Tag Archives: psychology

  

Hypertext-Wired Brains and Irrelevancy

Something tells me that these two areas of study, unfortunately, have interrelated results:

From Wired, “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brain” (Nicholas Carr):

Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

From the New York Times, “The Impact of the Irrelevant on Decision-Making“:

An intriguing example of transparently irrelevant information that affects behavior comes from a 1974 report on an experiment by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In the experiment, subjects first spun a wheel that supposedly would stop at random on any number between 1 and 100. Then they were asked what percentage of African countries belongs to the United Nations. For one group of subjects, the wheel was rigged to stop on 10; for a second group, on 65. On average, the first group guessed that 25 percent belong to the United Nations, but the second group guessed 45 percent.

In short, even demonstrably false or irrelevant information can influence judgments, which in turn influence decisions. In such cases, Professors Tversky and Kahneman wrote in 1981, “the adoption of a decision frame is an ethically significant act.”

On a sidenote, also from the Wired article, this makes you wonder about print media’s early attempts to do news video:

In a study published in the journal Media Psychology, researchers had more than 100 volunteers watch a presentation about the country of Mali, played through a Web browser. Some watched a text-only version. Others watched a version that incorporated video. Afterward, the subjects were quizzed on the material. Compared to the multimedia viewers, the text-only viewers answered significantly more questions correctly; they also found the presentation to be more interesting, more educational, more understandable, and more enjoyable.

  

The Best and Worst Memories

From National Geographic, the story of a woman with the best memory and a man with the worst. “Remember This“:

On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it’s not always clear whether he’s just had breakfast or just woken up.

Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness.

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he’d be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. “He’s happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it’s because he doesn’t have any stress in his life,” says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby.

h/t longform.org

  

Lumps of clay for hands: Dr. Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”

Last week, I bought a paperback version of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” just because I liked the title, and it’s been the best purchase I’ve made in months and the first book I’ve read through in about a year. It’s a collection of clinical tales of abnormal neurology and psychology. The titular essay is about a man who had perfectly fine eyesight and taught music at a prestigious school, but had a massive defect in internal visualization, hence, seeing a hat (and trying to pick it up) where his wife’s head was.

In many ways, it’s a depressing glimpse to at how our personalities, mannerisms, even our “souls” are so dependent on the material of the brain. In one chapter, a man murders his daughter under the influence of PCP and is blissfully unaware of the tragedy, until a massive head injury blissfully causes him to relive the memory as his own personal hell. On the whole, some of the anecdotes are inspiring, illustrating how what is perceived as abnormality by our society can be the basis for artistic genius. In one chapter, he describes a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who, despite constant outbursts of profanity, is able to live not only a relatively normal life, but also one in which is music and athletic skills are enhanced by the spastic neurons in his brain. When Dr. Sacks gives him a drug to mitigate his Tourette’s, the man finds he’s clumsier, less inspired…and gives up the drug rather than live a dull “normal” life (he ends up compromising by taking the drug during the workday, and letting his “normal” self shine on the weekends).

The following story probably has been made into a Lifetime movie, but is pretty inspiring no matter how normal your neurological condition may be:

Madeline J. was admitted to St. Benedict’s Hospital near New York City in 1980, her sixtieth year, a congenitally blind woman with cerebral palsy, who had been looked after by her family at home throughout her life. Given this history…I expected to find her both retarded and regressed.

She was neither. Quite the contrary: she spoke freely, indeed eloquently, revealing herself to be a high-spirited woman of exceptional intelligence and literacy.

“You’ve read a tremendous amount,” I said. “You must be really at home with Braille.”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “All my reading has been done for me – by talking-books or other people. I can’t read Braille, not a single word. I can’t do anything with my hands – they are completely useless.”

She held them up, derisively. “Useless godforsaken lumps of dough – they don’t even feel part of me.“

I found this very startling. The hands are not usually affected by cerebral palsy…Miss J’s hands…her sensory capacities – as I now rapidly determined – were completely intact.

There was no impairment of elementary sensation, as such, but, in dramatic fashion, there was the profoundest impairment of perception. She could not identify – and she did not explore; there were no active ‘interogatory’ movements of her hands – they were, indeed, as inactive, as inert, as useless as “lumps of dough.”

Dr. Sacks then wonders if that Miss J’s hands are functionless because, being blind and tended to her whole life, she had never used them:

Had being ‘protected’, ‘looked after’, ‘babied’ since birth prevented her from the normal exploratory use of the hands which all infants learn in the first month of life? And if this was the case – it seemed far-fetched, but was the only hypothesis I could htink of – could she now, in her sixtieth year, acquire what she should have acquired in the first weeks and months of life?

Dr. Sacks devises a simple test of his hypothesis, to prod Miss J to use her hands out of necessity:

I thought of the infant as it reached for the breast. “Leave Madeleine her food, as if by accident, slightly out of reach on occasion,” I suggested to her nurses. “Don’t starve her, don’t tease her, but show less than your usual alacrity in feeding her.”

And one day it happened – what had never happened before: impatient, hungry, instead of waiting passively and patiently, she reached out an arm, groped, found a bagel, and took it to her mouth. This was the first use of her hands, her first manual act, in sixty years, and it marked her birth as a ‘motor individual’.

…

And then – this was within a month of her first recognitions – her attention, her appreciation, moved from objects to people…She started to model heads and figures, and within a year was locally famous as the Blind Sculptress of St. Benedict’s.

For me, for her, for all of us, this was a deeply moving, an amazing, almost a miraculous experience. Who would have dreamed that basic powers of perception, normally acquired in the first months of life, but failing to be acquired at this time, could be acquired in one’s sixtieth year? What wonderful possibilities of late learning, and learning for the handicapped, this opened up.

The rest of the chapter is as moving as this excerpt. It’s an old book, almost a classic as its first print was in 1970. If you’re like me and always far behind on your reading list, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is worth picking up for its timeless scientific insight and wonder.