Link of the day: "It's all about anticipation"

Recently, there was a neat article from Sports Illustrated about the role of anticipation and experience in world class athletes.

An important concept is that experts "chunk" information into meaningful pieces rather than looking at all the little details.

Before occlusion studies shed light on perceptual expertise in sports (the first significant tests were performed by Canadian researcher Janet Starkes on volleyball players in 1975), studies of chess masters were beginning to illuminate the underlying processes. In famous experiments starting in the 1940s, Dutch psychologist and chess master Adriaan de Groot gave grandmasters and club chess players five seconds to look at chessboards with the pieces arranged in game scenarios. Then the arrangement was taken away, and De Groot had the players reconstruct the board they had just seen. Grandmasters could remember the position of nearly every piece, while decent club players could reconstruct only about half the board. De Groot and subsequent researchers determined that the masters were "chunking" information—rather than remember the position of every piece separately, the grandmasters grasped small chunks of meaningful information, which allowed them to place the pieces. We all use this strategy to an extent in daily life. For example, while it would be difficult to remember 15 random words, it's much less difficult to remember a coherent 15-word sentence because one need only recall bits of meaning and grammar, which coordinate the order of words in your head...

What major league players and pro tennis and cricket athletes seem to do is to synthesize and group information about the human body based on their playing experience...

Being able to process the information in smaller, but larger pieces allows the expert to process information much more quickly. This is especially important for athletes, who don't have time to think.

... Peyton Manning would probably have trouble recalling the exact position of randomly distributed players in the Colts' locker room, but show him those players positioned on a football field, and he would be better at recalling the arrangement because each segment—the positioning of the defensive backs relative to his receivers, for example—has an underlying, unifying meaning for him. That's why crafty defensive coordinators attempt to disguise a defense: They try to forestall Manning's ability to predict the future using cues from patterns he's seen before.

... Additionally, a quarterback, like a baseball batter, does not have time to consciously analyze everything he sees...

... Phillip L. Ackerman, a professor of psychology at Georgia Tech who studies skill acquisition, uses a military analogy to describe a quarterback's decision-making process: "It's an if-then task. If you recognize a certain pattern, you react to it. And you have to do it without thinking about it. It's like a soldier taking apart a weapon when it jams. You learn it to the level where you can do it without thinking, because people are shooting at you."

This idea about the value of experience and how it separates experts from beginners is something that I've seen before and that I find really interesting.

Experience allows you to take mental shortcuts. Like the difference between an expert and a student solving a classical mechanics problem. The expert quickly guesses what is the best and most efficient way to solve the problem (use energy conservation), whereas the student is worrying about the details (how do I connect mass, velocity, and energy?) Or a native vs a ELS student reading English text. The native reads chunks of text whereas the student has to read each word.

That's not all. The Sports Illustrated article also notes that since the anticipatory processes are sub-conscious, this needs to be taken into account in high pressure situations.

This science contradicts some of sports' hoariest beliefs. The exhortation of every Little League coach to "keep your eye on the ball"? Impossible. "If you monitor the eyes of batters, the gaze stops tracking the ball before they hit," Abernethy says. "You don't have a visual system fast enough to track the angular changes that occur over the last few meters of the flight." Nonetheless, he says, keep your eye on the ball is probably sound advice, because it keeps your head still and pointed in the right direction to gather the necessary information from the pitcher's body.

"The real advice would be, 'Watch the shoulder,'" Abernethy says, "but [even] that doesn't help. It actually makes [players] worse." That's because forcing an athlete to think consciously about an automated task destroys his ability to anticipate and puts him back in the realm of reaction.

Coaches who call timeouts to ice free throw shooters and field goal kickers are trying to exploit what researchers have codified: Break up the routine; get the player thinking. University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, author of the book Choke, has demonstrated that, in golf, pressure-induced poor putting can sometimes be overcome with simple remedies such as singing to yourself or counting backward by threes. For automated tasks like putting or placekicking, mild distraction, rather than intense concentration, may be the best approach because it keeps the process out of the higher-conscious areas of the brain, where what Beilock calls "paralysis by analysis" takes root.

At this rate, I might as well copy the entire article, but yeah, there is a lot of good stuff in it.

"The meaning we make does not always have etiologic implications"

I've always wondered about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and while I was looking for information on the topic, I ran across this website run by Dr. Ostroff at Yale. The site contains a link to an interesting essay called "Depression: An Overview with a Focus on ECT."

No, I am not interested in getting ECT, but I was surprised to learn that ECT is such an effective treatment for depression even though it has a reputation as "cruel" punishment or as a last resort. The author suggests that people should consider ECT earlier in their treatment.

But I'm digressing. The real reason I wanted to write the post was because I found the first page of the essay very interesting. It begins:

Depression is an illness and like any illness, it has an impact on biological, psychological and social functioning. Individuals may experience job difficulties, interpersonal difficulties and a variety of physical symptoms that may mimic other conditions. It is common for the patient to attribute the experience of depression to a life event, for example, the failure to get promoted or marital stress. It is human to make meaning of our experiences. It is important for clinicians to remember that the meaning we make does not always have etiologic implications.

I am reminded that coincidence does not imply causation. As a scientist, I am pretty careful to avoid that fallacy in my own work, but this quote cautions me that I can very well make the same fallacy in other areas like in the way I judge people.

As an example, the author tells the story of how he diagnosed a man with Hodgkin's disease. The man became convinced that he had "caught" Hodgkin's disease from walking outside on a damp, cold night because his first symptoms of Hodgkin's started around the same time.

The essay goes on to link the Hodgkin's case to patients with depression.

Like my Hodgkin's patient's experience of cold and coryza that felt like an ordinary flu, patients with depression often experience it as the outcome of immediate life events. Social and psychological events are closer to everyday human experience than neurotransmitter dysfunction in the central nervous system and are readily identified as causative agents.

I don't think the author is trying to say that depression is simply a chemical disorder that should be medicated at every opportunity. Here's my interpretation. Some people are genetically pre-disposed to depression. The other people were healthy individuals who suffered stressful events and the "bad" chemistry has persisted long after the inducing events. The external environment plays a big role, but it's not the entire story.

[Aside: I'm not sure if I believe this view completely. I used to think that everything is just "in your head," but I'm gradually coming around to the view that depression is a complex illness involving interactions between mind and body.]

Towards the end of the essay, the author discusses the implications of meaning and etiologic reasoning on the friends and family of the depressed individual.

Unfortunately, family members of the depressed individual struggle with a concept of illness that is unique to depression. Unlike illnesses that exist in the body in ways that give the appearance of being markedly discontinuous from the patient's emotional environment, such as rheumatoid arthritis or coronary artery disease, depression gives the impression of being related to, if not caused by the patient's emotional milieu...
... Since the depressed individual does not give the impression of being physically ill and a cardinal symptom of their illness is their mood, there is an almost irresistible tendency on the part of their loved ones to try and alleviate their mood. The family wants the depressed member to "snap out of it" or "cheer up" and will go to great lengths to achieve this end. Whereas the coronary patient's family won't let him mow the lawn or shovel snow, and the arthritic's family encourages them to avoid stressing their joints, the depressed patient's family will actively pressure them to change their mood...
... Because the cardinal symptoms of depression often involve emotion states, the family is posed with the problem of understand that emotional states can occur independent of internal or external environmental factors... The family of the depressed patient must understand that the depression is not a reaction to them, but rather a state that arises because of a physiologic problem that requires treatment.

The author notes that misguided family efforts can have significant real-world impact.

If there is a consensus that some external factor caused the depression, there is an overwhelming tendency to eliminate the external factor. I have repeatedly seen families and patients assign etiologic significance to school or work and decide that quitting the situation would eliminate the depression. A significant part of helping the family and patient recover is educating them to not make significant life decisions until recovery is well underway.

This discussion is very useful to me, since I have tried to help depressed people in the past and I will probably be trying to help someone in the future. I have to repeatedly remind myself "the meaning we make does not always have etiologic implications!"

Link of the day: "Why I never hire brilliant men"

There is a tendency in the business world not to hire overqualified job applicants and this very old 1924 article "Why I never hire brilliant men" summarizes the gist of it.

Of course, part of it is that businesses don't want someone to disrupt the cog-and-wheel atmosphere of the workplace, but there is some truth to the article. People don't really talk about the downsides of being "too smart." When you know too much, you can either be overly ambitious and try to do too much (thus being a bad finisher as the article states) or you can be overly depressed and do nothing because you project far into the future. Of course, I think these things can be overcome, but it takes some work. The more brain power you have, the more you have to use to control it.

Link of the day: Is Google making us stupid?

I came across this Atlantic Monthly article via Lifehacker called "Is Google making us stupid?" Unfortunately, the description sounds a lot like me. I wrote a bit about a similar topic in an old post called "ADD in geeks."

There is an interesting discussion about how technology can change the way we write. Nietzsche's prose style changed when he switched from writing long hand to using a typewriter. I notice that I can be very shy and restrained in face-to-face conversation, but in email, because I can type so fast and because the text seems virtual, I'll say all sorts of crazy things that I would never say out loud.

How do you stop "internet-thinking" from taking over your life? You should schedule unstructured time to explore places, build things, read books, take long vacations, etc.

Pithy information

Here's a thought I've been having lately. One of the challenges of communicating dense information is simply remembering it. The human brain is only capable of digesting information in chunks. For example, a US phone number is 10 digits and that's pretty much the maximum the average person can remember. One of the challenges of giving good presentations or lectures is how to package them so that people will remember them the next day. That's why my master's thesis advisor always told his students to tell a story. Stories are the basic coin of art and incredibly effective in making information delivery potent.

One of my favorite artforms is the musical. It doesn't get any better than that. With a musical, you have a compact two hour story with important moments captured in song. An expertly written song (e.g. many Sondheim songs) conveys so much information. The lyrics are like a poem and the music enhances the emotional power of the words. I don't know quite how to describe it, but the music is like a drug that rushes into your brain and turns on your emotional centers and consequently enhances your ability to take in the words. Unlike most songs though, a song in a musical is part of a larger framework - a story made of dialogue and more songs. I suppose everyone has their preference for length: poetry, short story, or novel. Musicals are analogous to short stories and that's the length I enjoy most. (Aside: for written work, I like both short stories and novels.)

I love good songs because you can sing and perform them and because they're so dense and compact, you can carry them in your pocket. When you come across an interesting moment in your life, you can simply pull out the song and use it as a mirror to reflect on the moment. You can say the same things about poetry, but somehow I just haven't developed a taste for poetry... yet.

Brain cross-training

The BBC News had a recent article about the handheld video game Brain Age and other games like it.

It looks like a lot of fun and I might even buy an Nintendo DS Lite just to play Brain Age.

My sister brings up a good question. Those of us who work in the academy get a lot of brain "exercise," but maybe it's a good idea to cross-train. For example, maybe scientists and engineers should go to museums and look at art or read classic literature. What are the different "muscle groups" of the brain? Are there equivalents to arm, chest, leg, abdomen, and back muscle groups?

Can I count playing puzzle-solving video games like Prince of Persia and Paper Mario as part of my cross-training?

Larry Summers' comments on women in science

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, recently made some comments about women in science at an academic conference. Allegedly, he said that women are discouraged from pursuing science because 1) they don't want to work 80 hour weeks and because 2) women are innately less inclined towards science and/or less able to do science. (Here I am using science as a generic term for math, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, economics, etc.) There was supposedly a third reason, but it was not reported.

Since I am a woman scientist, I've decided to write my comments here. America is a nation of free speech and Larry Summers should have the right to voice his (unpopular) opinion especially in an academic venue that is closed from the public. If Summers had made the same speech in front of an audience that included adolescent girls, the critics would have a right to protest since these statements would have been damaging to a young girl's self-esteem. But that was not the case.

I don't completely agree with Summers' statements themselves (assuming they were accurately reported.) He seems to imply that genetics is more important a factor than social/environmental influences. In Asian culture, no one believes in talent, only in the value of hard work. Thus despite their minority status in America, Asians are very successful. I don't have any hard facts in front of me, but I think this is a fair statement. Everyone knows that talent has to be nourished for a person to realize his/her full potential. Behind every star pitcher is a legion of family, friends, and coaches. As for the 80 hour/week barrier, I agree that is a problem, but I don't know how significant it is compared to the genetic and social/environmental factors I just discussed.

It is unfortunate that no one has an actual transcript of the Summers speech. Harvard supposedly has a tape, but refuses to release it. Without knowing what Summers actually said, it's difficult to judge whether he was merely being academic or really being offensive.