The potentially overwhelming magic of internal representations

I have two delightful daughters, now aged eight and 10. Just for fun, we have been trying to see how many digits of pi we can memorize. Our efforts are pathetic compared to the real pros out there, who can memorize tens of thousands of digits. We are just starting out, however, and I'm only able to recite about 80 digits by memory. I've been employing several mnemonic tricks, and this experiment has helped me to see how it might be possible to eventually memorize several hundred digits if I worked at it hard enough (I doubt that I will). So far, my main trick has been arranging the digits of pi in chunks of five on a grid containing lines of four chunks each. This allows me to assign a physical coordinate for each chunk. From there, I've been mentally walking through my grid, trying to memorize the chunks by associating a story with each chunk or setting up a simple " song" for each chunk. As I've been working on this memorization game, I've appreciated, even in light of my meager memorization skills, the power of the human mind to internally represent the external world. I physically set forth my 5-digit chunks on a physical grid on a piece of paper, but while I'm reciting the chunks, I am doing all of the "work" in my head on an imaginary grid of imaginary numbers mentally footnoted with imaginary stories or songs to trigger each chunk to spill out. This mental ability (not just mine, but this human capacity generally) is well worth stopping to contemplate. The human mind is able to replicate (to greater and lesser degrees) the external world and to make it available to us so that we can silently and internally manipulate its component parts, sometimes with great effectiveness. We employ our representational abilities in many other ways other than memorizing the digits of pi, of course. It's probably happened that you've lost your keys but gave up looking for them. Then, only while you were away from the house, you employed your representational powers to re-create your house and imagined where you last had the keys, or where you might have placed them. Perhaps you've successfully "located" your keys using only the representations in your own mind, mentally looking in the pocket of a mentally represented coat. This is truly a phenomenal capacity. When it works well, there is nothing more impressive than this human ability to re-create external reality and to manipulate its component parts in one's head. The fact that it works so well so often perhaps explains why many people fall prey to believing that their representational capacity is infallible. There are many people who have convinced themselves that the representations in their heads completely and accurately duplicate the external world. These are the smug people who have little use for real world evidence. Here's what I am suggesting: when they are not careful and humble, many people make the mistake of thinking that anything that they perceive in their heads is an absolutely true copy from the external world and, in fact, that their mental representations of the world might even be more accurate than the external world itself. Is this the move that gives credence to supernatural worlds for so many people? Are they so dazzled by the representational powers of their minds that they overlook the frailties of their representational powers? I suspect that some people combine the confirmation bias with their admiration for their own mental powers. Many people (those who are mentally fatigued or simply not careful) tend to filter out evidence that conflicts with their own representational systems. They begin to make their permanent homes within their representational capacities rather than making sure that they stay anchored by the real world. I realize that this is vague food for thought, but this problem is a real one: How is it that so many people who are so certain (but so very wrong) about basic facts have no use for evidence?

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The wide and deep dysfunction of inequality

Is social inequality merely something to be ashamed of, or does it bring ruin upon a society? I just finished reading a book review of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009). This book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett was reviewed in the April 30, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). The reviewer was Michael Sargent, a developmental biologist. The Wilkinson/Pickett book explores the social consequences of income inequality.

Using statistics from reputable independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23 of the world's richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the narrowest income differentials-such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal-the United States as a whole, the United Kingdom and Portugal do worst. Many measures of the quality of life, including life expectancy, are correlated with the degree of economic equality in each country.

Here's the elephant in the political room: there is nothing in the Republican platform to address this damage being inflicted upon society. Quite the opposite: the Republican platform has continually stoke a wild unregulated capitalistic engine that disproportionately rewards some at the expense of others. What kind of damage is caused by this widespread disparity? You name it:

Problems such as mental illness, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unwillingness to engage with education, misuse of illegal and prescription drugs, teenage pregnancy, lack of social mobility and neglect of child welfare increase with greater inequality. Violence, from murder to the bullying of children in school follows the same pattern. These trends are tied up with the issues of trust: the authors chart a profound decline in trust and United States from the 1960s to the present, which matches rising inequality during the long Republican ascendancy.

The authors go so far as to suggest a local hardwired biological mechanism: neuroendocrinological stress. The perception that others are reveling in the good life at one's expense undermines self-esteem and releases the hormone cortisol which causes stress, accompanied by high blood pressure and high blood sugar levels. The cortisol overwhelms hormones, such as oxytocin, that are critical for trust-building. The damaging effect of long-term cortisol has been well-studied and established in other animals. In some experiments, monkeys that were chronically shoved to the bottom of a wide social hierarchy "are more inclined to self medicate with cocaine, if given the opportunity." This article give me yet more evidence that we would be often better off to relinquish much of our judgmentalism and to reconceptualize morality as an aspect of ecology.

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Parents Support Transgendered Child

An eight-year-old child in Omaha, Nebraska, the middle of three boys, has told his parents throughout his life that he is a she. Since he learned to talk, he has said, daily, that he is really a girl. His parents have come to believe him, and are letting him begin the next school term in a new school, as a girl, with a new name. Ben-turned-Katie will not be allowed back in his Catholic elementary school. According to the priest in the parish, since the Catholic Church believes a person is born one gender and cannot change, his appearance at school would lead to too many questions and cause discomfort for the other children. It might, of course. Certainly it would raise all kinds of questions, yes. Hard questions, the kind that parents aren't sure how to answer. My guess is, though, that if the school called in an expert on the subject and held an assembly in which the child's situation is explained in brief and concrete terms and the other children were allowed to ask any questions they had, parents were allowed to attend, etc., the issue could be handled and put to rest. Children that age are amazingly accepting, and what a wonderful life lesson it could be. That is how it would be handled in our school - or similarly, somehow - one of the many reasons we are there. In watching the video, I was struck by the dedication of these parents to their child. I am so relieved, on Katie's behalf, that she has this kind of support. In conservative Nebraska, this can't be easy. I wish them well, and thank them for being the kind of parents every kid deserves to have. Unconditional love at its finest.

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Rush Limbaugh’s obsession with buttocks

Gabriel Winant lays out a strong case at Salon.com: Rush Limbaugh just can't stop talking about butts.

Critics say that Rush Limbaugh likes to talk out of his ass. But that's only half the story: Rush can't stop talking about butt, either. It's too bad that Sigmund Freud's long dead, because Rush is the old shrink's dream patient, with an obvious diagnosis: Limbaugh has an anal fixation.

Based on Winant's long list of evidence, it does make you wonder whether Rush needs to go see a therapist to figure out why it is that this "family values" guy has now divorced three women. Maybe we've got yet another classic case of reaction formation on our hands, and that would certainly explain a lot of Limbaugh's hostility.

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Why did some of the children wait for the second marshmallow? It’s not a matter of sheer willpower.

The marshmallow study run by psychologist Walter Mischel is a classic. In the late 1960s, the researcher Dave hundreds of four-year-olds, one by one, the chance to either eat one marshmallow right away, or to wait for a while, whereupon they would be allowed to eat two marshmallows when the experimenter returned to the room. Most of the children could not wait for the experimenter to return, even though that happened only 15 minutes later. Mischel's study is the focus of an article called "Don't," in the May 18, 2009 edition of the New Yorker. The incredible thing about the children who waited is that they did dramatically better in their lives as adults than the children who couldn't wait. The children who couldn't wait:

Got lower SAT scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The children who could wait 15 minutes had an SAT score that was, on average, 210 points higher than that of the kids who can wait only 30 seconds.

But there's more: "Low-delaying adults have a significantly higher body-mass index and are more likely to have had problems with drugs . . ." I commented more about this fascinating study here. The obvious question was whether the 30% of the children who had the ability to wait for the second marshmallow were simply exercising willpower or self-control. Mischel's follow-up work indicates that it's not a matter of sheer willpower.

The crucial skill was the "strategic allocation of attention." Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow--the "hot stimulus"-- the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide and seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from Sesame Street." Their desire wasn't defeated--it was merely forgotten. If you are thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you're going to eat it,"Mischel says. "The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

The reason that the successful children were able to wait reminded me of work by Jonathan Haidt, who suggested (in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis) that human beings consist of two parts. The most powerful part is a huge elephant consisting of appetite cravings and emotions ridden by a "lawyer." The appetites and emotions are simply too powerful to control by sheer willpower. One of the best tools for the "lawyer" has, then, is to distract the elephant. "Just say no" just doesn't work very well or very long. What does seem to work, however, is to divert and distract the attention of the elephant. The same technique that was employed by the successful children, many of whom became extremely successful adults.

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