Whether you are sitting for an important test or sinking a winning golf putt, your brain can get in the way when you need to perform at your very best. Ginger Campbell, MD, of the Brain Science Podcast interviews psychology researcher Sian Beilock about her book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
This excellent interview regarding research conducted at Beilock’s Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago provides some great insights into how the brains of high performers can interfere with delivering an expert performance when it matters most. Beilock doesn’t stop at explaining the many different reasons why someone might choke on a test, a job interview, a speech, or an athletic game. She offers many practical suggestions for how to overcome the memory overload that can impede top performance.
This is really valuable information for students and their teachers. Beilock says high performers are more likely to choke on a test than students with lesser skills. This seems counter-intuitive until she explains that these higher performers generally have greater working memory to help them perform highly complex cognitive tasks, but this working memory can become flooded by anxiety and worry, significantly limiting the amount of working memory available for the task, resulting in a less than optimal performance.
Beilock describes research that shows that 10 minutes of free writing about these feelings and anxieties can relieve the worries enough to free up that valuable working memory for the cognitive tasks and performance can return to normal.
The interview is filled with interesting research findings and concrete suggestions about mitigating performance problems. Brain Science Podcast host Ginger Cambell does a nice job leading Beilock through many different aspects of her research in a presentation that is easy to follow and full of practical advice. Be sure to take a look at previous episodes of the Brain Science Podcast for some fascinating interviews with many of the world’s leading neuroscience researchers.
Source: brainsciencepodcast.com
- The mind is inherently embodied.
- Thought is mostly unconscious.
- Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
These are the three main findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.
— Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh, p. 3.
Working memory: "the bottleneck is not in the remembering, it is in the perceiving"
That quote is probably the most important sentence I have read in a year.
Working memory refers to the number of things a person can actively hold in memory at once, such as numbers or colors. Most people can remember about four things at once, and some can remember more.
MIT neuroscientists have found that the limitations on working memory do not come from limitations on remembering. Instead they come from how many things can be accurately perceived at once. We bump up against limits in visual perception in the process of encoding things into working memory even before we try to recall those things.
It gets better. The study also found that we do not have a working memory, but actually have working memories — two of them — one in each of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The researchers concluded that the typical limit of four items in working memory at once was actually a limit of two items in the working memory of each of the two hemispheres.
“The fact that we have different capacities in each hemisphere implies that we should present information in a way that does not overtax one hemisphere while under-taxing the other,” said Timothy Buschman, the researcher who conducted the study.
I’ve been aware of the limits of working memory, and how this impacts the design of learning content in instructional technology, from research by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. The two ideas from Buschman’s study, though, raise some interesting additional questions.
What does it mean to balance the cognitive load between the left and right hemispheres? How should the visual design of instructional content reflect this idea? What could be done in content presentation that might increase the capacity or accuracy for visual perception in each hemisphere? How does pedagogy change if we recognize that perception is more important than recall in the capacity of working memory?
We already know that content delivered simultaneously through multiple modalities — such as visual and auditory — can increase the capacity of working memory. Does working memory related to other modalities also function as a dual system? Could this mean we actually have four (or more) distinct working memories that operate as an integrated system?
Education focuses so heavily on recall and pays so little attention to perception. This suggests that we really ought to consider whether we have things backwards.
Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
Chris Mooney, The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science, Mother Jones
Terrific research-based article with important implications for learning.
Source: Mother Jones
A Natural History of the Human Mind: Tracing Evolutionary Changes in Brain and Cognition
“We suggest that ‘descent with modification’ aptly describes the construction of the human mind. The studies we have reviewed demonstrate that, although humans have certainly acquired many novel cognitive and neural specializations in the course of evolution, a large number of features are shared exclusively with our fellow great apes. Our hypothesized model explains how incremental changes in brain development and organization might yield apparent discontinuity in our species-specific behavioral repertoire. Taken together, we consider it inescapable to recognize the continuity in mentality between the LCA [last common ancestor] and us, despite the significant disparity in phenotypes.”
A really long but incredibly informative article from the Journal of Anatomy. It discusses what makes human brains unique compared to other primates and analyzes the characteristics of our last common ancestor.
Source: heywoahitskimbo
Two very different types of knowledge
There are as least three powerful insights from recent studies of the brain that support cognitive science research findings:
First, our brains learn and process two very different types of knowledge: non-conscious, automated knowledge, and conscious, controllable, declarative knowledge. Evidence also suggests that we believe we control our own learning by conscious choice, when in fact nearly all mental operations are highly automated, including learning and problem solving.
Second, human beings have a very limited capacity to think during learning and problem solving and when that capacity is exceeded, thinking and learning stop without us being aware. Thus instruction and self-managed learning must strive to avoid cognitive overload.
Third, nearly all of our instructional design and cyber-learning theories and models fail to account for the influence of non-conscious cognitive processes and therefore are inadequate to deal with complex learning and performance.
Clark, Richard E. (2010). Cognitive and neuroscience research on learning and instruction: Recent insights about the impact of non-conscious knowledge on problem solving, higher order thinking skills and interactive cyber-learning environments. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Education Research. http://www.aect.org/publications/whitepapers/2010/ICER3.pdf
