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.)
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-25 10:48 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 01:57 am (UTC)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.