Category Archives: Science

Arts, Psychology, Science

Wellbeing theory: accomplishment and achievement

 POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Martin Seligman’s most recent theory of wellbeing contains the new component of “accomplishment”. It’s a broad category, covering everything from achievement, competence and success to progress towards goals and mastery at the highest possible level. These concepts have been studied individually in psychology for decades – but collecting them together under the heading “accomplishment” within positive psychology is new.

Positive psychologists don’t always agree on definitions of happiness and wellbeing, nor what should be included in wellbeing theory and what should be left out. Seligman’s original model of “authentic happiness” consisted of three components: positive emotions, engagement and meaning. In the intervening years, scientific research and debate inspired him to revise this by adding two further components to wellbeing theory, relationships and accomplishment.

Accomplishment is included as one of the facets of wellbeing because like the other components, it is something that humans pursue for its own sake. Even though we all know people who are high achievers for extrinsic reasons, such as increased power, status or pay, accomplishment per se is intrinsically motivating. Nurturing accomplishment on its own or together with any of the other four facets, says Seligman, will lead to higher wellbeing.

There are various techniques in psychology that can be used to increase your sense of accomplishment. One of these is known as the “accomplishment anchor”. With this, you can use your past successes to give you confidence, spur you on to greater achievements and give you a boost of positive emotion when you need a little psychological pick-me-up. This is an idea adapted from positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson.

How to increase your level of goal achievement

According to Seligman’s theory, achievement can be summarised as follows:

Achievement = skill x effort

He suggests that the skill and effort elements have certain characteristics which are needed for higher achievement:

. Speed of thought. According to wellbeing theory, if you have already acquired a lot of relevant skills or knowledge about a particular task, you won’t have to waste brain power on the basics. This leaves you more able to think quickly, and with time left over to devote to planning, checking and being creative. These, of course, are the hallmarks of performance excellence.

. Rate of learning. Clearly the faster you learn, the more information and knowledge you can acquire per hour spent on the task. In terms of achievement and accomplishment, this will also put you ahead of the game.

Becoming an expert

In terms of effort, research by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues suggests that it takes a minimum of 10 years (or roughly 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice in any subject to become an expert. By “deliberate practice”, Ericsson doesn’t mean practising those things which you already know how to do, he means putting sustained effort into the things you can’t do very well, or even at all. In other words, in order to become an expert, you must put yourself outside of your traditional comfort zone, which requires substantial self-motivation and self-discipline.

Since very little is currently known about how to increase our speed of thought and rate of learning, the one thing we can all do to improve our rate of accomplishment is to spend more time on deliberate practice.

Becoming an expert in a particular field, Ericsson and colleagues recommend two tips:

. Find a coach or mentor who can provide the level of challenge and critical feedback necessary to keep improving your skills.

. Spend time observing a “master” at work, then utilise or use similar techniques that were used.   

The role of competence

Competence is one of the psychological facets which increases self-motivation, goal achievement, and wellbeing. When it’s accompanied by perseverance, competence makes a good recipe for accomplishment at any level, big or small. When psychologists speak of competence, it implies being confident and effective in what we do.

There are several strategies you can adopt to increase your competence in a particular field. One way is to get regular constructive feedback about how you are performing. The feedback might be inherent in the activity: you can tell straight away whether or not you’re playing the piano or playing a game of squash well, for example. Or you may have to wait for results or seek feedback from someone else.

Another way to increase your competence in relation to your goal is to find ways to improve your skill-set. You could do this by gradually making the goal more challenging, so that you have to strive a bit harder every time you do it. People naturally shy away from stepping outside their comfort zone, but remember, this really is the only way to learn new skills. When feeling uncomfortable, remind yourself that this is a sign that you have the opportunity to learn something new.

A third method is to undertake specific skills training. You might do this in your own spare time or through an organisation. As Ericsson suggests, you could find a role-model to emulate.

Those are some of the ways that will help to improve your competence, and increase the probability that you will tread the accomplishment pathway to wellbeing. Effort and persistence are so essential for goal achievement.

Indeed, research in psychology suggests that regardless of innate talent, considerable effort is required to become an expert. Continual practise is a key ingredient.

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Arts, Philosophy, Science

Philosophy: The blank slate

INNATE IDEAS

Intro: In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke rebutted the rationalists’ argument that we are born with innate ideas, and so laid the foundations for modern empiricist thought.

“No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” – John Locke (1689)

British empiricism

Central to the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704) is the idea that there is no such thing as innate knowledge: at birth, the mind is what he called a tabula rasa, or “blank slate”. When we observe new born babies, he said, it is clear that they do not bring ideas into the world with them. It is only as we go through life that ideas come into our minds, and these ideas are derived from our experience of the world around us. This idea stood in marked contrast to much contemporary thinking, particularly the ideas of Descartes and Leibniz, who argued that we are born with innate ideas and that our reason, rather than our experience, is our primary means of acquiring knowledge.

Locke’s idea was not new – it had been defended by Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, and even went back to Aristotle. However, Locke was the first philosopher to give a comprehensive defence of empiricism – the idea that experience is our principle source of knowledge. That is not to say that Locke dismissed the importance of reasoning in our acquisition of knowledge. He believed, too, that each of us is born with a capacity for reasoning, and that the right education is critical to a child’s intellectual development.

Learning the world

Locke claimed that there are two kinds of idea – ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection – and that the latter are made out of the former. In Locke’s words, the objects of the world “cause” ideas of sensation to form in our minds. We then organise these ideas into ideas of reflection:

Blank Slate – At birth, a baby brings no ideas into the world; its mind is completely blank. This means that everything that it will know will come from the world around it. For this reason, Locke claimed that the child should be exposed to the best ideas possible.

Ideas of Sensation – According to Locke, the objects of the world cause ideas of sensation in the infant’s mind. These simple impressions form in the way that light forms images on photographic film: it is a mechanical process that requires no effort on the child’s behalf.

Ideas of Reflection – As the child grows older, it builds ideas of reflection out of its ideas of sensation. From its interactions with other people, and its simple understanding of the qualities of a ball, for example, it can create the idea of “football”. From that, and other simple ideas, it forms the more complex ideas of “teamwork” and “competition”.

Primary and Secondary Qualities

According to Locke, we can only receive information about the world through our senses. This information, he claimed, is of two kinds, and concerns what he called the primary and secondary qualities. An object’s primary qualities, such as its height or mass, are objective, and exist independently of whoever is observing it. However, its secondary qualities, such as its colour or taste, may differ between observers. A ball, for example, may appear grey or multicoloured to two different observers, but both will agree on its size.

Primary Qualities – For Locke, the primary qualities of a thing are its length, breadth, height, weight, location, motion, and overall design.

Secondary Qualities – The secondary qualities of a thing are its colour, taste, texture, smell, and sound. These qualities depend on the perceiver’s senses.

NEED TO KNOW

. Although Locke denied the existence of innate ideas, he claimed that we have innate capacities for perception and reasoning

. In the 19th century, the notion of innate ideas resurfaced. Scholars questioned whether behavioural traits come from “nature or nuture”

. In the 20th century, Noam Chomsky extended Locke’s idea that we have an innate capacity for reasoning. Chomsky claimed that all humans have an innate ability to acquire language.

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Environment, Research, Science

Migrating animals: How do they find their way?

ETHOLOGY

Intro: The ability by some animals to find their way when migrating over long distances intrigues and amazes us. The puzzle of how they do this is difficult to solve and we are only really just beginning to find answers

SOME of the migratory habits of animals are truly astonishing, not least because without our own navigational aids, our compasses and our GPS systems, we very easily get lost ourselves. Arctic terns leave their northern breeding grounds in and around the Arctic Circle towards the end of the summer to fly south all the way to the Antarctic coast, arriving in time for the onset of summer in the southern hemisphere, and then fly all the way back to the Arctic to breed the following spring. If the terns flew directly between their two destinations, this would involve journeys totalling over 32,000 km (20,000 miles), but they actually adopt much more convoluted routes, increasing the distances they cover by tens of thousands of miles. Yet after covering such enormous distances, the terns often return to the exact spot where they bred the previous year.

Atlantic salmon spend most of their adult lives in the ocean before returning to the same river where they were born, and usually to the same stretch of that river, to spawn. Some monarch butterflies are involved in a circular migration – which takes several generations to complete, travelling from southern Canada to overwintering sites in central Mexico while every year, millions of Christmas Island crabs travel from the forest in the interior of their Indian Ocean island to the coast to breed. Several species of frogs and toads engage in similar annual mass migrations, and sea turtles such as loggerheads and leatherbacks give the impression of being engaged in a lifelong migration, swimming for what can be thousands of kilometres between breeding grounds on beaches and feeding grounds in the distant ocean.

Navigating animals

These birds, fish, butterflies, crabs and turtles provide a few examples from among the thousands of species of animals that engage in migratory behaviour of one sort or another. Charles Darwin thought that animals, and to some extent humans as well, possessed an instinctive ability to orientate themselves in their surroundings, which they could use to navigate by dead reckoning, but he could not be any more specific about how this ability worked. Beginning in the 1910s, the Austrian animal behaviourist Karl von Frisch carried out experimental research on honeybees, which showed that their primary means of navigation involved using the position of the Sun to orientate themselves, but that they could also detect and follow the pattern of ultraviolet light in blue skies, which is caused by polarisation and is invisible to human eyes. On cloudy days, Frisch found that the bees could also make use of the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way when the Sun and polarised light were not visible. He would also be the first to describe the so-called waggle dance that the bees engaged in as a means of communicating the location of a source of nectar they had found to other bees in a hive.

Since Frisch’s work, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1973, other animals, such as sea turtles, have also been found to be able to detect the Earth’s magnetic field. Homing pigeons, which can return to their own lofts after being released hundreds of kilometres away, appear to use the magnetic field as one of a range of navigation techniques. Attempts have been made to discover how pigeons detect the magnetic field, which is actually very weak, and while we do not know for certain, one theory suggests they somehow make use of particles of magnetite, a highly magnetic mineral of iron oxide found in the upper part of their beaks. Even so, it remains a mystery how the navigational information that may be gained in this way is passed to the brain and processed.

Homing pigeons can switch between different methods of navigation as circumstances dictate, sometimes following known landmarks, such as coastlines, rivers and roads, while at others navigating by the Sun and stars. When it is too dark or cloudy for them to see the sky, they can fall back on finding their way by following the magnetic field. Researchers at the University of Texas who monitored the brain activity of pigeons while they were subjected to a moving magnetic field came to the conclusion that, as well as having compasses in their heads, the pigeons somehow constructed maps in their brains as they went along, so when they ended up in a place they had never been before they could head straight for home. We may like to think of ourselves as rather more intelligent than pigeons, but, for all our superior brainpower, we can’t do that.

Alternative theories

Research into the ability of European robins to use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate suggests that the mechanism involved may work at a subatomic, or quantum, level. If this proves to be the case, then it would go some way to explaining how animals can detect and make use of the natural magnetic field, which is far too weak to provide enough energy to power any molecular chemical reactions. Magnetoreception, as this ability is known, appears to function through the eyes of the robin, so it is possible that light provides the energy required to activate so-called radical pairs, subatomic charged particles that are small enough to be influenced by the low levels of magnetism and may create some form of navigational signal that is then passed to the robin’s brain via the optic nerve.

See also:

. Book Review – ‘Greenery: Journeys In Springtime’

. Science Book

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