More on Kahneman's Insights, from Freeman Dyson

Reflecting fifty years later on his experience in the Israeli army, Kahneman remarks in Thinking, Fast and Slow that it was not unusual in those days for young people to be given big responsibilities. The country itself was only seven years old. “All its institutions were under construction,” he says, “and someone had to build them.” He was lucky to be given this chance to share in the building of a country, and at the same time to achieve an intellectual insight into human nature. He understood that the failure of the old interview system was a special case of a general phenomenon that he called “the illusion of validity.” At this point, he says, “I had discovered my first cognitive illusion.”

Cognitive illusions are the main theme of his book. A cognitive illusion is a false belief that we intuitively accept as true. The illusion of validity is a false belief in the reliability of our own judgment. The interviewers sincerely believed that they could predict the performance of recruits after talking with them for fifteen minutes. Even after the interviewers had seen the statistical evidence that their belief was an illusion, they still could not help believing it. Kahneman confesses that he himself still experiences the illusion of validity, after fifty years of warning other people against it. He cannot escape the illusion that his own intuitive judgments are trustworthy. _Freeman Dyson

The deep trust that we all place in our own intuitive judgments is what Kahneman is trying to warn us about. But more importantly, Kahneman explains to us just why our intuitive judgments are so prone to being faulty.

At the end of his book, Kahneman asks the question: What practical benefit can we derive from an understanding of our irrational mental processes? We know that our judgments are heavily biased by inherited illusions, which helped us to survive in a snake-infested jungle but have nothing to do with logic. We also know that, even when we become aware of the bias and the illusions, the illusions do not disappear. What use is it to know that we are deluded, if the knowledge does not dispel the delusions?

Kahneman answers this question by saying that he hopes to change our behavior by changing our vocabulary. If the names that he invented for various common biases and illusions, “illusion of validity,” “availability bias,” “endowment effect,” and others that I have no space to describe in this review, become part of our everyday vocabulary, then he hopes to see the illusions lose their power to deceive us. If we use these names every day to criticize our friends’ mistaken judgments and to confess our own, then perhaps we will learn to overcome our illusions. Perhaps our children and grandchildren will grow up using the new vocabulary and will automatically correct their congenital biases when making judgments. If this miracle happens, then future generations will owe a big debt to Kahneman for giving them a clearer vision. _Freeman Dyson

And then, Freeman Dyson asks us to take Kahneman's insights, and to courageously apply them to farther fields of human endeavour. According to Dyson, Kahneman limited his research to what could be studied experimentally. But of all the broad range of life which humans experience, only a select segment can be studied in that way. Kahneman's insights are thus in need of expansion to other areas of life.

Freud and James were artists and not scientists. It is normal for artists who achieve great acclaim during their lifetimes to go into eclipse and become unfashionable after their deaths. Fifty or a hundred years later, they may enjoy a revival of their reputations, and they may then be admitted to the ranks of permanent greatness. Admirers of Freud and James may hope that the time may come when they will stand together with Kahneman as three great explorers of the human psyche, Freud and James as explorers of our deeper emotions, Kahneman as the explorer of our more humdrum cognitive processes. But that time has not yet come. Meanwhile, we must be grateful to Kahneman for giving us in this book a joyful understanding of the practical side of our personalities. _Freeman Dyson

We should be grateful to Dyson for pointing out this important fact: Human experience is far broader than that which can be studied and explained by psychological experimentation.

Just as good science must be supported and reinforced by good philosophy, so must good science be complemented by deep and time-tested insights into human nature that come from a wide range of fields outside of traditional science.

The Ascendancy of the Unconscious Mind

Scientists are beginning to zero in on the different types of unconscious brain activity which underlie and inform ordinary conscious awareness. From mathematics to music to visual awareness to moods, our unconscious minds form the foundation and framework for whatever our conscious minds choose to build.

We have looked at Daniel Kahneman's theories of the fast mind (intuitive, automatic, unconscious) and the slow mind (conscious, deliberative) and discovered that although we cannot live without our fast intuitive minds, we cannot altogether trust them either. Regardless, since we are stuck with this mode of cognition, we had best set about understanding it as well as we can.

Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis. Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see.

Unconscious Arithmetic
The first experiment is a collaboration among Filip Van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, Floris P. de Lange of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris. Dehaene, director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, is best known for his investigations of the brain mechanisms underlying counting and numbers. Here he explored the extent to which a simple sum or an average can be computed outside the pale of consciousness. Adding 7, 3, 5 and 8 is widely assumed to be a quintessential serial process that requires consciousness. Van Opstal and his colleagues proved the opposite in an indirect but clever and powerful way...

...What’s Wrong with this Picture?
Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem set out to test the extent to which the unconscious can integrate all the information in any one picture into a unified and coherent visual experience. Giulio Tononi and I had proposed in the last Consciousness Redux column [September/October 2011] that the ability to rapidly integrate all the disparate elements within a scene and place them into context is one of the hallmarks of consciousness.

The Israeli researchers used “continuous flash suppression,” a powerful masking technique, to render images invisible. A series of rapidly changing, randomly colored patterns was flashed into one eye while a photograph of a person carrying out some task was slowly faded into the other eye. For a few seconds, the picture is completely invisible, and the subject can see only the colored shapes. Because the images become progressively stronger, eventually they will break through, and the subject will see them. It is like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility fading with time and revealing what is underneath... _More at SciAm

The above short SciAm description of the two lines of research, should serve as a teaser for those interested in how the brain works. Here is more information from researchers themselves:

Von Opstal et al Rapid Parallel Semantic Processing of Numbers Without Awareness (Abs)

Full PDF article Von Opstal, Dehaene, De Lange

Integration Without Awareness: Expanding the Limits of Unconscious Processing (PDF) Mudrik, Lamy, et al

More publications from Lamy's lab

George Alvarez: Representing Multiple Objects as an Ensemble Enhances Visual Cognition (PDF) How unconscious ensemble coding helps us effortlessly keep track of multiple objects.

It is only by understanding both our strengths and our weaknesses that we can plot our path through life's challenges and obstacles. In many ways, our intuitive and automatic unconscious minds are both a strength and a weakness.

Certainly if we do not put in the effort to understand our own minds, eventually someone else will. And they are not as likely to have our best interests at heart.

Daniel Kahneman's Hard-Won Insights on Thinking

Daniel Kahneman is a retired psychologist in his late 70's, who as a boy was forced to hide out in a chicken coop to survive Hitler, and who grew up to win the Nobel Prize in economics. His latest book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," was meant as something of a parting shot to the world, from a man who has experienced the best and the worst of it, and through it all had come to understand his species better than most. And still, understanding himself will always be beyond him.

This is not a book review -- there are dozens available on the web that focus on various aspects of Kahneman's book. It is not a summary of the book -- Google Books' preview of Thinking, Fast and Slow is your best bet for that. This is a short look at the key idea that apparently summarises Kahneman's thinking and life's work, and what that idea means for modern, between-level humans and their quest to find themselves, find the truth, and have it all.

Regular readers of Al Fin will have seen Kahneman's basic idea in various forms: The human brain does most of its work unconsciously and automatically. It requires work to maintain the focus and attention of the conscious mind to learn something new, but once it is learned it tends to revert to the automaticity of the subconscious. In other words, we are capable of conscious, deliberate, and painstakingly logical thought. But usually we flow with the river of unconsciousness, automatically.

Kahneman's claim to fame -- which helped him win his Nobel prize -- is to expose how error-prone our intuitive and automatic thinking is, and why. He exposed this perilously "false intuition" in a number of different areas of "expertise." The reason a psychologist won a Nobel Prize in economics, for example, is because Kahneman and Tversky revealed the "illusion of expertise and certainty" utilised by experts when making economic and investing decisions. But the delusion is operative in every area of human action.

The reason human intuition can go so badly wrong despite the strong certainty felt by the individual, is that the intuition uses a faulty source of information, according to Kahneman. The intuition relies upon "whatever comes to mind most easily," or whatever is salient in memory. For those who are consumers of the mass media, the most salient thing in memory is whatever the masters of the media decide to put on the menu. For those who are card carrying members of one devout orthodoxy or another, the salient thing is whatever they are soaking their minds in. Singers in echo choirs are particularly prone to the tyranny of the salient idea, which is reinforced with every chorus that is sung.

You may be thinking that Kahneman is warning against self-delusion, telling you to be careful not to fall into thinking traps or bogs of false belief. No. He is telling you that you cannot help but fall into the traps, bogs, and quagmires -- it is in your nature, and mine. And he does a better job of explaining why that is the case than most anyone else could do, in everyday language.

If you absorb the basic idea, and carry it far enough forward, it will be easy to understand why all ideology is false. It will also be easy to understand why you can never find yourself -- and what the very idea of finding yourself has in common with catching your own shadow when the light is constantly changing directions and intensity.

Previously published at Al Fin blog

Human Babies Born with Intuitive Sense of Numbers

Humans have an intuitive sense of number that allows them, for example, to readily identify which of two containers has more objects without counting. This ability is present at birth, and gradually improves throughout childhood

_ScienceDaily

Johns Hopkins scientists have tested the Approximate Number Sense (ANS) in human pre-schoolers, then compared their ANS scores with later standard tests of math ability administered in school at age 6. They discovered a high correlation between the ANS score in preschool and the later math ability scores at age 6.

The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a primitive mental system of nonverbal representations that supports an intuitive sense of number in human adults, children, infants, and other animal species. The numerical approximations produced by the ANS are characteristically imprecise and, in humans, this precision gradually improves from infancy to adulthood. Throughout development, wide ranging individual differences in ANS precision are evident within age groups. These individual differences have been linked to formal mathematics outcomes, based on concurrent, retrospective, or short-term longitudinal correlations observed during the school age years. However, it remains unknown whether this approximate number sense actually serves as a foundation for these school mathematics abilities. Here we show that ANS precision measured at preschool, prior to formal instruction in mathematics, selectively predicts performance on school mathematics at 6 years of age. In contrast, ANS precision does not predict non-numerical cognitive abilities. To our knowledge, these results provide the first evidence for early ANS precision, measured before the onset of formal education, predicting later mathematical abilities.

...Further longitudinal studies are needed to evaluate whether and how mediators of the relationship between ANS skills and symbolic mathematics vary as a function of other child characteristics, and how ANS skills might predict not only math performance at a given time but also trajectories of growth in formal mathematics skills over development. _PLoS (Full paper)

The authors were unable to determine whether ANS skills could be improved through early childhood intervention. But their findings add to a growing body of knowledge demonstrating a wide range of cognitive abilities between individuals, starting from a very early age. One should note that ANS precision correlates only to later math skills, and not to language skills.

It is important for scientists and educators to determine how much of individual cognitive capacity can be improved, and how much is relatively fixed. This should be done on an individual-to-individual basis to avoid prejudgement, and to better customise and optimise the education experience for each child.

This Johns Hopkins study offers some suggestive hints as to the nature of pre-verbal and non-verbal metaphor development in young children, prior to any formal math training.

Brave New Baby: Genius Training for Infants

Image Source
We have heard of the "better baby" and even the "superbaby." But those approaches to creating the "brave new baby" have been around for a while, and yet, here we are. Still looking for workable ways of training smarter, more cognitively capable children.

University of London researchers have come up with a new approach, beginning with 11 month old infants:

The researchers trained 11-month-old infants to direct their gaze toward images they observed on a computer screen. For example, in one task, a butterfly flew only as long as the babies kept their eyes on it while other distracting elements appeared on screen. Infants visited the lab five times over the course of 15 days. Half of the 42 babies took part in training, while the other half watched TV. Each child was tested for cognitive abilities at the beginning and end of the study.

Trained infants rapidly improved their ability to focus their attention for longer periods and to shift their attention from one point to another. They also showed improvements in their ability to spot patterns and small but significant changes in their spontaneous looking behavior while playing with toys.

"Our results appeared to show an improved ability to alter the frequency of eye movements in response to context," Wass said. "In the real world, sometimes we want to be able to focus on one object of interest and ignore distractions, and sometimes we want to be able to shift the focus of our attention rapidly around a room -- for example, for language learning in social situations. This flexibility in the allocation of attention appeared to improve after training."

The fact that the babies' improvements in concentration transferred to a range of tasks supports the notion that there is greater plasticity in the unspecialized infant brain.

...The findings reported online on Sept. 1 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, are in contrast to reports in adults showing that training at one task generally doesn't translate into improved performance on other, substantially different tasks. _ScienceDaily

Study abstract from Science Direct

This type of research is likely to continue and intensify -- particularly in parts of the world with more authoritarian government control. It is likely to continue because it is quite probable that infant brains can eventually be functionally shaped to approximate a preconceived "ideal." Infant brains are highly plastic, and experience incredibly rapid shaping and re-shaping of local neuronal assemblies and white matter pathways.

Of course there are ethical approaches to this type of research, which should be freely carried out in more open societies. And of course individual parents are free to incorporate elements of such research into their child's overall, well-rounded upbringing. It is likely that there are easily devised "games" which the baby would enjoy playing, which could lead to a faster-thinking, more imaginative child. Perhaps even a child capable of multi-tasking in many ways.

But experimenting parents should beware. The super-baby which you raise may rapidly grow beyond your ability to comprehend and control. Children are essentially amoral creatures who are capable of incredible destruction if given too much power too soon, without superb training in executive function.

It is not wise to train a child in particular areas of genius without incorporating safeguards, executive function training, and ethical training in the overall program. This training should resemble an assortment of games and engaging interactional narratives to the very young child.

At the Al Fin Institute for the Brave New Baby, we are concerned about current trends toward a dumbed-down future. We will share the results of our research into brave new babies as it becomes available.

Important Information for Would-Be World Dictators

By manipulating the activity of particular brain areas, scientists can now make people more vulnerable to marching in lock-step with the crowd. Controlling conformity will make it easier for would-be world rulers to capture the masses in one fell swoop.

Telegraph

Volunteers whose posterior medial frontal cortex, an area in the middle of the brain that is associated with reward processing, were exposed to the magnetic pulses suffered reduced levels of conformity.

The researchers believe this part of the brain dates back a long way in the evolution of animals and is responsible or automatically "correcting" our performance when we fall out of line with a group.

They say that by suspending this mechanism, it allows people to think and behave differently. They now believe it may be possible to develop drugs or behaviour changing techniques that could increase or decrease people's conformity.

..."Drug manipulation of dopamine could also affect conformity."

Such drugs would be controversial, however, as they could be used by companies hoping to make their employees more reliable or to help control rebellious individuals.

In the study, the researchers asked 49 female volunteers to take part in a study where they were asked to rate the attractiveness of 220 photographs of female faces, but they were allowed to change their ratings after seeing what others in the study had scored.

When Transcranial Electromagnetic Stimulation (TMS) was used to inhibit the activity of the neurons in the posterior medial frontal cortex, the participants did not change their ratings of the photographs so they were more in line with the rest of the group. _Telegraph

We already know that using TMS to stimulate the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has the effect of decreasing inhibition and increasing risk-taking behaviours. Further experiments will determine more specific areas of cortex involved in judgment and decision-making. TMS can be used to either reduce the activity of the part of the brain that is targeted, or to increase the activity.

The Telegraph article discusses the idea of using drugs to increase or decrease conformity. But a more effective method for would-be dictators would be to utilise targeted nano-capsules which contain genetic programming for more long-term alteration of outlook and allegiance to the collective.

The USSR collapsed because science had not developed far enough to provide these useful tools to the guardians of the collective. In the future, managing the loyalties of large collectives should become easier, using these new methods of brain control.

As far as world dictatorship, the main threat will be multiple stable regional dictatorships which refuse to assimilate into a central world collective. Al Fin cognitive scientists have been asked to provide solutions to this possible complication, but at this time we are maintaining a strict neutrality. We are, however, moving strategic labs and offices of the Al Fin Institutes to a secure, undisclosed, island location.

For those who remain in the population centres, resistance may very well become futile. The chances are growing, that you will be assimilated. Try to resolve yourselves to your likely fate. It will be easier that way.