Sandy Hook and Useless Common Sense on Guns

As a parent and a human being, I am horrified and terrified by the events of last week in Newtown, Connecticut.  I have hugged my kids, I have sat and cried upon reading notes sent by six year old best friends. But as a psychologist, I can’t help but read the discussion around this event through this lens: I know that some people feel that if more people had guns, everyone would be safer since we would regulate our behavior more carefully. We would have less crime if we knew that anyone around us could shoot us if we got out of line. This is not just a theory of the Constitution, or a theory of guns, but a theory of human behavior. And as such, it is batshit insane. So I ignored it.

But then the governor of my state endorsed this, or at least opened the door for a “discussion” which is what people in public office want to do when they want to endorse something without explaining it.

As those who read this blog regularly, I find mockery without seeking understanding distasteful, especially when I feel myself engaging in it. So here is my effort to understand this, through my understanding of the psychology of cognitive biases. I think, in all this, there is also a lesson about the value of psychology in the face of what some might call common sense.

If I were to pick a psychological topic for people in this debate to understand more fully, it would be the concept that in calculating the likelihood of events (future or past), or how things are caused, we take our thoughts, our memories, and our imagination as data. We might recognize that our views are subjective and we may try to account for our own values and experience, but what we do not account for is that we are not merely subjective, but we are all biased. We are biased because our imaginations are biased. It is simply easier to think of some things that others.

Depending on how it is applied, this tendency is sometimes called the availability heuristic, sometimes the simulation heuristic. When judging what causes something else (was it the guns or the deranged mind?), we engage in counterfactual thinking (what could have stopped this?) and we judge things that are more mutable (things we can imagine changing) as more important to causing an event than those we can’t imagine changing.

This feels like logic, but it is not. A thought experiment is not an experiment.

Just because I can imagine looking more carefully doesn’t make it likely that I would have avoided getting hit by that car when I was on my bike. Just because it is easier to imagine avoiding the accident than breaking my neck, doesn’t make me any less lucky that I only had a few stitches on my hand.

Just because we can imagine that mentally ill person being violent, doesn’t change the facts:

Most people with SMI [severe mental illness] are not violent, and most violent acts are not committed by people with SMI. In fact, people with SMI are actually at higher risk of being victims of violence than perpetrators. Teplin et al found that those with SMI are 11 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.ⁱⁱ

Just because we can imagine that if only Dawn Hochsprung had a weapon when she heard that crash, the shooter would have been stopped, doesn’t make it more likely.

Just because someone can imagine that a crowd ganging together and rushing an attacker (yes, someone imagined such a thing in print) might be an effective way of limiting fatalities, doesn’t make it so. Bringing up Flight 93 only proves the point that one could only think this because of its success in another totally unrelated and different scenario.

In a case as horrible as this, how could we not nudge our memories and our imaginations to make it not happen? Isn’t it merely human to imagine this evil man-child, this villain, this terrorist, blown away at the door by a vigilant police officer or quick thinking super hero-teacher? Isn’t it equally human to imagine this monster, angry and frustrated, only being able to access a small handgun and a small clip, then walking into this school and *only* killing half the class?

These are human responses, and when I confront tragedies large and small I do the same thing. But when we are designing laws and policies, I think we can do better than what some columnist thought about on a cab ride home. We have to force ourselves outside of our own imagination, both by expanding our imagination, but also by consulting the science of how people actually behave and evidence of how people have actually behaved in the past.

The data on the complicated but not random phenomena of suicide offers a sad but necessary reminder of the limits of our imaginations and the need to ignore our common sense. Common sense might make it easier for us to imagine that suicide is only the result of extreme chronic depression and hopelessness. Someone who hits “rock bottom” and can’t take it any more. But suicide in bipolar disorder also can happen in the manic phase, and it is often better considered an acute event, rather than an inevitable chronic one. What might seem like the most personal, independent and isolated decision one could ever make can actually be contagious, and affected by media reports. While a suicide attempt is often an indicator of psychiatric disorder, it is not a death sentence.  Finally, this act, of taking one’s own life, for most of us almost the very definition of “the unthinkable,” is actually far more common than we’d like to acknowledge. More common than homicide. More common than deaths from war. Worldwide, more common than accidents, homicide and war put together.

I think trying to expand our imaginations (or at least remind ourselves of their limitations) can also be a useful complement to statistics. Feel comforted by the idea of having a gun when your house is burglarized? I know I have imagined this. My house growing up was burglarized three times, once when my family was in it. My first apartment out of college was burglarized.

Now try imagining that gun in many other moments of its life. Listen to Nas’ “I Gave You Power.” Imagine it in the hands of every other person who lives in your house. How about in ten years? (“Having school-age children in the household did not significantly affect gun ownership rates, either positively or negatively“)  Imagine that you leave the door unlocked and someone comes into your house at night and sits on your couch and fumbles around for remote. I know someone who this happened to, a new neighbor got very drunk and walked into the wrong house at 2am. Do you use your gun?

What really strikes me about the proposal to arm teachers (or arm everybody) is in our frenzy to get schools safe, we are ignoring what schools do when they are not being attacked by assault rifles. We are so caught up in this moment, in our grief, in our human desire to reverse this, that people can only imagine a teacher’s gun erasing this moment, and not all the other moments it would create. To many non-teachers, the moments where a teacher must think “This makes me scared and angry, but I really shouldn’t shoot this person” vastly outnumber the moments where drawing and/or shooting a gun might be appropriate.

Sandy Young, one of my favorite commenters over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ place at the Atlantic  relates his experience this way (but read his whole comment):

Three times in my career as a teacher, I have had to confront and disarm disturbed and angry students. Once I had to disarm an intruder. None of these cases involved firearms; they involved knives, a machete, numchucks (sp?) and a crowbar. Each time I had to face them down and tell them that they had but two choices; they could surrender the weapon to me, or they would have to use it on me.

Each time, I watched and waited as they pondered their decision. I was surprisingly calm. I felt in that moment that I had simply cast my fate to the wind. It was only later that the shakes set in.

I am a college professor, not a high school teacher, nor an elementary school teacher. But through my kids, my visits, and my loved ones, I know that discipline in a classroom often consists of personal inhibition of action, rather than active confrontation. Teachers try to create in the classroom a model of the civil society that Alan Jacobs sees us relinquishing in efforts to ensure personal safety through assured destruction. Classrooms are exactly the last place that we should bring guns in. Safety in the classroom has to be assumed and thoughtless, not constantly reminded through the presence of weapons.

To come around, once more, to our deficit of imagination, and to suicide: According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, one in five American high school students reported seriously considering suicide in the past year and 8% of high school students make an attempt. That is two kids in a class of twenty five. If we get more guns into more people’s hands, whoever wields a gun is likely to use it in the way that guns are currently most commonly used: to kill themselves, not save children from homicidal maniacs. Just because it is harder to imagine this, doesn’t make it any less true.

In this debate that we have, over gun control, over access to mental health, over our collective reaction to rare events, I hope that we can at least agree to give priority to evidence about how people actually behave, instead of how they behave in our minds.

Deep and Shallow Arguments in Logos, Cursing and Civil War Memory

Over the weekend I witnessed several seemingly unrelated conversations that held a common thread. On the surface, these might seem to be shallow conversations about logos, style of language, or word usage. However for many having strong feelings about these apparently shallow issues, investigating these issues are not scratching the surface, but rather using them as windows, or lenses into the real issues underlying them.

The first was a discussion about the new logo for the University of California system.

Old and New Logos For University of California System

Also, check out the video announcing it. 1:16-1:18 is awesome (Go Marian Diamond and neuroplasticity!). The rest, well, I’m with Aaron Bady on this one. Yes. It looks like a toilet. Or a little icon that says “Loading, loading….”

What’s the big deal? It’s just a logo, right?

The second is a kerfuffle over Rachel’s post (picked up by Diane Ravitch) about why she doesn’t like it when education leaders like David Coleman and Gerard Robinson use profane language and metaphors when describing different educational policy decisions.

The third is the latest installment in Ta-Nehisi Coates ongoing discussions about why he doesn’t see the Civil War as tragic. His series is collected here. Coates acknowledges that he is talking symbolically, obviously not about the obvious fact that many many people died, and that there is sadness in any death. But as he reads deeper and deeper into Civil War history, Coates sees real triumph in the Civil War, and he sees problems with the view that because many died, it was therefore a national tragedy.

In each of these examples, some commentators respond with shrugs and “What’s the big deal?” Some of these people might think “let’s skip over these shallow and tangential discussions and get to the real meat of the discussion.” Criticisms of the language style are derided as political correctness, criticisms of the re-branding are seen as academic revulsion at advertising and marketing in a digital age, and Coates is often labeled as belaboring an argument based on semantic vagueness.

But for those who bring up these “surface” examples, they reveal a window into deeper, more fundamental differences. These people writing these critiques see them not as merely sitting on the surface of the deeper structural and logical disagreements, but reflecting the form of what’s beneath.

From Bady’s post on the logo:

That thing is ugly. But it’s not only ugly because it looks like a Swedish flag being flushed down the toilet; it’s ugly because it so perfectly crystallizes everything that’s been going wrong with the University of California for years, the same mindset that’s been dragging the UC down in its nose-dive with destiny.

From Rachel’s post on Sex, Shit N’ Standardized Testing,

How are we take one of the lead advocates of the more “rigorous” and intellectual ELA Common Core Standards seriously when he doesn’t see fit to use appropriate, professional, and specific language when advocating for the standards and for their accompanying tests. Coleman may be thinking I’m brash, but all I can think is, No, you’re full of disdain. Disdain for teachers, disdain for students, and disdain for engaging in any process of education reform.

From Coates:

And from the moment the first shots were fired, the black imagination conceived of the Civil War differently than the rest of the country. That difference continues up to the present day. Were I not the descendant of slaves, if I did not owe the invention of my modern self to a bloody war, perhaps I’d write differently.

Why does it matter what the UC logo looks like? Because it is just another place to realize how fully the language, attitudes, values and goals of the corporate world have co-opted our public universities. When people talk about how higher education should be run more like a successful business, they should acknowledge that many “successful” modern businesses put more effort and resources into marketing and advertising than they do research and development. Now ask yourself what a university with that ethos would look like. The University of Phoenix spends $170,000 a day on Google advertisements, making it the biggest advertiser on Google.

Why does it matter if David Coleman says that “People don’t give a shit about your feelings” and “tests are shittier?”  Because it indicates a disdain for engaging with your opponents and their evidence and perspectives. When Gerard Robinson shrugs and compares the anxiety over (what he thinks is indispensable) standardized testing to the inevitable anxiety over (equally indispensable?) sex, he is refusing to grapple with the reasons for the opposition to his policies.

Why does it matter whether we call the Civil War tragic or just merely full of sad death? Because it was a war fought over black humanity, and its memory should acknowledge black agency as a core element of how we tell its history. From what I see, Coates, as a mainstream journalist and writer plumbing the depths of Civil War history, wants us to acknowledge that to the modern African American, the Civil War was a War of Independence, and as much a cause for celebration as any war can be. The “rending brother from brother” stuff was happening to some people for a hundred years before the Civil War.

None of these points are tangential, they get to the core of the philosophical disputes in these cases. The reason Michelle Rhee was so despised in DC was that she openly and bluntly dismissed the value of dialogue, diplomacy and consensus. (“I think if there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months, it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”)  Part and parcel of this attitude is maintaining tha tyou have nothing ot learn from understanding The reason David Coleman is so despised is that his language indicates a disgust with his opponents. To me, this represents not just a disconnect between sides of an emotional issue, but a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of your own job. David Coleman, if you treat teachers who use Huck Finn as an entrance to modern racial identity as if they are training shallow navel-gazers, they will stop listening to you. I am not anti-David Coleman, and neither is Rachel, we are probably natural allies if you look at our support of Core Knowledge and the role of background factual knowledge in critical thinking. but the cursing in this case says “I am not taking people who disagree with me seriously.”

The UC leadership should realize that they are not a Bay Area tech startup in 2003. The people who comprise their institution, who make it work, have a different value system than a tech startup. Of course this is sometimes a problem. But it is a reality, and should be acknowledged, rather than ignored.

And Coates’ argument about Civil War history and memory should be taken to heart. A casual sigh about the tragedy of the Civil War comes with a casual diminishing of the triumph of that war for millions of Americans then and since.

A Day at an Elementary School with a Cognitive Psychologist

In what is becoming an annual tradition, I spent a day at elementary school last week, as part of the WATCH Dogs program. I thought I’d share some reflections.

I learn something new every time I go. If you are interested in education reform, there really is no substitute for actually spending a whole day in elementary school. I spent time in three different classrooms (two kindergarten and one second grade), I worked several shifts in the lunchroom, and watched a school assembly.

First, I am pretty confident that school has gotten better in the past twenty to thirty years. This is probably not universal, but I would guess that if we were good enough at collecting the data, it would be similar to climate change. The weather in one place may not get hotter year to year, but overall, things are definitely changing, and changing in certain direction. There are certain pedagogical practices and overall principles which have reached consensus now, and are positive improvements. I believe that the way children are taught to read (to decode) and to do mathematics overall has improved. The emphasis placed on literacy and on developing a love of reading very early in school has improved. The way young children are treated has improved. To clarify, I mean this in the value-neutral sense that we understand more about how younger minds work, and how children are motivated, and how this is applied to classroom practice. Although the evidence in limited (unlike the clear man-made influence on climate) and there may be some doubt whether these changes are “school-made” or “home-made,” there are measurements which have documented improvement in overall academic achievement.

Second, despite overall improvement, there are still times when we just flat out waste students time. I want to dwell on this point for a little bit, because I read a lot of rants about how we waste students’ time by teaching algebra or old physics, or whatever. Most of these rants miss the point regarding how difficult it is to tell  if students are being appropriately challenged or if their time is being wasted. These polemics are often written by people who haven’t actually had to struggle with teaching the rest of the curriculum, and their back of the napkin speculating doesn’t hold upon further scrutiny.  But this rant (the one that follows) tries to consider a more general case and also tries to confront the difficulties with knowing if students’ time is being wasted or not. Students often get better at stuff, but it is not always obvious whether it is because they have gotten older and it would have clicked anyways, or whether that year of torturous practice actually helped them.

Most of the skills worth having in this world take a great deal of practice, and you have to start small and build your way up. Want to learn to read? First start by practicing letter recognition. It takes most kids a good chunk of time to reliably tell the difference between a ‘d’ and a ‘b.’ So, kids in kindergarten spend a fair amount of time on activities which are little games designed to help them identify letters, then identify the sounds that go with them. Sometimes kids find this tedious (although amazingly, some kids love it), but I tend to see this as an unavoidable first step on your way to reading the Great Books. (and good books, and everything in between).

However, some skills cannot be acquired, and hence shouldn’t be practiced, until the right time. While it serves infants of any age to be read to, no one bothers tutoring a two-month-old infant on recognizing their letters. For starters, their visual acuity isn’t well-developed enough to even discriminate between the letters. No amount of practice will change this. But then at some point, we decide that children are capable of practicing a certain skill, whether it be tying one’s own shoes, or buttoning one’s own coat, or reading on your own. We recognize that the struggle in these cases in necessary for improvement.

“And this item on the exam asks students to draw the distribution of rods and cones across the retina. Can you say fovea?”

Some skills move from being near impossible to trivially easy, either because we get older or because they weren’t really skills in the first place. These are exactly the wrong things to practice, because they just get better by themselves.  The development of fine motor-skills strikes me as a good example. Practicing grasping objects, drawing, writing, and then tying shoes are all good things to develop fine motor-skills. Practicing sharpening your pencil would be a waste of time, because the more you practice writing and drawing, the better you will be at holding your pencil. In other words, identify the larger skill (control over fine-motor movements) and practice that in the most fun and effective way possible. For example, picking up and manipulating blocks, then coloring with fat markers, and then writing with pencils. Spending equal amounts of time drawing and sharpening the pencil would be absurd. Sharpening the pencil comes for free once fine motor skills develop.

In one kindergarten classroom, I assisted at a station where the activity consisted of practicing logging in to the computer over and over again. They had to remember an order of operations, and what to do on each step. They had to begin by pressing ctrl-alt-del at the same time, then type in their login number and password (which were both written on a popsicle stick). In between fields, they had to remember to hit the tab key (and remember where the tab key was as well as the enter key). Then, once they logged in, an adult (me or another assistant) would log them out and the students would start all over again. Several kids I was helping were getting frustrated with this–because they could not remember the steps, had a hard time pressing all the keys at once, or had some difficulty finding and recognizing all the letters and numbers in their login sequence and password.

Logging in to a computer is not something you need to, or can, practice. Knowing where the keys are? Yes, that’s important. But there are so many better ways to practice that. Hitting ctl-alt-del is a dead simple thing to learn when you are eight years old, but tortuous when you are five years old, so why bother practicing it when you are five? This struck me as a classic example of practicing something that can’t and shouldn’t be practiced. It also struck me as something which is likely driven (albeit indirectly) by test-based accountability. This is a subject for another post, but even though most kindergardeners aren’t included in standardized testing (yet), there is still pressure to familiarize them with testing routines. Eventually they will be using the computer by themselves to take these tests, so the schools and teachers are eager to get an early start on computer skills and familiarity with the computer. This could be applied to testing situations, but would also seem to apply to life in the 21st century. Everyone needs to know how to log in, right? But again, why practice something which later comes effortlessly?

How would I improve this? Give younger students familiarity with the computers by showing them the cool stuff they can learn on computers. There are good games, boring games, activities which are fun and smoothly integrate the content to be learned, and activities which are electronic flashcards. Students already do these activities, so I would prefer they just continue them. Any additional time and energy should go into assessing whether younger kids are motivated and engaged in the actual content they are doing on the computer, and not into practicing hitting the right buttons or memorizing an arbitrary set of steps that is beyond the current limits of their working memory.

Or, it could be that they turn out not to be skills, but strategies, which can generally be instructed and applied immediately. Cracking an egg with one hand is a skill, while coating the inside of the bowl with vinegar to speed whipping egg whites is a strategy. It is heartbreaking to see elementary-aged kids “practice” tasks which are not really skills. These include strategies, such as those taught when reading is taught as a subject, like making inferences or gleaning cause and effect. The kids don’t feel like they are getting better at reading (or even at taking reading tests), because they aren’t. Either they are capable of completing the task (applying the strategy) or they are not. No amount of practice will change this. When students are subjected to an incoherent, fragmented curricula of random excerpts, they miss out on content-rich instruction. Sometimes, even if the passage has interesting facts in it, students learn that the information about penguins is not important. They focus on what they are told to focus on, practicing making inferences, defeating the purpose of reading in the first place: to learn stuff.

I am concerned about this. Not scared. Just a little concerned. Oh, and that mouse pad looks chewy and delicious.

To end on a positive note, it always strikes me both what a magical time learning to read is and how incredibly difficult it is to teach a room full of sixteen or seventeen children of this age. Younger children feel and express wonder at things we take for granted. “Bear starts with B” . . . “HEY! MY NAME STARTS WITH B TOO!” It is as if the  letter itself is a talisman of magic power, which they, by virtue of their name, own and hold.  And these letters *are* full of power and magic. They grant these little creatures their first steps into the kingdom of the grown-ups, of the learned. As my own daughter learns to read, I am reminded again how awesome reading is and, at the same time, how confusing it must have been not to be able to read anything in our text-filled world.

Even as this magic is happening for some kids in a classroom, for some it isn’t. And it is frustrating. It takes real craft to toe the line between encouraging children to practice reading, setting some students free in a world of books, and gently guiding and holding the hands of others. Some simply need to learn the lesson that great knowledge and great stories can be found in books and that school can be a place to experience these great things, even if it takes them a while to understand that the letters on the side of their orange juice don’t say “Shaky Wheel,” they say “Shake Well”. Even though I have criticized the practice of logging in above, I still have the utmost respect for all of the teachers I witnessed, for how they keep their students happy and engaged, identifying what each needs individually, and nudging them at the same time to consider their community of classmates, as well.

Final Exam for Sensation and Perception

I thought some of my readers might be interested in seeing the final exam I give for my introduction to Sensation and Perception class. I’d welcome any feedback, if people had it.

 

You are welcome to use your own books, notes, and lecture slides, but do not seek or give help to your classmates on this exam.  I strongly suggest that you start early and give yourself ample time to complete it.  Normally, you might spend a certain amount of time studying, and then take a 3 hour exam.  Since this exam is open book, open notes, and untimed, I would expect it to take that time which would combine studying and taking an exam, which would be considerably longer than 3 hours.  I think allotting 8-9 total hours to complete the exam is likely a good estimate.  You may skip one question, leading to a total of 15 questions.

1. Why is it not quite accurate to say that we have 5 senses? Pick one of your senses and describe how we might consider it more than one sense. Describe two sensory experiences in which it seems that we are experiencing the same sense, but in fact there are separate biological detectors and pathways in the brain.
2. Compare the processes of transduction for hearing and for taste.  How are they similar?  How are they different? (2-3 paragraphs)
3. The first chapter draws the distinction between “perception” and “recognition.”  Describe a time when you “perceived” something without “recognizing” it.  Did you recognize it eventually? Use some of the knowledge you have learned in this class to apply to your recognition process in this case.  (2 paragraphs)
4. Our perception of color is similar in many ways to our perception of pitch.  Describe at least 4 similarities and 4 differences between these two different perceptual dimensions (and no, the fact that one is seen and the other is heard does not count as a difference).    Focus on both the physical qualities of the energy in the world, as well as the biological and psychological aspects of the sensations and perceptions. (3-4 paragraphs)
5. Watch the video of the cheetah running here: http://vimeo.com/53914149  Describe the optic flow field for this cheetah. Why might it be advantageous to the cheetah (considering again the optic flow field) to hold its head as steady as it does? Compare the optic flow field of the cheetah running to that of a human running. What might be different between the two? Use elements of the optic flow field from the book and those that you’ve learned in class.
6. Take the Magic School Bus book and make your own set of full facing pages (two pages in the book).  They should include two little lined notebook pages, with fun facts, and text in the style of the rest of the book.  To give you some idea, I think we have covered a fair amount between pages 15 and 17 (more on rods and cones, or receptor activity in the retina) that you could fill in, or after page 19 (depth perception?  Object perception?), or you could fill in our spatial localization of sounds (the headphones and ringing bells demonstration), or something on speech.  You get the idea.  I would prefer that you draw yourself, but you are welcome to use computer collage techniques, but do not simply cut and paste from the textbook.  I won’t grade on your artistic ability, but I want you to put some thought into summarizing what you know on a topic and putting it into an accessible and fun format.
7. Draw a figure explaining how lateral inhibition leads to Mach bands.  Draw a neural diagram that would NOT result in our perception of Mach bands.   Which two kinds of cells in the retina, if removed, would lead to a reduction of lateral inhibition?  (2 drawings, and two words)
8. Why is the sky blue? Without getting into more detail than the physics of light that we have described in class, why do we see the sky as blue? Describe the wavelengths of light and the relative activity of photoreceptors. How is this related to the pictorial depth cue of atmospheric perspective?
9. Pick a photograph from the National Geographic Photo Contest at the following website: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/photo-contest/2012/entries/gallery/nature-week-12/ or from the selections at this website: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/11/national-geographic-photo-contest-2012-part-ii/100414/ For this photograph pick four (4) pictorial depth cues and describe how they help to arrange the objects in depth. Also, describe the depth of field in the photograph, how depth of field is changed in a camera, and how it is different for our eyes (2 paragraphs)
10. Pick another photograph from one of those sites and describe how 4 Gestalt principles of perceptual organization apply to specific elements of the photograph. (1 paragraph, at least 4 sentences)
11. In one movie clip shown in class describing an experiment by Dan Simons, an unknowing participant was asked for directions.  While they were giving the directions, the person listening to the directions was changed, and the directions-giver did not notice.  This video shows another example of inattentional blindness https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UGR7hh0se2k .  Can you explain this referring to the relative density of cones in the fovea (how tightly the cones are packed) vs. the peripheral retina?   If you can, explain using the density of cones in the fovea.  If not, explain why this happens.
12. Describe your Thanksgiving dinner, in terms of taste, smell, and flavor.  First, start with the preparation.  How do the smells go from the cooking in the kitchen to your nose, and then to your brain? (describe the pathway in one paragraph)   When you sit down to eat, how do the foods activate your taste buds?   Can you account for the flavor of the food just by the activity of the taste buds?  Let’s say that there is a special family recipe that uses hot sauce to flavor the stuffing.  What kind of receptor activity accounts for the spicy flavor of the stuffing?
13. Watch the following video: http://vimeo.com/33480080  Describe how this video was made (you may google, but also use concepts covered in class).  Is this real motion?  Is anything on TV motion?  How is this video similar to a normal TV show, in terms of the process of visual perception of motion? (2-3 paragraphs)
14. Below is an illusion of brightness.  The front face of the words “black” and “white” are each the same color (they are shown to the right without the rest of the picture).  How does this illusion work?  You may want to make a drawing and refer to luminance, illumination, and reflectance.
15. What was your favorite demonstration, movie, or activity from the class?  How did the particular aspects of this demonstration illustrate the relevant concept (please be specific)?
16. Briefly describe what you learned from your favorite student presentation.   What made this presentation or topic particularly interesting or memorable?  (1 paragraph – 5-6 sentences)

Neurobabble: Inflated Credibility Currency

My fingers did.

Ok, not really, but both are limited views of the complex process of writing this post.

It seems that the tide may be turning on neurobabble, and I thought I would contribute a few thoughts. A recent op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Neuroscience Under Attack” chronicled the rise of “neurodoubters,” a few (interestingly, mostly British) bloggers who have been skeptical about pop neuroscience. The unfortunate title to the op-ed (which the body of the piece does attempt to clarify) is that it is not neuroscience itself that it under attack, but rather the glib popularization. Like Neuroskeptic, I hope this attack isn’t construed as undermining the science itself. Rather, I see them as strengthening science through clarifying its communication to the public. I find it critically important that there is no neurocynic (although this attitude has been voiced by the occasional philosopher), that is, most of these bloggers are scientists themselves, and see neuroscience as potentially insightful into interesting questions about the human condition. But they see it as important not to inflate the insight.

This leads me to what I think is a good metaphor for the inflated power of neuroscientific explanations. Neuroscientific terms are an inflated currency in the bargains we all strike for credibility.

“The death of one man, that is a tragedy, the death of millions, that is a statistic” quote misattributed to Josef Stalin, who nonetheless exemplified it with his policies

They are not worthless, but more often than not they are given more value than they deserve. When we make an argument, we want to persuade our reader and we make use of techniques and evidence at our disposal. Among this evidence is personal experience as well as statistical and scientific evidence.  Scientists often bemoan the unreasonable power of personal experiences and case studies. Stories have a real power that numbers rarely do. But the science and the numbers too often have an outsized role in persuasion. Even within the science there is a hierarchy of inherent persuasiveness. It is here that neuroscience has an inflated weight in credibility. The classic paper on the Seductive Allure of Neuroscientific Explanations shows how even irrelevant neuroscience explanations can increase the perceived credibility of an explanation. As Neuroskeptic points out, this could merely be an artifact of adding complexity and jargon. However, other research has also identified images of brain scans as particularly persuasive, above and beyond other scientific explanations. Unfortunately, I think this inflated value of neurojargon often comes at the cost of discounting the value of psychological explanations.

This is my brain on… ok, this is just my brain

When we read something like “multitasking impairs attention” it seems commonsensical and we shrug and say “sure, why did we need science for that?” When we read something like “multitasking impairs attention by inhibiting circuits involving the intraparietal cortex,” it just seem more science-y.  In each case, we should be asking further questions: “How do they define multitasking?” “Under what conditions does multitasking impair attention?” “How do they measure attention?” For someone interested in the consequences of their own multitasking behavior and how to change it, these questions are relevant ones, not questions about the wiring diagram of the intraparietal sulcus.  Which is not to say that these “wiring diagrams” are useless, just that they are not likely to be as immediately applicable as it may seem.

How would I like to see this changed? First, I’d like to see science journalists be more careful and precise in how they address the relationship between psychological research and neuroscience research. I think this would more often come with a careful attention not necessarily to how one uses the neuroscience words such as amygdala, hippocampus or oxytocin but rather in the words such as “because” (why do we remember some events more than others? Because of the hippocampus”), “underlie,” or “makes.” It is the strong causal links which are most often problematic, rather than saying that oxytocin is roughly associated with circumstances in which trust or love is a relevant emotion. (what a horribly vague and hedging sentence). In these cases, sometimes what is needed is the bravery to construct a horrible journalistic sentence which is nonetheless a precise and accurate summary of the science. If one can’t construct reasonably clear sentences for the public, maybe the science being described isn’t ready for a 800 word summary for someone with no background.

Second, I’d like to see neuroscientists and psychologists make more of an effort in getting out there and describing their research themselves. This might mean having a debate out in the open about what counts as overreaching. While I am sure this can result in some awkward moments with colleagues, I think it will ultimately bolster the credibility of the field as a whole. Part of this is also having higher standards for the journalists that cover them. Perhaps the most depressing part of this thorough post-mortem of the Lehrer fiasco was this quote:

If Lehrer was misusing science, why didn’t more scientists speak up? When I reached out to them, a couple did complain to me, but many responded with shrugs. They didn’t expect anything better. Mark Beeman, who questioned that “needle in the haystack” quote, was fairly typical: Lehrer’s simplifications were “nothing that hasn’t happened to me in many other newspaper stories.”

Not all science journalists are alike. Science journalists have to separate good and bad science mostly on their own with some help from scientists. Scientists could incorporate public communication into their identities more, and can help separate good and bad science journalism. I hope they do this by championing the good, and doing more to improve the bad (which is often well-intentioned simplifying), and in some cases out-and- out refuting.

Let’s slowly, patiently reduce this inflation, rather than popping it like a bubble.

Myths Come From Values, Not From Ignorance

Like many interested in how we apply basic cognitive science to education, I was interested in the recent finding that many teachers still endorse many myths and misconceptions about neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Here is the original paper, and an excellent op-ed by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons in the Wall Street Journal. One interesting element of the experiment was that teachers who knew the most were also the most misinformed (from Chabris and Simons):

Ironically, in the Dekker group’s study, the teachers who knew the most about neuroscience also believed in the most myths. Apparently, teachers who are (admirably) enthusiastic about expanding their knowledge of the mind and brain have trouble separating fact from fiction as they learn. Neuromyths have so much intuitive appeal, and they spread so rapidly in fields like business and self-help, that eradicating them from popular consciousness might be a Sisyphean task. But reducing their influence in the classroom would be a good start.

I have spent a fair amount of time trying to change one of these myths, the learning styles myth, and I have learned some lessons that I think apply to the rest of them. By way of reference, here are a couple of past posts and writings of mine on the topic: Dialogue with a teacher who defended learning styles. An article (accessible to non-scientists) with Dan Willingham in Change Magazine (picked up by Andrew Sullivan!).

Despite my strong belief that these myths are have a pernicious effect on education, I think it is important not to simply dismiss those who hold them as ignorant or thoughtless. In fact, as this study showed, those who hold the myths are just as often the most thoughtful, reflective, and knowledgeable, rather than the least. How can a myth which seems to signify a lack of knowledge be an indicator of someone who is knowledgeable? Because many myths, and these myths in particular are rooted not in ignorance, but in strongly held values.

In the case of learning styles, many well-meaning people hold a strong value that all children can learn. I too hold this value. However, when we take this to its extreme, it becomes: all children can learn all content equally well and quickly. Unfortunately, this is false. There are differences in cognitive ability, which have consequences for how quickly and easily some children learn some material. the temptation of learning styles is partly a hope that students who struggle with a subject simply have not found the right “channel” yet. Their unlimited reservoir of intelligence simply hasn’t been tapped properly. Unfortunately, some of us have bigger reservoirs than others (although we do all have different reservoirs for different content).

To dismiss the learning styles myth, we have to let go of equating cognitive ability (or intelligence) with some sort of larger social value. Further, ability also does not have to stand in as potential. I may have little artistic ability, but if I was inspired to draw, struggled with  drawing classes for a few years, I have no doubt I could become a capable at drawing. We can nurture interest while acknowledging that some will struggle more than others. As I write in the links above, in confusing ability from style, the learning styles myth also distracts us from the dimensions that really matter, such as individual attention and presenting content to be interesting for all students.

Similarly, the “we only use 10% of our brain” myth reflects a belief that we have untapped potential. This is surely true. Most of us at any given moment we have an awareness that our mind is not as focused as it could be. This might be because many of us get to occasionally experience those great moments that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” when we are totally immersed in the task at hand. In all other times, we can observe our own mind wandering and feel the cognitive costs. We have also observed experts at work, doing things effortlessly which we could not even imagine. If we could only use 25% of our brain, that would be within our grasp! Like many brain myths, this doesn’t hold up to any scientific scrutiny. But the point is that most who endorse this myth in this see it as a neuroscientific translation of their belief in untapped cognitive potential. And they are right! We do have untapped potential. There doesn’t seem to be a limit to how much you can hold in your long term memory. And it seems to stay there forever! But this is not because we only use 10% of our brain.

My final point is that these myth studies often reveal language differences between scientists and the public. One of the myths in the study is the following:

“Environments rich in stimuli improve the brains of preschool children.”

A scientist such as myself might zero in on this and ask “hmm, what do they mean by stimuli?” I could follow the logic that I know certain interventions do help preschool children learn. I also know that a home environment rich in vocabulary helps some preschool children enter school with a larger vocabulary. This greater content knowledge has huge implication in elementary school. Like any kind of learning, there must be some sort of brain change involved. But the critical part of this myth is the “rich in stimuli.”  Simply adding stimulation (colors, mobiles, toys) does not improve your child’s brain. But to the teachers who endorsed this myth, I would imagine that it simply reads as “Good environments help the brains of preschool children.” This is obviously true, but it doesn’t begin to address what is good (or even what counts as environment).

This study (and those like it) show that scientists must be careful and sympathetic in explaining our research to the public. First, we need to recognize that the reason people hold myths is that these myths become attached to values. If we simply try to yank the myths away through overwhelming force of logic and evidence, without addressing the values, the myths simply won’t come off. I see this often with debates over evolution (and I try to apply it in my own classroom when we cover evolution). We need to make the case that one can accept evolution without giving up their sacred values. With learning styles, we need to show that we can still give individual attention and value each student’s contribution while letting go of the learning styles myth.

Second, we need to recognize that the way we use language is often different and sometimes more precise than popular usage. In psychology, this is often the same words (such as “intelligence” or “emotion” or “attention”). When people say “we only use 10% of our brain power” they they don’t mean that only 10% of the neurons are active, or that each neuron is only used 10% of the time it could be, or that each mitochondria in each neuron is only running at 10% of capacity. They mean that humans have untapped cognitive potential. Let’s join them in agreeing with that first, before explaining that in fact, even though you can always learn more, all of your brain is always on.

Obama’s Tears and No Voter Left Behind

Like many progressive Obama supporters, I was moved by his tears as he thanked his Chicago staff and volunteers this past week. Whether or not you believe he is a great president, it is pretty clear he is a good man and genuinely grateful for his audience’s service to his cause. This rare crack in the remarkable poise reminded me of Charles Pierce’s piece on the greatness of Obama in his Esquire blog:

Part of what drives people crazy about him — and if you wanted to see crazy, you should have seen the fugue state that overcame the Fox election all-stars last night, because I’ve seen jollier police lineups — is that he so clearly understands his own genuine historical stature, and that he wears it so easily, and that he uses it so deftly. It is not obvious. He does not use it brutally or obviously. It is just… there with him, a long and deep reservoir of violence and sorrow and tragedy and triumph out of which comes almost everything he does.

As most of Pierce’s writing, this is well worth your time and attention. Later, Pierce describes Obama’s big project, the virtual (and vital) referendum that we voted on last week, as “the creative project of self-government.” These are the notes Obama strikes again and again. It is not him, it is us. Our work does not stop with our vote, but with us stepping up in our families, in our communities, to keep America great, one citizen at a time.

But Pierce’s soaring rhetoric, and Obama’s humble and heartfelt tribute to his volunteers and staff reminded me of some of the reasons I feel his education policy has failed us and continues to fail us. He deviates from his own stated principles and approaches in other domains, enforcing a more top-down approach, driven by centralized benchmarks not local goals, by confrontation not collaboration. In his speeches, we are all in the same boat, but his education policy is a Race that we all seem to be losing.

But back to his speech to his volunteers. As he was describing his own experience of coming to Chicago as he was 25 years old, he said “I didn’t know what I was doing.” He mentions the good will of some churches that hired him to do some community organizing. But he reiterates that he didn’t know what he was doing, and that he learned more than the community he was supposed to be serving. I don’t think this is a terrible thing, but it is important to acknowledge. It reminds me of my attitude towards Teach for America. If there are schools that are understaffed, or filled with disgruntled long term substitutes, by all means, fill these spots with well-meaning but ultimately naive Barack Obamas. But don’t act as if their high grades and SAT scores make them better teachers than those who have chosen and sought jobs in those schools. Obama was a brilliant law student, but had no idea how to “community organize.” He says the experience made him a man. No doubt many feel similarly about their experience in TFA, but while it may be a solution for providing purpose and maturity to elite graduates such as Obama, this is not a solution for those communities. They need more Paul Brunos, Sabrina Stevens Shupes, Nancy Flanagans. They don’t need more Michelle Rhees. Obama would not say that the key to making a better country is to get a better quality of citizen, but he apparently has no problems when Arne Duncan flirts with this simplistic vision of improving education.

Obama pivots from his own incompetence and growth to his current crop of volunteers and staff. “You, you are amazing, you are so much better than I was” he says. I beg to differ. They are just like you were: overacheiving, idealistic, leveraging their idealism in practical ways for political change. The program these volunteers are engaged in reminded me of education reform as well, except that this is a much simpler proposition. Getting out the vote is not the buzzing blooming confusion of how to create a well-educated student (well-read, prepared for both college and the professions, creative, competent, full of knowledge and skills). No, this project is relatively simple: get people who are likely to vote for the President to go to their voting place and place their ballot on election day. Of course, this was a huge and resounding success; Obama won more votes than Romney, both in the electoral college where it counts, and in the popular vote. However, if we compared this to education policy, if we instituted a “No Voter Left Behind” reform, we could just as easily declare this effort a dismal failure. More people chose to not vote at all rather than cast a ballot for Obama.

Of course this is unfair and reflects an ignorance of how electoral politics works. This dismissal of Obama’s voter turnout system ignores the day-to-day reality of many of these non-voters. It ignores the rational calculation of swing states vs. non-swing states and the differential effort put into turnout in different states. It ignores the barriers to voting that many people experience. Whether these are reasons or excuses is a matter of interpretation. Whether the campaign does what it can with the resources it has, or what it could do with more resources, well, that’s a subject for a future barrage of emails.

But note how similar this is to education. Saying that some horrifyingly large percentage of students drop out in some district, or fail some standardized test of reading competence (often shortened to “can’t read on grade level” or just “can’t read”) without context, without understanding what life and schools are like in that district is quite similar to citing a turnout of 60% as shameful and leaving it at that. Citing the obstacles that childhood poverty presents to students is not all that different from citing the obstacles that adult poverty presents to voters.

As Obama seeks to improve teacher quality, I hope that he remembers his own experience with being smart but knowing nothing and becoming a man in the South Side of Chicago. I hope he tempers his progressive hopes for elites such as himself with the modesty he showed in this speech to his supporters. I hope he remembers that just like community organizers need help, support and engagement from the community, so does education reform. Top-down efforts that disdain teachers, parents and the people who love their neighborhood schools are just as likely to fail now as they were when he was twenty-five.