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

[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.