prof. Daniel Gopher

Dr. Newberg, thank you for being with us today. Can you please explain the source of your interests at the intersection of brain research and spirituality?

Since I was a kid, I had a keen interest in spiritual practice. I always wondered how spirituality and religion affect us, and over time I came to appreciate how science can help us explore and understand the world around us, including why we humans care about spiritual practices. This, of course, led me to be particularly interested in brain research.

During medical school I was particularly attracted by the problem of consciousness. I was fortunate to meet researcher Dr. Eugene D’Aquili in the early 1990s, who had been doing much research on religious practices effect on brain since the 1970s. Through him I came to see that brain imaging can provide a fascinating window into the brain.

Can we define religion and spirituality -which sound to me as very different brain processes-, and why learning about them may be helpful from a purely secular, scientific point of view?

Good point, definitions matter, since different people may be searching for God in different ways. I view being religious as participating in organized rituals and shared beliefs, such as going to church. Being spiritual, on the other hand, is more of an individual practice, whether we call it meditation, or relaxation, or prayer, aimed at expanding the self, developing a sense of oneness with the universe.

What is happening is that specific practices that have traditionally been associated with religious and spiritual contexts may also be very useful from a mainstream, secular, health point of view, beyond those contexts. Scientists are researching, for example, what elements of meditation may help manage stress and improve memory. How breathing and meditation techniques can contribute to health and wellness. For example, my lab is now conducting a study where 15 older adults with memory problems are practicing Kirtan Kriya meditation during 8 weeks, and we have found very promising preliminary outcomes in terms of the impact on brain function. This work is being funded by the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation, but we have submitted a grant request to the National Institute of Health as well.

Can you give an overview of the benefits of meditation, including Richard Davidson’s studies on mindfulness meditation?

There are many types of meditation – and we each are researching different practices. Which of course share some common elements, but are different in nature. Dr. Davidson has access to the Dalai Lama and many Buddhist practitioners, so much of his research centers on mindfulness meditation. We have easier access to Franciscan monks and to practitioners of Kirtan Kriya meditation.

At its core, meditation is an active process that requires alertness and attention, which explains why we often find increased brain activity in frontal lobes during practice. Usually you need to focus on something – a mantra, a visual or verbal prompt- while you monitor breathing.

A variety of studies have already shown the stress management benefits of meditation, resulting in what is often called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. What we are researching now is what are the cognitive – attention, memory- benefits? It is clear that memory depends on attention and the ability to screen out distractions – so we want to measure the effect of meditation on the brain, both structurally and functionally.

To measure the brain activation patterns we have been using SPECT imaging, which involves injecting small amounts of radioactive tracers in volunteers, and helps us get a more view of what happens during practice (fMRI is much more noisy).

To measure functional benefits we use the typical batteries of neuropsychology testing.

If there is a growing body of evidence behind the health and cognitive benefits of meditation – what is preventing a more widespread adoption of the practice, perhaps in ways similar to yoga, which is now pretty much a mainstream activity?

Well, the reality is that meditation requires practice and dedication. It is not an easy fix. And some of the best-researched meditation techniques, such as mindfulness meditation, are very intensive. You need a trained facilitator. You need to stick to the practice.

In fact, that’s why our ongoing research focused on a much easier to teach and practice technique. We want to see if people can practice on their own, at home, a few minutes a day for a few weeks.

The other problem is that this is not a standardized practice, so there is a lot of confusion: many different meditation techniques, with different sets of priorities and styles.

My advice for interested people would be to look for something simple, easy to try first, ensuring the practice is compatible with one’s beliefs and goals. You need to match practice with need: understand the specific goals you have in mind, your schedule and lifestyle, and find something practical. Otherwise, you will not stick to it (similar to people who never show up at the health club despite paying fees).

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote two very thought-provoking articles, one on the Cognitive Age we are living in, another on the Neural Buddhists, where he quotes your work. What is the big picture, the main implications for society from your research?

I believe Philosophy complements Science, and all of us human beings would benefit from spiritual practices to achieve higher state of being, develop compassion, increase awareness, in ways compatible with any religious or secular beliefs. This is the main theme of my upcoming book, How God Changes Brain (to be published on March 2009): how we develop a shared knowledge of our common biology, and celebrate the differences which are based on our specific contexts. We are spiritual and social beings.

From an education point of view, I believe schools will need to recognize that rote learning is not enough, and add to the mix practices to improve cognition, and manage stress and relationships.

That spiritual angle may prove controversial in a number of scientific quarters. What would, for example, say to biologist Richard Dawkins?

I’d tell him that we all view the world through the lens of our brains, reflecting our cultural, social, and personal background. His view is based on his lens. Same as mine. All of us have a belief system. His is not particularly more accurate than everybody else’s.

We shouldn’t throw out the baby with bathwater. I don’t think religion is a black & white matter: yes, fundamentalism is a problem, as is rejecting data and ignoring scientific findings. But there are also good elements: the motivation to care about human beings, to develop compassion, to perfect ourselves and our world.

Dr. Newberg, thank you for your time today.

My pleasure.

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You may enjoy more interviews with leading scientists by checking out our Neuroscience Interview Series.