Metablog

This post contains speculation that, even by bloggish standards, is unfounded. Get out your salt shaker. Or buy me access to some cogsci journals.

I’m going to publish this post even though it needs another hour or two of editing, and another fifty of researching, because it’s already getting close to the size where I’ll never finish it.

I’ve been working on my procrastination recently, and as a serendipitous side effect of my unusually consistent effort on it for the past couple weeks, I happened to have not spent as much time as usual practicing piano, reading blogs, watching TV, or playing video games or puzzle games (like Tetris or Sudoku). At the end of that time, I had an unusually productive two days at work, until around mid-afternoon of the second day, when I had finished all of my pressing work and decided to spend a few minutes playing Tetris—despite the fact that experience has taught me that the few minutes would turn into much longer.

Now, there was nothing particularly unusual about my deciding to play Tetris; after all, I am working on my procrastination. But I noticed something quite unusual when I started. I felt a head rush, and a strong one. It was like five shots of espresso, all at once. (Minus the jitteriness.) Now, I’ve never taken cocaine, but I imagine it would feel the same way. I take stimulants for my ADHD, and the feeling was the same, but stronger and immediate.

And it hits me—Tetris gives me a dopamine rush. Of course! That’s why it’s addictive! It’s the same mechanism behind food and sex and cocaine and meth and nicotine!

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Late just this November, the world champion chess player Vladimir Kramnik played the leading chess software, Deep Fritz. In his second match, he allowed the computer to win with a mate in one. He said,

It was actually not only about the last move. I was calculating this line very long in advance, and then recalculating. It was very strange, some kind of blackout. I was feeling well, I was playing well, I think I was pretty much better. I calculated the line many, many times, rechecking myself. I already calculated this line when I played 29…Qa7, and after each move I was recalculating, again, and again, and finally I blundered mate in one.

Is this confirmation bias? Looking for evidence that the line he was calculating was the correct line, but not looking for evidence that it was the incorrect line? If so, it means that, the best current player of chess in the world has not been able to completely rid himself of this bias, even in the limited field of his area of expertise.

I just stepped into the bathroom and experienced a moment of vertigo. Our workplace (quite small) has two identical unisex bathrooms right next to each other, and I was paying so little attention that after I closed the door I couldn’t figure out which one I was in. It felt like my inner ear was going crazy for a second. Weird.

Mel (my new blogcrush) links to this neat paper on learning and pedagogy styles. If the authors are to be believed (and I don’t have the expertise to evaluate their claims) then the reason I got a B in physics was that there weren’t nearly enough examples for me to follow before I started working through problems on my own. Which makes a lot of sense to me.

The mechanism, apparently, is that while searching for the solution to a problem, we use up so much of our cognitive resources that we don’t have any left over for remembering how we solved the problem, or getting better at solving those problems. That is, when searching for a solution using unfamiliar techniques. Once those techniques are thoroughly learned, then it’s actually more effective to learn by solving problems than to follow along with solutions. But before one is skilled with that, trying to solve problems is, basically, a waste of time.

If I could apply all of the knowledge in that paper, I could probably do a lot better in school than I did last time around.

Go read the paper—it’s good. Here’s the abstract:

Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert-novice differences, and cognitive load. While unguided or minimally-guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half century that consistently indicate that minimally-guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide ‘internal’ guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.

While reading some provoking comments on another interesting post over at Overcoming Bias, I found a link to an even more provoking essay by Robin Hanson.

You are a body with a mind. Your mind is the result of activity in your brain, and your body was grown from a single cell following the instructions of your genes, which you acquired from your parents. Your parents acquired their genes from their parents, and so on back for billions of years. (The few genes not acquired from parents were created by random mutations.) The fact that you have certain genes and not others was determined almost entirely by a fierce competition between genes to create better “survival machines,” i.e., creatures that perpetuate and spread those genes. The genes that produced you are not a random sample from all possible genes; they are some of the few genes that, so far, remain in this competition.

[…]

Our genes do not care whether we experience more pleasure than pain. Our genes only care that we anticipate both possibilities, so that they can control us via our passions, i.e., our preference for pleasure over pain. When our bodies are no longer capable of reproducing, or of helping those who share our genes reproduce, our genes literally do not care if we live or die. Our genes will happily shorten our lifespans, or give us great pain, if that will help those genes to reproduce. Our genes will also lie to us to promote their goals, such as by making us think that our happiness depends more than it does on our success. Our genes can indeed be cruel masters.

[…]

Why do humans have such big brains, which are so devoted to a dream world of abstract ideas and feelings that have so little direct relation to personal survival and reproduction? Our best theory at the moment is that this dream world is produced by sexual selection, much like the large and colorful and otherwise useless tail of the peacock. […] The theory is that we similarly have “mating minds”, i.e., minds that are designed in large part to impress potential mates and allies. When we display to observers how agile and creative we are at love, humor, talk, story, art, music, fashion, sport, charity, religion, and abstract ideas, we show those observers that we have high quality genes, with few bad mutations. Having such minds also helps us to judge the quality of others’ genes from their displays.

Cheerful, eh?

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“Darwin”, of DarwinCatholic, (h/t Gene Expression) writes here about a Business Week piece on the ethics of selective abortion using genetic screening for various disorders.

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UPDATE: Here’s another article by Thomas Brown, taking the view that ADD is or is one of a spectrum of executive function impairment disorders. Really good article. I’ll blog it later.

I just read a really interesting article about what Jeffrey Tate, a doctor specializing in ADD, thinks the core symptom of the disorder is. He thinks that it’s about not being able to focus on important tasks, as opposed to interesting tasks. Normally, either importance or interest are enough to allow us to focus on something, but for ADD sufferers, interest is all that suffices.

Now, this seems like it might be a bit off to me. Doesn’t everyone have trouble focusing on boring but important things? Or is that really pretty unusual? So, if you’re reading this, please answer these two questions:

1. Do you find it (a) easier (b) as easy, or (c) harder to focus on important tasks (things that need to be done) versus interesting tasks (that are entertaining, but not necessary)?
2. When there is something quite important but relatively uninteresting to be done, do you find it (a) easy (b) moderately easy (c) moderately hard, or (d) hard to get it done?

If I’m right, most people would answer C on the first question, and C or D on the second. Wouldn’t that make it so most people suffer from ADD? And what is “important”, in this context? Is it our conscious determination of the importance of the task? Unlikely. It’s probably some heuristic based on urgency, using cues from peer pressure (who wants you to do the task?) and the perceived immediate consequences of not doing the task. If someone is breathing down your neck about doing something, it can be a pretty powerful motivator.

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OK, I’ve learned a bit about dopamine and how it relates to various addictions and behavior modification. Dopamine is strongly implicated in addiction to alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, heroin, and morphine. It’s also the chemical release when some task has been sucessfully completed, by a person’s own standards. This positive feedback effect is probably why we become addicted to Sudoku or crossword puzzles. I think it can also explain blog commenting—we get a dopamine rush when we get approval from other commenters, and posting on friendly sites with likeminded commenters is likely to get us approval for many of our comments, and so we end up trying to comment a lot to get and maintain that approval.

Also, there’s probably something satisfying, and dopamine-inducing, about discovering a new and interesting piece of information. Both commenting and reading can lead to this.

It’s possible dopamine plays a central role in all kinds of human motivation and reinforcement learning, though to what extent I couldn’t say (and probably isn’t known yet).

How does interest relate to attention? Can most people choose to pay attention to things that they’re not particularly interested in for long periods of time? I wouldn’t think so. And yet many descriptions of ADD and ADHD (especially, it seems, those geared toward children with the disorder) say that “it much easier … to sustain attention in … work … when tasks are interesting, meaningful, or in some way motivating …”, as if this were something unique to individual afflicted with ADD. But that just sounds like bullshit to me. Even Wikipedia says that “[those affected] face some of their greatest challenges in the areas of self-control, self-motivation, as well as executive functioning”.

On the contrary, it seems more likely to me (and I speak as someone medicated for the disorder) that most people who have these problems have them because they work on very abstract and complicated subject with very little immediate emotional or adrenal influence. And, for humans, that’s a recipe for those problems.

Oooh, shiny. Humans have a “propensity to focus on emergency situations to the exclusion of background phenomena which may be more significant.” They “respond more readily to novel objects and fast changes.” The problem is that our attention allocation system is very poorly calibrated to with the level of complexity that our modern environment has. So many of the stimuli that we have to attend to over the course of the day is so far removed from its eventual impact on our lives, even when that impact is certain and substantial, that we cannot allocate it the amount of attention relevent to its actual importance to us.

But surely “colorful and moving” aren’t the only things that grab our attention. Obviously, people are fascinated by and spend countless time on many things that are quite bland. For instance, crossword puzzles. What draws our attention to crossword puzzles?

I’m going to have to read more about this.

UPDATE: I read a little more about this. (I’m going to the good library tomorrow.) Dopamine reinforcement probably has a lot to do with all this. Which is quite discouraging.