All Eyes On You...But Not Really. A guest post by Nicholas Imlach.

          While talking about spotlight effect, illusion transparency, and the better than average effect this week in class, I was wondering if knowing would change anything. The spotlight effect is essentially when people think others are paying more attention to them than they actually are. When someone is having a bad hair day, for example, they think everyone notices, but in actuality only a few will notice. The Illusion of transparency is when people think others can tell what they’re thinking. An example of this would be you and your friend looking at each other after seeing something and saying “are you thinking what I’m thinking” and you both thought something completely different. The better than average effect is assuming that you are better than the average person on most things. While learning about these different effects, a few questions arose.

            Would knowing change anything? Now that I am aware that people don’t pay that much attention, I may not be as concerned about saying something potentially stupid in class, or not as worried if I have a bad hair day. At least I would like to think I wouldn’t be as concerned. Now that I know people in general miss things, I wonder if I will be more attentive and try to spot more things. Another question that arose is the difference between people you run into on a daily basis compared to good friends. Are people more likely to see small changes in friends before colleagues? Also what if someone has feelings for someone else, are they more likely to notice the changes? Or is it people in general just can’t notice a lot while going about their average day?

            The illusion of transparency brought up some questions also. In class we talked about lying and how people can’t really tell. My question is, “is it that we can’t tell or do we not want to tell?” When is the last time someone asked you something looking for a compliment (hair style change) and you said it was awful? Most people will tell a white lie and keep their friend or significant other happy. To reiterate the question, when it comes to small lies for what most people see as the greater good, is it that we can’t tell the difference or do we not want to tell the difference?

                Finally the better than average effect surprised me. I honestly thought more people would say they were better than average. I thought most of the categories in class would have 85% and above. People don’t want to be in the bottom of most categories. I wonder if people switch, when they realize they are in the bottom 50% of a category, to “at least I’m not the worst.” In order to salvage some part of their self-esteem I imagine people eventually use that strategy. I have always enjoyed learning about human behavior, this class shined a light on some information that got me thinking about many implications, and I believe it comes down to knowing. Now that I know, I will attempt to be more attentive in spotting inconsistencies

So How 'Bout That Expertise? A guest post by Conor Carney.

            What is an expert?  Well it probably depends on whom you ask.  Webster dictionary defines an expert as having, involving, or displaying special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience.  It is rather broad, so it is difficult to really define an individual as being some one who is an “expert.”
            We saw a video of someone who was an expert at drawing.  He was able to see the New York sky line from a helicopter for only about 20 minutes then draw almost an exact replica of the city.  He was able to do all of this despite the fact that he was said to be severely autistic.  There are very few people who would be able to accomplish such a task, so I would consider him to be an expert. 
            What about professional athletes?  It is obvious that they have a very special skill, but there are so many of them.  If someone is injured, they are immediately replaced and sometimes the person behind them can out do their previous performances, so are they truly an expert?  Or are they just someone with a high level of skill.
            The same goes for almost any profession.  People are referred to as experts very frequently, but we really do not stop to think what that really means.  There are expert doctors, lawyers, chess players and even limousine drivers, but what does this really all mean. 
            To me an expert is someone who cannot be replaced.  Someone who is so highly skilled at what they do, that if they were to stop no one would be able to replicate what they do.  In this sense there would not be too many experts, because in almost every profession, there is always someone behind you that is ready to take your place.
            The autistic New York drawer is someone who is nearly irreplaceable.  If he were to no longer continue drawing, would one be able to give someone a 20 minute ride throughout a major city then have them draw a thorough and accurate replica of what they saw?  I highly doubt it, at least not without an extensive search.  What if you were sick and your regular doctor was on vacation?  Would you wait until their return or simply go to another doctor?  One would likely find another doctor, or “expert,” in their place.  This is the same throughout all occupations.
            What is an expert?  There is really no answer to that question, because it all depends on the person answering the question.  One person may consider someone an expert and another person may disagree and there really is not a right or wrong answer.  The requirements are so loose that someone could claim they are an expert sandwich maker or expert driver and there is really no way to tell them that they are wrong.  So, to answer the question what is an expert? It depends.  

Do Experts Truly Exist? A guest post by Kyle Luke.

                When I hear the word “expert,” I immediately think of individuals who have spent a large amount of time learning and working on a specific subject.  Typically, I think of individuals who have taught me different lessons or skills.  So to me I would define an expert as someone who has a great deal of knowledge about their field and who have earned the right to teach others what they have learned.  I know that this is different from the definitions given by dictionaries, but I feel that overall it has the same message.  For me I feel as though a person cannot be an expert until they have a solid enough understand of their subject or skill that they can successfully pass it on to others.  After all, what is the point of being an expert of something and compiling all of that knowledge on the subject if you are not willing to pass it on to the next generation and to hopefully keep the subject improving and evolving. 

                At my martial arts school it was common for certain black belts to help teach some of the lower ranking members of the school before the more advanced class started.  Fortunately for me, I was offered this opportunity even though I was a few years younger than those whom I taught.  I am not going to lie, originally I felt that I did not deserve to teach others because I would not have the respect of those whom I was trying to teach because of my age and that I would be an unfit teacher because I was still learning myself.  When I expressed to my head instructor that I was no expert on martial arts and how I felt that I had a long way to go before I could teach anyone, he told me some famous  quotes by martial arts expert Bruce Lee which I still value today (the quotes can be found at the end of this post).  The first quote was a message that even a martial artist as good as Bruce Lee never considered himself a master and that he was constantly learning and improving as he worked.  The second was about how knowing about yourself will help you interact with other people and that by putting in the effort and constantly improving, it is possible to earn other people’s respect and admiration.  After hearing these lessons, I felt much more comfortable about teaching others and I must say that I am extremely glad I did because I feel that I learned more by teaching others and helping them out than I did by practicing by myself.  It felt good to see that those whom I was teaching saw me as someone who had the knowledge to help them improve their skills – to them I was the expert. 

                I have to be honest and say that I am nowhere near an expert in martial arts.  I am merely someone who is slightly above average.  Yet, to my students I was someone whom they respected and trusted enough that they were willing to learn from me.  This was an experience that I really valued, not only for the chance to help out my fellow students, but for the opportunity to learn what it was like to teach someone about something I had knowledge about. 

 “I'm not a master, I'm a student-master, meaning that I have the knowledge of a master and the expertise of a master, but I'm still learning, so I'm a student-master. I don't believe in the word master, I consider the master as such when they close the casket.”  - Bruce Lee

“Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself – to be is to be related” - Bruce Lee

I Remember It Like It Was Just Yesterday: Flashbulb Memories. A guest post by Tabitha Candido.

          Throughout today’s lecture, flashbulb memories were the most interesting to me. Flashbulb memories are highly detailed, vivid “snapshots” of an event. Flashbulb memories are a type of autobiographical memory. Flashbulb memories usually come about and stick in someone’s mind because of personal importance, emotions, or shock factor (surprising events).

            An example of a flashbulb memory would be like the memory of 9/11. Many people think they remember what they were doing that day, where they were, and who was with them. Most people believe that they remember every specific detail about that day and what happened, but the truth is most of the time they don’t.

            Every time you recall any memory, it is not better than any other kind of memory. Flashbulb memories, even though they seem more vivid in your mind, really are not. 

            When you recall something, you think you remember it more and more but you truly do not. Every single one of those times you actually remember it a little differently and restore it the way you have just recalled it, to be changed once more another day. Flashbulb memories can also be influenced by TV footage of an event.

            Taking into account 9/11, many of us are asked if we remember this event, especially in school. I have been asked in school if I remember where I was and what I was doing that day and even whom was around me. As I was so young when this happened, I do not remember that much of it. All I really remember is that I was in elementary school, in math class specifically, and I remember the announcements going on the loudspeaker asking teachers to all go to the principal’s office if they were able to.

            After my teacher (Ms.Machado) came back into class she told us what was happening and told us we were going to get early dismissal that day because of this.

I remember my mom actually calling the school to talk to me to ask if I was ok and told me my aunt was going to be the one picking me up from school that day.

            Even though I remember these little snippets of what happened that day I feel now, after learning about flashbulb memories, that my memory from that day is not as accurate as I think I actually remember it. Thinking about this day now and trying to remember what I can actually, vividly remember is not as much as I actually tell people when asked about this day. All I truly remember is being told what happened and seeing my teacher cry.

As you can see, flashbulb memories are not always 100% correct or remembered in their entirety, but they usually demonstrate the emotional part of the memory and explain why people have these memories for so long. Just remember, even though you might believe you remember something very vividly, you might be very wrong.

The Human Brain. A guest post by Cynthia Ball.

     This week I enjoyed the presentation from our quest speaker, Professor Jackson, who did an excellent job of explaining various aspects of the brain that relate to neuroscience and cognition. It was the first time that learning about parts of the brain was not boring, but rather quite interesting. He explained various parts of the brain and their functions as relating to various defects in the physiology of the brain.

     What intrigued me most, and inspired me to write this, was the last section about “Myth Busting the Brain.” How mortifying!  I was one who believed in all of them, so naturally I was beside myself.  I thought, how was I now going to justify those beliefs to myself now? The left brain/ right brain theory was the first to baffle my mind. When he explained where the myth began, I was able to readily understand that it is the whole brain that is used and that either side may be more activated at various times.

     Another myth was one regarding how “puzzles boost brains.”  An example of such being the website Luminosity, as it claims to help you “reclaim your brain.” This also took me by surprise. I recently considered investing in the website and actually participated in one of their trials. The program’s intention was to have us believe that one’s cognitive skills would be greatly improved by using their website and playing their mind games. No doubt, as explained by Professor Jackson, the action of practicing these puzzles is the means for doing better at them as time progresses – but does not have an actual effect on your cognitive function or the “strength” of your brain.

     A similar program that I indulged in with my daughter during my pregnancy and after she was born and preached to other parents about is the Baby Einstein series of tapes and DVDs. They alleged their ability to greatly improve children’s cognitive development. It’s even been stated that by playing Mozart or any classical music to developing fetuses that they would get a head start on better cognitive skills.  The idea that listening to classical music can increase your brainpower has become so popular that it's been dubbed "the Mozart effect." I was one of those parents who actually fell for this and took part in it. How silly do I feel now? This particular myth started in the 1930’s when an ear, nose, and throat specialist had suggested that people with auditory disorders could have improved speech by listening to Mozart. Then in 1990, a study had been done regarding IQ tests in which it was suggested that listening to Mozart prior to taking the test resulted in higher test scores. Hence, “the Mozart effect” was born. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/10-brain-myths.htm#page=2)

     The world of commercialism has and continues to apparently dupe a large majority of people into believing such myths to sell products. I recently came across an article entitled, “Age-Proof Your Brain” in Healthy Living Magazine. This article goes on to state, “So-called senior moments can be unsettling and frustrating, but we tend to accept them as a non-negotiable result of aging. In fact, researchers now believe that we don’t have to just sit back and let our gray matter fizzle over time.” Gray matter was something that Professor Jackson had also discussed with us in his presentation, so I thought this was quite interesting to now be reading this article. The article further claims, “New imaging technologies are revealing that the brain is far more elastic than we believe.” It suggests that through the use of “Brain Trainers” and Mind Games such as Sudoku, Rubik’s Cubes, and Crossword Puzzles, the brain is more likely to have neuroplacticity, according to researchers, and that will make the brain more resistant to disease because these games work areas of the brain responsible for memory in the hippocampus and for language in the left temporal lobe. This information was given by a Dr. Hall who also says, “They [the games] also encourage different parts of the brain to work together.”

     So, what are we all supposed to believe after a pitch like that? As Professor Jackson explained, those behind such myths claim as fact that they are “built on proven neuroscience,” yet it now makes more sense to me that it is more likely a result of practicing these so called mind games over and over again (Practice Effects) as stated previously. And also according to Professor Jackson, we all know that things are showed and demonstrated, not proven, and it’s about “science not magic.”

Holy Heuristics. A guest post by Justyna Dorris.

            Have you ever heard the word heuristics before? No, well me neither until this year and it turns out we use them every day and this is just the fancy word which simply means a “rule of thumb” that provides a best guess solution to a problem. Now that you know what a heuristic is, you’ll realize that you do this every day. In class we talked about three of the most commonly known ones, which are: the gambler’s fallacy, availability heuristic, and anchoring and adjustment heuristic. Let’s do a quick rundown of each of these before we move on to another one.

To explain gambler’s fallacy, let’s use the example of flipping a coin and getting heads or tails. Say you flip it eight times, the first one is tails, and then you get tails six times in a row, what will the eighth flip be? Odds are you said heads and your reason is because it was “due to land on heads.” That right there is the gambler’s fallacy. We have a 50/50 chance of getting heads or tails, so after a long run of getting tails you’re more likely to believe that you’ll get heads next even though it’s always a 50/50 chance.

To explain the availability heuristic, let’s think about a few things. Are you more likely to die from a car accident or stomach cancer? Most people will say car accident, but in all reality more people die from stomach cancer. We say car accident over stomach cancer because we hear about people dying from car accidents more often than we hear about people dying from stomach cancer, so this information is readily available to us. The things that we hear about more on a daily basis are the things that will come to our minds first. Another example of this is do more words start with the letter K or have K as the third letter? Believe it or not more words have K as the third letter than the first, so why are we more likely to say that there are more words that start with K? The answer is simply because it’s easier for us to think of words that start with K rather than words that have it as its third letter, but as soon as someone starts saying words that have K as the third letter you’ll think of a bunch of them (i.e. bike, like, lake, cake, etc.).

The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is when we are given certain information and then adjust it up or down. So someone asked you, are there more than 25 people in your psychology class without counting? You look and see there’s more and then they ask you how many people are there, most people will say 30 and they got to this by doing 25 people, plus 5 is 30. Or usually the chips you buy from the store are on sale for $2.50 but this week they’re being sold for $3.25. This is also an example of this heuristic because the store took the usual sale price and increased it from $2.50 to $3.00. They adjusted it from low to high which is a common practice for stores to do. Now that we understand these three heuristics let’s move on to another kind.

            A lesser known heuristic is the simulation heuristic, which is “a more specific form of the availability heuristic that explains why people experience regret and use counterfactual thinking. Simply stated the simulation heuristic pertains to how likely one thinks an outcome will occur” (Psychowiki.com). “The mental processes, by which people construct scenarios, or examples, resemble the running of the simulation model. Mental simulation appears to be used to make predictions, assess probabilities and evaluate casual statements. A particular form of simulation, which concerns the mental undoing of certain events, plays an important role in the analysis of regret and close calls. Two rules of mental undoing are proposed. According to the downhill rule, people undo events by removing surprising or unexpected occurrences. According to the focus rule, people manipulate the entities on which they focus” (Kahneman & Tversky 1981).

There are different reasons for when people will use this heuristic. The first is when someone has no previous information about something and they have to make a general prediction. So for example, when two people meet for the first time, neither one of them knows anything about the other so they make basic predictions about each other. When it comes to assessing probabilities’ using this heuristic, an example would be what would have happened if Lincoln wasn’t shot by John Wilkes Booth, how would history have been different? Or what will happen if you don’t study for your cognitive psychology final? Finally an example of evaluating casual statements would be something like: did studying for an hour cause you to get an 85% on your test or was the test just very easy? So as you can see we do use this heuristic in our lives when it comes to certain things. The other three heuristics mentioned are the better known ones and the ones that are used more often, but all of them are valuable when it comes to us making decisions and guesses about things.

Cognitive Psychology Connecting mind, research, and everyday experiences by E. Bruce

Goldstein

http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Simulation_Heuristic

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1981). The simulation heuristic (No. TR-5). STANFORD UNIV CA DEPT OF PSYCHOLOGY. 

Just Call Me The Brain Mythbuster!

     In this post we are going to discuss and up-and-coming field: cognitive neuroscience. We are also going to debunk some myths about the brain.

     Cognitive neuroscience studies the biology behind cognition. It focuses on the biological connection between the brain and cognition. If you visit the website for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (http://www.cogneurosociety.org/), you will find a quote by one Eric R. Kandel who says, “Cognitive Neuroscience – with its concern about perception, action, memory, language, and selective attention – will increasingly come to represent the central focus of all Neurosciences in the 21^st century.” Now while I can’t argue that this is a fact, I also can’t argue that it is improbable. Cognitive Neuroscience seeks to explain a lot of things we otherwise would have no understanding of, especially things we, as a society, want to know more about such as Alzheimer’s Disease and how to help/slow down/prevent it.  

     Cognitive Neuroscience, as well as general Neuroscience, is also responsible for our ability to reject certain myths about the brain.

     For example, we do not use 10% of our brain. We use 100% of our brain. Where does this myth come from? Well our brains do this thing called culling, and when we are around seven years old, early childhood, we have a lot more neurons and neural connections than we need. As we get to young adulthood, our brain “culls” these surplus connections to increase the efficiency of the neural connections in our brains. So though we may have fewer neurons than we did when we were younger, we are still using the full power of our brains.

     It is NOT all downhill after 40. It is often drilled into our heads that as you get older mental abilities decrease, but this is not entirely true. Yes, cognitive skills decline as you age; for example, it is easier for a younger child to learn another language compared to your middle-aged self. However, some mental skills improve such as vocabulary and regulation of emotions.

     People are not left-brained OR right-brained; we use both sides of our brain. If we didn’t need both sides, evolution would have disposed of one side centuries ago. While certain functions of the brain are dominated by certain hemispheres, common everyday tasks require the use of both hemispheres. (So that quiz you just took on Facebook about which side you are, is not actually accurate).

     Drug use does not cause holes in your brain. Only physical trauma can cause holes in your brain. Though I am not condoning the use of drugs, I find it important to specify that drugs do not cause holes in your brain. They do, however, cause a reduction in size of key regions of the brain and interfere with the set chemical connections of the brain. On a similar note, alcohol does not ALWAYS kill brain cells. Moderate amounts are acceptable, however if you blackout consistently each week (which you can read more about in my earlier post “Last Friday Night”) then you may be killing a decent amount of your brain cells.

     Your brain is entirely capable of creating new cells. In fact, it generates new cells constantly. It also continues to do so as you age.

     Blasting classical music will not increase your intelligence. Before you put some headphones on your pregnant wife’s belly to make your unborn child smarter, take note of this: it doesn’t actually do anything. There is no evidence of it increasing a child’s intelligence. In fact, there is actually some evidence that it decreases a child’s vocabulary.

     Playing games does not improve cognitive function. While you may improve your vocabulary or puzzle-solving skills, you won’t actually improve your brain’s overall function. To maintain the “youth” of your brain, workout: not your mind, your body. Good nutrition and consistent exercise will preserve your mental abilities more so than any “mind game.”

     Brain damage/brain injuries are NOT always permanent. Sometimes the brain is capable of repairing itself. Although it depends on location and severity, it is important to note that they are not all permanent. In fact, it has been seen in some instances that the brain is actually capable of “rerouting” and developing new connections to repair its mental abilities while not necessarily repairing its physical state.

I hope you found these myths interesting. Keep these in mind and the next time someone tries to mention one of these you can shut them down (politely of course!).

http://www.brainfacts.org/neuromyths/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html?c=y&page=2