Tagged: Psychology
Biology and risk taking
Cleaning more book notes out of my Google Drive files…
Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a useful complement to Misbehaving and Thinking Fast and Slow. The author started out as a derivatives trader, then changed their career to neuroscience bringing unique personal perspective to the well worn path of studying how humans can act irrationality in financial markets and life.
Thinking Fast and Slow is a somewhat pendantic and rambling summary of groundbreaking research. Misbehaving is a humorous summary of the development of behavioral economics. Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a more personal story, with emphasis on dealing with risk and stress. All three are worth reading.
Written on the temple of Delphi was the maxim “know thyself” and today that increasingly knowing your biochemistry.
Brain-Body Connection
Probably the most valuable part of the book is a discussion of mind-body connection in the context of dealing with risk.
Category divide between body and mind, runs deep in western philosophy. This idea:
originated with Pythagoras, who needed the idea of immortal soul for his doctrine of reincarnation, but the idea of a mind-body split awas cast in its most durable form by Plato, who claimed that within our decaying flesh there flickers a spark of divinity, being an eternal and rational soul. The idea was subsequently taken up by St. Paul and enthroned as Christian dogma. It was a very edict also enthroned as a philosophical conundrum later known as the mind-body problem; and physicists such as Rene Descartes, a devout Catholic and committed scientist, wrestled with the problem of how this disembodied mind could interact with the physical body, eventually coming up with the memorable image of a ghost in a machine, watching and giving orders.
Today Platonic dualism as the doctrine is called is widely disputed within philosophy and mostly ignored in neuroscience, but there is one unlikely place where a vision of the rational mind and pure as anything contemplated by Plato or Descartes still lingers- and that is in economics.
Author argues that this platonic dualism has impaired ability to understand financial markets. Need to study how people react to volatile markets. For too long people have ignored brain body feedback.
Book goes on to discuss crazy behavior of traders, bankers, and the idiotic decision they made. Not original, but well worth reading, and the author puts a unique spin on it.
A couple other related ideas:
- Neocortex gave us reading, writing philosophy. Making tools throwing spears etc.
- Another brain region outgrew neocortex- cerebellum like a separate brain acting as operating system for rest of brain.
We may be gifted with considerable rational powers, but to solve a problem with them we must first be able to narrow down the potentially limitless amount of information, options and consequences. We face a tricky problem of limiting our search and to solve it we rely on emotions and gut feelings.
See also- Cialdini’s Law of Data Smog.
“Somatic Market Hypothesis”
Each event we store in memory comes bookmarked with the bodily sensations…. Called somatic markets we felt at time of living through it at our first time, and these help us decide what to do when we find ourselves in similar situations. These bookmarkers basically help us sort through options. Somatic markers help rational brain function.
Moving towards stress adaptation
Some scientists study stress and response too it. Chronic stress leads to illness, learned helplessness. Short lived bursts of stress, in contrast, cause people to emerge hardier. Can be verified with lab rats. Well known for anyone building muscle mass or aerobic capacity.
Humans are built to move, so we should. The more research emerges on physical exercise, the more we find that its benefits extend far beyond our muscles and cardiovascular systems. Exercise expands the productive capacity of our amine-producing cells, helping to inoculate us against anxiety, stress, depression and learned helplessness.It also floods our brains with what are called growth factors, and these keep existing neurons young and new neurons growing – some scientists call these growth factor brain fertilizer- so our brains are strengthened against stress and aging. A well -designed regime of physical exercise can be a boot camp for the brain.
Fatigue and focus
I once had a coach who told me “rest is a part of training. ” Similarly, one of the top performing hedge fund managers I know sleeps 9 hours a night, and is obsessed with importance of rest.
A recently developed model in neurosciences provides an alternative explanation of fatigue. According to this model, fatigue should be understood as a signal our body and brain use to inform us that than expected return from our current activity has dropped below its metabolic cost. The brain quietly searches for the optimal allocation of attentional and metabolic resources and fatigue is one way it communicates its results. If we are engaged in some form of search and have not turned up any results, our brain, through the languages o fatigue and distractibility tells us we are wasting our time and encourages us to look elsewhere. The cure for fatigues, according to this account, is not rest, it is a fresh task. Support form this idea comes from data showing that overtime work in itself does not in itself lead to work-related illness such as hypertension and heart disease, these occur mainly if workers have no control over allocation of their attention. Applying such a model could benefit workers and management alike, for more flexibility in choosing what to work on, and when, could reduce worker fatigues, while management might be delighted to find that workers may be just as refreshed by a new assignment as by a vacation. This model of fatigue provides a good example of how understanding a bodily signal can alter the way we deal with it.
Only complaint about Hour Between Dog and Wolf is it probably could have been a long form article- I suspect the book publisher wanted to fill it out. Still worth taking a look though. Hour Between Dog and Wolf provides a useful framework for anyone who has a high stakes job that requires stamina.
See also:
Askeladden Capital on Sleep/Rest/Chronotypes Mental Model
Askeladden Capital’s review of Misbehaving
Optimizing An Organized Mind
How can one maximize mental performance? The Organized Mind- Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload by Daniel Levitin is a book that works towards an answer to this question. The book’s ideas on offloading things to external systems and organizational techniques are very similar to David Allen’s , Getting Things Done . However, The Organized Mind, provides much more historical and scientific background an context. Further, An Organized Mind avoids being overly prescriptive, and instead gives the reader ideas on how to best optimize for their own situation.
Some of my highlights on the key themes of the book:
Getting the mind into the right mode
One useful framework that the books develops is hte idea of the mind as functioning in different modes. An important component of high performance is the ability to use the right mode at the right time.
There are four components in the human attention system: the mind-wandering mode, the central executive mode, the attention filter, and the attention switch, which directs neural and metabolic resources among the mind-wandering, stay-on-task, or vigilance modes.
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Remember that the mind-wandering mode and the central executive work in opposition and are mutually exclusive states; they’re like the little devil and angel standing on opposite shoulders, each trying to tempt you. While you’re working on one project, the mind-wandering devil starts thinking of all the other things going on in your life and tries to distract you. Such is the power of this task-negative network that those thoughts will churn around in your brain until you deal with them somehow. Writing them down gets them out of your head, clearing your brain of the clutter that is interfering with being able to focus on what you want to focus on. As Allen notes, “Your mind will remind you of all kinds of things when you can do.
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The task-negative or mind-wandering mode is responsible for generating much useful information, but so much of it comes at the wrong time.
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Creativity involves the skillful integration of this time-stopping daydreaming mode and the time-monitoring central executive mode.
Insights into how human memory works
The book delineates the nuances of human memory by comparing it to systems in the physical world.
Being able to access any memory regardless of where it is stored is what computer scientists call random access. DVDs and hard drives work this way; videotapes do not. You can jump to any spot in a movie on a DVD or hard drive by “pointing” at it. But to get to a particular point in a videotape, you need to go through every previous point first (sequential access). Our ability to randomly access our memory from multiple cues is especially powerful. Computer scientists call it relational memory. You may have heard of relational databases— that’s effectively what human memory is.
Having relational memory means that if I want to get you to think of a fire truck, I can induce the memory in many different ways. I might make the sound of a siren, or give you a verbal description (“ a large red truck with ladders on the side that typically responds to a certain kind of emergency”).
This feature can lead to either valuable insights or being overwhelmed, depending on how it is controlled:
If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of activations can cause competition among different nodes, leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get through to consciousness, and you end up with nothing.
Categorization is key to mental functioning.
This ability to recognize diversity and organize it into categories is a biological reality that is absolutely essential to the organized human mind.”
Shift burdens to external systems
You might say categorizing and externalizing our memory enables us to balance the yin of our wandering thoughts with the yang of our focused execution.
Practical Philosophy: Finding Time for Deep Work
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
Cal Newport defines Deep Work
Cal Newport quotes A.G. Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy who wrote in The Intellectual Life
Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure.
Winifred Gallagher concludes in the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
1) The Monastic Philosophy
This is available to a limited pool of people, mainly tenured professors, and successful authors. Examples include computer scientist Donald Knuth and science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who both go to extreme lengths to eliminate shallow tasks and communication.
2) The Bimodal Philosophy
Practically speaking, this is about taking a proper holiday, or carefully blocking off certain days for different kinds of work. It need not be long. Carl Jung, on several key occasions in the 1920s retreated to a house in the woods in order to work on writing, but spent most of his time to living a very active social life in Zurich. Adam Grant, a famous business school professor is, is very active with university responsibilities most of the time, but when working on a book, he’ll cut himself off from most office communication for 2-4 day periods.
3) The Rhythmic Philosophy
This is perhaps the most practical method for most people. Basically, it means creating a simple regular habit of deep work. Combine a simple scheduling heuristic, and an easy way to keep track.
One suggested method is to get up 90 minutes earlier and spend the extra time on deep work(this happens to be the method used by yours truly to get more reading/writing/coding done )
4) The Journalistic Philosophy
This seems like it could be combined with the rhythmic philosophy. In essence it means getting deep work in whenever you can fit it. It does require strong attention discipline(but like muscles, this can be trained). Walter Isaacson managed to write his first 800+ page book while working full time as a journalist using this method. (us mere mortal can use noise cancelling headphones as an aid in applying the journalistic philosophy of deep work)
Newport also offers two suggestions for ramping up the amount of deep work one does.
- Beware of distractions and looping. This is when the brain wanders into unrelated issues when it should be focused on a critical task. Newport used the example of when his brain would rehash preliminary results over and over again when he was trying to work on a proof.
- Structure deep thinking. Identify relevant variables, define the specific next step questions, and once it is solved , consolidate the gains by reviewing the identified answer. Approach problem solving methodically.
Cialdini’s Law of Data Smog
In the classic book Influence
“Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process information is likely to be increasingly inadequate to handle the surfeit of change, choice, and challenge that is characteristic of modern life. More and more frequently we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals, – with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment. “ Influence
One of the thirteen laws of Data Smog
“In the electronic age, a good lie well-told can zip around th world and back in a matter of seconds while the truth is trapped, buried under a filing cabinet full of statistics.” –Data Smog
Cialdini’s follow up book, Pre-Suasion
“…(1)what is more accessible in the mind becomes more probable in action, and (2)accessibility is influenced by the informational cues around us, and our raw associations to them….
… In addition to its time-challenged character, other aspects of modern life undermine our ability (and motivation) to think in a fully reasoned way about even important decisions. The sheer amount of information today can be overwhelming- its complexity befuddling, its relentlessness depleting, its range distracting, and its prospects agitating. Couple those culprits with with the concentration-disrupting alerts of devices nearly everyone now carries to deliver that input, and careful assessments role as a ready decision-making corrective becomes sorely diminished. Thus a communicator who channels attention to a particular concept in order to heighten audience receptivity to a forthcoming message- via the focus-based, automatic, crudely associative mechanisms of pre-suasion- won’t have to worry much about the tactics being defeated by deliberation. The calvary of deep analysis will rarely arrive to reverse the outcome because it will rarely be summoned.” –Pre-Suasion
Summon the calvalry of deep analysis
What can one do about this?” Hueristics are necessary to function in the modern world, but they must be examined from time to time. The calvary of deep analysis must be summoned for big decisions. Cialdini also recommends forceful counters assault. Recognize the tricks being employed are often enough to blunt their force, but in other cases it may be necessary to aggressively fight against the tricks. These books are a great place to start.
Ockham's Notebook 