Category Archives: Psychology

Arts, Books, Psychology, Science

Book Review: The Complete Guide to Memory

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: If you want to strengthen your mind, a new compendium exploring the mechanics of memory may be the place to start

IT IS all too easy to forget how much we rely on our memory and how quickly things can go south when it falters. Although the march towards forgetfulness is often presented as a foregone conclusion, it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s according to Dr Richard Restak in The Complete Guide to Memory, a short but comprehensive compendium of everything we know about memory and how we might improve it.

So-called brain training has been in vogue for decades in the form of sudoku puzzles or apps that promise to help you defy the cognitive decline of ageing, but there is little evidence for this.

Despite his book’s subtitle – The science of strengthening your mind – Dr Restak’s gambit is slightly different. He is a neuroscientist, author of more than 20 books on the human brain, and with decades of experience of patients with memory problems. Here he argues that by performing certain tasks to boost your memory, other mental faculties that rely on it will improve and you might ease the impact of old age.

Of course, memory isn’t one thing, but an interconnected series of brain structures and processes that interact with stimuli and consciousness in myriad ways. To understand how to improve it, an understanding of these processes is helpful, so Restak devotes a sizeable chunk of this book to teasing out the nuances of memory.

This includes episodic, semantic and procedural memory, how working and long-term memory differ, and how these are, in turn, formed from different stimuli, such as internal and external speech or visual information. It can feel like a whirlwind tour, and unless you take Restak’s advice to be attentive and intentional about remembering, the neuroscience will likely wash over you.

But understanding how different kinds of memories are made and stored does help make sense of the sections that follow, on how our brains use memory in daily life and what happens when these processes falter or start to go wrong.

The book is at its most enjoyable when Restak blends case study and personal anecdote to explore memory and what happens when faculties start to disengage.

Somewhat distressingly, the chapter devoted to memory’s malfunctions is almost as five times as long as the chapter that describes it working as intended – but, apart from rare brain injuries or traumatic events, these cognitive vulnerabilities are instructive.

For instance, knowing that advertisers and political campaigners tend to recycle and repeat the same catchphrases to evoke a sense of familiarity, and so prime you to remember them, could fortify you against manipulation in the future – or encourage you to use those same repetitious techniques for things you would like to remember.

The main way to improve all forms of memory, the author says, is to actively practise certain techniques, ideally daily. Some are as simple as attending to things more closely to expand long-term memory, while others are more involved, such as exercises and games that include memorising sequences of cards or numbers to boost working memory.

For all its emphasis on brain structure, the guide can feel frustratingly unstructured. Some curiosities, like the brain’s tendency to more easily recall interrupted tasks (the Zeigarnik effect) or that you remember things better when you see them on large screens, seem random and underexplored, with only a few paragraphs devoted to each and little about how you should incorporate them into your life.

Then there are its more eye-catching claims – for example, that memory exercises could help prevent memory decline in Alzheimer’s disease. Some might say that these rely too much on Dr Restak’s clinical experience and suffer from a lack of balanced discussion, essential for a book that has “avoid memory loss” on the cover and mentions Alzheimer’s on the first page.

Critical reviewers will likely still be pondering over the book’s anti-dementia credentials, although a few weeks of the daily memory exercises emphasised may well lead to a small boost in recall and help those who use them to feel more present.

The Complete Guide to Memory by Dr Richard Restak is published by Penguin Life, 208pp

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Arts, Psychology, Society

Why can’t I get a word in edgeways in meetings?

GENDER DIVIDE

Intro: That punch-in-the-gut feeling of being cut off or ignored is something we’ve all experienced – and women suffer it more than men

RESEARCH across cultures shows that men dominate conversations, interrupt more, and have their suggestions taken more seriously by others – even by women. Assertiveness by a woman in a male-dominated workplace is more likely to be viewed as “bossy” and “abrasive”; conversely, men who act identically are more likely to be termed “decisive” and “assertive”.

Many business gurus have said that women’s views are unfairly sidelined because their speech is too “feminine” – punctuated with phrases that are termed “softeners”, such as “sort of”, “just wanted to…”, and “I’m sorry but…”. They say these make the speaker sound hesitant and indecisive to others. Objective research, however, shows that this theory is mostly hot air. Men use this kind of speech just as much as women.

Research does shows just how unbalanced the divide can be. For example, in a mixed-sex discussion group, women tend to get equal airtime only when the group has a ratio of at least four women for every man in the group.

So why are men such verbal bulldozers in the workplace? Male dominance at work has less to do with language and biological authority, and more to do with entrenched, global views of men having authority and taking command, while women are seen as more passive and family-focused. This work divide started around 10,000 years ago, when humans began farming in settlements, and whether we like it or not, these roles have seeped into the world’s psyche: patients feel more assured when their surgeon is a man and air passengers say they are more relaxed when the pilot’s voice they hear has a baritone rather than a soprano pitch.

Despite this, research also shows that the most effective teams are mixed, and that strong female role models (especially in positions of leadership) help to shatter stereotypes. We all have our part to play by being aware of this traditional norm and by striving to find and work with others who see the world differently to us.

Psychology of the Gender Divide

Unconscious prejudices are slow to uproot in societies. Humans are tribal; our unspoken social rules have been key in knitting together fragile communities over tens of thousands of years. Everyone conforms, and everyone is expected to conform. If we humans had not developed social norms then we would have co-operated only haphazardly and not been able to form such stable societies.

Even though the world has been inching towards a more gender-balanced society, primal psychology still remains powerfully at play. Anyone who bucks the trend by acting differently to what has gone before risks a social backlash for defying the expectations of others.

We also suffer “confirmation bias”, valuing those men and women who conform to stereotypes, and dismissing those who don’t as being unusual.

Even when our collective ideals shift, there is still a time lag before it affects how individuals actually live and work. Nevertheless, the choices we make today will have an impact on the accepted rules in our tribe. Each can be one small step in moving towards the world we want to live in tomorrow.

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Psychology, Research, Science

Are male and female brains wired differently? 

GENDER BRAINS

Intro: It is often pointed where we differ, but when it comes to our brains, research shows that there are far more similarities than differences

WE are told that men and women are so different, it’s as if they came from separate planets. Martian men are stereotypically target-focused, assertive, and good at navigating; women born on Venus are more empathetic, caring, and expert multitaskers. We are all fascinated by what makes the other sex tick, but back on Earth, when it comes to brains, much of what’s been written about the sex divide is more science fiction than scientific fact.

Websites and news outlets have seeped scientific-sounding theories into common wisdom, such as the idea that women listen with both sides of their brain, whereas men use only one side; or that men and women navigate using “entirely different” brain regions. Some even claim that there is a “male brain” and a “female brain”.

These ideas often have their roots in scientific research, but much of it is based on early experiments in our brains which were either found later to be insignificant, or their results were misinterpreted or misreported.

Scientists are suckers for wanting to tell a story that will be the talk of the town – and the media are willing accomplices. Less headline-grabbing experiments that show little or no difference can get stuffed in the drawer, never to see the light of day.

So, what does the science really say? From the eighth week in the womb, little boys’ and girls’ brains do start to develop slightly differently. Throughout our lives, the sex hormones testosterone, oestrogen, and progesterone mould our individual physical and emotional development. Hormone level differences tweak the dial on characteristics such as aggression, pain threshold, stress response, and parent-child bonding, but each person is so unique that there is often more variation within each sex than there is between them.

Male and female brains don’t differ significantly in size, either. Men’s brains are slightly larger as a consequence of their larger bodies, and thanks to detailed scanning we know that some brain parts differ in proportion between the sexes, but the differences are too small to claim that there is such a thing as a “male brain” or a “female brain”.

Most areas of mental functioning, behaviour and personality are the same in both sexes. What differences there are, such as in aggression levels, are usually driven by the differences in sex hormones such as testosterone after puberty.

Nature or nurture?

Recent research points to the historic sex divide actually being down to society, not science. When the magnifying glass of science reveals the workings of the brain, the accepted male and female stereotypes mostly vanish.

Some scientists now think that what differences there are between male and female brains – such as, say, in map reading – are the result not of biology, but of thousands of years of brain-training. The good news, however, is the brain is brilliant at learning new things – you can adapt and learn many new skills within a lifetime.

So it is logical that, if given the opportunity, men and women can learn skills stereotypical of the other sex very easily. For example, children who are given Lego to play with are likely to mature and have brains which have larger spatial cortexes, regardless of whether they are male or female.

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