Transport for London have combined two of my favourite things: safety for cyclists and classic Psychology experiments. The website dothetest.co.uk provides a test of awareness that Mind Hacks fans will instantly recognise as an updated (urbanised!) version of Hack #41: "Make Things Invisible Simply by Concentrating (on Something Else)". Fantastic!
Link to the awareness test here
Link to a previous post on mindhacks.com discussing inattentional blindness
Cognitive Daily has just published a great write-up and demonstration of a study that illustrates how self-control is an energy intensive process that puts a big drain on the body's glucose levels.
The article tackles a recent study [pdf] led by psychologist Matthew Gailliot that found that exercising self-control in either conversations or in lab tasks reduces blood glucose levels.
The researchers also found that initial glucose levels can predict how well people do on these tasks and that self-control can be temporarily boosted by giving people a sugary drink.
Cognitive Daily's have recreated one of the lab tasks. Go and check it out, it's an excellent demonstration. It makes the task wonderfully clear but also illustrates how even such simple self-control tasks are so difficult.
This sort of 'self-control' is heavily linked to attention - in part, the ability to focus yourself on one particular thing and not get drawn into perceptual or emotional distractions.
This study doesn't tackle brain function, but another recent paper by Gailliot [pdf] does link these findings to what we know about the neuropsychology of 'self-control'.
This ability is particularly associated with the frontal lobes, which are known to play a key role in inhibiting inappropriate responses.
You can see control break down in interesting ways after frontal lobe damage, which can often lead to a range of impulsive behaviours.
For example, patients with damage to this area might display utilisation behaviour, where they are unable to resist carrying out actions presented by their environment.
The affected person might be unable to walk past a door without trying to open it or sit in front of a coffee cup without sipping it, even when they know it's too hot to drink.
What's interesting, is that as the CogDaily article illustrates, we seem to have a mild form of this when we are low on energy or fatigued.
It's interesting to speculate that the reason we get 'snappy' when tired is because we're less able to control the emotions sparked by small annoyances.
Link to great CogDaily article on self control (try the demo!).
Psychologists have often wondered whether attention and consciousness are the same thing. Can we only be conscious of things we pay attention to? And can we attend to things we're not conscious of?
A paper [pdf] published last year suggests that they are, in fact, separate mental processes.
William James, one of the founder of modern psychology, wrote that "everyone knows what attention is" when trying to define it.
Similarly, as neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has pointed out, scientists often rely on a 'we all know what we're talking about, don't we?' definition of consciousness.
It turns out that attention is easier to define that consciousness, and in psychology it generally refers to the preferential processing of one source of information over another.
This can be measured experimentally because it's possible to see how experience of one thing affects performance on another task, even if the person isn't aware of experiencing anything in the first place.
We described an example of this last week, in a study that found that people could make accurate beauty judgements for faces presented so quickly they didn't consciously recognise them.
This study, and many others on 'implicit' or 'subliminal' perception, demonstrate that people can attend to something without being conscious of it.
Being conscious of something we haven't attended to, and where attention is nearly absent, is a bit more tricky.
The paper, by cognitive scientists Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya, suggests that getting 'gist' impressions might be one example.
Experiments show that when photographs are unexpectedly flashed up in front of participants for no more than 30ms, they don't have time to focus on any part of it, but can report a general gist or summary of the image.
Consciousness and attention have also been shown to have opposite effects in some instances.
When participants try to find two embedded images within a rapidly flashed stream of pictures, they often fail to see the second image - an effect known as 'attentional blink'.
However, one study [pdf] found that distracting people during this task, actually made them better at it, they were more likely to consciously detect the second image.
Reducing their attention to the task seemed to increase their conscious awareness.
The Koch and Tsuchiya paper has many more examples if you're interested in trying to untangle these closely related processes.
pdf of 'Attention and Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes' (via SciCon).
Like lots of people who sit in front of a computer all day, I am addicted to email. This worries me for two reasons. The first is the sheer strength of my compulsion. I must hit the 'get mail' button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don't have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I'm not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am suppossed to be doing. When I come back to my office it's the first thing I do. If I'm prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.
This is all rather sad, but the second reason I am worried by my email addiction is that I work in a psychology department and we're supposed to understand how these things work. Now email isn't a drug - it doesn't deliver a chemical into your bloodstream. Yet it is clearly addictive. I'm a normal rational person (which is to say I'm just normally maladjusted) and I know that I don't need to check my email as often as it do - certainly not immediately after checking it the first time for Goodness' sake! - but still I am compelled. What's going on, and can psychological science help me out?
Read more below the fold
So, I think I've got an idea of what's going on with email, and if I'm right it should provide some clues as to how I can stop myself being so addicted. The key is what psychologists call 'operant conditioning'. This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century. Many lab animals, and many person-hours, were recruited to help understand exactly how rewards and punishments could be arranged to influence behaviour. One suprising finding is that if you want to train an animal to do something, consistently rewarding that behaviour isn't the best way. The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There's a logic to this. Although we might know that we've stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the behaviour and not getting the reward. Because 'next time' might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there's never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether.
We're animals - we have animal brains. All animal brains have the circuitry in place for producing operant conditioning. It's a fundamental psychological process, and just the sort that can create behaviours what operate automatically, or in spite of our consciously telling ourselves we should do otherwise. Like me checking my checking my email. Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.
I have just proved to myself how automatic my email checking behaviour has become. I am writing this in a hotel room which doesn't have internet access. When sorting through my email (you don't need a connection to delete email you've replied to, or are never going to reply to) I still hit the 'check mail' button at the rest points of the read-consider-delete cycle I am performing. My reflective self knows that there is no internet connection, so there is no way in hell I'm going to have new email - but that knowledge doesn't filter down to the part of me hitting the 'check email' button. The habit, engrained in my mind by operant conditioning, is isolated from conscious knowledge, and in part from deliberate control; it can start without me thinking about it or even me wanting it to.
If operant condition is at the root of the problem, what's the solution? Over a hundred years of experimental psychology has provided a rigorous characterisation of behavioural conditioning, and of the process by which reinforced behaviours disappear - known as extinction. By looking at each stage of the process by which a behaviour becomes conditioned, we can throw up ideas for addressing the problem of 'unconditioning' them.
If a behaviour isn't rewarded then it will gradually disappear. The problem is that we don't want to remove the reward (email), so we need, instead, to weaken the strength of the link between the action and the reward. A simple delay would do this - imagine a five minute delay between hitting the check email button and getting new email. A delay is doubly-effective because the longer the delay the more likely you are to have email and so the more consistent the reward will be - and hence the less strong its reinforcing effect (I can see this is action when I go away for a week and check my email when I come back. I might have hundreds of emails, but there's often nothing that seems very interesting. The combined effect just isn't as rewarding as the anticipation of getting one hundred single emails). In theory, the opposite end of this 'consistency strategy' would be to check email constantly. If you check your email every second then the consistency of the reward increases - you consistently get nothing! The action-habit might extinguish because the action is now rewarded so infrequently relative to the number of times it is performed. How to do this practically? Have your inbox constantly visable, so that there is no jump from wondering if you have new mail/seeing a 'new mail' alert and knowing that it isn't that important (although a down side is that if the new email is intrinsically distracting - such as a good joke, hot piece of gossip or invite out - it will now definitely interrupt when it arrives).
Removing the action all together, so that you cannot demand an email check, doesn't solve the problem - we just move the association from the action of hitting 'check mail' to the action of opening your email client to see if there is any mail there. One strategy is to wait 30 seconds from the appearance of the alert before checking to see what kind of mail has arrived - if you can internalise the delay.
Automatic behaviours such as email are contingent on environmental triggers - they need the right circumstance to become active, since they aren't invoked by a smart, deliberate consicous process. So one way to decrease email checking behaviour might be to decrease the association between stimuli and the action. Moving or removing the 'check mail' button will stop it hijacking your action-stream when it is in your field of view. Similarly, so will stopping email alerts all together, but it leaves you with the problem of wondering what is going on while you're attention is on another app (are you missing out on some important information?). Changing the consistency of the environmental trigger could work. If the 'new mail' appeared slowly, so it didn't grab your attention, was in a different place each time, or was a different shape/colour/icon then your low-level monitoring systems wouldn't be able to form an association between its appearence and automatically triggering the 'check mail' interrupt habit. When you wanted to check your email you could scan for the icon - it could still be perfectly obvious, but the lack of consistent appearence would prevent it getting wired into a direct channel in your brain.
I don't think the solution is social - getting people to never email you urgent information wouldn't work. There would always be invites for coffee that someone didn't feel like knocking on your door or phoning you to make, but which they'd still like you to know about (and you'd still like to know, so you'll be checking your email for them). Plus there'll always be important information which isn't urgent, but which we're still going to want to know as soon as it is available (look at news - it rarely has any immediate consequence for our daily lives, but checking it is how many of us start the day).
A classical approach to changing habits is to shift the cost-benefit pay-off. If checking or reading email is made harder to do, mayhbe we can increase the cost of the action and hence make the overall reward of getting email less. More difficult interfaces maybe? Several screens to click through to get the email? Passwords and 'are you sure' dialogue boxes? Punishment is the ultimate ingredient that you can add to alter the pay-off matrix. Except for those of us with immense self-disicipline ("if i check email in the next hour, no coffee at lunchtime") self-imposed punishment isn't an obvious strategy (and are those with self-discipline likely to have a problem with getting distracted anyway?).
[Although, on reflection, I don't think this question is as rhetorical as it sounds here. The problem is not with your ability to deliberately schedule and implement actions (including actions such as self-punishments), the problem is with automatically evoked actions (i.e. checking email) and then getting distracted by the consequences. These are two types of actions and it is entirely conceivable that they might be differently ammeanable to the deliberate control of our reflective selves]
A final strategy, and one that is used in animal training to remove problem behaviours, is to reinforce an alternative, incompatible action. If you have a problem with your pet eagle landing on your head the most efficient way to stop it is to reward landing on a mat at your feet, rather than struggle with extinguishing head-landing. What this would mean in the context of email checking I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
So, what I'm really interested in is in seeing what people think. If some of what I've said makes sense, what other ways are there to use it to make email less addictive? Or maybe I've got the solution completely wrong. Or the problem? I'd like to hear either way
Some things I read while writing this follow (thanks to Marc Baizman for the Katie Hafner article in the NYT)
Andrew Brown on why the internet-addiction will be like alcoholism for this generation of writers
'Husband training', New York Times article about using behaviourist principles in your marriage
February 10, 2005 New York Times, You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention by Katie Hafner (designing interfaces that work with our attention, rather than distract)
Most of the time it feels as though our perception of the world is based on what’s out there, what psychologists call ‘stimulus-driven’ or ‘bottom up’ processing. But in reality, our perceptual experience is a seamless mixture of both what really is out in the world and what we expect to be out there (so-called ‘top down’ or ‘concept-driven’ processing). Tom gave an elegant example of this in a recent post, describing how so many people hadn’t noticed the erroneous use of the word ‘conservations’ in the Mind Hacks book, when it should have said ‘conversations’ – in this case readers saw what they expected, not what was written.
I was struck by a couple of similar examples in recent visits to the gym. On the first occasion I’d just finished on the running machine where I have to really crank up my MP3 player volume to drown out the loud music played over the public speakers. When I sat down in the far quieter weights section, the volume on my headphones suddenly felt painfully loud in this quieter environment, and so I quickly jabbed the volume down a few notches. I felt such a relief as the music gradually softened and my eardrums were saved. It was only much later that I realised my MP3 player’s controls were in the lock position – I hadn’t turned the volume down at all. My expectations had overridden the true information arriving at my senses.
On my next visit I proudly grabbed two 14kg (don’t laugh!) dumbbells for some bicep curls. I’d worked up to this weight over recent months and considered it my limit. I was pumping away but my left arm was really struggling, which I put down to it being my weaker arm. Still, I persevered and did my usual number of reps. It was only when I went to replace the dumbbells that I saw the weight in my left arm was 18kg! – someone had put the weights in the wrong places… Well, I thought, maybe I’ve not been pushing myself enough, but no, later on when I went to try out some curls with 18kg weights, it was hopeless: when I ‘knew’ what the weight was it ‘felt’ too heavy!
Anyone got some other examples?
It's good to try some of the ideas in Mind Hacks on real-world problems. We have a piece up on the O'Reilly Network today, using visual attention concepts to comment on Flickr's Daily Zeitgeist toy. Photos continually fade in and shrink down on a grid of pictures--what does this mean, from the perspective of change blindness and the attention-grabbing nature of rapid movements?
Read the full article for more: Paying Attention (or Not) to the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist.
(To situate this in the book, we're making use of "Blind to Change" [Hack #40] for not noticing the photos fading in, "Grab Attention" [Hack #37] for noticing them shrink, and "Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision" [Hack #17] for not being able to see where the photo has shrunk to because your eyes are in motion as it does so. See the book's table of contents for which chapters these are in.)
