Category: Psychology

Arthur Ashton’s Serendipitous Invention of Optical Tweezers

(p. B11) Arthur Ashkin, a physicist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize for figuring out how to harness the power of light to trap microscopic objects for closer study, calling his invention optical tweezers, died on Sept. 21 [2020] at his home in Rumson, N.J.

. . .

Dr. Ashkin’s discovery was serendipitous.

In 1966, he was head of the laser research department at Bell Labs, the storied New Jersey laboratory founded by the Bell Telephone Company in 1925, when he went to a scientific conference in Phoenix. There, in a lecture, he heard two researchers discuss something odd that they had found while studying lasers, which had been invented six years earlier: They had noticed that dust particles within the laser beams careened back and forth. They theorized that light pressure might be the cause.

Dr. Ashkin did some calculations and concluded that this was not the cause — it was most likely thermal radiation. But his work reignited a childhood interest in the subject of light pressure.

Light pushes against everything, including people, because it comprises tiny particles called photons. Most of the time the pressure is utterly insignificant; people, for one, feel nothing. But Dr. Ashkin thought that if objects were small enough, a laser might be used to push them around.

. . .

Then, in 1986, he and several colleagues, notably Steven Chu, achieved the first practical application of optical tweezers when they sent a laser through a lens to manipulate microscopic objects. Their results were published in another paper in Physical Review Letters. Dr. Chu began using the tweezers to cool and trap atoms, a breakthrough for which he was awarded a one-third share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997.

Dr. Ashkin, it was clear, was irked that the Nobel committee had not recognized his foundational work in awarding the prize. But he had already begun to use the tweezers for a different purpose: trapping live organisms and biological material.

Other scientists thought this application would not work, as he explained in an interview with the Nobel Institute after he was awarded the prize in 2018.

“They used light to heal wounds, and it was considered to be deadly,” he said. “When I described catching living things with light, people said, ‘Don’t exaggerate, Ashkin.’”

. . .

Dr. Ashkin was awarded one-half the 2018 physics prize, . . . . In so doing he became, at 96, the oldest recipient of a Nobel Prize at the time.

. . .

Dr. Ashkin’s retirement from Bell Labs did not stop him from continuing his research. When he received word of his Nobel Prize, he was working on a project in his basement to improve solar energy collection. Asked if he was going to celebrate, he said: “I am writing a paper right now. I am not about celebrating old stuff.”

For the full obituary, see:

Dylan Loeb McClain. “Arthur Ashkin, 98, Dies; Nobel-Winning Physicist.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 29, 2020): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Oct. 5, 2020, and has the title “Arthur Ashkin, 98, Dies; Nobel Laureate Invented a ‘Tractor Beam’.”)

The essay about Aoyagi mentioned above is:

Severinghaus, John W. “Takuo Aoyagi: Discovery of Pulse Oximetry.” Anesthesia & Analgesia 105, no. 6 (Dec. 2007): S1-S6.

“You Can’t Wait for Somebody to Make a Giant Study”

(p. A6) In April [2020], researchers published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting many Covid-19 patients with respiratory distress might require a different treatment approach than typically used for ARDS.

. . .

Maurizio Cereda, an anesthesiologist and head of the surgical ICU at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, said doctors normally use standardized tables to match the level of oxygen in the blood with the amount of PEEP needed. Penn tends to use a table with lower PEEP values, he said, but even those lower levels seem to damage the lungs of some of his Covid-19 patients. As a result, he disregards the table entirely at times, he said, even though some in his institution disagree with his approach.

“You can’t wait for somebody to make a giant study,” Dr. Cereda said. “You are alone with your clinical observation. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable with that because they want to have big guidelines. People seem to be afraid they’re going to do something wrong.”

. . .

At Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, critical-care and emergency-medicine doctor Cameron Kyle-Sidell said he was initially seeing much higher mortality rates from Covid19 patients on ventilators than he would have expected from classic ARDS, possibly because physicians were sticking to PEEP levels used to treat traditional ARDS.

“There are people who are treating this the way they would have treated any other ARDS,” he said. “Then there’re people on the flip side—and I am on that flip side—that think you should treat it as a different disease than we treated in the past.”

For the full story, see:

Sarah Toy and Mark Maremont. “Doctors Split on Best Way To Treat Coronavirus Cases.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 2, 2020): A6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 1, 2020, and has the title “Months Into Coronavirus Pandemic, ICU Doctors Are Split on Best Treatment.” The online version quoted above includes a couple of added sentences quoting Dr. Cereda, beyond the single sentence quoted in the print version.)

New York Times’s “Inexcusable” Reporting Ignored Sophia Farrar, Whose Actions Belied the Kitty Genovese Narrative

(p. A24) The story of Kitty Genovese, coupled with the number 38, became a parable for urban indifference after Ms. Genovese was stalked, raped and stabbed to death in her tranquil Queens neighborhood.

Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times reported in a front-page article that 37 apathetic neighbors who witnessed the murder failed to call the police, and another called only after she was dead.

It would take decades for a more complicated truth to unravel, including the fact that one neighbor actually raced from her apartment to rescue Ms. Genovese, knowing she was in distress but unaware whether her assailant was still on the scene.

That woman, Sophia Farrar, the unsung heroine who cradled the body of Ms. Genovese and whispered “Help is on the way” as she lay bleeding, died on Friday [Aug. 28, 2020] at her home in Manchester, N.J.

. . .

The murder was reported in a modest four-paragraph article in The Times. Two weeks later, its interest piqued by a tip from the city’s police commissioner, The Times produced a front-page account of the killing that transformed the murder into a global allegory for callous egocentrism in the urban jungle and undermined the innocent-bystander alibi.

. . .

That account — epitomized by one neighbor’s stated excuse that “I didn’t want to get involved” — galvanized outrage, became the accepted narrative for decades and even spawned a subject of study in psychology: how bystanders react to tragedy. Except that with the benefit of hindsight, the number of eyewitnesses turned out to have been exaggerated; none actually saw the attack completely; some who heard it thought it was a drunken brawl or a lovers’ quarrel; and several people said they did call the police.

. . .

In several retrospectives decades after the murder, The Times reassessed the original account, concluding that more neighbors might have heard Ms. Genovese’s screams than actually witnessed the attack. But only one Times article, during Mr. Moseley’s trial, even mentioned Mrs. Farrar’s name, reporting that she and Ms. Zielonko found the victim in the vestibule.

Since Mrs. Farrar was interviewed on camera in “The Witness,” though, among those who criticized The Times’s failure to report her presence in earlier accounts of the crime was Joseph Lelyveld, who was the executive editor of The Times in the 1990s. He has called the omission “inexcusable.”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Sophia Farrar Dies at 92; Belied Indifference to Kitty Genovese Attack.” The New York Times (Friday, September 4, 2020): A24.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 2, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)

Open Offices Reduce Productivity and Spread Diseases

(p. B4) When historians of the early 21st century look back on the pre-Covid era, one of the absurdities they might highlight is the vogue for gigantic, open-plan offices. The apotheosis of this trend of breaking down barriers between co-workers must surely be Facebook Inc.’s 433,555-square-foot Frank Gehry-designed open-plan office at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Opened in 2015, it’s now a ghost town, a monument to offices vacated by the pandemic.

Cramming cavernous spaces with as many desks as they could hold might have increased serendipitous interactions, but it almost certainly reduced productivity and helped spread communicable diseases, including coronavirus.

. . .

Cue the “dynamic workplace,” a pivot away from the open plan, built on the idea that with fewer employees coming to work on any given day, offices can offer them more flexibility of layout and management.

While open offices and dynamic workplaces share similar components—privacy booths and huddle rooms to escape the hubbub, cafe-like networking spaces, etc.—they’re philosophically distinct. One is intended to be a place where people come (at least) five days a week, and get most of their work done on site. The other is planned for people rotating in and out of the office, on flexible schedules they have more control over than ever.

. . .

Research on hot-desking in office spaces, for example—where employees give up a dedicated space in favor of first-come-first-serve seating—finds that it decreases socialization and trust. This happens because employees figure they might never again see the person they sit next to on a given day, says Dr. Sander. In other studies, employees complain they can’t find their colleagues, that it’s a hassle to find a new spot to work every day, and that such arrangements ignore humans’ innate territoriality and desire to make a space their own.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “Goodbye, Open Office. Hello, ‘Dynamic Workplace.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, September 12, 2020): B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the same date and title as the print version.)

A Forgotten Language Will Be Easier to Re-Learn

(p. 12) What makes sociolinguistics a subject worth engaging with are the surprises, and Kinzler’s book is full of them. She reveals the extent to which language imprints our brains and how we are neurologically programmed to be sensitive to it. Even if we lose a language after early childhood and no longer speak it in adulthood, learning it will be easier because of deep-seated neural settings permanently etched by that first language.

For the full review, see:

John McWhorter. “Fuggedaboutit!” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, August 2, 2020): 12.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 21 [sic], 2020, and has the title “The Biases We Hold Against the Way People Speak.”)

The book under review is:

Kinzler, Katherine D. How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do―and What It Says About You. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

Radenbaugh Started Rad Power Bikes as Teenager in Family Garage

(p. B8) The residents of Garberville, Calif., didn’t know what to make of 15-year-old Mike Radenbaugh and the odd motorized bikes he was concocting in his family’s garage.

It was 2005, the home-brew era for electric vehicles, and there he was, a high school freshman zooming by at up to 35 miles an hour, not even pedaling. He seemed to defy gravity as he ascended the region’s steep winding roads lined with 300-foot redwoods.

. . .

Wires fried and batteries died. But after six months of experimentation, Mr. Radenbaugh had a semi-reliable electric bike. “It got better and better. And it got faster,” he said. “All of a sudden, I’d be riding into town passing slow cars. I quickly became known as the kooky e-bike guy in my little hometown.”

By his junior year, he’d founded Rad Power Bikes. Now based in Seattle, his company approached $100 million in sales in 2019. It has sold over 100,000 electric bikes. Numbers aren’t well reported for this young industry, but Rad Power Bikes is widely considered the largest e-bike seller in the United States.

. . .

What’s most impressive about the RadRunner is its use of smart design, wringing value from clever choices. The RadRunner has extra-fat tires to absorb bumps rather than an expensive front suspension. The rear hub motor is simpler and more cost-effective than what is known as a pedal-assist mid-drive. The LED controller mounted on the handlebars is basic, but it’s user-friendly and gets the job done. The detachable battery can be brought inside to charge.

. . .

Mr. Radenbaugh, now 30, manages a staff of 200 people. He described the current pace of change — and the myriad business challenges it poses — as “hyper-growth.” It’s not easy steering a transportation revolution. He said, “Every night, I feel like my brain was beat to pieces.”

For the full story, see:

Bradley Berman. “The Teenage Tinkerer Behind an E-Bike Revolution.” The New York Times (Friday, August 7, 2020): B8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 6, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)

Home Viewing Allows Movies to Bloom Late

(p. C9) It’s no overstatement to say that “Rudy’s” reputation was revived thanks to Blockbuster Video. Audiences saw the film on home video, a technology also responsible for the late success of another notable box-office underperformer, “The Shawshank Redemption,” which came out a year later. “Maybe this was the opening wedge of what’s become a very modern phenomenon, which was films that do not work well in theaters working well at home,” Mr. Turan said.

Perhaps the naked sentimentality of “Rudy” was better experienced at home rather than among rowdy multiplex-goers. “When it’s something you bring home…you don’t have to answer to anything,” Mr. Thomson said. “You’re just in direct conversation with your own heart as to what you want.”

For the full review, see:

Peter Tonguette. “For a Football-Deprived Fall, the Inspiration of ‘Rudy’.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, September 5, 2020): C9.

(Note: ellipsis in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the same date and title as the print version.)

Deliberate Practice Is Key to Peak Performance

(p. D7) Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist who demystified how expertise is acquired, suggesting that anyone can become a grand chess master, a concert violinist or an Olympic athlete with the proper training and the will, died on June 17 at his home in Tallahassee, Fla.

. . .

Professor Ericsson discovered that what separated the violinists’ skill levels was not natural-born talent but the hours of practice they had logged since childhood. The future teachers registered around 4,000 hours, the very good violinists 8,000 and the elite performers more than 10,000. The same study was conducted with pianists, with similar results.

Published in 1993 in Psychological Review, the paper later formed the basis for the so-called 10,000-hour rule described in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling “Outliers” (2008), which holds that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a skill or field.

. . .

“Many people think what Anders discovered is that quantity of practice makes you a champion,” said Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Grit” (2016), a book about passion and perseverance. “That’s disastrously incomplete. It’s quantity and quality. One of his insights that I hope will have a lasting legacy is people need to work hard, but also smart.”

Professor Ericsson focused on what he called “deliberate practice,” which entails immediate feedback, clear goals and focus on technique. According to his research, the lack of deliberate practice explained why so many people reach only basic proficiency at something, whether it be a sport, pastime or profession, without ever attaining elite status. A Sunday golfer may whack balls around the course for years, but without incorporating such methods that player will never become the next Tiger Woods.

. . .

He had his critics. One of them, Zachary Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University, co-wrote a paper in 2014 that concluded that deliberate practice was not the sole reason for peak performance in chess players and musicians. Innate characteristics like talent and intelligence, Mr. Hambrick argued, play a far more significant role than Professor Ericsson allowed for.

“There’s a side of me that resonates with his hopeful message,” said Scott Barry Kaufman, a humanistic psychologist who studies creativity and hosts “The Psychology Podcast.” “However, there’s another side of me that has seen the research, in a wide range of aspects in the field, that suggests that we can have some pretty severe limits on what we can achieve in life.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Kaufman added, “I don’t think any of this invalidates his contributions. He showed that humans have the capacity to go beyond, from one generation to the next, what had been thought of the limits of human potential.”

For the full obituary see:

Steven Kurutz. “Anders Ericsson, 72, Psychologist Who Became ‘Expert on Experts,’ Dies.” The New York Times (Monday, July 6, 2020): D7.

(Note: ellipses added, italics in original.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated July 4, 2018, and has the title “Anders Ericsson, Psychologist and ‘Expert on Experts,’ Dies at 72.”)

Anders Ericsson explained his views on peak performance in his co-authored book:

Ericsson, Anders, and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Tough Advice from Experienced Advisers Helps Us Acquire Skills

(p. R6) Recent studies suggest that people tend to favor advisers who are positive, cheerleader-types over tough talkers and voices of experience. But such preferences, the researchers also say, often lead to detrimental results, a finding with wide-ranging implications for companies and managers.

A paper published in March [2020] in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General summarized the findings of six connected studies. Subjects of inquiry included: what characteristics people predict they will use when selecting an adviser; those people’s actual adviser selections; and the potential consequences of these decisions.

. . .

And when researchers looked at the outcomes of these decisions, they noted a disturbing pattern. Those who relied primarily on cheerleader-types generally underperformed those who were guided more by expertise.

Catherine Shea, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business who focuses on organizational behavior and theory, says that choosing an experienced mentor who may be rough around the edges can be like taking cough medicine.

“It tastes awful, but it works,” she says. “Sometimes you really do need the skill set, and sometimes the nice person is not going to give it to you.”

For the full story, see:

Cheryl Winokur Munk. “People Want Mentors Who Are Their Cheerleaders. That May Not Be Wise.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 15, 2020): R6.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 14, 2020, and has the title “People Like Their Mentors to Be Cheerleaders. That May Be a Mistake.”)

The March 2020 paper mentioned above is:

Hur, Julia D., Rachel L. Ruttan, and Catherine T. Shea. “The Unexpected Power of Positivity: Predictions Versus Decisions About Advisor Selection.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (published online in advance of print on March 16, 2020).

Excellence Achieved by “Deliberate Practice” That Is Critiqued by Tough Expert Teachers

(p. A12) Dr. Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argued that sustained practice was far more important than any innate advantages in determining who reaches the top in athletic, artistic and other fields.

That practice, however, couldn’t be mindless repetition. He called for “deliberate practice,” preferably guided by an expert teacher, focused on identifying and correcting weaknesses and monitoring progress. If you were enjoying the practice, it probably wasn’t working.

Dr. Ericsson’s research gained prominence with the publication of “Outliers,” a 2008 book by Malcolm Gladwell. Drawing loosely on Dr. Ericsson’s findings, Mr. Gladwell proclaimed “the 10,000-Hour Rule,” to denote the typical amount of practice time needed to master certain skills, such as playing the violin at an elite level. Dr. Ericsson later wrote that Mr. Gladwell’s rule oversimplified the relevant research.

. . .

He was comfortable in an office surrounded by mounds of books and papers that appeared to have been arranged by a tornado.

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Professor Studied Habits Of World-Class Experts.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 27, 2020): A12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date June 25, 2020, and the title “Professor Studied How Elite Performers Reach the Top.”)

The Gladwell book that made highlighted Ericcson’s research, is:

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.

Many Men “in the West” View Mask-Wearing to Be “a Sign of Weakness”

(p. A4) As countries begin to reopen their economies, face masks, an essential tool for slowing the spread of coronavirus, are struggling to gain acceptance in the West. One culprit: Governments and their scientific advisers.

Researchers and politicians who advocate simple cloth or paper masks as cheap and effective protection against the spread of Covid-19, say the early cacophony in official advice over their use—as well as deeper cultural factors—has hampered masks’ general adoption.

There is widespread scientific and medical consensus that face masks are a key part of the public policy response for tackling the pandemic. While only medical-grade N95 masks can filter tiny viral particles and prevent catching the virus, medical experts say even handmade or cheap surgical masks can block the droplets emitted by speaking, coughing and sneezing, making it harder for an infected wearer to spread the virus.

. . .

Male vanity . . . appears to be a powerful factor in rejecting masks. A study by Middlesex University London, U.K., and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif., found that more men than women agreed that wearing a mask is “shameful, not cool, a sign of weakness, and a stigma.”

For the full story, see:

Bojan Pancevski, Jason Douglas. “Mask-Wearing Still Meets Resistance.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 29, 2020): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 29, 2020, and has the title “Masks Could Help Stop Coronavirus. So Why Are They Still Controversial?”)