Arts, Psychology, Research, Science

Memory and the functioning of our minds

HUMAN MEMORY

EVERYDAY functioning of our minds or how we make sense of the world is central to Psychology. Memory research, an area that has been explored since 1885, started when Hermann Ebbinghaus published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. His was a lab-based approach where he set out to study our ability to memorise pure information, screening out the kinds of facts that people might already know would influence the experimental outcome. He designed trigrams, made-up syllables built from three letters – a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant – that had no meaning but looked like words. Ebbinghaus and an assistant carried out these experiments on themselves, learning the trigrams from flashcards, and varying the experiments to see what factors affected their capacity to remember.

This could be called a purely cognitive approach to memory – examining the way information is processed, memorised, and recalled. The work of George A. Miller forms part of this tradition, looking at how much random information we can remember in the short term, and how we can boost our ability to remember. The problem with this kind of approach is that in real life, as we all know, we don’t deal with meaningless information and there is a difference in what we remember when reading a book, tying our shoelaces, or recognising someone we know across the street.

Frederic Bartlett, another pioneer of research into memory, took a markedly different approach. Working in the 1930s, he became interested in how we organise our memories to fit in with things that we already know. Bartlett discovered that we adjust the material we hear so that it makes sense, deciding what to leave in and what to omit. His approach was more about how memory is adjusted in the light of human experience. There are parallels with this approach which can be seen in Freud’s theories about repression and the unconscious, and also in the research carried out by Elizabeth Loftus on eyewitness testimony.

Stubborn beliefs

Perception and cognition relate to what we take in from the world around us and what we make of it. While memory can seem a surprisingly slippery concept, so are the beliefs we hold – or think we hold. Faced with beliefs that clash – known as “cognitive dissonance” – we can end up unconsciously tweaking our beliefs, as if to restore order. There is a stubborn aspect to our belief systems, too. The concept of “confirmation bias” looks at how resistant we can be to information that conflicts with our most firmly held beliefs, and how this is even more marked when we are part of a like-minded group. And while we may claim to try to understand other people’s points of view, our default position, as Lee Ross’s “Fundamental Attribution Error” demonstrates, appears to be that we do no such thing. For example, look at some of the entrenched, anachronistic and insulting views held by some Protestant groups. Or certain factions that exist on social media.

The power of emotion

Understanding emotion, too, is also important: in particular, where it comes from. A century ago, the belief was that physiological changes in the body (like a surge in adrenaline) triggered our emotions. Now it is seen as being about how we interpret the situation in front of us, which is in part to do with the society to which we belong. This begs the question of whether emotions, and how we express them, are universal, or specific to certain cultures. Such questions recur throughout psychology.  

Over many decades of the last century, much of psychology was developed at Western universities, with experiments largely carried out on Western students, leading many to ask if this is a broad enough sample from which to develop universal truths about humankind.

Emotions also drives how we make decisions. Pure rationality would get us nowhere, because in every aspect of our lives we could find ourselves processing an infinite amount of information, but sadly lacking the processing speed of a computer. We need an emotional element to help us to rule out a whole bunch of options – helping us to make decisions based on gut feeling so as to be able to get on with our lives. And all this decision making can take a mental and emotional toll on our resources. As Roy Baumeister’s experiments appeared to show, it is possible simply to run out of the capacity to decide.

(Podcast ends)

A Short Biography of George A. Miller (1920–2012)

MILLER studied at Alabama, and gained his Ph.D. at Harvard. He began his research there in the 1940s, looking at speech production and perception, and his Language and Communication (1951) helped to establish the new science of psycholinguistics.

Building on existing mathematical theories of communication, he published a paper on short-term memory capacity, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” It captured the public imagination and even encouraged lively debates on the optimal length of telephone numbers.

He continued to work on the psychology of speech, testing some of Noam Chomsky’s theories, and in 1960 founded (with Jerome Bruner) the Harvard Centre for Cognitive Studies. He is regarded (with Chomsky and Bruner) as one of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, the study of thought processes – a dramatic departure from behavioural psychology, which stated that since mental processes were not observable, they were not suitable for scientific study.

After a period at New York’s Rockfeller University, working on language acquisition, Miller moved to Princeton where he helped establish both the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory and WordNet, a word database that has applications in present-day search engines and artificial intelligence (AI).

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Arts, Mental Health, Psychology

Habit forming: Start small

THERE WILL BE OBSTACLES

SOMETIMES the problem isn’t that you don’t have enough drive to do something but that you have too much. It’s easy to put all your time into starting something new and then burn out, letting the project drop by the wayside because you are tired or want to reclaim some of your time. Or, you may feel overwhelmed by all the things you want to do and not know where to start.

Start small while you are forming your new routine so you are better able to sustain it. Complete one task and stop while you are still excited or have the energy to do more. Your excitement will fuel your motivation, which will in turn keep you returning to your activity and assist in the forming of a habit.

Michael Phelps, the great US Olympian, said: “There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.”

No day spent in pursuit of my dream is a day wasted.

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Arts, Philosophy

Philosophy: Purposes in nature

TELEOLOGY

Intro: According to Aristotle, everything that exists has a final cause, or purpose – what in Greek is called a telos. In other words, everything in nature exists to fulfil a goal.

EXPLAINING things in terms of their purposes was not unusual among classical Greek philosophers, but today it stands at odds with our modern, scientific understanding of the world. To our modern eyes it is quite normal to describe a man-made object, such as a tool, in terms of its function or purpose. A hammer, for example, exists for the purpose of pounding in nails. But this is an extrinsic purpose, one that is imposed upon it from the outside. What Aristotle proposed was that everything, including everything in the natural world, has an intrinsic purpose: that is, each thing exists in order to achieve its own ends – its internal purpose. For example, a seed’s purpose is to germinate and become a plant, and trees exist in order to produce fruit.

For Aristotle, it is not only living things that exist for a purpose. Rain falls in order to moisten the ground and enable plants to grow. It is the rain’s telos to water the earth, and the plants’ telos to grow. Their purpose or goal is the reason they have come into being.

More in line with our modern thinking is the Atomists’ assertion that natural things do not have an intrinsic purpose or “final cause”: instead, their existence is the cause of other things. Rain does not fall in order to water the plants; rather, the plants use the moisture that happens to have been provided by the rainfall.

. The Unfolding World

For Aristotle, the essential property of a seed is its ability to grow. That is also its intrinsic purpose: it exists to become a plant, which, in turn, exists in order to produce seeds. Living things are therefore characterised by their tendency to move or change, and to reproduce. And, since all terrestrial things are imperfect and impermanent, beings not only grow, but also eventually perish and decay.

. Causation

Aristotle’s theory of causation is based on his idea that everything has four causes. What we usually think of as a cause – that which makes a thing happen – is what Aristotle calls an “efficient cause”. For example, a person who pushes a rock downhill is the efficient cause of the rock’s movement. The purpose, or “final cause”, of its movement – why it goes downwards instead of up or sideways – is that it is seeking the centre of the Earth. The final cause of the action of pushing the rock is to see how far it will roll. The rock’s movement is also determined by formal and material causes.

Efficient Cause – in this example, the efficient cause is the person who pushes the rock. The rock moves because of the person’s actions.

Material Cause – This is the rock’s physical composition. The rock is made of earth, and so, because earthy things seek the centre of the Earth, it moves downwards.

Formal Cause – The shape of the rock’s trajectory is determined by the landscape. The rock’s rolling and bouncing are caused by the slopes and bumps of the hill.

Final Cause – The rock comes to rest when it reaches the closest it can get to the centre of the Earth – the bottom of the hill.

THE UNMOVED MOVER

Aristotle’s universe had no beginning, but he believed that something must have set the heavenly bodies in motion, since everything is caused by something else. However, this raises two questions: What caused that cause, and what moved the mover of the Universe? Aristotle proposed the idea of a first cause, an “unmoved mover”, responsible for all the motion in the universe.

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