If you’ve spent any time on YouTube over the last few years (and you know you have), you’ve likely seen the video of the invis­i­ble gorilla exper­i­ment (if you’ve some­how missed it, catch your­self up here). The researchers who con­ducted that study, Dan Simons and Chris Chabris, didn’t real­ize that they were about to cre­ate an instant classic—a psy­chol­ogy study men­tioned along­side the greats, and known well out­side the slim con­fines of psych wonks. Mil­gram taught us about our sheep­ish obe­di­ence to author­ity; Mis­chel used marsh­mal­lows to teach us about delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion; and Simons and Chabris used a faux gorilla to teach us that we are not the mas­ters of atten­tion we think we are.

The duo’s new book Read the rest of this entry »

In 1993, Para­mount Pic­tures released Search­ing for Bobby Fis­cher, which depicts Joshua Waitzkin’s early chess suc­cess as he embarks on a jour­ney to win his first National chess cham­pi­onship. This movie had the effect of weak­en­ing his love for the game as well as the learn­ing process. His pas­sion for learn­ing was reju­ve­nated, how­ever, after years of med­i­ta­tion, and read­ing phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­ogy. With this rekin­dling of the learn­ing process, Wait­zkin took up the mar­tial art Tai Chi Chuan at the age of 21 and made rapid progress, win­ning the 2004 push hands world cham­pi­onship at the age of 27.

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 Read the rest of this entry »

Where does our “Feel­ing of Know­ing” come from? Have you ever felt cer­tain that you knew an answer even though you couldn’t think of it right off? Where does that “feel­ing of know­ing” come from? The answer to this ques­tion is the focus of neu­rol­o­gist Robert Burton’s new book On Being Cer­tain: Believ­ing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.

I recently reviewed Dr. Burton’s book on the Brain Sci­ence Pod­cast and last week I had the oppor­tu­nity to inter­view him for the show. He explained that one of the ori­gins for his book was his expe­ri­ence with patients with con­di­tions like Cotard’s syn­drome (where the patient thinks he is dead or does not exist). What Dr. Bur­ton calls the “feel­ing of know­ing” is so strong that peo­ple con­sis­tently trust it even when their beliefs con­tra­dict the evi­dence. At first it might seem sur­pris­ing that this feel­ing is gen­er­ated at an uncon­scious level in our brain, yet the same sort of pro­cess­ing cre­ates the world we see and hear. It is well-known that what we see is not what enters our eyes, but Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: Should Ham­let be liv­ing with us now and read­ing best­sellers, he might be won­der­ing: To Blink or not to Blink? To Think or not to Think? We are pleased to present, as part of our ongo­ing Author Speaks Series, an arti­cle by Madeleine Van Hecke, author of Blind Spots: Why Smart Peo­ple Do Dumb Things. In it, she offers the “on the other hand” to Mal­colm Gladwell’s Blink argument.)

To Think or to Blink?

- By Madeleine Van Hecke, PhD

Is thought­ful reflec­tion nec­es­sar­ily bet­ter than hasty judgments?

Not accord­ing to Mal­colm Glad­well who argued in his best-selling book, Blink, that the deci­sions peo­ple make in a blink are often not only just as accu­rate, but MORE accu­rate, than the con­clu­sions they draw after painstak­ing analysis.

So, should we blink, or think?

When we make judg­ments based on a thin slice of time  a few min­utes talk­ing with some­one in a speed dat­ing sit­u­a­tion, for exam­ple are our judg­ments really as accu­rate as when we ana­lyze end­less reams of data?

Read the rest of this entry »