Skills Training and the Brain

Training a child to be broadly competent is useful for the child's confidence and later ability to solve novel problems. But what about more intense training for a deeper mastery? We have learned that it requires at least 10,000 hours of training to master a skill. Sometimes skills mastery requires between 10 to 20 years of intense, wisely directed practise.

Are there precautions we should take to protect the child from overdoing it?

Learning a new skill involves rewiring of the brain, a phenomenon called neural plasticity, the paper notes. For the new skill to persist, those brain changes must be stabilised or consolidated by being transferred from short-term memory and locked into long-term memory.

“If the information and/or neural changes are not adequately consolidated, then learning will be temporary or not occur at all,” the researchers say. Other research has found that lack of sleep, for example, can interfere with the consolidation process, as can trying to train for a second skill before the first one has properly sunk in.

“Many studies have shown that you don’t learn if you don’t sleep after a day of training,” says Dr Pearson. “Likewise, overtraining can reduce learning if you don’t allow time for consolidation.”

The researchers were specifically interested in the role played in learning by “waking consolidation” – that is, taking breaks during the training process. They recruited 31 students to learn a difficult computer task - tracking groups of moving dots disguised amid visual distractions on the screen. The subjects were divided into three groups, each of which was asked to learn the task in different ways.

On the first day, a control group spent one hour training and an overtraining group spent two hours non-stop at the task. A third group also trained for two hours, but with a one-hour break between sessions with subjects choosing their own activities – except sleep.

On the second day, it was found that the control group had mastered the task better than the overtraining group, despite training for only half the time. Likewise the waking consolidation group had also learnt better than the overtrainers, even though the two groups had spent the same total time training. _MedXpress

Study abstract Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences

The findings of the above study should be seen as suggestive rather than definitive. A few days of training on a computer task is not the same as a decade of training in a complex skill the comprises an untold number of sub-tasks which must be learned and integrated together.

But there are dangers in "overtraining." A fascinating neurological disorder known as focal dystonia can affect musicians who train beyond their brain's ability to integrate the training. In such cases, the brain can actually lose the ability to control fine motor movements of the fingers and hands. As one might imagine, this can be immensely frustrating and distressing to the budding young prodigy.

All of this suggests that regular rest periods, and a regular sleep schedule, should be integrated into all serious training regimens. But beyond that common sense advice, it also suggests that coaches, parents, and trainers need to be on the lookout for the analogs of "focal dystonia" in other areas of intense training.

Hard training is necessary for mastery of difficult skills, but so is smart training. Some children may opt for a course of training for reasons other than a genuine suitability and drive. Coaches need to detect when a child is not ready for intense training, or if the child's interest in the training is only superficial.

Besides the real physical and emotional risks of intense training, there is also the risk that a child may be sacrificing other potential avenues of competency or mastery which would be far more rewarding to the child.

That being said, one cannot overstate the inspirational impact of a true master. If the area of mastery is well chosen for the child, and if the regimen of training is wise and measured, the end result can be a lifetime of excellence and satisfaction.

Needless to say, the modern rush to universal psychological neoteny and lifelong incompetence -- as embodied in modern educational systems and child-raising methods -- leads to the opposite of inspiration or satisfaction.

Peter Thiel's Avalanche Effect on College Education

Peter Thiel is a successful entrepreneur, visionary, and venture capitalist. One of his recent investments involves sponsoring youth under the age of 20 years old, in the starting of their own enterprises. The young people must forego a college education during the time that they are engaged in their intensive entrepreneurial training and startup experience.

Interestingly, one of Thiel's young hopefuls -- 19 year old Dale J. Stephens -- has embarked on an entrepreneurial campaign in opposition of the phenomenon of excessive college education. The excerpt below is taken from Stephens' article in CNN: College is a waste of time:

I have been awarded a golden ticket to the heart of Silicon Valley: the Thiel Fellowship. The catch? For two years, I cannot be enrolled as a full-time student at an academic institution. For me, that's not an issue; I believe higher education is broken.

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

...College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. In the book "Academically Adrift," sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college. Student loan debt in the United States, unforgivable in the case of bankruptcy, outpaced credit card debt in 2010 and will top $1 trillion in 2011.

... Learning by doing -- in life, not classrooms -- is the best way to turn constant iteration into true innovation. We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions.

... We who take our education outside and beyond the classroom understand how actions build a better world. We will change the world regardless of the letters after our names. _College is a waste of time

Brave words, which will need to be backed up by braver actions. Stephens will receive $100,000 and access to expert advice and assistance in reaching his entrepreneurial goals. Stephens has already been signed by Penguin Press to write his first book, "Hacking Your Education."

What is most interesting about this phenomenon is that Thiel's initial investment is spurring a downstream expansion in interest in entrepreneurial alternatives to mainstream college education. And this downstream expansion is likely to spawn further downstream expansion, and so on etc. . . .

Wise people understand that school is not the education. Life is the education. The efforts of modern society to place emphasis on the educational effect of schools at the expense of the educational effect of life, has led to a society of Peter Pans and Cinderellas, perpetual incompetent adolescents of the psychologically neotenate variety.

Peter Thiel aims to change that emphasis back, in an effort to help save at least a few youth from wasting their time and lives. Peter Thiel aims to misbehave. And he is hoping that the attitude will be catching.

Men Waiting to Start a Family: Mature Men and Younger Women

Young women hold a strong erotic attraction to men of all ages. So it is natural for mature men, once they have achieved success and comfort in life, to seek relationships which give him the most pleasure. Throughout history, older men have started families with younger women, who are still in their fertile period. In most human cultures such things are considered normal and natural.

But in many decadent western societies, ideologically radical feminism has taken over politically correct cultures. Relationships involving older men and younger women are strongly discouraged by the PC thought police.

Scientific research in mice has been performed in an attempt to prove that older fathers lead to disabled and dysfunctional children. But however much feminists would like for human males to be mice, humans are not actually mice and should not be treated as such. A better science would look at human subjects in order to determine the facts about the children of older fathers and younger mothers.

And that is what Sweden's Karolinska Instutute has done, in a massive study:

This present study is based on data from over 135,000 children in Stockholm, who left compulsory school between 2000 and 2007, and tested the hypothesis that any negative consequences of the father's age on the child's IQ would be offset by the social advantages that being raised by older parents brings.

"To the delight of fathers choosing to wait before having children, our results suggest that children of older fathers perform no worse in school," says Anna Svensson, study leader at the Department of Public Health Sciences. "When we studied children's final year-nine grades we could see no difference between children of fathers in their 50s and children of fathers in their 30s."

Children of even younger fathers performed slightly worse in school, although these difference could largely be attributed to differences in the parents' own educational background. _SD

According to the report above, children of older fathers actually performed better than children of younger fathers.

The point is not to advocate the pairing of older men with younger women. The point is rather to be honest about the consequences of such pairings, in order to allow humans to make informed choices. When science is subsumed within political ideology -- as in modern PC science -- no one can truly trust the results of such politicised research.

From "climate science" to cognitive science to reproductive science to energy sciences and technologies, the destructive influence of PC leftism and lefist green dieoff.orgiasm has cost modern societies trillions of dollars in dysfunctional economic and social policies. Much of the modern economic and cultural malaise being suffered by modern societies is directly due to the malignant influence of a dieoff leftist influence on science, politics, and culture.

In modern times it takes men longer to mature and become financially independent, on average. The pairing of mature and economically self-sufficient men with younger, fertile women of erotic appeal, makes a lot of sense when these men do finally get around to starting a family.

If feminists cannot keep their hands off normal human relationships, perhaps it really is time for the backlash.

Update 8Oct2011: Here is a news report of a Dutch study that attempts to link older sperm with mental disabilities in offspring. The actual findings do not actually support the claims being made for the study, and in fact contradict actual results studies performed by the Karolinska Institute, as noted above.

Just as older mothers increase the risk of chromosomal and genetic problems in offspring, it is also logical that a theoretical risk of genetic problems from older fathers also may exist. But such a risk still needs to be proven beyond the merely theoretical -- and needs to be quantified and individualised so that appropriate precautions can be taken, if needed in the particular case.

In the meantime, humans should be free to go about their lives without being held hostage by a feminist-overlord culture of PC repression.

Lori Gottlieb and the Collapse of the American Empire

The message we send kids with all the choices we give them is that they are entitled to a perfect life—that, as Dan Kindlon, the psychologist from Harvard, puts it, “if they ever feel a twinge of non-euphoria, there should be another option.” Mogel puts it even more bluntly: what parents are creating with all this choice are anxious and entitled kids whom she describes as “handicapped royalty.” _Lori Gottlieb

Pity meek and mild Lori Gottlieb, an intern in family counseling who has made some interesting observations in the course of her work. Gottlieb discussed her observations in a recent piece in the Atlantic. The piece has raised a firestorm of online debate, snark, and condemnation, almost entirely undeserved. The fault in Gottlieb's piece lies not in what she says, but in what she leaves out -- what these disturbing findings imply for the future of the American empire.

...Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

...Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle...

...Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups” because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”

...A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance.

...This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year, parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an answer, because the answer is never no!’”

... _theAtlantic

And so on... An interesting glimpse into the modern state of child-raising in the US from someone on the front lines of family therapy.

If Americans truly are raising generations of fragile, entitled children, who is going to do the hard work that needs to be done? As long as the US economy was doing well, America could import its hard workers and many of its hard thinkers, so as to keep the wheels of commerce and invention moving along. But with the rapid emergence of crisis levels of debt and demography, the US economy may not be able to import so much of its needed human capital -- to compensate for the disastrous failures of its parents and educational system.

Children need to learn practical competence in a wide range of skills. They need to learn to focus on a difficult task, and learn to work hard at it until it is done. Children must not be age-segregated in prison schools for so many of their formative years, kept away from any responsibility or opportunity to explore the real world.

The Roman Empire collapsed over a few centuries for many of the reasons the American empire is threatened: debt, demography, social problems that were swept under the rug, entitled and abusive ruling classes, etc.

American parents have only one or two children, on average, and far too many of them are being raised as "trophy children," pampered perpetually childish pets rather than skilled, competent, and responsible proto-adults. This failure to reproduce -- and failure to competently raise the meagre progeny which they do produce -- is what truly threatens the collapse of the American Experiment (not actually an empire in the Roman sense at all).

Gottlieb was actually rather tentative and modest in her conclusions -- not taking them as far as she perhaps should have. Yet she was castigated by the "pampering nannies" of modern academia, journalism, and the blogosphere. The dysfunction can probably not be reversed before catastrophe ensues, at least not in the many strongholds of the destructive philosophy.

It is up to parents who wish to raise competent and functional children to structure an environment around the child which facilitates the acquisition of skills and an ongoing successful adaptation to adult world responsibilities.

Pick Any Lock, Fleece Any Flock

You would like to believe in a world that is safe from terrorists, thieves, spies, and busybodies. But that would not be the truth. There is no lock that cannot be hacked. The security procedures of governments, corporations, and homes is more of a convenient fiction than a reality.

Tobias thinks of himself as a humble public servant. When he attacks the Kryptonite bike lock or the Club (or those in-room safes at Holiday Inn or Caesars Palace), he's not a bad guy—he's just Ralph Nader with a slim jim, protecting consumers by exposing locks, safes, and security systems that aren't actually locked, safe, or secure. At least, not from people like him.

The problem, if you're a safe company or a lock maker, is that Tobias makes it all public through hacker confabs, posts on his Security.org site, and tech blogs like Engadget. He views this glasnost as a public service. Others see a hacker how-to that makes The Anarchist Cookbook read like Betty Crocker. And where Tobias sees a splendid expression of First Amendment rights, locksmiths and security companies see a criminal finishing school. Tobias isn't just exposing problems, they say. He is the problem.

But forget bike locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places like military installations and the homes of American presidents and British royals...

...Kids study Tobias' online video, crack the lock off Dad's Glock, and put holes in things that shouldn't have them. Enterprising junkies embark on habit-feeding crime waves. Hotel rooms, no longer secure, become magnets for burglary and rape. High school truants walk the halls shimming combination locks off rows of lockers. Crime gangs use Tobias' case study to copycat the 2003 Antwerp diamond heist, while tech terrorists simply co-opt the master list of Marc Weber Tobias problems to outwit America's Keystone Kop-homeland security and generally blow stuff up. The world is unzipped. And our innocence—not to mention a good deal of our cash, jewelry, and portable electronics—is lost.

Tobias shrugged off such concerns, along with the hate mail. Scaring citizens to attention is part of his educational program. "Do you really think ignorance will keep you safe?" he asks. "Is it even an option?" ...

..."It's not about me. It's about what these locks protect," Tobias says. "Medeco locks are the best in the world—that's why they're used by the Pentagon, the embassies. These agencies believe that the locks can't be picked in under 15 minutes, that they can't be bumped, that you can't trace keys onto plastic. It's the definition of high security—and it's wrong! We proved it."

"Look," he says, taking it down a few notches. "If we can do it, so can the bad guys. Medeco needs to acknowledge it and let the locksmiths know it—and the DOD, FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and all their clients." _Wired

And so we are left with a world without security. Nothing is safe, not really. But if that is true, are we not better off knowing the facts and learning to take the necessary precautions? Is it not past time for us to outgrow our psychological neoteny, and to move through our rites of passage into adulthood?

That is when the fun really starts.

Are You Competent for What May Come?

Because, personally, I seriously doubt that you are--if you are a typical psychologically neotenised, academically lobotomised, child of the western world.

You might try the "Jericho Test." If you have not seen the episodes of the doomed television show Jericho, go here and watch at least the first few episodes. Imagine yourself in such a circumstance. Would you be useful. How?

I recall sitting in an insurance office in a new town, transferring my policy to my new location. My young, attractive female agent was processing my paperwork and chatting with two co-workers who had gathered around the desk out of boredom. Somehow they were discussing a collapse of civilisation and what they could do to survive. My agent made the offhand comment, "at least I could work as a whore."

But there is only so much need for whores, and some of the male survivors of a holocaust would not treat their whores very kindly. So the rest of you might start thinking about other possibilities, while you have a little time. Particularly the college professors among you, who--if you pardon me for saying so--are almost certainly particularly useless in an emergency (unless your training is in applied engineering, technology, or biomedical sciences).

Your politics, religion, and ideology will probably be irrelevant, as long as you are not a psychopath. It is your useful skills that will count.

People always assume that things will continue as they are, in a straight line extrapolation of current trends. People are always wrong about that. Most people need shock therapy to acknowledge things that might go wrong, and to be motivated to prepare.

No matter how busy you are, you still have time to take steps to make you and your family more survivable.


Everyone needs a stockpile of clean water, food, and basic hygienic and first aid supplies. If you depend on a medicine such as insulin, you should have extra medication on hand, and rotate it to maintain the expiration date. If your vital medicines require refrigeration, you should have a way to power a small refrigerator off the electrical grid. (generator with fuel, solar panels with batteries, etc.)

There are many important things to think about, in connection with surviving a massive natural or man-made disaster. The Al Fin blog sidebar has an entire section of links dealing with these issues, about three fourths of the way down. As an added one-time-only bonus, here is an online book on surviving a nuclear war.

Watch the first few episodes of Jericho. Think about it.
Related

Standing Up

Most modern college students in North America have been sheltered from challenge and responsibility their entire lives. Compared to the upbringing of most children through history, modern college aged youth are pampered, and assured of their own specialness.

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

..."Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said.

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

Source.

Modern child-rearing in North America lacks meaningful challenges, and rites of passage--to provide a clear demarcation between self-centered childhood and a more competent and responsible adulthood.

In Science Fiction author Alexei Panshin's novel "Rite of Passage", 14 year olds underwent "The Challenge", a necessary rite of transition which some of them did not survive. Of course this idea was drawn from many earth examples of aboriginal and other cultures that require the child to undergo a rite of passage that sometimes results in the child's death.

For boys, the ritual often involved surviving in the wilderness--perhaps hunting a dangerous animal such as a lion. For girls, rites surrounding the onset of menses were common. Certainly giving birth for the first time was a sufficiently life threatening and altering experience to qualify as a rite of passage for girls.

Going to college for many years, and perhaps graduate school for many more, can often be a way to simply avoid one rite of passage--a full time job leading to economic self-sufficiency. If a youth considers himself too "special" to undertake most forms of work, the rite may be postponed indefinitely. For a young woman, school and long preparation for a career can postpone the childbirth rite so late in her life, that the biological clock eventually obviates the issue permanently.

Psychologically neotenous youth are typically narcissistic as well. If they also open themselves to indoctrination at a typical university or college, they have scored the magic hat trick--narcissism, psychological neoteny, and academic lobotomy. When that occurs, there is little reason to expect adult behaviour or responsible attitudes and participation in the society at large.

There are, however, some areas of North American society where the rite of passage occurs in all its historical potency. That would be in much of the military, fire departments, EMS, rescue units, and better trained and disciplined law enforcement personnel.

The idea of a rite of passage is a powerful one, as old as humanity. You can see how easily it is perverted in the muslim culture, where violent murder by martyrdom is too often celebrated as a rite of passage--although a rather grotesque and pointless one in my opinion.

But rites of passage need not be so perverse. An enlightened society has to understand that lifelong pampering and protection from challenge and responsibility is no way to raise productive adults who willingly contribute to their communities in all facets of living. Until North Americans understand the problem they have created for themselves, the ride will be bumpy and more than a little precarious.