1,090 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2022
    1. Psychologists call this mechanism activeinhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007

      Active inhibition is the filter that prevents our minds from being constantly flooded with memories and allows us to focus. It acts as a barrier between our long term memories and our immediate present.

      Is the filter behind active inhibition really active or is it passive? What is the actual physiological mechanism?

    2. Although hewas very good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almostincapable of getting the gist of something, the concepts behind theparticulars and distinguishing the relevant facts from minor details.

      Solomon Shereshevsky faced an extreme version of the sort of information overload many of can relate to, however in his case, because his memory was so good, he found it difficult to get the gist of something because the minor details drowned out the broader ideas.

  2. Feb 2022
    1. If we put effort into the attempt of retrievinginformation, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run,even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end (Roediger andKarpicke 2006)
    2. Reading, especially rereading, caneasily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading isespecially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: Themoment we become familiar with something, we start believing wealso understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more(Bornstein 1989).

      The mere-exposure effect can be dangerous when rereading a text because we are more likely to falsely believe we understand it. Robert Bornstein's research from 1989 indicates that we will tend to like the text more, which can pull us into confirmation bias.

      Bornstein, Robert F. 1989. “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968-1987.” Psychological Bulletin 106 (2): 265–89.

    3. Separate and Interlocking Tasks

      Chapter 9 of How to Take Smart Notes looks at some of the psychology research involving attention, multitasking, decision making, willpower, concentration, expertise, planning, to highlight the value of the design and structure of the zettelkasten as a positive tool for helping one to be more productive in their thinking and writing work.

    4. Conversely, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage bydeliberately keeping unanswered questions in our mind. We canruminate about them, even when we do something that has nothingto do with work and ideally does not require our full attention. Lettingthoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains theopportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisinglyproductive way. While we have a walk or a shower or clean thehouse, the brain cannot help but play around with the last unsolvedproblem it came across. And that is why we so often find the answerto a question in rather casual situations.

      One can use the Zeigarnik effect to their advantage by keeping specific unanswered questions in their mind so that it can use the diffuse thinking effect to solve them while doing other activities like walking, doing the dishes, etc.

    5. psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe wehave become good at it – completely independent of our actualperformance (Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confusefamiliarity with skill.

      The mere-exposure effect leads us to confuse familiarity with a process with actual skill.

    6. The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces usto shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks inreasonable time before moving on to the next one.

      Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

      The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

      (Summary of Section 9.2)

    7. Good students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar forthemselves as they focus on what they haven’t learned andmastered yet. This is why high achievers who have had a taste ofthe vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from whatpsychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are notreally up to the job, even though, of all people, they are (Clance andImes 1978; Brems et al. 1994).

      He's saying here that smart, high achievers are more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome specifically because they've read more broadly and know what they're doing.

      Does the psychology research indicate this? Is there a higher incidence of imposter syndrome at the higher end of the spectrum in part because ones' knowledge of the Known Unknown Framework is dramatically expanded?

      Look into these sources for more detail on this question.

    1. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to know that there are certain activities that help create that space, and it’s been widely commented upon. Doing the dishes, walking the dog, cleaning the house – you need to be doing something.For me, pruning trees in our olive grove is perfect. It takes a little bit of attention, but not that much attention.

      This is related to the idea of diffuse thinking caused by taking breaks or doing things that don't require extreme concentration. Flaneuring... walking, etc.

      You want an activity that requires a little bit of attention but not too much attention. Doing dishes, walking, errands, etc. are good examples.

      Relate this to the

    1. Highlighting would be a crude form of knowledge telling. Knowledge transforming involves interpretation on the part of the content producer.

      Scholars who study writing differentiate between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming.

      Highlighting can be seen as a weak form of knowledge telling. It's a low level indicator that an idea is important, but doesn't even go so far as the reader strengthening the concept by restating the idea in their own words similar to the Feynman technique.

      One could go steps further by not only restating it but transforming it and linking it into one's larger body of knowledge or extending into other contexts.

    1. Timothy Caulfield. (2022, January 31). How Do You Respond When an #AntiVaxxer Dies of Covid? Https://nytimes.com/2022/01/30/opinion/culture/covid-death-mental-health.html?smid=tw-share by @JamesMartinSJ “Indulged in regularly, #schadenfreude ends up warping the soul.” “Don’t find another person’s misery the subject of mirth, glee or satisfaction.” Good reminder. One I needed. [Tweet]. @CaulfieldTim. https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1488183630056755205

  3. Jan 2022
    1. Duckworth and Seligman, 2005;

      He cites this article in line, but doesn't provide the details in the bibliography:

      Duckworth AL, Seligman MEP. Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents. Psychological Science. 2005;16(12):939-944. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x

    1. “It makes perfect sense,” says Moro from his home in Boston. “For the game to be a success, it needs to be simple and playable, and picking the most common terms means that in the end, we all get it right in just a few tries.”

      Esteban Moro

      For games to be a success they need to meet a set of Goldilock's conditions, they should be simple enough to learn to play and win, but complex enough to still be challenging.

      How many other things in life need this sort of balance between simplicity and complexity to be successful?

      Is there an information theoretic statement that bounds this mathematically? What would it look like for various games?

    1. How does living in an environment defined by individual achievement—­measured by money, privilege, and ­status—alter a person’s mental machinery to the point where he begins to see the people around him only as aids or obstacles to his own ambitions?
    1. Frenzel, S. B., Junker, N. M., Avanzi, L., Bolatov, A., Haslam, S. A., Häusser, J. A., Kark, R., Meyer, I., Mojzisch, A., Monzani, L., Reicher, S., Samekin, A., Schury, V. A., Steffens, N. K., Sultanova, L., Van Dijk, D., van Zyl, L. E., & Van Dick, R. (2022). A trouble shared is a trouble halved: The role of family identification and identification with humankind in well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. British Journal of Social Psychology, 61(1), 55–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12470

    1. Hari puts his general air of unworldly distraction down to his dyspraxia, but it comes across as donnish.

      Johnann Hari has indicated in an interview that he suffered from dyspraxia.


      I wonder how this may or may not affect his writing about being distracted with respect to his book Stolen Focus. Cross reference: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media

    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1477714767854850049.html

      original thread: https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/1478003120483577859?s=20

      This takes a part Johann Hari's Guardian article Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen, but it does so mostly from a story/narrative perspective. Burnett is taking the story as a science article (it was labeled "psychology") when it's really more of a personal experience story with some nods to science.

      Sadly the story works more on the emotional side than the scientific side. It would be nice to have a more straightforward review of some of the actual science literature with some of the pros/cons laid out to make a better decision.

  4. takingnotenow.blogspot.com takingnotenow.blogspot.com
    1. What we Remember by Manfred Kuehn https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

      archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021192005/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

      Dutch psychologist Wilem Wagenaar conducted memory related experiments on recollecting what, where, who, and when for the most interesting experiences of his days. It turned out that the "What?" was most useful followed by where? and who?, but that "when?" was "useless in every instance".

      p.116 of Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity, Marlowe & Company, 2007, New York.

      Despite this, timestamps might serve other functions within a note taking system. The might include conceiving of ideas, temporal order of ideas presented, etc.

  5. Dec 2021
    1. There is the mammal way and there is the bird way." This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind.
    1. Among the oldest surviving scholarly works in neurosurgery is the so-called ‘Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus’(Breasted, 1930)
      • DId Susrutha surgical expertise bear lterary evidence for neurosurgery ?

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  6. Nov 2021
    1. Memory and smell go hand-in-hand. A Disney Imagineer literally invented a machine (Smellitizers) to emit scents that match surrounding. Main Street (cookies baking) Pirates of the Caribbean (salty sea air) Pooh's Adventure (honey)
  7. Oct 2021
    1. I just bookmarked this article published today in Current Biology for later reading and annotation. While the article isn't specifically focused on memory, the fact that it touches on visual structures, emotion, music, and movement (dance) which are core to some peoples' memory toolkits, I thought that many here would find it to be of interest.

      One of the authors provided the following tl;dr synopsis:

      "Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together?

      We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain."

      For those who haven't integrated song or dance into their practices, searching around for the idea of songlines will give you some background on their possible uses.

      cc: @LynneKelly

    1. Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)01283-5

      This portends some interesting results with relation to mnemonics and particularly songlines and indigenous peoples' practices which integrate song, movement, and emotion.

      Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/254961v4

      Across the world, people express emotion through music and dance. But why do music and dance go together? <br><br>We tested a deceptively simple hypothesis: Music and movement are represented the same way in the brain.

      — Beau Sievers (@beausievers) October 12, 2021
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Beau Sievers </span> in "New work published today in Current Biology Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception With @ThaliaWheatley @k_v_n_l @parkinsoncm @sergeyfogelson (thread after coffee!) https://t.co/AURqH9kNLb https://t.co/ro4o4oEwk5" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/12/2021 09:26:10</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Timothy Caulfield on Twitter: “Will you fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Https://t.co/8mLQqSBnqb by @databyler @codingyan Good breakdown on some of the social forces (like ideology) that drive conspiracy theories. Despite the fact I study topic, still amazed how many believe this stuff. Https://t.co/L1T0cpy9kB” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2021, from https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1445794723101175818

    1. Drawing from his own experiences fighting for the French resistance against the Vichy regime, Ellul offers a unique insight into the propaganda machine.

      Why is Jacques Ellul believable when he takes a psychological and sociological approach to understanding propaganda? Because he lived through the Nazi invasion of his own country and became a leader in resistance to the Vichy regime.

      As we live in times when populist movements are outsourcing influence, capacity, and agency to authoritarian leaders who purport to be able to solve our problems, we are horrified to realize that we also have been merely following orders in the work to imagine, design, and build the fascist architecture of modern society.

  8. Sep 2021
    1. A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand.

      “Mental models are one of the most important concepts in human–computer interaction (HCI).”

      — Nielsen Norman Group

    1. One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.

      Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

      How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

      Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

      At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

    1. https://via.hypothes.is/https://finiteeyes.net/pedagogy/extending-the-mind/

      A well written review of Annie Murphy Paul's The Extended Mind. Matthew Cheney has distilled a lot out of the book from his notes with particular application to improving pedagogy.

      I definitely want to read this with relation to not only using it to improve teaching, but with respect to mnemotechniques and the methods oral and indigenous societies may have either had things right or wrong and what Western culture may have lost as a result. I'm also particularly interested in it for its applications to the use of commonplace books and zettelkasten as methods of extending the mind and tools for thought.

    2. To use your brain well, get out of your brain. Paul calls this offloading. To think well, she says, “we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world” (243).

      This is certainly what is happening in the commonplace book tradition and even more explicitly in the zettelkasten tradition.

      What other methods of offloading exist besides writing and speaking? Hand gestures? Dance? What hidden modalities of offloading might indigenous societies use that Western culture might not be cognizant of?

      Often journaling or writing in a diary is a often a means of offloading the psychological cruft of one's day to be able to start afresh.

      This is some of the philosophy behind creating so-called "morning pages".

    3. One of the best things I picked up in project-based learning training was to be deliberate in teaching groups how to work together. Though our brains may be pretty good at it, our societies are not, and it’s only getting worse. Students need modeling and practice to be able to figure out how to interact in positive ways in groups, how to structure collaborative work, how to overcome the atomizing forces of society.

      I wonder here at the stereotypical gendered views of working together. Who is better at it and why?

      What social function, if any, does a more conflict-based ability to not work together provide?

    1. When you notice someone feeling anxious at work, try grabbing a notebook and helping them to get their concerns and questions onto paper. Often this takes the form of a list of to-dos or scenarios.

      Fight anxiety by organizing your mind

    2. Anxiety comes from not seeing the full picture.

      Where anxiety comes from

    3. Overreaction is often a sign that something else might be going on that you aren’t aware of. Perhaps they didn’t get enough sleep or recently had a fight with a friend. Maybe something about the situation is triggering an unresolved trauma from their childhood — a phenomenon called transference.

      Possible reason for emotion overreactiveness

    1. Hypomania/Mania Differentiation:

      duration:

      • hypomanic episodes >4 days vs. mania >1 week

      intensity: no display of psychotic symptoms i.e.

      • delusions
      • hallucinations

      and does not cause SIGNIFICANT impact on the individiuals ability to socialise

    1. Psychologist Jerome Bruno suggests we're 22x more likely to remember facts when told through story.

      General plan for his approach

      • immersion
      • learn
      • activate
    1. Billionaire business owners deployed lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit. Confidential IRS records show the windfall that followed.

      @choppa1890 says "will read and get mad about one of these days"

      With respect.....this learned attitude is the leading contributor to the problem with modern America. The quote reflects cognitive dissonance that is dealt with through a weak form of denial. @choppa1890 uses a mentally acceptable task (posting in Hypothesis) and 'avoidance', to resolve the dissonance. @choppa1890 can not allow him/herself to read the article, create knowledge and emotion. It's too much to think about so I will make a note in Hypothesis and move on!

    1. Researchers of online courses in community colleges found that the level of interpersonal interaction was the best predictor of how well an online course did.

      Research shows that the level of interpersonal interaction is the best predictor for how well an online course does.

      Reference for this??

    1. 27

      The dual coding theory, proposed in the 1970s by Allan Palvio, suggests that the brain processes information using two primary channels: verbal and visual.

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  9. Aug 2021
    1. Pham, Q. T., Le, X. T. T., Phan, T. C., Nguyen, Q. N., Ta, N. K. T., Nguyen, A. N., Nguyen, T. T., Nguyen, Q. T., Le, H. T., Luong, A. M., Koh, D., Hoang, M. T., Pham, H. Q., Vu, L. G., Nguyen, T. H., Tran, B. X., Latkin, C. A., Ho, C. S. H., & Ho, R. C. M. (2021). Impacts of COVID-19 on the Life and Work of Healthcare Workers During the Nationwide Partial Lockdown in Vietnam. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 563193. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.563193

    1. The Zeigarnik effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect. Maria Ovsiankina, a colleague of Zeigarnik, investigated the effect of task interruption on the tendency to resume the task at the next opportunity.
    1. The idea here is to clear the decks so to speak. Getting all the negative worrisome shit out of your head and onto the page is an easy form of catharsis that can provide sharp relief from all the niggling little issues stopping you from blasting pure awesome out into the universe.

      Example of clearing the mental clutter by writing using Julia Cameron's Morning Pages concept.

  10. Jul 2021
    1. I would rather see the scientists and the healers and the artists depicted in a heroic light.

      Why are so many villains in comic books depicted as scientists? Has this harmed the American psyche? Encouraged an anti-science temperament?

      Observation sparked, in part, to episode of Young Sheldon, Season 1 about Sheldon's eating issues.

    1. As I went about my morning routine, I picked up the floss and flossed one tooth. I thought to myself, “Well, even if everything else goes wrong today, I’m not a total failure. At least I flossed one tooth.” I smiled in the mirror and said one word to myself: “Victory!”

      This is sort of hilarious but generally true, at least for me.

      I tried something like this ages ago that just involved telling myself to smile 5 times a day to feel better and it made smiling into a fairly regular habit.

    2. Psychologist BJ Fogg is the founder and director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University — he’s coached over 40,000 people in his behavior change methods and influenced countless more. His Tiny Habits method states that a new behavior happens when three elements come together: motivation, ability and a prompt.
    1. For consumers seeking the best price per ounce, the most value is normally in our larger boxes of cereal," says Kelsey Roemhildt, a General Mills spokesperson. "This change also allows more efficient truck loading leading to fewer trucks on the road and fewer gallons of fuel used, which is important in both reducing global emissions as well as offsetting increased costs associated with inflation." General Mills' reframing of its shrinkflation seems to be pretty typical of Corporate America. Companies often sell downsizing as a way to help the environment, offer consumers more choice, or improve the quality of their products. When a spokesperson for Charmin, for example, was confronted by reporters at WBUR about shrinking the size of their toilet sheet squares, she suggested it was the result of "innovations" that allow consumers to, basically, wipe their butts more efficiently.

      So in addition to sketchy economic and psy-ops practices, they're also engaging in greenwashing as well.

    1. Refer to the research of Rimé et al, _Social Sharing of Emotion (see references) who have found people talk about troubling topics like emotions a lot. Some suggest this is an indicator that talking will clarify your understanding. 

      I've heard that keeping a journal can also be helpful for sorting out and expanding on emotions. This is assuredly related. More often it's framed from the perspective of getting things out rather than working them out.

      This could be useful research to read.

  11. Jun 2021
    1. Soderberg, C. K., Errington, T. M., Schiavone, S. R., Bottesini, J., Thorn, F. S., Vazire, S., Esterling, K. M., & Nosek, B. A. (2021). Initial evidence of research quality of registered reports compared with the standard publishing model. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01142-4

    1. Woolf, K., McManus, I. C., Martin, C. A., Nellums, L. B., Guyatt, A. L., Melbourne, C., Bryant, L., Gogoi, M., Wobi, F., Al-Oraibi, A., Hassan, O., Gupta, A., John, C., Tobin, M. D., Carr, S., Simpson, S., Gregary, B., Aujayeb, A., Zingwe, S., … Pareek, M. (2021). Ethnic differences in SARS-CoV-2 vaccine hesitancy in United Kingdom healthcare workers: Results from the UK-REACH prospective nationwide cohort study [Preprint]. Public and Global Health. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.26.21255788

  12. May 2021
    1. For instance, when someone is not confident in what they are saying or know that they are lying, they may take a step backwards as if stepping back from the situation.

      Example of micro expression to detect a lie

    2. People with ADHD are highly sensitive to micro expressions.
    3. There are seven expressions that are universal to all humans no matter which country they are born: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt.

      7 universal expressions

    4. A macro expression is the normal facial expression you notice that lasts between ½ a second to 4 seconds. These are fairly easy to notice and tend to match the tone and content of what is being said.A micro expression is an involuntary facial expressions that lasts less than half a second. These expressions are often missed altogether but they reveal someones true feelings about what they are saying.

      Macro vs micro expressions

    1. Crux -

      1. Calm plants the seeds of crazy. And also crazy plants the seeds of calm.
      2. Basically when times are good, we indulge in it, become complacent about our achievements, become skeptic of the warnings ahead. So, when something bad hits, it's a shock.
      3. Similarly crazy plants the seeds of calm, when we are going through a societal shock, we come up with revolutionary solutions, that can help to bring calm for the years to come.
      4. Progress requires optimism and pessimism. Shoot for the stars aim for the moon. Be prepared for the worst, give your best.
      5. People believe what they want to believe, see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear. Either the model of how I think is wrong, or the other person is wrong. And it is often the latter that people go with, since it is the path of least resistance, both to make changes yourself, and as well as your image.
      6. Important things rarely have one cause
      7. Risk is what you don't see
    1. People might think I’m not experiencing new things, but I think the secret to a good life is to enjoy your work. I could never stay indoors and watch TV. I hear London is a place best avoided. I think living in a city would be terrible – people living on top of one another in great tower blocks. I could never do it. Walking around the farm fills me with wonder. What makes my life is working outside, only going in if the weather is very bad.

      How farmers perceive happiness in life