Exploring the Final Frontier

[drwex]

Contrary 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.)

Comments

[dpolicar]

(nods) There's a reason that one of the first things I do when I feel situational pressure getting to me is make lists. Often moronic lists of things that are only slightly less work to write down on a list as they would be to do. The nice thing about lists is that they externalize the data structures in my head and keep me from thrashing as I iterate through them again and again. I have a list. I can just do the next thing on the list. Or the easiest thing, or the most urgent thing, or the most fun thing. I don't have to keep it all in my head anymore.

Every once in a while I mention this epiphany to people who aren't of the "just stare at it until it all becomes clear in your head" school of problem-solving, and they look at me as if I'd just figured out that writing is a convenient way of getting information to people, or that sex makes babies.

[drwex]

Heh. I'm amused, in part because I can picture those facial expressions. To your core point - yes, I think you're right. By unloading things from working memory lists would be a big help in these situations.

[golux-org.livejournal.com]

I have some thoughts about what this might indicate about cognition, but it's a complex subject, and I'll only give this a shallow treatment in the context of a LJ comment.

My suspicion is that stress provokes a brain chemistry change that favors some modes of cognition over others, and people used to relying on the particular modes submurged by that brain chemistry change find themselves less able to access their usual problem-solving toolkit. And that a complicated test is more likely to stimulate the modes of that toolkit, and thereby counter the effects of the stress-based brain chemistry change with a 'this is interesting' second brain chemistry change.

I think it would be interesting to see if the results would vary after a subject was exposed to quick action-response activity (such as throwing a ball into one of several bins quickly based on the solution to a math problem). Because that might provide some mode training that strengthens a problem solving toolkit that is more amenable to function under stress.

In this entire domain, a major problem is that English diction does not provide a sufficiently fine distinction between concepts. "Thinking" and "feeling" obviously relate to this study. But in the Myers-Briggs context, these words mean something completely different. I'm pretty sure that this study doesn't tell us anything about the validity (or lack thereof) of that model. To me, that example highlights the ease of misunderstanding when talking about cognitive theory, and I wouldn't be surprised if my substantive comments come across quite differently from what I actually intend ... keep that in mind if I seem to make no sense.

[drwex]

I think the comments make sense - your second paragraph more or less mirrors what the authors originally said.

As for the thinking-feeling distinction, this is a particular hot-button topic of mine. Back when M-B first came around there was a series of challenges to it, and the bottom line is that it's based on nothing you or I would call science. However, it's popular. More popular is the notion that thought and emotion can be separated, a notion that M-B plays on. Both are equally false. Sure, the language isn't as good as we'd like, but that doesn't change the basic premise: a dichotomy is a false way to look at how people operate.

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Hm.

I don't know if what I'm about to say will make you change your mind or think that I'm dumb, but I'll say it anyway.

I think that running a test and saying that thinking and feeling are not two different things, or are only one thing or even that they are two separate things is not the right thing to do. Why? Because of confounding factors, and I'm not satisfied that they have separated the several things yet. Personally, I think that feeling and thinking are two different things -- I can see it in people while both are happening, and it's even easier when you can observe animals being trained. But that's just anecdotal evidence, it's probably way harder to actually test for them.

If I can give you another example, I feel that what has been done so far is akin to benchmark tests for computers. I think that thinking and feeling are two different layers that also go thru a third piece of software/firmware/hardware that may be busy with other things (thinking, feeling, managing other hardware) and thus the bottleneck to the entire thing, giving the impression that thinking and feeling are one and the same. Like testing 3 computers and coming up with 2 numbers for 3 different computers -- which one of the computers with the same benchmark number is faster for I/O and which one is faster for CPU-bound tasks? Is the 3rd computer with a higher benchmark number better or worse at CPU- or I/O-bound tasks or both or none? In this case, the benchmark is not very helpful because it's not comparing similar things and it might be nicer to have all the intermediate numbers to decide. I both think and feel that both thinking and feeling need extra resources (like a printer, window manager, terminal, whatever) to report results and that layer messes up the test.

That is also the reason that when talking to people in general I am very careful about reporting (and paying attention to their words) if I am thinking or if I am feeling something. If you pay attention to yourself, you'll notice that sometimes two conflicting things will arise, you will for example, feel like the person is being honest while thinking they have been lying -- those states are extremely useful, because you can then search for extra data to complete the puzzle and get to the true state, if the person lied or was honest or something entirely different happened, like someone framed the person with extra data that'd explain why you feel the person is honest but the data points to them lying. Or you might have a different explanation for my examples and I may learn something.

(And yeah, I'm way behind my LJ reading and just got to this post.)

[drwex]

I would say that you should read the original study, not second-hand reports, if you want to critique the method and see what factors they controlled for.

As for the thinking-feeling thing, there's a HUGE body of research that has been accumulating since about 1990 on this topic. You can read some of the more accessible summaries in places like Descartes' Error and Emotional Intelligence.