Psychology – Page 35 – artdiamondblog.com

Successful Billionaire Mathematician Would Have Lost Math Contests, But Was Good at Slow Pondering

(p. D1) James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.
But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.
He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”
After that, he was fired.
His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you.
. . .
(p. D2) “I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world,” Dr. Simons said of his youthful math enthusiasms. “I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.”

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM J. BROAD. “Seeker, Doer, Giver, Ponderer; A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of Ferocious Curiosity.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 8, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 7, 2014.)

Perceptual Diversity Puzzle: Is It White-and-Gold or Blue-and-Black?

“The dress in a photo from Caitlin McNeill’s Tumblr site.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) The mother of the bride wore white and gold. Or was it blue and black?

From a photograph of the dress the bride posted online, there was broad disagreement. A few days after the wedding last weekend on the Scottish island of Colonsay, a member of the wedding band was so frustrated by the lack of consensus that she posted a picture of the dress on Tumblr, and asked her followers for feedback.
“I was just looking for an answer because it was messing with my head,” said Caitlin McNeill, a 21-year-old singer and guitarist.
. . .
Less than a half-hour after Ms. McNeil’s original Tumblr post, Buzzfeed posted a poll: “What Colors Are This Dress?” As of Friday afternoon, it had (p. B5) been viewed more than 28 million times. (White and gold was winning handily.)
. . .
Politicians were eager to stake out their positions. “I know three things,” wrote Senator Christopher Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, on Twitter. “1) the ACA works; 2) climate change is real; 3) that dress is gold and white.”
Sorry, senator. The dress, as we all now know, is blue and black. It goes for 50 pounds at Roman Originals, a British retailer.
. . .
Various theories were floated about why the dress looks different to different people. (No, if you see the darker hues of blue and black it doesn’t mean that you are depressed.)
Duje Tadin, associate professor for brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, says it may be because of variations in the number of photoreceptors called cones in the retina that perceive the color blue. The human eye has about six million cones that are sensitive to green, red or blue. Signals from the cones go to the brain, which interprets them as color.
“It’s puzzling,” conceded Dr. Tadin. “When it comes to color, blue is always the weird one. We have the fewest number of blue cones.” He added, “If you don’t have very many blue cones, you may see it as white, or if you have plenty of blue cones, you may see more blue.”
. . .
The one thing scientists could agree on was that this is a very unusual illusion. People who see the dress one way do not eventually begin to see it the other way, as is common with many optical illusions. “This clearly has to do with individual differences in how we perceive the world,” said Dr. Tadin. “There’s something about this particular image that just captures those differences in a remarkable way.

For the full story, see:
JONATHAN MAHLER. “The Dress That Melted the Internet.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 28, 2015): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 27, 2015, and has the title “The White and Gold (No, Blue and Black!) Dress That Melted the Internet.”)

Machiavelli Experienced “Flow” Writing The Prince

(p. 8) “Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are,” Machiavelli wrote in “The Prince.”
. . .
After the reveling, back in his study at a heavy desk much like the one in Palazzo Vecchio, he would spend the evening on the work that would come to define him. “For four hours,” he wrote, “I feel no boredom, I forget every worry, I don’t dread poverty, nor has death any terrors for me.”

For the full story, see:
ONDINE COHANE. “Footsteps; Following the Rise and Fall of Machiavelli.” The New York Times, Travel Section (Sun., DEC. 7, 2014): 8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 4, 2014, and has the title “Footsteps; In Tuscany, Following the Rise and Fall of Machiavelli.”.)

Machiavelli’s classic is:
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1992 (based on a translation first published in 1910).

Conscientiousness and Openness Matter More than Intelligence

(p. 2) In a 2014 paper, the Australian psychology professor Arthur E. Poropat cites research showing that both conscientiousness (which he defines as a tendency to be “diligent, dutiful and hardworking”) and openness (characterized by qualities like creativity and curiosity) are more highly correlated with student performance than intelligence is. And, he notes, ratings of students’ personalities by outside observers — teachers, for instance — are even more strongly linked with academic success than the way students rate themselves. The strength of the personality-performance link is good news, he writes, because “personality has been demonstrated to change over time to a far greater extent than intelligence.”

For the full commentary, see:
ANNA NORTH. “Should Schools Teach Personality?” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JANUARY 11, 2015): 2.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JANUARY 10, 2015.)

Relevant articles by Poropat are:
Poropat, Arthur E. “A Meta-Analysis of the Five-Factor Model of Personality and Academic Performance.” Psychological Bulletin 135, no. 2 (March 2009): 322-38.
Poropat, Arthur E. “Other-Rated Personality and Academic Performance: Evidence and Implications.” Learning and Individual Differences 34 (August 2014): 24-32.

Former Nebraskan Writes that Football Breaks the Soul

(p. C1) The poet Erin Belieu was born in Nebraska. It’s a place where, she once wrote,

football is to life what sleep deprivation is

to Amnesty International, that is,
the best researched and the most effective method
of breaking a soul.

Ms. Belieu got out, soul entirely unbroken. She’s spent the past two decades composing smart and nettling books of poems, beginning with “Infanta” (1995), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Hayden Carruth. I’ve admired her three previous books, but her new one, “Slant Six,” seems to me better by an order of magnitude. It’s got more smoke, more confidence, more wit and less tolerance for obscurity. Her crisp free verse has as many subcurrents as a magnetic field.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “From a Slim Book, Many Observations.” The New York Times Book Review (Weds., DEC. 10, 2014): C1 & C4.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date DEC. 9, 2014, and has the title “From a Slim Book, Many Observations.” The name of the interviewer, presumably the author of the italicized passage above, is not given in either the online or print versions.)

The book under review is:
Belieu, Erin. Slant Six. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2014.

Stalin Was “a People Person”

(p. 12) In “Stalin. Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” a masterly account that is the first of a projected three-volume study, Kotkin paints a portrait of an autodidact, an astute thinker, “a people person” with “surpassing organizational abilities; a mammoth appetite for work; a strategic mind and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SIEGEL. “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., NOV. 30, 2014): 12.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date NOV. 26, 2014, and has the title “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.”)

The book under review is:
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

“It Is the Individual Who Is the Agent of the Action”

(p. C6) Mr. Mischel begins by describing how, in the late 1960s, he and his colleagues devised a straightforward experiment to measure self-control at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University. In its simplest form, children between the ages of 4 and 6 were given a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes. Some kids ate the marshmallow right away, but most would engage in unintentionally hilarious attempts to overcome temptation.
. . . About a third of the original subjects, the researchers reported, deferred gratification long enough to get the second treat.
. . . in 2006, . . . Mr. Mischel published a new paper in the prestigious journal Psychological Science. The researchers had done a follow-up study with the students they had tested 40 years before, examining the sort of adults they had grown into. They found that the children who were able to delay gratification had higher SAT scores entering college, higher grade-point averages at the end of college and made more money after college. Perhaps not surprisingly, they also tended to have a lower body-mass index.
. . .
In his commencement address, Adm. McRaven explained his final life lesson with an anecdote: “In SEAL training there is a bell,” he explained. “A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit–is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT–and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. Just ring the bell.” To ring the bell is to give up.
Interestingly, one of Mr. Mischel’s lesser-known marshmallow experiments had a similar setup, with a bell that the children could ring to call back the experimenter and save them from themselves. For the children, though, ringing the bell was not giving up but calling in the cavalry. His book is an encouraging reminder that, despite all the factors that urge us to indulge, “at the end of that causal chain, it is the individual who is the agent of the action and decides when to ring the bell.” You are ultimately in control of your self.

For the full review, see:
MICHAEL SHERMER. “Willpower and Won’t Power; To resist the tempting treat, kids looked away, squirmed, sang or simply pretended to take a bite.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 20, 2014): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 19, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘The Marshmallow Test’ by Walter Mischel; To resist the tempting treat, kids looked away, squirmed, sang or simply pretended to take a bite.”)

The book under review is:
Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

Successful Discoverers “Follow the Evidence Wherever It Leads”

(p. 314) Why are particular people able to seize on such opportunities and say, “I’ve stumbled upon a solution. What’s the problem?” Typically, such people are not constrained by an overly focused or dogmatic mindset. In contrast, those with a firmly held set of preconceptions are less likely to be distracted by an unexpected or contradictory observation, and yet it is exactly such things that lead to the blessing of serendipitous discovery.
Serendipitous discoverers have certain traits in common. They have a passionate intensity. They insist on trying to see beyond their own and others’ expectations and resist any pressure that would close off investigation. Successful medical discoverers let nothing stand in their way. They break through, sidestep, or ignore any obstacle or objection to their chosen course, which is simply to follow the evidence wherever it leads. They have no patience with dogma of any kind.
The only things successful discoverers do not dismiss out of hand are contradictory–and perhaps serendipitously valuable–facts. They painstakingly examine every aspect of uncomfortable facts until they understand how they fit with other facts. Far from being cavalier about method, serendipitous discoverers subject their evidence and suppositions to the most rigorous methods they can find. They do not run from uncertainty, but see it as the raw material from which new scientific and medical certainties can be wrought.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Resilience of Ordinary People Matters Most in Early Stages of Crisis

(p. A11) Throughout “The Resilience Dividend,” Ms. Rodin pays particular attention to the influence that ordinary people can have in a crisis, especially in the early stages, when it may not be clear what has happened and the professionals haven’t had time to put a plan into place. In the minutes after Boston Marathon bombing last year, citizens rushed forward to help the injured. In New York City on 9/11, hundreds of privately owned boats carried thousands of stranded commuters off the island of Manhattan and across the Hudson River to New Jersey.

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “BOOKSHELF; Never Waste a Crisis; How was the city of Medellín transformed from the murder capital of South America into a thriving urban center? Escalators.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 21, 2014): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 20, 2014.)

The book being reviewed is:
Rodin, Judith. The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.

Loewi Proved a Slow Hunch after 17 Years

(p. 243) Loewi had long been interested in the problem of neurotransmission and believed that the agent was likely a chemical substance and not an electrical impulse, as previously thought, but he was unable to find a way to test the idea. It lay dormant in his mind for seventeen years. In a dream in 1921, on the night before Easter Sunday, he envisioned an experiment to prove this. Loewi awoke from the dream and, by his own account, “jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper.” Upon awakening in the morning, he was terribly distressed: “I was unable to decipher the scrawl.”
The next night, at three o’clock, the idea returned. This time he got up, dressed, and started a laboratory experiment.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

“People Don’t Like Open Plans”

(p. A1) Originally conceived in 1950s Germany, the open-plan office has migrated from tech start-ups to advertising agencies, architecture firms and even city governments. Now it has reached what is perhaps its most unlikely frontier yet: book publishing.
Few industries seem as uniquely ill suited to the concept. The process of acquiring, editing and publishing books is rife with moments requiring privacy and quiet concentration. There are the sensitive negotiations with agents; the wooing of prospective authors; the poring over of manuscripts.
. . .
(p. B6) Even as the walls of America’s workplaces continue to come crashing down, leaving only a handful of holdouts — like corporate law firms — a number of recent studies have been critical of the effects of open-plan offices on both the productivity and happiness of cube dwellers.
“The evidence against open-plan offices is mounting,” said Nikil Saval, the author of “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.” “The idea is that these offices encourage collaboration and serendipitous encounters. But there’s not a lot of evidence behind these claims. Whereas there is a lot of evidence that people don’t like open plans.”
The notion of cookie-cutter cubicles is especially anathema to a certain breed of editors who see themselves more as men and women of letters than they do as businesspeople.
“It’s a world of words that we’re working towards, not an intellectual sweatshop,” said Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and an opponent of open-plan offices.
For book editors, offices provide more than just privacy. They like to fill the bookcases inside with titles that they’ve published, making for a kind of literary trophy case to impress visitors.

For the full story, see:
JONATHAN MAHLER. “Cubicles Rise in a Brave New World of Publishing.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 10, 2014): A1 & B6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 9, 2014, and has the title “Climate Tools Seek to Bend Nature’s Path.”)

The Saval book is:
Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014.