I had a strange thought this morning brought about by reading Sebastian Faulk’s excellent book “Human Traces”. The book deals with the early days of phsychotherapy or “mad doctoring” as it was affectionately known. Anyway, while reading I realised that most people suffer episodic but extreme delusions while watching movies and reading books. (the many ironies of this are not lost on me) It’s the basis upon which the thriller genre is based. For example take the movie the 6th Sense. Even if you guess the twist before it’s revealed you’ll still have an epiphanical moment where you realise that you’re mental picture of what you were watching is incorrect. At the end of the movie the director reveals how he has coyly sneaked references to the truth under your mental radar so that the truth is just as plausible and perhaps even more consistent than the alternative conceptualisation that most viewers have. Well, here’s the thing. Your brain has been duped by skill but what if you simply couldn’t perceive the falsehood of a pseudo-consistent view because you had a mental blind spot (lacuna) to a particular issue or experience brought about by anything from psychological to somatic trauma. We all experience this to greater or lesser degrees. Phobias prevent us from engaging with the reality of a situation as our experience is not consistent with objective reality or the objective reality of others. Some people fear flying, some spiders, some rats, some Mondays. There’s nothing that distorts the world view like living! Phobias can appear mad to others and perfectly sound to the sufferers. How fine the line is between these and more serious delusions is a matter of conjecture.
Category: psychology
Fun with puzzles
Today is R’s birthday. Happy bday R & thanks for everything!
However, this particular factum has nothing to do with the remainder of this blog post. A few days ago I was busy typing away at an interesting computer problem using python (thanks brian) when I clicked the button at the wrong time and ended up in the middle of one of those online IQ test things. I did the test while continuing to work on my little computer programme and got a nice high mark. I don’t know about anyone else in computing but there are more challenges than braincells out there so I needed an ego boost, as usual 🙂
Then I got sent a report about my mark and I realised that I hadn’t actually gotten anything wrong, I’d just been taking my time, which I knew anyway. So just to prove to myself that these things are a gross simplification of the multi-faceted thing we circularly perceive as intelligence I resat a subtley different test and duly improved my score to something ridiculous (170+). Everyone’s cogs are grooved, worn and turn in a different manner, especially those whose cogs are always turning. Therefore it’s nonsense to put any kind of store in such a result except to acknowledge that they point towards a situational intelligence that, when taken within in its proper context, correctly predict that the person will perform well at certain intelligence tests on a certain day of the week. As useful as that, wow!Jayz, I need to invent auto-punctuation. Seriously though, a highly intelligent and witty colleague once remarked that many of the PhD’s she’d met “couldn’t find their arse with a map”. The cult of the IQ is extremely damaging in moderns society as we’ve had studies which are both revisionist and reductionist in their attempts to attribute high IQ scores on famous thinkers througout history. Thus retrofitting IQ to achievement. An example is Catherine Cox’s 1926 publication on 300 emminent thinkers throughout history. The secondary research might be meticulous but the rationale is flawed. This book and others such as the Bell Curve and “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” have arguably contributed to a complete misunderstanding of what intelligence is, how it manifests itself and more importantly, the possible intellectual differences between different racial groups and cultures. Even a cursory examination of most so-called intelligence tests reveal a marked bias towards the kind of mathematical/verbal questions that are affected by the level of schooling attained. It’s no surprise that if your socio-economic group doesn’t enable you to pursue academic success, you won’t score well on a test which directly and indirectly measures it.
Anyways, this got me thinking about a fairer test of intelligence beyond the semi-conscious ingrained insights of a engineer to a spatial/verbal/logical problem. I couldn’t think of any which just goes to show that these tests are rubbish 🙂
Failing that, here’s a fascinating puzzle that was created by an esteemed german physicist with even dafter hair than me. Followers of sudoku (cheers richard) which actually closely resembles the classic sudoku hard puzzle in that it’s best solved (in my opinion anyways) by viewing the solution space as a matrix. This is a complex way of saying, imagine the houses and their occupants and write down what you know about each under the relevant headings til a solution is reached. Like the Sudoku puzzle you have to make a number of logical inferences based on positions/duplications/etc.
There are 5 houses in 5 different colors
In each house lives a person with a different nationality
These 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.
Here’s the question: Who owns the fish?
1. The Brit lives in a red house
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets
3. The Dane drinks tea
4. The green house is on the left of the white house
5. The green house owner drinks coffee
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
8. The man living in the house right in the middle drinks milk
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house
10. The man who smokes Blend lives next door to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next door to the man who smokes Dunhill
12. The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer
13. The German smokes Prince
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water
With these 15 clues the problem is solvable.
Don’t worry. Gaisan’s blog hasn’t been taken over by one of those spamming bots promoting Human Growth Hormone, a larger appendage or a higher IQ. Still, I read some rather shocking (pardon the terrible pun) news from the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders & Stroke. The study investigates the effects of Functional Electrical Stimulation and wired has an article with soundbytes from key staff. It appears that a small (2 mA) current passed through electrodes attached to the surface of the forehead can increase a subjects’ verbal skills. In the study, volunteers were asked to think of as many words as possible that begin with a particular letter. The current was applied and the challenge was reissued. After the current was applied volunteers were able to come up with on average 20% more words. It is hoped that these findings could be used to create a new drugless treatment for neurological illnesses or used to repair brain trauma. The researchers are as yet unclear as to why the current effectively stimulates brain function but Eric Wasserman, a scientist at the institute proposed the following conjecture:
“What we think we’re doing is changing the electrical environment of neurons and causing them to change their activity,” said Wassermann.>
The only side effects observed so far are a “tingling senstation” around the area where the electrodes are applied. However “It’s unknown whether chronically overdriving an impaired system might cause it to burn out faster”
Thought provoking reads
I’ve read 3 books this year that have had a profound affect on my outlook in life. May sound corny but I think that there’s something for everybody in these books whether sceptic or wild-eyed believer. Mostly however, they provide an insight into what it means to be a thoughtful individual struggling with the many difficult decisions and tasks of our professional and personal lives. The titles are:
- Who Moved My Cheese? (by Spenser Johnson)
- The Blank Slate (by Stephen Pinker)
- The Structure of Magic (by Jonathan Grinder and Richard Bandler)
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Also, after much discussion with friends and family (some of which are practicing psychotherapists) I believe they contain a very important message about people’s ability to deal with rapid technological change. I call this “the new dystopia of the Information Age”. Catchy title I think you’ll agree! The central thesis rests on the Technological Revolution (TR) having substantial positive and negative effects on our self-esteem; depending on age group, social background, intelligence, etc. Expressing it as two distinct push and pull factors:
- Before mass media people’s relative self-worth was established in direct comparison with their neighbours. We’re a hierarchical society after all (whether we like it or not) and we look for baselines to compare our progress through life, relative success etc. However, with mass media we’re increasingly bombarded with unreal and surreal media fragments about people who are more superficially successful than ourselves, to the point where the baseline is unrealistically moved. In a sense, the media provides us with the criteria for judgement and then pronounces us “unworthy” in order to sell more image enhancing product. This is significantly lowering the self-esteem of many within our society. I’m not proposing ludditism here, merely saying that there are detrimental effects of exposure to socially-emphatic mass media. Let’s call this group “the disenfranchised”
- On the flip side, many people, particularly those in the teen to 20-something age group, find a sense of belonging in technological or online communities, bolstering their self-esteem. These “online ghettos or tribes”vary wildly in content & sentiment but their purpose is perhaps common. Also technology is easing access to these online tribes, making them more inclusive and pervasive. Some tribes with purposes fulfilling basic human needs have grown to embrace millions of users. These include the tribe of mobile phone users or the Instant Messaging community… Individuals in this groups may be called “tribe-members” and the people and organisations who create the technologies, online boards, blogs etc. are their “tribe-leaders”
If we assume that we react to external stimulus such as information then the variation, quantity and the manner and pace of delivery of that information must affect the reaction on an individual basis. From reading these books and trying to absorb their insights about NLP, genetics and human nature it seems that our minds and bodies are being pushed to the limit. One of the first casualties is mental health and life satisfaction. Mental health is difficult to ascertain as there are contrasting views on what it actually means and what constitutes mental illness. But it does seem that if the pace and stress of our techno-dystopia was leading to depression then it would be most severely reflected in depression and suicide statistics of teenagers and 20-somethings. In the UK studies have shown that this definitively IS the case. Eating disorders and addictions are also all on the increase over the past 20 years. Suicide rates among teens in the US have increased by 6% over the past 20 years.. The same stats show that almost 1 in 5 US high-school students seriously consider suicide. I believe that tribe-leaders need to better consider the side-effects of particular technologies on the human tribe, emphasising the positive with tribes promoting inclusiveness, compassion and empathy and ensuring greater responsibility among those promoting image-enhancing products.