Inattentional blindness: Moon-walking Gorilla in the Brain

Have you ever wondered why you usually miss glaring bloopers in major motion pictures? If you are like most people, you probably believe that just because your eyes are open, you are seeing. So why do we sometimes fail to see things that are right in front of our eyes?

The reality is that attention plays a major role in visual perception. One of the primary reasons why you fail to notice these mistakes in films and television programs is a psychological phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. When your attention is focused on one demanding task, such as paying attention to the main character in a movie, you might not notice unexpected things entering your visual field.

The “left – right brain” Myth

We wrote about the 10% brain myth last month and subsequently we wondered about how these types of myths and rumors come into being.    Myths about the brain typically arise in this fashion: An intriguing experimental result generates a plausible if speculative interpretation (a small part of the lobe seems sufficient) that is later overextended or distorted (we use only 10 percent of our brain). The caricature ultimately infiltrates pop culture and takes on a life of its own, quite independent from the facts that spawned it.

Another such myth is the idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are fundamentally different. Are you a creative and emotional person? Maybe an artist or a musician? Then you are probably right-brained. No? Perhaps you are a rational, analytical and logical thinker? Maybe a mathematician or an engineer? Then you are most likely left-brained. Who does not know that creativity and emotion are located in the right half of the brain, while rationality and logic are situated in the left half of the brain? Everyone has come across this popular notion of left or right brain dominance, which determines a person’s way of thinking and his/her personality. This notion, however, is a widely held misconception.

Scientists at the University of Utah have debunked the myth with an analysis of more than 1,000 brains. They found no evidence that people preferentially use their left or right brain. All of the study participants — and no doubt the scientists — were using their entire brain equally, throughout the course of the experiment. A paper describing this study appeared in August 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Book Review)

Gladwell’s talent is for weaving together scientific research findings from fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, criminology and marketing with an anecdotal style to create new ways of looking at things for the popular reader.

Blink, Gladwell’s follow-up bestseller to The Tipping Point, is a more purely psychological work, leaning on the research of Timothy Wilson, a professor at the University of Virgininia who has written about the ‘adaptive unconscious’, that part of our minds which can lead us to good decisions even though we don’t know how we make them; and Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist who is an expert on how people arrive at decisions under pressure.

Blink is an attempt to bring to the public’s eye this emerging area of psychology, rapid cognition, that has received little popular attention.

Obedience to Authority (Review of Psychology Classics)

Book Title:  Obedience to Authority (1974)  by Stanley Milgram

In 1961 and 1962, a series of experiments were carried out at Yale University. Volunteers were paid a small sum to participate in what they understood would be ‘a study of memory and learning’.

In most of the experiments, a white-coated experimenter took charge of two of the volunteers, one of which was given the role of ‘teacher’ and the other ‘learner’. The learner was told he had to remember lists of word pairs, and if he couldn’t recall them, the teacher was asked to give the person, who was strapped into a chair, a small electric shock. With each incorrect answer, the voltage rose, and the teacher was forced to watch as the learner moved from small grunts of discomfort to screams of agony.

What the teacher didn’t know was that there was actually no current running between his control box and the learner’s chair, and that the volunteer was in fact an actor who is only pretending to get painful shocks. The real focus of the experiment was not the ‘victim’, but the reactions of the teacher pressing the buttons. How would they cope with administering greater and greater pain to a defenseless human being?

The Milgram experiment is one of the most famous in psychology. Here we take a look at what actually happened and why the results are important.

Expectations and reality

If you are like most people, you would expect that at the first sign of genuine pain on the part of the person being shocked, you would want the experiment halted. After all, it is only an experiment. This is the response Milgram got when, separate to the actual experiments, he surveyed a range of people (psychiatrists, graduate students, psychology academics, middle-class adults) on how they believed the subjects would react in these circumstances. Most predicted that the subjects would not give shocks beyond the point where the other subject asked to be freed. These expectations were entirely in line with Milgram’s own. But what actually happened?

Most subjects were very stressed by the experiment, and protested to the experimenter that the person in the chair should not have to take any more. The logical next step would be then demand that the experiment be terminated.

In reality, this rarely happened.

Despite their reservations, most people continued to follow the orders of the experimenter and inflict progressively greater shocks. Indeed, as Milgram notes, “…a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on the generator”. This is even when they could hear the cries of the other subject, and even when that person pleaded to be let out of the experiment.

Why good leaders make you feel safe…

What makes a great leader? Management theorist Simon Sinek suggests, it’s someone who makes their employees feel secure, who draws staffers into a circle of trust. But creating trust and safety — especially in an uneven economy — means taking on big responsibility.

Fascinated by the leaders who make impact in the world, companies and politicians with the capacity to inspire, Simon Sinek has discovered some remarkable patterns in how they think, act and communicate. He wrote Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action to explore his idea of the Golden Circle, what he calls “a naturally occurring pattern, grounded in the biology of human decision making, that explains why we are inspired by some people, leaders, messages and organizations over others.” His newest work explores “circles of safety,” exploring how to enhance feelings of trust and confidence in making bold decisions. It’s the subject of his latest book, Leaders Eat Last.

Brain’s Optimism Generator

“Always look on the bright side of life” might seem a simplistic piece of schoolboy philosophy offered by the likes of Monty Python, but they might just have been on to something. A team of University College of London (UCL) neuroscientists and psychologists has discovered that not only does the brain produce an optimism bias for good news, but that such a bias could actually be harmful for our decision-making capabilities. Their results were published on September 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Book Review: The Truth About Leadership

Mind Your Brain

The Book: The Truth about Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts you Need to Know by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, Jossey-Bass, Hardcover, October 2010.

Leadership is an amorphous topic. The more you try to pin down just what leadership is, and the qualities and actions it requires, the more it seems to squirm away. Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner wrote one of the keystone tomes on leadership thirty years ago—The Leadership Challenge. They proceeded to build a whole product line around that book with supplements, tests and workbooks—a line that still sells astonishingly well because they have come perhaps the closest to determining what leadership really is. Kouzes and Posner’s current book, The Truth about Leadership, could be described as the condensed version of their classic. It gets, as it says in the subtitle, to the heart of leadership through boiling down years of studious…

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Five Minds for the Future (Book review)

The name Howard Gardner requires no introduction – inside of field of education and psychology – that is. He is a Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and  best known for his theory of multiple intelligences.

Published by Harvard Business Press Books in 2009, Howard Gardner Five Minds For the Future presents another tasty dish for us to chew on . (Sorry, I don’t have a better analogy except food – I am currently hungry.) Gardner concerns himself with the kinds of minds that people  to thrive in the world during the eras to come. In the inter-connected world in which we now live, Gardner believes in the need to identify the kinds of minds that should be developed in the future for the greater good of our society as a whole.

I like the book because it show humility. Gardner wants readers to know right up front that despite decades of thinking and researching — he doesn’t have a crystal ball when it comes to predicting the kind of minds we will need in the future. But in order to thrive as managers and leaders and citizens, especially in a world where people and places are super-connected, he writes that there are five minds he thinks we should have:

1. The Disciplined Mind–mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft;
2. The Synthesizing Mind – ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others
3. The Creating Mind-capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena
4. The Respectful Mind–awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups
5. The Ethical Mind-fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and citizen.

David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence 如何建立创造力自信心

Book Review on “Development as Freedom” (part 2)

(continued from part 1)

 Respect for Local Decisions

By defining the level of development by how much the country has, Sen largely sidesteps a value judgment of what it means specifically to be a developed country – this isn’t the usual laundry list of Western institutions. It’s a bold statement – he gives the example of a hypothetical community deciding whether to disband their current traditions and increase lifespans. Sen states he would leave it up to the community and if they decide on shorter lifespans, in the full-freedom environment he imagines, this is perfectly consistent with the action of a fully developed country (although Sen doesn’t think anyone should have to chose between life and death – this is the reason for freedom 3).

This also is an example of the inherent interrelatedness of Sen’s five freedoms – the community requires political freedom to discuss the issues, come to a conclusion and have it seen as legitimate, with social opportunities and education for people to engage in such a discussion.