Exploring the Final Frontier
Dec. 22nd, 2006 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexContrary to Star Trek's declaration, I've always thought that the human mind was the true final frontier. We know way the heck less about the lifecycle of a thought than we do about the lifecycle of a star. So I've been a cogsci dilettante for years and this kind of stuff is neat to me:
Cognitive Daily glosses some research on what makes people choke under pressure. Those of us who've had this experience (which I think is probably most of my friends) might be interested to know what's going on. Basically it's two things:
1. People with larger working memories (the ability to keep more stuff in your head at once) are more likely to choke under pressure.
2. The easier the test the more likely you are to choke under pressure.
These things are both surprising, and related. The underlying principle is that anxiety and other emotions we find unpleasant reduce our available working memory. So people who are used to being good problem-solvers because they have lots of working memory suddenly crash when they start feeling the pressure. People who aren't so good in normal situations sometimes do BETTER under pressure, probably because they feel challenged and stimulated.
I also love this sort of stuff because it continues to give lie to the separation of feeling and thinking. There's no separation, no continuum (and Meyers-Briggs is full of horsepucky for insisting on it). Feeling and thinking are two sides of the same coin.
(props to docbug for the original link.)
Cognitive Daily glosses some research on what makes people choke under pressure. Those of us who've had this experience (which I think is probably most of my friends) might be interested to know what's going on. Basically it's two things:
1. People with larger working memories (the ability to keep more stuff in your head at once) are more likely to choke under pressure.
2. The easier the test the more likely you are to choke under pressure.
These things are both surprising, and related. The underlying principle is that anxiety and other emotions we find unpleasant reduce our available working memory. So people who are used to being good problem-solvers because they have lots of working memory suddenly crash when they start feeling the pressure. People who aren't so good in normal situations sometimes do BETTER under pressure, probably because they feel challenged and stimulated.
I also love this sort of stuff because it continues to give lie to the separation of feeling and thinking. There's no separation, no continuum (and Meyers-Briggs is full of horsepucky for insisting on it). Feeling and thinking are two sides of the same coin.
(props to docbug for the original link.)
