Jeremy Gershfeld is listening

Paralysis by analysis

2009-11-17T11:56:00.000-08:00

With all this talk of deep practice and cognitive development, it was interesting to see that Jonah Lehrer asks the question of what happens to people with highly developed skills who choke. The TV is full of professional athletes who are highly skilled at their craft, and grossly underperform when under pressure. Leher posits that they are overthinking at the wrong time. He cites analysis of professional golfers who consistently play worse when Tiger Woods is in the field. Those under Tiger's spell start thinking about how they play, instead of relying on well developed processes, that have long ago matured away from the slow, thinking part of their brain, the pre-frontal cortex. Perhaps an element of deep practice (in addition to rigorous feedback and analysis) is to practice performing the skill one has developed with an un-nervous self-conscious. Clear your mind once you're ready to go. I know Yankees fans will immediately think of Jeter vs. A-Rod.

Lehrer:

Scientists have begun to uncover the causes of choking, diagnosing the particular mental differences that allow some people to succeed while others wither in the spotlight. Although it might seem like an amorphous category of failure, their work has revealed that choking is triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking too much.
The sequence of events typically goes like this: when people get nervous about performing, they become self-conscious. They start to fixate on themselves, trying to make sure that they don't make any mistakes. This can be lethal for a performer. The bowler concentrates too much on his action and loses control of the ball. The footballer misses the penalty by a mile. In each instance, the natural fluidity of performance is lost; the grace of talent disappears.

Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has helped illuminate the anatomy of choking. She uses golf as her experimental paradigm. When people are learning how to putt, it can seem daunting. There are just so many things to think about. Golfers need to assess the lay of the green, calculate the line of the ball, and get a feel for the grain of the turf. Then they have to monitor their putting motion and make sure that they hit the ball with a smooth, straight stroke. For an inexperienced player, a golf putt can seem unbearably hard, like a life-sized trigonometry problem.

But the mental exertion pays off, at least at first. Beilock has shown that novices hit better putts when they consciously reflect on their actions. The more time they spend thinking about the putt, the more likely they are to hole the ball. By concentrating on their game, by paying attention to the mechanics of their stroke, they can avoid beginner's mistakes.

A little experience, however, changes everything. After golfers have learned how to putt - once they have memorised the necessary movements - analysing the stroke is a waste of time. The brain already knows what to do. It automatically computes the slope of the green, settles on the best putting angle, and decides how hard to hit the ball. Bradley Hatfield, a professor of kinesiology and psychology at the University of Maryland, has monitored the brain wave activity of expert athletes during performance. (Because the subjects have to wear a bulky plastic cap full of electrodes, Hatfield can only study golfers, archers and Olympic rifle shooters.) While the brain waves of beginners show lots of erratic spikes and haphazard rhythms - this is the neural signature of a mind that is humming with conscious thoughts - the minds of expert athletes look strangely serene. When they are performing, they exhibit a rare mental tranquility, as their brain deliberately ignores interruptions from the outside world. This is neurological evidence, Hatfield says, of "the zone", that trance-like mindset which allows experts to perform at peak levels. (As the corporate motto says, the best athletes don't think: they just do it.)

Beilock's data further demonstrate the benefits of relying on the automatic brain when playing a familiar sport. She found that when experienced golfers are forced to think about their putts, they hit significantly worse shots. All those conscious thoughts erase their years of practice. "We bring expert golfers into our lab, we tell them to pay attention to a particular part of their swing, and they just screw up," Beilock says. "When you are at a high level, your skills become somewhat automated. You don't need to pay attention to every step in what you're doing."

This is what happens when people "choke". The part of their brain that monitors their behaviour starts to interfere with actions that are normally made without thinking. Performers begin second guessing skills that they have honed through years of practice. The worst part about choking is that it tends to spiral. The failures build upon each other, so a stressful situation is made more stressful.

Leading activity and active learning

2009-11-17T09:09:00.000-08:00

The idea of active learning as an indicator of what the the mind is learning is illuminated by Bordova and Leong.
If we can engage a person with roles and fantasy, their intrinsic motivation to think is accelerated. In children, it is worth observing how they are playing to determine how they are thinking.

Bordova and Leong:

When the development of a child's leading activity lags behind that of other children of the same age, the child may experience difficulties meeting the expectations of his current social context. For example, a school-aged child whose make-believe play has never reached an advanced level might have trouble performing academic tasks that require high levels of symbolic thought and self-regulation, competencies that are required from extensive role-playing. Reversing the clock is not an option; second-grade teachers can't send students back to preschool or even kindergarten. However, individual interventions for these "lagging" students will be more successful when teachers take into account not only the level of their current leading activity - in this case learning activity - but also the level they have reached in the preceding leading activity. Therefore, for a second grader with a "play deficit disorder," playing games that combine academic content with some fantasy elements and structured rules will do more than completing extra worksheets.

Unfolding thinking: teaching makes you smarter?

2009-11-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

How do you know if you've been successful at teaching someone a complex process? Specifically, how do you know if your kids really understand what they're supposed to be learning in school? Perhaps the answer is to have them teach it to someone else.

Petter Kristensen, and Tor Bjerkedal wrote in Science that it is possible that the act of teaching may, in fact, make you smarter. Their claim, through a study of Norwegian kids, is that eldest siblings are, on average, 2.3 IQ points more intelligent than their younger brothers and sisters. And it's not necessarily being born first that makes the difference — it's being raised as the eldest child. What causes the difference? The fact that it's down to social upbringing rather than biological birth order leads Kristensen to think it's because of factors such as parental attention to older siblings, or time that the elders spend tutoring younger sisters and brothers.

Leong and Bodrova illuminate us further:

Through talking and communicating with another person, the gaps and flaws in one's thinking become explicit and accessible to correction. Once concepts are internalized, they may exist in a folded state so that mistakes are not easily revealed. Children may be able to come up with an answer but have only a vague understanding of how they got it. In talking and writing, or drawing for someone else, thought becomes sequential and visible to the thinker. Shared activity forces the participants to clarify and elaborate their thinking and to use language. To communicate to another person, you must be clear and explicit. You have to turn your idea into words and talk until you believe the other person understands you. You are forced to look at different aspects of an idea or task and to take another person's perspective. As a result, more and more sides or characteristics of an object or idea are exposed.

The question is, how do you teach children the idea of how to teach? I suspect the answer lies in how one draws out a child in conversation. If it is difficult for a child to explain something, then it is the parent/teacher/coach's responsibility to break the concepts up as simply as possible until the child can explain their thoughts. Those simple concepts will build on each other ultimately, into complex and coherent systems.

Mozart has a Marketing solution to the Recession?

2009-11-05T12:27:00.000-08:00

If you're curious about how Mozart resembles an integrated marketer, look no further than this multi-media piece I co-authored with Judy Franks. The audio streaming from this multi-media piece musically illustrates how the current recession plays out for integrated marketers. You then hear what Mozart's solutions would be.

As for the string quartet performance: I sat in playing second violin with friends of mine from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Qing Hou, on first violin, Larry Neuman on viola, and Brant Taylor on 'cello. The exception is when I scored the whole quartet for solo violin. I performed that bit of awkward musical gymnastics.

Assisted Active Learning

2009-11-05T12:13:00.000-08:00

More on the Vygotskyian approach to learning:

from Bedrova and Leong:

No learning occurs if the learner is relatively passive - just following the adult's directions. No learning occurs if the learner is not mentally active. All participants, whether they are equal or unequal in knowledge, must be mentally engaged, or the activity will not be shared. With sharing, playing or working next to each other is not enough. The participants must communicate with each other by speaking, drawing, writing, or using another medium. Without rich verbal, written, or other kinds of exchanges, sharing will not produce the highest level of assistance possible. Language and interaction create the shared experience.

I think of Daniel Coyle's deep practice idea, describing how the learner must engage in highly focused, mental stretching. The learner/deep practicer is always seeking feedback. In this Vygotsyian context, the parent/coach/teacher must engage the student and teach them to give as well as demand feedback which ultimately influences their progress.

Metacognition

2009-10-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

Thinking about thinking, or self-awareness, as metacognitive thinking is called, is the ultimate goal for Vygotsky's highest mental functioning. In children, this leads to more deliberate actions, and less moving towards the flashing light or shiny object.

from Bodrova and Leong:

Young children lacking deliberateness react to the loudest noise or the most colorful picture. When children acquire higher mental functions, they direct their behavior to the environment most pertinent to solving a problem.

In terms of listening, isn't this the same idea as focusing one's attention on whom you are listening to, while mindful of setting aside your own judgments, as well as the inclination to interrupt with one's own thoughts?

Vygotskyian approach to learning

2009-10-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

After having my interest piqued by the NYT magazine article about the right kinds of play teaching self-control, and blogging about it in Listening in Kindergarten, I've decided to dig deeper into the Vygotskyian school of psychology and education. Vedrova and Leong's book, Tools of the Mind, lays out Vygotsky's vision for teaching self-regulation through a social context. Tools of the Mind starts out with the idea that humans separated themselves from primates by our use of tools. Vygotsky claims the mantle of "tools of the mind" by articulating how educators use the social context of "scaffolding" to increase a child's abilty to navigate their social context.

Vedrova and Leong:

Vedrova and Leong:Social context plays a central role in development, becuase it is critical for the acquisition of mental processes. Vygotsky's unique contribution was to see the possibility of the sharing of higher mental processes. Mental processes not only exist internally to the individual but can occur in an exchange among several people. Children learn or acquire mental process by sharing, or using it when interacting with others. Only after this period of shared experience can the child internalize and use the mental process independently.

Scaffolding in this sense means adults sharing information about increasingly sophisticated processes (in a facilitative manner) while interacting (playing) with kids.

Expertise and experience count for something

2009-10-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Christopher Kimball writes an opEd in the NYT about the shuttering of Gourmet Magazine:

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google “broccoli casserole” and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise — the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks.

The incompatible nature of expertise and artistry with the marketplace of the Lowest common denominator is rooted in the culture of convenience. It is the same clash of slow food and fast food. Sitting still to listen thoughtfully to a concert vs. having a sensory explosion experience with 100 decibals. The irony of technology making life easier for us, is the atrophying of our patience to think about something not easily understood. The cultivation of the complex is the casualty.

Listening in Kindergarten

2009-09-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

I was reading in the September 27 issue of the New York Times Magazine about how certain kinds of dramatic play develops cognitive function in pre-K and kindergarten aged children. The idea is that certain structured dramatic play stimulates cognitive-self regulation, rather than externally induced behavioral regulation.
The author, Paul Tough, writes:

"The ability of young children to control their emotional and cognitive impulses, it turns out, is a remarkably strong indicator of both short-term and long-term success, academic and otherwise. In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests. The problem is that just as we’re coming to understand the importance of self-regulation skills, those skills appear to be in short supply among young American children."

Tough describes the work of Leong and Bodrova, who examine this role of self-regulation in children:

"Over the past 15 years, Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova, scholars of child development based in Denver, have developed a program called Tools of the Mind, dedicated to improving the self-regulation abilities of young children, starting as early as age 3. Tools of the Mind is based on the teachings of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who died of tuberculosis in 1934. Their program, they say, can reliably teach self-regulation skills to pretty much any child — poor or rich; typical achievers as well as many of those who are considered to have special needs. (They make the claim that many kids given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. would not need Ritalin if they were enrolled in Tools of the Mind.) And if Leong and Bodrova are right, those improved self-regulation skills will lead not only to fewer classroom meltdowns and expulsions in prekindergarten and kindergarten; they will also lead to better reading and math scores later on.

Dramatic play, believed to improve cognitive self-control, is a central part of the Tools of the Mind curriculum.

At the heart of the Tools of the Mind methodology is a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend."

Full disclosure: I have 2 children ages 4 and 6, where I observe all kinds of examples of this behavior at home.

I have witnessed dramatic play with my kids that resembles chaos, and play where I swear that I was witnessing the beginning of self-directed cooperation. The Times magazine article talks about how dramatic play is where self- narrative enables children to posses a larger capacity for controlling their own behavior. They are playing a role, and their specific narratives allows them to fit specific behavioral norms into their character. The multi-stimuli of their normal world is filtered by the rules of the character they are playing. For example, if the child is playing a fireman, they can only do and say what a fireman does. The very practice of this strengthens their abilty to filter out distractions when inhabiting their real-life personas. Perhaps this kind of play myelinates the cognitive pathways that helps them ultimately resist every new enticing stimulus that would distract them from performing well in their lives.

I find this idea to have many implications for how we can practice engaged listening. If our child's narrative or role is to practice observing a set of rules for how they interact, they are practicing how to control the filters of the inputs and outputs of their minds. They are practicing listening and expressing themselves under a set of rules that they consciously impose for themselves. There is a choice, or mindfullness in this. Perhaps it is difficult, as adults to practice the discipline of engaged listening, (while holding our judgement to the side when considering an external idea). What if our "play" narrative is to be the character who is the engaged listener? Are we able to listen, and think in a way consistent with this listening character we are trying on? It is a new interpretation of Descartes, I think, therefore I am?
"I think I am a listener, therefore, I am a listener."

Top Chef Management Theory

2009-08-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

I've been watching Top Chef Masters this summer, and last week's show was an interesting display of the chefs' management skills. The challenge from this show involved each competing chef choosing sous chefs from selected previous Top Chef competitions. The 4 chefs were able to interview the prospects for approximately 60 seconds, and then they chose teams among the pool of talent. In a true contrast of management styles, the interview process accurately foreshadowed how the chefs treated their charges.

Michael Chiarello asked those he interviewed to perform skills like chopping carrots to a specific style, and tried to ascertain how they would perform under pressure. The interviewing sous chefs took offense to his commanding (some would say condescending) style. Anita Lo looked for people she felt comfortable with, including someone who had previously worked for her. Huber Keller wanted to know who had experience working in his expertise (French) and Rick Bayless wanted to know of the chef's experiences, including time they spent in non-resort Mexico, and if they had ideas for contest in which they would be cooking.

Bayless of Frontera Grill (one of the contestants) has written a blog about the experience of being on the show. He picked up on Chiarello's heavy handed managerial style, Keller's strong mentoring/teaching ability, and Lo's poor ability to delegate.

Bayless:

None of us had watched all of the past seasons of Top Chef, so we didn’t know all of the players, their strengths and weaknesses. Hubert seemed genuinely excited to work with them, Michael sprouted a side none of us had ever seen in the competition, Anita seemed to hunker down and just want to get through the competition and I was worried about building a team that could do my food (guessing that none of them had experience with traditional Mexican cuisine).

We stopped talking. Just cooked. Everyone took 100% responsibility for the dishes they were making, getting them to the buffet on time, getting them garnished, then serving them to the crush of guests that poured in ALL AT ONCE!! We had no time for a game plan or coaching. I knew I’d find out, whether I liked the outcome or not, if I’d chosen the right team.

Hubert had a different strategy: he knew he had a strong team with lots of modern French background, so he let them create their own dishes for his buffet. He’s a strong leader, loves complexity and see from a distance if he thinks you’re headed for disaster.

The results of the competition illustrated their styles from the beginning. Chiarello's staff had low morale, and merely executed his plan. While Chiarello's ideas were good, the show threw some surprise wrinkles, like moving the service at the last minute to a hot and sunny locale, which is brutal on the food. His people only followed orders, and did not rise to the occasion.

Anita Lo's first choice was someone who had worked for her previously. Only when her substandard cooking ability displayed itself, did Lo remember more qualities about her choice. At that point, it was too late, and while Lo was supremely skilled, her team was not so strong. It was Anita plus hangars on. Her overall product reflected this.

Huber Keller chose people who were trained in the style that he cooks, and then set them off to improvise in his genre. His mastery of the cuisine allowed him to mentor and steer them to their best creative efforts. His vision provided them coherence as a group and the confidence to do their best. The result was a tour de force.

Rick Bayless had a similar attitude to Keller's, yet did not have the advantage of cooks who knew his style of cuisine. This required a stronger vision for what to cook. Where Bayless gave his staff room to create was by utilizing their skills to add to his vision. Nowhere was this more evident than in the molecular gastronomists use of liquid nitrogen to make avocado ice cream, at a scorching hot venue. His final result was superlative, the judges commending the effort as a first rate effort. He was surpassed by Keller, perhaps because Keller's team knew their genre better from their past experiences.

Keller and Bayless were able to provide clear direction, and then gave some latitude to take full advantage of the the sous chefs' creative talents. Giving some responsibility with authority is very motivating. The staff could feel ownership of the process and dig a little deeper for the team.
Chiarello provided clear direction, but his authoritarian style sapped motivation. Lo just didn't build a coherent team, and her own superlative cooking skills just weren't enough to carry her through.

Emotion and Meaning in Music

2009-05-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

This landmark book from 1956 by Leonard Meyer spells out

"The difference of opinion that exists between those who insist that musical meaning lies exclusively within the context of the work itself, in the perception of the relationships set forth within the musical work of art, and those who contend that, in addition to these abstract, intellectual meanings, music also communicates meanings which in some way refer to the extamusical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character. Let us call the former group the "absolutists" and the latter group the "referentialists."

Somewhere in here I see a clocks/clouds analogy along the lines of reductionism and systemic awareness. Stay tuned...

Shakespeare is the best guide to Afghanistan

2009-05-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

George Packer of The New Yorker interviews Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s finance minister from 2002 to 2004. He’s about to throw his hat into the ring of Afghan politics and challenge his former boss, Hamid Karzai, in the presidential election scheduled for August 18th.
Ghani:

“When people suddenly come to office from exile, without any previous history, sycophancy becomes a very high component, because they’re dependent on relationships,” Ghani said when I asked what had gone wrong with Karzai. “No one has a constituency, and the person at the top is bombarded with praise—‘You’re the greatest thing since sliced cheese’—and human beings being human beings, if they hear they’re great, and only a few people are saying no, who are they going to believe? Shakespeare is the best guide to Afghanistan.”

It reminds me of Obama's attempt to escape the bubble of his office. If the information one receives comes from very few sources, the chance of entertaining the whole (sensing the balance of the largest system possible) becomes remote.

If science breaks us apart, art puts us back together

2009-04-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

Again, from Proust was a Neuroscientist, Leherer quotes Noam Chomsky:

It is possible, overwhelmingly probable, that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.

The sound of Art changing the Brain

2009-04-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

Leherer really makes an intriguing hypothesis. Stravinksy's The Rite of Spring's musical patterns were so new to the audience at the premier in Paris in 1913, that the performance stimulated a dopamine response in the listeners which literally drove them crazy. We enjoy making easy predictions about where music will go, fulfilling our pleasure responses in the brain. When we cannot make any predictions about where the music is going, we

"begin the neural process that ends with the release of dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that reorganizes the auditory cortex. Dopamine is also the chemical source of our most intense emotions, which helps to explain the strange emotional power of music, especially when it confronts us with newness and dissonance. By tempting us with fragile patterns, music taps into the most basic brain circuitry."

Leherer writes that the Rite, essential caused the listeners to overload on dopamine, and experience temporary madness.

Fortunately our brains adjust (via our corticofugal network) , and with repeated experience, we can process the new patterns, stretching our minds, by literally changing our brains.

Plato on Music

2009-04-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

From Leherer's Proust was a Neuroscientist:

Plato insisted that music (along with poetry and drama) be strictly censored inside his imaginary republic. Seduced by the numerical mysticism of Pythagoras, Plato believed that only consonant musical pitches - since they vibrated in neat geometrical ratios - were conducive to rational thinking, which is when "the passions work at the direction of reason." Unfortunately, this meant systematically silencing all dissonant notes and patterns, since dissonance unsettled the soul. Feelings were dangerous. At first glance, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring seems like perfect evidence for Plato's theory of music. Stravinsky's orchestral dissonance provoked a violent urban riot. This is exactly why the avant-garde must be banned: it's bad for the republic. Better to loop some easy elavator music. But Plato- for all of his utopian insight - misunderstood what music actually is. Music is only feeling. It always upsets our soul. If we censored every song that filled people with irrational emotions, then we would have no songs left to play. And while Plato only trusted those notes that obeyed his mathematical definition of order, music really begins when that order collapses. We make art out of the uncertainty.

What Leherer via Plato is wrangling with is the cognitive dissonance we experience with music. The tension. What I would add to Leherer, is that the art is in building the tension, and then, how we resolve the tension. Resolving the dissonance. Without the act of resolution, cue the elevator muzak.

The irrepressible plasticity of our brains

2009-03-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

From Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist:

"Neurogenesis is cellular evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving. George Eliot was right: to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning. Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis ensures that we are never done with our changes. In the constant turmoil of our cells - in the irrepressible plasticity of our brains - we find our freedom."

Wisdom of feelings

2009-03-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

I've been making my way through Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist, essentially about 19th and early 20th century artists predicting contemporary neuroscience. He quotes Antonio Demasio, who writes about Walt Whitman:

"The body contributes more than life support. It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind."

Lehrer writes that one of Demasio's discoveries is

"that feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought. When Demasio's patients lost emotion, they became incapable of making reasonable decisions. Demasio argues that rationality requires feeling, and feeling requires the body."

From Neitzche via Leherer:

"There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom."

Invisible leadership skills

2009-02-22T17:33:00.000-08:00

Michael Lewis, of Moneyball fame, writes in the New York Times Magazine about Shane Battier. Battier is a professional basketball player for the Houston Rockets. He was traded for by the Rockets General Manager who is a pioneer in using unusual, deeper than first level analysis statistics to develop value for players. Battier is kind of slow, can't create his own shot, and doesn't score, rebound or get that many blocks. His teams just win a lot.

Lewis writes about the Rocket's analysis of a player beyond points, rebounds, steals etc. to an ajdusted score for how many points better each player makes their team. Battier was up there with Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, two superstars of the NBA. Battier accomplishes this by an extremely intellectual approach to playing basketball. He analyzes scouting reports far more than other players. Battier looks for tendencies in players he faces. By finding these "soft spots" Battier is able to encourage these opposing players to play in a way that makes them tremendously less efficient. Perhaps he makes them favor their less dominant hand, or move them to parts of the floor where they are just uncomfortable. While watching him defend a "superior player" it looks as thought he's getting beat up. If one looks at the stat sheet, however, this player is usually having a terrible game, which is reflected in their team playing poorly. Battier's team, on the other hand improves with these subtle details. He will tip a rebound to a teammate who is in a better position, or encourage more communication between players. These statistics show up nowhere but the win/loss column, heavily in his team's favor.
There are tremendous parallels in any team culture where a team member emodies Battier's qualities.

Federer and Nadal

2009-02-09T12:16:00.001-08:00

I revisited the idea of motivation through curiosity versus motivation through competition following the transcendent tennis rivalry (after Nadal's victorious Aussie open, perhaps less rivalry and more psychological thumping) between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.

I wrote back in December,

"When I am very curious about an idea or a topic, I want to read everywhere and anywhere about the subject no matter how broad the range of material.

If I am feeling competitive and my motivation is to do better than someone else, I will focus on more obvious places of reference, and pour over the material over and over again. Perhaps this is a bonus if I am competing to develop a skill. It reminds me of ferociously competitive athletes who possess an astounding level of skill with an extremely narrow focus."

I thought of comparing famous figures in terms of who is curious vs. competitive.

Curious: Albert Einstein: He dreamed about dancing on light beams. Discovered relativity
Competitive: Michael Jordan: He wanted to dominate everybody in basketball. Became greatest basketball player in history.

Add Federer to the curious list, and Nadal to the competitive list.
In a battle of wills, it definitely appears that the competitive trumps the curious. Federer's tennis game will always appear beautifully creative, intriguing and beguiling. He hits the ball to parts of the court with spins never thought possible. An artist with a racquet. Perhaps the best ever? Don't ask Rafa Nadal. He hungers to play and beat Federer. His considerable physical talent combined with his competitive drive, (like Jordan in basketball) inspires his work and focus to acheive this outrageous goal. In the moments when the pressure is highest, Nadal's mindset is in "the zone" and engaging in the act of beating his opponent is what gives greatest pleasure. Especially if his opponent is the most vaunted. No matter how transcendent Federer's game may be, Nadal's game will triumph.

Interestingly, once the match is over, Nadal's fury subsides.

As Nadal began to grasp the degree of Federer’s emotional distress (at the awards ceremony following the '09 Aussie final), he added a moment of reflection to his moment of triumph.

“Of course it can happen to all of us,” he said of Federer’s breakdown during the ceremony. “It was an emotional moment, and I think this also lifts up sport, to see a great champion like Federer expressing his emotions. It shows his human side. But in these moments, when you see a rival, who is also a comrade, feeling like this, you enjoy the victory a little bit less.”

Christopher Clarey of the Times writes of Nadal's indomitable hunger to compete:

One still wonders where it comes from: all that on-court fury, all that hunger and singularity of purpose. It is not as if he has some gaping childhood hole to fill. He comes from a close and prosperous family on Majorca with the sea and sun parts of the daily view.

Why does he need to fight that much with a racket in his hand?

“I love the competition, not only in tennis,” he said. “I love the competition in all aspects of life. When I compete, I love to be there and fight for the win.”

He paused and said, “Maybe I like more fighting to win than win.”

And maybe that is why despite beating Roger Federer five times in a row and relegating him quite clearly to No. 2, Nadal prefers to keep Federer on a pedestal instead of climbing up there himself.

Nobody is as smart as everybody

2009-01-29T05:11:00.001-08:00

Bernard Avishai writes about how decentralizing the US auto industry will improve its innovative capacity. Honda and Toyota already do this, as well as tech firms like Apple and Samsung. I've blogged about the idea that creativity in groups comes from the intersection of different social worlds. Avishai argues for information superhighways connecting different autogroups. This will create modular design possibilities. For example, Pontiac and Chevy could produce very different cars that are developed by sharing ideas and parts from each division, yet are conceived separately. The shared ideas and parts are the toolbox to come up with innovative cars.

Avishai:
"These 'modular' principles have been true for consumer electronics for years; car companies are simply getting up to speed. In fact, this set of principles applies to pretty much every high-tech product and every high-tech manufacturing process that produces a low-tech product. It applies to delivering professional and financial services. Peer-to-peer networks have changed the rules. Nobody is as smart as everybody."

As it stands now, the centralized GM comes up with an idea, and each division gets a slightly different version of the main theme. Avishai argues that this is the big blunder that has gotten GM, Ford and Chrysler into this current mess.

Avishai writes about our global competition for innovation:

"The good news is that the United States still has the world's largest proven reserves of intellectual capital. The bad news is that, unlike oil, the fact that we have it doesn't mean that others do not."

Clocks and Clouds

2009-01-27T14:02:00.000-08:00

STUART KAUFFMAN
Director, The Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at The University of Calgary writes about reductionism.

"The evolution of the biosphere, the economy, our human culture and perhaps aspects of the abiotic world, stand partially free of physical law and are not entailed by fundamental physics. The universe is open.

Many physicists now doubt the adequacy of reductionism, including Philip Anderson, and Robert Laughlin. Laughlin argues for laws of organization that need not derive from the fundamental laws of physics. I give one example. Consider a sufficiently diverse collection of molecular species, such as peptides, RNA, or small molecules, that can undergo reactions and are also candidates to catalyze those very reactions. It can be shown analytically that at a sufficient diversity of molecular species and reactions, so many of these reactions are expected to be catalyzed by members of the system that a giant catalyzed reaction network arises that is collectively autocatalytic. It reproduces itself.

The central point about the autocatalytic set theory is that it is a mathematical theory, not reducible to the laws of physics, even if any specific instantiation of it requires actual physical "stuff". It is a law of organization that may play a role in the origin of life.

Consider next the number of proteins with 200 amino acids: 20 to the 200th power. Were the 10 to the 80th particles in the known universe doing nothing but making proteins length 200 on the Planck time scale, and the universe is some 10 to the 17th seconds old, it would require 10 to the 39th lifetimes of the universe to make all possible proteins length 200 just once. But this means that, above the level of atoms, the universe is on a unique trajectory. It is vastly non-ergodic. Then we will never make all complex molecules, organs, organisms, or social systems.

In this second sense, the universe is indefinitely open "upward" in complexity.

Consider the human heart, which evolved in the non-ergodic universe. I claim the physicist can neither deduce nor simulate the evolutionary becoming of the heart. Simulation, given all the quantum throws of the dice, for example cosmic rays from somewhere mutating genes, seems out of the question. And were such infinitely or vastly many simulations carried out there would be no way to confirm which one captured the evolution of this biosphere.

Suppose we asked Darwin the function of the heart. "Pumping blood" is his brief reply. But there is more. Darwin noted that features of an organism of no selective use in the current environment might be selected in a different environment. These are called Darwinian "preadaptations" or "exaptations". Here is an example: Some fish have swim bladders, partially filled with air and partially with water, that adjust neutral bouyancy in the water column. They arose from lung fish. Water got into the lungs of some fish, and now there was a sac partially filled with air, partially filled with water, poised to become a swim bladder. Three questions arise: Did a new function arise in the biosphere? Yes, neutral bouyancy in the water column. Did it have cascading consequences for the evolution of the biosphere? Yes, new species, proteins and so forth.

Now comes the essential third question: Do you think you could say ahead of time all the possible Darwinian preadaptations of all organisms alive now, or just for humans? We all seem to agree that the answer is a clear "No". Pause. We cannot say ahead of time what the possible preadaptations are. As in the first paragraph, we really do not know what will happen. Part of the problem seems to be that we cannot prespecify all possible selective environments. How would we know we had succeeded? Nor can we prespecify the feature(s) of one or several organisms that might become preadaptations.

Then we can make no probability statement about such preadaptations: We do not know the space of possibilities, the sample space, so can construct no probability measure."

In other words, it is impossible to determine the cause of anything of complexity, because the system from which we live is open, and infinite. Perhaps it is possible to describe features of the system, which facilitates our awareness of a larger part of it.

Jonah Lehrer intercedes:

"Karl Popper famously distinguished between two types of scientific problems: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be elegantly solved through reduction. (Think, for instance, of planetary orbits, which can be explained with gravitational equations.) A cloud, on the other hand, is an epistemic mess; as Popper put it, they are "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." After all, clouds are carried and crafted by an infinity of currents; they seethe and tumble in the air, and are a little different with every moment in time.

The question, of course, is whether the universe (and all the life contained therein) is a clock or a cloud. The methodology of modern science is predicated on the assumption that everything is a clock, a wonderfully complex timepiece to be sure, but still a clock. But what if reality is a cloud? Is reductionism still valid? Or are clouds best solved through simple observation, induction and ad hoc theorizing? Of course, that's how science was done in the 19th century (eg, Darwin), but maybe that's our future?"

More on the mind/body system

2009-01-23T12:47:00.000-08:00

Carla Hannaford's Smart Moves continues to impress me with her systemic awareness.

She writes that the

"Final goal of any learning experience should be the creation of meaning."

Hannaford continues:

"Real knowledge occurs as we take in our rich sensory environment and piece it together in our own unique way to give us a picture of the world. This then becomes our reality, and each new experience refers to it, each new experience reorders and expands it. From this reality, we are able to make decisions and take actions that explore, test and anchor our beliefs and our understanding. Our acquired skills manifest as conscious physical responses demonstrating knowledge acquisition."

Hannaford again:

"Thinking itself is actually a skill dependent on the whole, integrated mind/body system."

I was thinking about this concept as related to the idea of working through a difficult book, or trying to solve a problem. The resulting friction created by wrestling with (towards solving) a problem is essential to generate new meaning and developing real acquired knowledge. I realized how important that was when someone in conversation cavalierly mentioned that you could pick up the "gist" of an important idea by reading the abstract of the article. Perhaps you could recite the key points of an idea, but one doesn't benefit from any real acquired knowledge.
The physical aspect of this dawns on me whenever I'm working with a violin or viola student. It is clear when a student has learned a concept when they can physically demonstrate this with their balanced system of playing the music they are working on. Out of curiosity, I wonder if there are measurable physical manifestations with every intellectual gain?

About Israel

2009-01-16T06:47:00.000-08:00

It pains me to see such a hardening of positions among the residents and citizens of Israel, but I can’t say that it surprises me. I think that the right shifting electorate, very different from fellow American hawkish Jews, is a result of overwhelming social conditions. I can't help think of (and which I've blogged previously about) Philip Zimbardo’s Lucifer Effect, and the description of his Stanford Prison Experiment from the early 70’s. Subjects, which were pre- selected for their good psychological health, were placed in the roles of prisoners and their captors, (randomly chosen within the sample). Within 8 hours, the social system disintegrated into the social conditions that pervade prison atmospheres. The point Zimbardo makes is that within enclosed social systems, the systemic norms are far more powerful than the individual. The group norm imposes its value on everyone within the system. I think that has happened in Israel, where people are faced with a fanatical neighboring enemy, one's social group starts to see everyone associated with that group (Hamas) as not humanely similar to your group. It certainly has happened to many Palestinians view of Israelis as a whole. The irony, of course, is that this antipathy doesn't hold true when people engage as individuals. Unfortunately, the hardest of the hardliners on each side are interested in stoking this raging sentiment within the majority of people who are capable of compassion for the other side. In some twisted and awful way, the minority of people who are willing to violently steer the social conditions are ending up in control. How we change this vexing paradigm, so that the prevailing condition is compassion for your neighbor in the face of very real violence is the $64 question. Hamas and the West bank Israeli settlers will fight to the death to keep this from happening.

Projected action sequencing

2008-12-11T14:27:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Gladwell has a new article out in the New Yorker about predicting who is most likely to succeed in certain particular professions. Of interest, he mentions the lack of predictive ability of which college football quarterbacks will succeed in the NFL. His analysis is that while quarterbacking in the respective levels of football at this position should be fairly comparable, they are not. The offensive philosophy in which the star quarterbacks play in college do not resemble those in the NFL. When the freshly graduated QB enters the NFL, the defenses are much faster and powerful, and he does not find his receivers nearly as open to catch passes. The skills required in college are athleticism, passing accuracy, and good talent to surround you on offense. In the NFL, you need these things at a minimum. You also need the ability to see the defense as it forms, in real time, and a predictive ability to know where your receiver will be open, a few seconds into the future. Occupational therapists call this Projected Action Sequencing. (I've written about this on another post in this blog, comparing NFL quarterbacking skills to playing the violin.)
Interestingly, Gladwell writes about another profession that vexes talent locators: Teachers.
In his piece, Gladwell describes an excellent teacher as someone who can read the body language of 30 individual and collective children, and intuitively engage each and all in dialog about the present subject on the docket. This teacher keeps the room focused on the dialog of learning while picking up on errant attention spans, and general hokum before the room gets out of control. Gladwell's first point is that fancy and multiple degrees in education are not indicators of this skill. His second point is the obvious question of why we don't spend more resources as a nation to find people with these skills and pay them to educate our children. Gladwell illustrates this by describing the resources poured into developing financial planners and laments that our society prioritizes our financial assets over our children.
He missed a beautiful analogy between the NFL quarterback and the teachers. The successful teacher is accessing their alertness (and projected action sequencing) to watch over the fluid dynamics of 30 children in a classroom, the same way a successful NFL quarterback is watching over the fearsome defense. The successful QB pays attention to the subtle cues of his opponent to project where he will be, and where to direct the football. The successful teacher directs the flow of teaching material to engage their students. If we test each of these type of prospects for fluency in these skills, we will find the talent we've been looking for. About devising that test...

The balance of coffee and bagels

2008-12-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

Christoph Niemanan provides some important thinking on the balance of bagels with his coffee obsession. His napkin art is not to be missed.
Here's one frame that graphs his love for different varieties, and admitting his mistake for his fling with blueberry bagels.

Neimann's key to the graph:

Here’s a chart that shows my coffee bias over the years.

For good measure I have added my bagel preferences over the same period. (1) Drip coffee, (2) Starbucks, (3) blueberry bagels, (4) sesame bagels, (5) poppy-seed bagels, (6) everything bagels

Please don’t hold my brief affair with blueberry bagels against me. I cured myself of this aberration.