Psychology – Page 36 – artdiamondblog.com

“Long, Lonely Odyssey “from Heresy to Orthodoxy””

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. D5) As the Nobel committee put it in the 1997 citation for Dr. Prusiner’s prize in physiology or medicine, he had established “a novel principle of infection” — one so controversial that a few experts in the field still continue to search for that elusive virus. But as far as Dr. Prusiner is concerned, the Nobel confirmed that his long, lonely odyssey “from heresy to orthodoxy” was over.

The journey he details was full of hurdles. Some were of the kind likely to befall any researcher: insufficient laboratory space, poor correlation between needs and resources. (At one point, Dr. Prusiner calculated that for a single year’s worth of experiments he would have to house and feed 72,000 mice, an impossible multimillion-dollar proposition.) He submitted a grant application that was not just rejected for funding but actually “disapproved,” often the kiss of death for a train of scientific thought.
Some of his problems were a little darker but still universal — graduate students captured by competing labs, data appropriated and misrepresented by erstwhile colleagues, bitter authorship battles.
Some of Dr. Prusiner’s shoals, however, seem more particular to his personal operating style. As a teenager he was blessed with what he describes as indefatigable self-confidence, and this trait apparently endures, to the considerable irritation of others.

For the full review, see:
ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. “Books; A Victory Lap for a Heretical Neurologist.” The New York Times (Sat., May 20, 2014): D5.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 19, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Prusiner, Stanley B. Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions–a New Biological Principle of Disease. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Rickenbacker Wasn’t the Best Pilot or the Best Shot “but He Could Put More Holes in a Target that Was Shooting Back”

Source of book image: http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9781250033772.jpg

(p. C6) With his unpolished manners, Rickenbacker encountered a good deal of arrogance from the privileged sons of Harvard and Yale, but after he had downed his first five enemies, criticism ceased. About Rickenbacker’s killer instinct his colleague Reed McKinley Chambers had this to say: “Eddie wasn’t the best pilot in the world. He could not put as many holes in a target that was being towed as I could, but he could put more holes in a target that was shooting back at him than I could.”

For the full review, see:
HENRIK BERING. “Daring Done Deliberately.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 31, 2014): C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 30, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘Enduring Courage’ by John F. Ross.”)

The book under review is:
Ross, John F. Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2014.

Psychological Theorizing Based on False Facts

Source of book image:
http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/k/kitty-genovese/9780393239287_custom-113f9b45a7b76ac664f82c62c6604fd07d7ad5f9-s6-c30.jpg

(p. C7) The Kitty Genovese myth has turned out to be as enduring an urban legend as the tale of alligators prowling the New York sewers. In March 1964 the young Queens bar manager was stabbed to death at three in the morning outside her Kew Gardens apartment while 38 neighbors watched from their windows and did nothing to save her–or so the tale has gone for the past half-century.

In fact, hardly anything about the Genovese story is what it first appeared to be, although it has calcified into a metaphor of urban alienation and prompted research into a psychological phenomenon that has come to be known as the “Genovese syndrome.” As Kevin Cook writes in his heavily padded but provocative new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America,” the tale is as much about the alchemy of journalism as urban pathology.
. . .
. . . , as it turns out, only a few neighbors understood the attack for what it was and failed to respond.
. . .
Journalism is a blunt instrument, and allowances must be made. Even so, it’s plain that the original story was more hype than first draft of history.

For the full review, see:
EDWARD KOSNER. “BOOKS; What the Neighbors Didn’t See; A woman was stabbed and raped steps from her door. Did no one call the police?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 1, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 28, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Kitty Genovese’ by Kevin Cook; A woman was stabbed and raped steps from her door. Did no one call the police?”)

The book under review is:
Cook, Kevin. Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014.

Edison’s Goal Was Not Philanthropy, But to Make Useful Inventions that Sold

(p. 163) . . . , Edison had declared publicly that his inventions should be judged only on the basis of commercial success. This had come about when a reporter for the New York World had asked him a battery of questions that threw him off balance: “What is your object in life? What are you living for? (p. 164) What do you want?” Edison reacted as if he’d been punched in the stomach, or so the writer described the effect with exaggerated drama. First, Edison scanned the ceiling of the room for answers, then looked out the window through the rain. Finally, he said he had never thought of these questions “just that way.” He paused again, then said he could not give an exact answer other than this: “I guess all I want now is to have a big laboratory” for making useful inventions. “There isn’t a bit of philanthropy in it,” he explained. “Anything that won’t sell I don’t want to invent, because anything that won’t sell hasn’t reached the acme of success. Its sale is proof of its utility, and utility is success.”
He had been put on the spot by the reporter, and had reflexively given the marketplace the power to define the meaning of his own life.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)

Edison Was Too Frugal to Buy a Yacht

(p. 148) Edison spent the weeks preceding his first Chautauqua visit at the Gillilands’ to get comfortable with the new version of himself that he was trying on: a gregarious bon vivant, uninterested in work, filling summer days with frivolous entertainments such as boat rides, card games, and a variation of Truth or Dare for middle-aged participants. He seriously considered buying a yacht, before he came to the realization that his self-transformation was still incomplete–he recognized that he still lacked the ability to disregard the frightful expense.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Solitary Swimming Helps Creativity and Problem-Solving

(p. 5) Ms. Nyad has spent a lifetime in the water, chasing an elusive mark in marathon swimming, and she has written about the exhilarating out-of-body experience she has when powering through long distances. The medium makes it necessary to unplug; the blunting of the senses by water encourages internal retreat. Though we don’t all reach nirvana when we swim, swimming may well be that last refuge from connectivity — and, for some, the only way to find the solitary self.
. . .
For better or worse, the mind wanders: We are left alone with our thoughts, wherever they may take us. A lot of creative thinking happens when we’re not actively aware of it. A recent Carnegie Mellon study shows that to make good decisions, our brains need every bit of that room to meander. Other research has found that problem-solving tends to come most easily when our minds are unfocused, and while we’re exercising. The neurologist Oliver Sacks has written books in his head while swimming. “Theories and stories would construct themselves in my mind as I swam to and fro, or round and round Lake Jeff,” he writes in the essay “Water Babies.” Five hundred lengths in a pool were never boring or monotonous; instead, Dr. Sacks writes, “swimming gave me a sort of joy, a sense of well-being so extreme that it became at times a sort of ecstasy.” The body is engaged in full physical movement, but the mind itself floats, untethered. Beyond this, he adds, “there is all the symbolism of swimming — its imaginative resonances, its mythic potentials.”
Dr. Sacks describes a sublime state that is accessible to all, from his father, with his “great whalelike bulk,” who swam daily and elegantly until 94 years of age, to the very young. . . .
. . .
I asked Dara Torres, who has logged countless training hours for her five Olympics, what she thinks about when she’s swimming. “I’m always doing five things at once,” she told me by phone (at the time, she was driving a car). “So when I get in the water, I think about all the things that I have to do. But sometimes I go into a state — I don’t really think about anything.” The important thing, she says, is that the time is yours. “You can use it for anything. It depends where your head is at — it’s a reflection of where you are.”
The reflection of where you are: in essence, a status update to you, and only you. The experience is egalitarian. You don’t have to be a great swimmer to appreciate the benefits of sensory solitude and the equilibrium the water can bring.

For the full commentary, see:
Justin Gillis. “BY DEGREES; Freezing Out the Bigger Picture.” The New York Times (Tues., FEB. 11, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date FEB. 10, 2014.)

If Lack of Focus and Poverty Go Together, Which Is the Cause and Which the Effect?

Source of book image: http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/BF860CC7-371A-46BB-8ACCECD4289565A8.jpg

Are the poor poor partly because they concentrate less, or do they concentrate less partly because they are poor? Samantha Power discusses one of her favorite books of 2013:

(p. C11) In “Scarcity,” Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir offer groundbreaking insights into, among other themes, the effects of poverty on (p. C12) cognition and our ability to make choices about our lives. The authors persuasively show that the mental space–or “bandwidth”–of the poor is so consumed with making ends meet that they may be more likely to lose concentration while on a job or less likely to take medication on time.

For the full article, see:
“12 Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends–from April Bloomfield to Mike Tyson–to name their favorite books of 2013.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 14, 2013): C6 & C9-C12.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 13, 2013.)

The book that Power praises is:
Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. New York: Times Books, 2013.

Sleep Is a Dishwasher that Cleans Toxic Proteins from the Brain

(p. E8) . . . a . . . recent finding published in Science magazine suggests that sleep cleans the brain of toxic proteins “like a dishwasher,” as one of the study’s authors put it.

For the full commentary, see:
MOLLY YOUNG. “Tapping Into a Goodnight.” The New York Times (Thurs., MARCH 6, 2014): E8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 5, 2014.)

The Science article mentioned above is:
Xie, Lulu, Kang Hongyi, Xu Qiwu, Michael J. Chen, Liao Yonghong, Meenakshisundaram Thiyagarajan, John O’Donnell, Daniel J. Christensen, Charles Nicholson, Jeffrey J. Iliff, Takano Takahiro, Rashid Deane, and Maiken Nedergaard. “Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain.” Science 342, no. 6156 (Oct. 18, 2013): 373-77.

“Babies Are Smarter than You Think”

Source of book image: http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_296w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/12/19/Outlook/Images/booksonbooks0031387485124.jpg

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discusses a favorite book of 2013:

(p. C11) . . . , babies are smarter than you think, and their cognitive and moral lives, revealed by ingenious experimental techniques, show that fairness, empathy and punitive sentiments have deep roots in human development. Paul Bloom’s “Just Babies” illuminates this research with intellectual rigor and a graceful, easygoing style.

For the full article, see:
“12 Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends–from April Bloomfield to Mike Tyson–to name their favorite books of 2013.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 14, 2013): C6 & C9-C12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 13, 2013.)

The book that Pinker praises is:
Bloom, Paul. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown Publishers, 2013.

Hope for “a Morality that Maximizes Human Flourishing”

Source of book image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6zEBTa23QDo/UtsQ6rZTkoI/AAAAAAAACdI/lAdUEZDMyaQ/s1600/Moral+Tribes.png

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discusses a favorite book of 2013:

(p. C11) “Moral Tribes,” by Joshua Greene, explains the fascinating new field of moral neuroscience: what happens in our brains when we make moral judgments and how ancient impulses can warp our ethical intuitions. With the help of the parts of the brain that can engage in careful reasoning, the world’s peoples can find common ethical ground in a morality that maximizes human flourishing and minimizes suffering.

The book that Pinker praises is:
Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013.

Aging Brains May Be Slower Because They Have More Data to Search Through

(p. D3) In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.
Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.
“What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,” the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, “fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.”
. . .
Scientists who study thinking and memory often make a broad distinction between “fluid” and “crystallized” intelligence. The former includes short-term memory, like holding a phone number in mind, analytical reasoning, and the ability to tune out distractions, like ambient conversation. The latter is accumulated knowledge, vocabulary and expertise.
“In essence, what Ramscar’s group is arguing is that an increase in crystallized intelligence can account for a decrease in fluid intelligence,” said Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University. In a variety of experiments, Dr. Hambrick and Timothy A. Salthouse of the University of Virginia have shown that crystallized knowledge (as measured by New York Times crosswords, for example) climbs sharply between ages 20 and 50 and then plateaus, even as the fluid kind (like analytical reasoning) is dropping steadily — by more than 50 percent between ages 20 and 70 in some studies. “To know for sure whether the one affects the other, ideally we’d need to see it in human studies over time,” Dr. Hambrick said.

For the full commentary, see:
BENEDICT CAREY. “MIND; Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind.” The New York Times (Tues., JANUARY 28, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JANUARY 27, 2014, and has the title “MIND; The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind.”)

The Ramscar article mentioned above is:
Ramscar, Michael, Peter Hendrix, Cyrus Shaoul, Petar Milin, and Harald Baayen. “The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning.” Topics in Cognitive Science 6, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 5-42.

One of the papers by Hambrick and Salthouse that discusses crystallized knowledge is:
Hambrick, David Z., and Timothy A. Salthouse. “Predictors of Crossword Puzzle Proficiency and Moderators of Age-Cognition Relations.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, General 128, no. 2 (June 1999): 131-64.