Stages of Grief

Stages of Grief 

People grieve all over the world. They generally reserve their deepest mourning mostly for the same thing: the death of a loved one. Grief is powerful.

In her book “On Death and Dying”, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross examined what people go through when they discover that they have a terminal disorder. She said that they went through stages of grief. The named of theses stages have become part of the public conversation about grief:

• Denial: This is the first stage, when a person first hears about their disorder and pretty much refuses to believe it.
• Anger: This is the stage when it begins to sink in that the person is terminal, and it really makes them angry.
• Bargaining: This is when people try to negotiate their way out of the bad news. The bargaining can be directed at God, usually an attempt to stave off the inevitable.
• Depression: This is when the person understand that there's nothing he or she can do – nothing will stop the bad stuff from coming.
• Acceptance: This final stage is mostly an emotional white flag. It's often accompanied by a feeling of peace, however bittersweet it may be.

Not everyone experiences all five stages when they grieve – nor does everyone go through the stages in the described order when the stages were present. Some people flit between one stage and another, moving back and forth between them.

Kubler-Ross, more than anyone else, has put our grief responses to death and dying into the public discourse. That includes the research world, and because of that, we owe her a great debt. However she published her book in 1969, a time when our understanding of how the brain works was much more primitive that it is now.

Almost everybody suffers memory loss with aging. Almost everybody suffers from something we call refocusing problems with aging. There are ways to slow down the cognitive decline -or, better, to substantially delay the inevitable. Social interactions and exercise can slow the natural erosion of the aging brain.

 Sadly, memories are susceptible to degradation with time. A cemetary. Photo by Elena.

Happiness and Its Absence

Happiness and Its Absence

Nature is hardly the whole story regarding happiness, of course. Psychologist Martin Seligman says that set ranges are only part of the story – that a great deal of happiness includes environmental factors and choices that are completely under your control.

What research says makes you happy can be summarized in two sentences: Relationships make you happy. Money does not. One of the most potent surefire ways to sustain happiness in your life has to do with relating to other people – for example, cultivating and maintaining lots of friends. The more friends you have in your life, and the more you interact with them, the happier you are statistically likely to be.

Another aspect that science knows about making people happy is the amount of time people spend seeking out how to make other people happy. One of the greatest predictors of happiness turns out to be how outwardly focused you are on the needs of others, including volunteering and doing charity work. People who give out of the abundance of their heart are at lower risk for depression. They seem to receive as much as they give.

One counterintuitive idea concerns what does not make you happy: money. Pas a certain amount of income – enough to keep you our of poverty – more money doesn't make you statistically much happier. Millionaires are not substantially happier than even the lower middle class.

The absence of happiness is depression. Depression is serious; it can be life threatening. At its core, depression is an unusually negative reaction life. But it's not just feelings of being blue, which might occur, for example, after a divorce. And it's not just bereavement, which might occur, for example, after a death. Those are all normal reactions to life's hard events – not depression.

Depression involves a profound change in mood that explicitly affects a person's ability to function. There is often a chronic hopelessness associated with it. This type of hopelessness, which is described by an idea called learned helplessness theory, is usually accompanied by other changes in behaviors.

Sometimes, stress is our enemy. Some other times, stress responses are our evolutionary friends. Photo by Elena.

If you go down the depression road, you not only feel hopeless, but you also feel different. Your sleep habits often change; you either start getting too much or not enough. Your eating habits become altered. You lose the ability to focus and to make decisions. You quit enjoying things that used to bring you a tremendous amount of happiness. A hallmark is a loss of interest in sex.

Depression affects many people. About 17 percent of all Americans will experience it at some time in their lives. It also skews in the direction of gender. Upward of about 25 percent of all females experience depression (that statistic is an overall lifetime risk); upward of about 10 percent of all males will.

Depression also afflicts people in different ways. About 40 percent of anybody who suffers a major depressive illness do so exactly once, recover from it, and never get it again. About 50 percent of people who suffer a major depressive illness don't get that luxury: It will recur again after a period of recovery. About 10 percent of the people get depressed and never recover. This is called chronic depression.

There is a severity issue to contend with as well. Some people get severely depressed. Some people don't experience depression but deal regularly with something called dysthymia, which is a low-level depression that tends to stay with you for years. You wake up in the morning and are immediately persuaded that life sucks, and that low-level blue mood follows you throughout the day.

Dysthymia is not as intense as depression, but it is a mood disorder. And it's not all that uncommon. About 2.5 percent of all Americans will suffer from dysthymia at some point in their lives.

Both depression and dysthymia are opposites of happiness. The interesting thing about depression is that these days it is very treatable. Taking advantage of mental health services if you are depressed is about the smartest thing you can do.

The biological origins of depression have been under investigation for decades, but it has yielded its secrets only grudgingly. We know that some types of depression involve an aberrant balance in the concentrations of neurotransmitters between specific neuronal circuits – specifically, their reuptake, which is where one neuron spits out a bevy of neurotransmitters to its neighbor during signal transfer. 

Reuptake is recycling. It's the process whereby neurotransmitters return to their origin. A change in the balance of this trafficking is thought to undergird the disorder. Depression is often called a chemical imbalance, in part because of this insight.

Progress is certainly being made. We've tried to learn about depression by examining closely the molecular mechanisms of the of the most prescribed classes of drugs: antidepressants. There are many kinds of antidepressants. One of the most popular classes of antidepressants is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). They appear to be inhibiting the reuptake process and, in so doing, make some people's moods substantially better.

There are many mysteries regarding what antidepressants may or may not reveal about the disorder. First, many antidepressants take a long time to exert their therapeutic effects. Six weeks is not unusual. Second, they don't work for everybody. A person often has to go through several antidepressant medications, or several concentrations of a single medication, before he or she arrives at an effective dose.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

There are many practices known to reduce stress in the vast majority of people, from deep-breathing exercises to progressive muscle relaxation. Photo by Elena.

PERMA

PERMA

Many scientists have researched what sustains subjective well-being over years of life. Martin Seligman has codified his research, as well as findings from others, int a five-letter acrostic: PERMA, which stand for the five foundational elements people need to be experiencing to maximize their Subjective Well-Being (SWB):

Positive Emotion: To keep the dogs of depression away, you need to be regularly experiencing positive feelings and emotions, including pleasure, gratitude for the good things in your life, and hopefulness for the future. People with sustained SWB have a willingness to enjoy the present for its own sake.

Engagement: You should be regularly involved in meaningful activities, including feeling lost in a project. It should be so meaningful that you lose track of time, of where you are, and even of who you are.

Relationships: You should have many positive relationships with family and friends and be regularly interacting with them. Having many relationships is a powerful bulwark against depression.

Meaning: This is the argument to be in constant service to something that is larger than you are, including God, a cause, an idea, or a charity – something that continually forces you out of your own experiences and into the experiences of others. There is actually a prosocial twinge to this idea: Doing good for people by serving something larger than you is another way of doing good for yourself.

Accomplishment or achievement: The idea is to achieve some goal, creating a mastery over some skill in the service of that goal – something achievable so that a sense of accomplishment is explicitly experienced. Running a marathon, especially if you've never done before, is a good example. But this category is not asking you to burn yourself out; it is simply an appeal not to be listless or unfocused, both of which are often experienced by depressed people.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Though not as severe as depression, dysthymia can stay with you for years and is still considered a mood disorder. Photo by Elena.

Happiness

What Makes You Happy?

What is the mysterious substance of happiness? What is happiness to the human brain? What are characteristics and definitions of happiness? What makes people happy and what happens when it is absent and depression comes? What makes most of us happy over the long term?

Definitions and Nature/Nurture

What exactly does it mean to be happy? How do you distinguish it from contentment, satisfaction, or even pleasure? The truth is that we don't know. The words may all be describing something similar. That's another way of saying that semantic differences aren't necessarily biological ones. Words like “contentment” and “satisfaction” are separable phenomenon only if you don't look too closely, with “pleasure” probably having the most unique distinguishing characteristics from the happy pack.

The one characteristic that holds up well regardless of how you define happiness is that everybody seems to experience it differently. The concept is so dependent on individual experience that researches have come up with a different name; the word “happiness” is not generally used. More common are the words “subjective well-being” (SWB).

How does one define happiness in scientifically meaningful fashion? Doing so requires a great deal of asking people about their feelings. This is called self-report. Admittedly, basing research on self-report is not ideal because the data is not always reliable. There are researchers who think it's doable, though – and they get the definitions.

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand, amongst other things, you own intellectual and emotional landscape. Photo of an Icelandic volcanic stone by Elena.

One such researcher is psychologist Ed Diener, who describes SWB as “people's cognitive and affective evaluations of their lives.” Diener has used this definition in a courageous attempt to codify the experience across the United States, th around the world, despite stout intellectual headwinds.

Diener created a test where you can score your happiness and compare your scores to other people's scores from all around the world. It's called the satisfaction with life scale, originally published in the “Journal of Personality Assessment”. You can find this instrument online. There are many variables that go into your subjective sense of well-being, so tests like these have to be taken with a grain of salt. As usual, there are both nature and nurture issues to consider.

A thermostat is a perfect metaphor for the nature side of happiness. Some psychologists believe that we are born with a happiness set point, or set range, like a thermostat in a home. If your happiness is normally high, but then your girlfriend breaks up with you, you will be down for a while.

But at some point your set range gets violated, your feelings get too “low”, and your mood alarm goes off. As a result, you turn on some SWB heat. Eventually, you return to your natural happiness temperature. If your happiness is too “high” - for example, if you win the lottery – the system works in reverse, eventually turning on some SWB air-conditioning. You return eventually to the same happiness you had before winning.

Happiness set points are conceived by some researchers as being more or less a permanent feature of your personality. That means that your set range is in part biologically determined – genetic, perhaps – which means that it's mostly concerned with how well you chose your parents.

There is evidence to suggest that these some psychologists might be on to something. Studies of twins reveal that the SWB scores are experienced alike, regardless of the environment in which the twins are raised.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Our intelligence is a form of self-awareness, whereby you understand your assets and limitations, your strengths and weaknesses. Photo by Elena.

The Brain

The Brain

What happens to specific regions in the brain when you feel anger and fear? Before you became angry and fearful, you had to determine if there was something to be angry and fearful, you had to determine if there was something to be angry and fearful about. This is the evaluation, appraisal, step, mediated in part by higher regions of the brain and in part by the amygdala.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped part of a larger complex called the limbic system. It looks like a small scorpion stuck in the middle of your head. The claws of this scorpion are the amygdalae. You have two amygdalae embedded into your brain, one on the left and one on the right.

The amygdala is the region most responsible for tagging a given sensory input with an emotional message. The amygdala helps generate emotional experiences and also helps in remembering them. It does this mostly unconsciously, out of sight of our awareness. Those talented claws take input from all five senses and return to the brain the beginnings of what may be a memorable emotional reaction.

When you experience anger and fear, signals are sent deep into your brain's interior, arriving at the thalamus, that egg-shaped structure in the middle of your brain that sits on the back of the scorpion. The signal is sent down two neural paths simultaneously once the thalamus is finished with it. One path goes directly to the amygdala, via a highway LeDoux calls the fast path. That may be the emotion part and mostly lies out of your awareness. But not for long.

The second signal is shuttled to the cortical regions necessary for you to consciously process your anger and fear. After visiting the cortex, those signals are routed back at the amygdala. That may be the feeling part – but because it has to visit more brain regions, it's a much slower signal. Not surprisingly, LeDoux calls it the slow pathway.

Emotions and their accompanying feelings have deep survival benefits. Illustration by Elena.

Because the fast pathway is obviously faster than the slow pathway, you may begin responding emotionally to something you see before you're consciously aware of even looking at it. But the emotion will be there when you do, thanks in large part to your amygdala.

This doubly stimulated almond is not alone in processing emotional responses. As the amygdala understands the meaning what you're seeing, it starts alerting some of its neurological neighbors. One neighbor that gets a lot of attention is the hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus lies beneath the thalamus. It's small and thin – only about one-tenth of an inch thick. But don't let its small size fool you. The hypothalamus is also involved in handling the big emotions processed by the rest of the brain, from feelings of stress to feelings of hunger. You can artificially stimulate it and derive feelings of pleasure. You may even feel like projecting your genes into the next generation.

The hypothalamus is not just for romantic and sexual pleasure, though. If you get into a fighting mood as you view something that makes you angry or afraid, you can blame that on the hypothalamus, too. It also controls body temperature, so if your blood begins to boil, you'll know why.

Many regions of the brain are involved as you generate emotional responses. Some of these regions, such as the hypothalamus, alert the rest of the body that some kind of important deliberations are occurring and it had better pay attention.

Many of those bodily processes create chemicals and electric signals that go back to the brain, forming feedback loops. These loops inform the brain about the body's reactions, which in turn modifies the brain's experience of emotions and feelings – and even the behaviors that flow from them. That's why the brain and body are both the cause and effect of emotion, settling the controversy, or at least providing nuance to it.

Many regions of the brain are involved when experiencing anger and fear. Illustration by Elena.

Relationship between the Brain and Body

Relationship between the Brain and Body

Many attempts have been made to explain the relationship between the brain, body, and emotion, with great disagreement. One theory seeking to explain this relationship is called the James-Lange theory of emotion. The James of this duo is a reference to the famous William James of the 19th century.

The James-Lange theory says that an emotionally competent stimulus is detected first, and that triggers physiological responses. Those responses then feed back into the brain, producing the emotions and feelings we experience.

A cornerstone idea of this theory is that different stimuli elicit different bodily states. Specific emotions are experienced from the interpretations of these various states. What we feel depend of what our bodies are telling us.

Another duo of researchers in the early part of the 20th century put forth what became the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. They argue that emotions couldn't just be a reaction to what is going on in the body, and for two reasons. First, our physiological responses are just too slow. You can consciously feel some things instantly, and then your body catches up (blushing is a good example).

The second reason comes from data a little more startling. Research eventually showed that arousals were remarkably similar from one stimulus to the next, even opposing stimuli. For example, feelings of pleasure ignite similar physiological responses as feelings of stress do.

Given these contradictions, Cannon-Bard came up with another idea. They stated that an emotionally competent stimulus triggers some physiological bodily response while simultaneously triggering other activity in the brain. Different feelings then arise because of differing interpretations of similar aroused bodily responses. Your brain has to make an inference from other sources before the emotion is identified.

These days, the controversy has come to something of a truce, mostly because we have more data. Both theories have elements that were shown to be correct over the years, and both have elements that weren't.

This is all understandable. The real view turns out to be confusing. We now know that brain and body are both the cause and the effect of emotions and feelings. They work together to create the experiences, establishing an equilibrium – a bidrectionality.

A negative stimulus might be realizing that you're falling off a cliff. Photo by Elena.

Emotions, Feelings, Appraisals

Emotions, Feelings, and Appraisals

It should be a fairly easy task to define what an emotion is You've felt dozens of them every day, from minor irritations to experiences that made you smile. Anecdotally, we are very familiar with emotions. But only anecdotally. It's an untrustworthy rope that ties the anecdotal to the neurological. You need go no further than the English language to show how difficult anecdotal experiences are to characterize.

For example, take the basic word “emotions” and try to separate it from the word “feelings.” Are both of these different from the word “motivation”? What about the word “drive”? Or “appraisal”? Are the emotions of love different from the feelings of hunger for example? How are these related to survival drives?

Certainly, context matters. There have been many attempts to settle these definitional issues – but they still haven't been settled.

Some researchers do not believe in the concept of emotions at all, except at the obscure anecdotal level. To them, what we call emotions are simply patterns of electrical stimulation involving specific neural networks recruited for some survival purpose.Different patterns accomplish different things, but they're just patterns of activity. To them, distinctions between our feeling worlds and our thinking worlds are artificial.

According to Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, “emotions are automatic, largely unconscious behavioral and cognitive responses triggered when the brain detects a positively or negatively charged significant stimulus.” A positive stimulus might be realizing that you're falling in love. A negative stimulus might be realizing that you're falling off a cliff.

“Feelings are the conscious perceptions of emotional responses,” say Damasio and LeDoux. You become aware of various emotional responses your body and brain are cooking up in reaction to some stimulus. That awareness plus emotion equals feelings. This not the entirety of the data; it may not be the most accurate. The relationship between brain and body and the experience of emotions is fraught with controversy.

Another concept is that of evaluation, or appraisal, in emotional processing. From the appraisal comes the emotion, and then the feeling. It's a chain. However, not everybody agrees with that chain.

You do not see with your eyes; you see with your brain. Photo by Elena.

The Darker Side of Pleasure

The Darker Side of Pleasure

The cargo is the famous molecule dopamine. The nucleus accumbens uses dopamine to mediate its electrical signaling to the VTA. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. In fact, it's one of the excitatory neurotransmitters – that is, its function stimulates nerve cells into action (as opposed to inhibiting them).

Dopamine follows the normal course of any neurotransmitter. The presynaptic cell releases dopamine into the synaptic cleft. The dopamine travels across the clef to the neighboring postsynaptic cell, where it binds to a receptor, stimulating it into action. The dopamine is released. It ends up back in its neural origin in a process known as reuptake.

Dopamine is involved in a bewildering number of behaviors. The neurotransmitter is involved in learning and memory formation. It's also involved in emotional arousal, and feeling pain and motor activity.

Its deregulation can have severe consequences. If you make too much of it, you may get schizophrenia. This idea is known as the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia. On the other hand, dopamine deficiencies in specific areas of the brain cause Parkinson's disease. In addition to its function of mediating pleasure, it's also involved in the ability to coordinate muscle movement.

One of its most insidious functions is the role it plays in addictive behaviour – and how powerfully we can be drawn to pleasure when overstimulated. This toxic effect can be illustrated by one of the most heart-breakingly familiar experiments in all of brain science. It was first designed in the lab of James Olds.

The basic design of the experiments is as follows. Tiny metal electrodes were inserted into the nucleus accumbens of a lab rat, allowing the region to be stimulated electrically. The electrode apparatus was connected to a bar in the cage. Every time the animal pressed the bar, electricity flowed through the electrode, stimulating the nucleus accumbens. Because the region mediates pleasure, every time the rat pressed the lever, the animal experienced pleasure.

Text to the brain is simply a complicated picture. Illustration by Elena.

This landmark study provided many great insights into the addictive side of pleasure. The nucleus accumbens electrically stimulates the VTA via dopamine, the molecular cargo. As a result, you feel pleasure. If you stimulate it too much, really bad things can happen. Chief amongst these is the experience of addiction.

Put simply, addiction is the state of behavioral dependence on a chemical substance or activity. Some behaviors, such as an addiction to gambling, show the same hallmarks of addictive behavior.

They even involve some of the same neurological processes as chemical addictions. The following are the tree main hallmarks of addictive behavior:

1. Craving: The most obvious characteristic of addiction is an intense craving for a substance often after casual use. In the case of crack cocaine, the high comes very quickly, a high so pleasurable that most people want more of the drug as soon as the high subsides, which is soon, because the high only lasts a few minutes. Cravings set in within the first hour after ingestion. As the days and weeks go by, you consume more of it in an attempt to repeat the initial buzz.
2. Tolerance : Tolerance is defined as a reduction over time of the ability of a drug's “regular“ dosage to get you high. After a while, you have to take more of the drug to get a buzz. The high becomes less and less intense, so you begin consuming more of the drug, attempting to reestablish the pleasure. Eventually, the drug no longer gets you high. You have to take it just to feel normal, just to function, and to avoid the third characteristic of addictive behavior: withdrawal.
3. Withdrawal symptoms. The drug's most insidious characteristic comes from the fact that, over time, your body switches from pleasure seeking to aversion avoidance. You begin to experience withdrawal if you can't ingest the drug. Now you're not looking to the drug for a buzz; you're looking to the drug for survival. In the case of cocaine, you can become depressed (even suicidal), fatigued, hostile, anxious, paranoid, violent, homicidal, and equipped with such a craving to get more of the stuff that nothing else in life seems to matter. And when/if you finally do get more stuff, you have to take such large dosages that it can become life threatening.

Researchers have discovered, in broad outlines, the biology behind the addictive behaviors that are seen in substance abuse issues. We know the following four things:

1. We know that the VTA is deeply involved in the initial phases of setting up cocaine addiction.
2. We know that the nucleus accumbens, which the VTA targets, helps mediate the pleasure responses to the drugs.
3. We know that both regions, and the neural circuits that connect them traffic in dopamine.
4. We know that drug abuse overdrives these systems, releasing massive quantities of dopamine into their circuitry. The buzz is so powerful that you only want to get high.

The darker side of the pleasure. One of the most insidious functions of dopamine is the role it plays in addictive behavior. Photo by Elena.

Fluid Intelligence and Creativity

Fluid Intelligence and Creativity

Fluid Intelligence

One textbook defines fluid intelligence as the “ability to deal with novel problem-solving situations for which personal experience does not supply a solution. That's a pretty broad definition. It's probably made clearer by describing what it does not include.

Fluid intelligence does not rely on experience. It relies on things like inductive reasoning, abstract reasoning, and pattern matching. It deeply engages your ability to come up with unique solutions when presented with vexing stimuli. This not the realm of experience dependence. That's why the definition includes problem-solving skills.

From an evolutionary perspective, we think that these talents spring directly from the geological and meteorological instability of our East African birthplace. If we couldn't solve a problem on the spot, if we didn't have robust fluid intelligence abilities, given our biological wimpiness, we'd be dead.

Many brainteasers exercise fluid intelligence. If you're good at them, you may have strong fluid intelligence scores.

Inductive reasoning, problem solving, and pattern matching are all skills that engage the more creative aspects of our psychological selves. Exactly what does creativity mean under these conditions? How does it relate to fluid intelligence? There is a relationship between fluid intelligence and creativity; they may actually intersect at a memory system and may even be two sided of the same coin.

Creativity

Creativity may involve a balance between two cognitions on opposite sides of a catwalk. On one side, we have something called cognitive disinhibition; on the other side, we have something called latent inhibition.

Noted Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson defines cognitive disinhibition as the failure to disregard information that is irrelevant to some preestablished goal, thought process, or activity. Simply put, you choose not to remove extraneous facts from your conscious awareness, even if those facts are irrelevant to whatever goal you are trying to achieve.

One way to illustrate cognitive disinhibition is to find new uses for something. Laboratory instruments have been devised that measure it – instruments called tests of divergent thinking.

People who have unrestrained, or unrestrainable cognitive disinhibition often have a mental health issue, such as schizophrenia. Photo by Elena.

One famous example involves finding new uses for a brick. If you are not particularly creative, you might respond by explaining that it could be a paperweight or doorstop. Someone who scores high on divergent thinking tests might say that he or she would scrape the brick with sandpaper, mix the dust with water, and use the concoction to paint something.

Unfortunately, not all disinhibited responses are signs of creativity. For some people, cognitive disinhibition is a weapon of mass distraction. It results in the collapse of something we call cognitive filtering, which itself has many complex neurological processes associated with it.

On the opposite end of the catwalk is latent inhibition. Put simply, latent inhibition is the ability to block out options in pursuit of some goal, such as communicating with someone. It is a filtering system, and we use it all the time. It can even be measured in the laboratory.

If you have high latent inhibition scores, you can block out a lot of the options being offered to you in pursuit of a goal. If you have low latent inhibition scores, you become willing to entertain more and more unusual – potentially irrelevant, certainly uninhitibted – ideas. It is very possibly that these data are revealing the internal circuitry of narrow-mindedness and also the intoxicating freedom of choice.

There has been a great deal of interest in these filtering systems in the mental health community. Indeed, some researchers say that the presence of creativity and the presence of mental illness go hand in hand. Others simply say that it is a matter of perspective. 

Cognitive dishinhibition and latent inhibition reside side by side, in tension in typically functioning human beings. You don't get creativity with both. How do these relate to fluid intelligence? Where they may find common ground lies at the intersection of creativity and a memory system known as working memory, or short-term memory.

Some researchers say that the presence of creativity and the presence of mental illness go hand in hand. Illustration by Elena.

Working Memory

Working Memory

Working memory is a temporary storage, whereas long-term memory is permanent. Although they reside in one brain, they are separate systems.

British scientists Alan Baddeley has done a lot of research to characterize the many facets of working memory. He conceived of working memory as a temporary workspace, like a desktop, with lots of items on it. Working memory is a temporary storage space in your brain. Its job is to bring information into your conscious awareness and then hold it for a short period of time, usually to support some activity you have chosen to engage in.

For example, you use working memory when you decide to call someone, inserting the phone number into working memory while you punch in the number. You also use it when you are reading, holding pieces of previously exposed text in a temporary buffer while you take in new information. You use it when you are drawing things or when remembering an artistic work someone else drew.

Working memory has a number of complicated associated subsystems, according to Baddeley. There is a subsystem within working memory that mainly processes verbal information. Baddeley calls this the phonological loop neurons of working memory. There is another subsystem that mainly processes visual information, called the visual-spatial sketchpad neurons of working memory. Finally, there is a subsystem in the brain that supervises the work of the other two subsystems, called the central executive. These three components work together in a coordinated fashion to help you read text, see objects, and generally get along in life.

Some researchers believe that working memory can directly affect your fluid intelligence abilities – and for a simple reason: It determines the number of temporary variables you can hold in your head simultaneously. The bigger your capacity, the more you can hold.

This is a skill you need if you are going to attempt to pattern match, solve problems, do abstract reasoning, or use any of the cognitive gadgets that characterize fluid intelligence. Cattell and Horn believe that the many skills involved in fluid intelligence need a fairly robust desktop to function adequately. It's the same space you need to be creative.

The ideas of Cattell and Horn both require memory processing. They say that crystallized intelligence involves long-term memory systems. Fluid intelligence involves short-term memory systems.

The presence of both short-term and long-term memory is another terrific way to show that memory is not a unified concept. The concept is mature enough that we even know some of the neurological systems involved in each. We needed both to survive in the unstable world of the Serengeti.

We have many senses which work together to give us perceptions of reality. Illustration by Elena.

Evolutionary Reasons for Memory

Fallibility and the Evolutionary Reasons for Memory

A characteristic of long-term memory systems that is important to many fields, such as law enforcement and standard testing, is their relative stability or instability. Human memory is a sap that isn't always very sickly.

An example of this instability can be found in your answer to the following question: What were you doing when John Kennedy was assassinated? If you were around during that time, you probably believe that you can answer that question very accurately.

But how well is that long-term memory trace laid down during your experience of Kennedy's assassination? How about those of your friends? There's a way to test this. You could ask people to write down their activities just after some natural disaster occurred. You would then hold onto their answers for a period of time – years even – and then ask them to recall what they were doing when the disaster occurred. Your task would be to compare their years-later recollections to the responses made immediately after the dramatic event occurred.

Such research has been done. Memories of what people were doing when the space shuttle “Challenger” blew up, and during other events, have been assessed. Two consistent findings have emerged from such ghoulish research: People are very confident about the accuracy of their memories, and they are mostly wrong.

Memory degradation occurs very quickly with time, even for important memories. The 9/11 study showed that only two years after the tragedy, 55 percent of those queried were making errors in their autobiographical recollections. And it got worse with time. This was a surprise to nearly everybody who enrolled in the study. They thought that they had perfect recall of what they were doing.

The old memory no longer exists and is no longer accessible. Photo by Elena.

It's a sad fact for mots of us, but one of the first characteristics we discover about our memory traces is their susceptibility to erosion. Different types of memories efface at different rates. You easily forget 98 percent of the semantic memory content in a classroom 30 days after you've had the lecture.

Exactly how does that instability occur? Why does it occur? It all has to do with the mechanisms the brain uses to retrieve information. The interesting fact is that you have different retrieval gadgets, and you use them differentially over time.

Consider the case of semantic memory, or memory for things. When a semantic memory is first established, you are busy taking in the moment, and you can see all of the details. This doesn't require much effort. Your recall is robust.

This more stable form of recollection is sometimes called reproductive retrieval memory, because you are reproducing what you experienced on the spot. It doesn't stay stable, unfortunately. As time goes by, original pieces of the memory begin to fade. You lose small details of the memory trace and large details of the memory trace. You begin confusing information from other memory traces with the memory trace in question. The memory is eroding and getting confused.

If you want to retrieve this older memory, you are going to have do some reassembly. The old memory no longer exists or is no longer accessible. You will begin reassembling your memory from component parts as you recall strategies. We call this type of recall reconstructive retrieval memory.

Reconstructive retrieval is almost never as accurate as reproductive retrieval. Original details may get left out entirely as you attempt your reassembly. Details not in the old memory – often from other memories – may get mistakenly inserted into your reconstruction efforts. Astonishingly, you often don't recognize the error and swear they are part of the original.

As time passes, we move from reproductive memory to reconstructive memory. That's why the test subjects' 9/11 recollections failed two years out. At first, their recall was very accurate. But as time passed, the less-accurate reconstructive retrieval systems kicked in, complete with their 55 percent inaccuracy rates.

The most surprising thing about this research is out blind confidence that such a thing was not happening. But it does happen, made worse as we get older – at least for most of us. Oddly enough, the loss is uneven. Ts there something in our evolutionary history that favored retrieval systems to be unevenly fragile and increasingly inaccurate, always with limited initial capacity?

It's an inefficient design if memory is supposed to be providing us with an archive so that we can accurately remember the past. It erodes far too quickly to be a reliable library. Some researchers think that what's wrong with this explanation is not our memories but our conception of what purpose memories actually serve. Some researchers believe that we have misinterpreted the evolutionary intention of memory.

They think that our memory systems are not built to remember what happened previously so that we can remember yesterday. Instead, they are built so that we can make more accurate predictions about what might occur tomorrow. You don't need it to be photographic if you are trying to reimagine what might happen to you. Accuracy is only modestly required; you just need an approximation In this view, memory systems are gadgets for the future, not the past.

Memories vanish as time goes by. Photo by Elena.

Suggestions for Improving memory

Suggestions for Improving Memory

Researchers offer several suggestions for improving memory. Let's suppose that you have to take a test that will require you to regurgitate, at least in part, declarative information. 

• Practice overlearning. Researchers suggest that you repeat declarative information in timed intervals, over and over again until you've memorized it. And have that memorizing finished a week before you're scheduled to take the test. Seven days prior to the test, practice what researchers call oeverlearning, which means continually reexposing yourself to the information you've already memorized. Do it over and over again in spaced intervals.
• Don't pull all-nighters. A great deal of information processing occurs at night.
• Don't cram. Research also shows that regularly timed exposures stretched over a period of days creates learning far superior to cramming for an exam a day before you take it. Let's say that you only have 10 times to study for a test. The memory is much more robust if you studied once a day for 10 days rather than do 100 exposures the day, the night, the hour before you take the exam.

There are many other tricks you can use to help your brain limp past its Serengeti heritage, from doing something we call elaborative rehearsal to mnemonic strategies to using mental imagery.

If you dig down deeper into human memory, things get very complicated fast. Memory is not like a camera on a cell phone. Photo by Elena.

Anxiety Disorders and CBT

Anxiety Disorders and CBT

We need information repeated on a regular basis to memorize something solidly. It's the intimate hallmark of how we learn. It may even shed some insight on certain mental disorders commonly experienced such as anxiety disorders.

Phobias afflict many people. We believe that people who suffer from anxiety disorders such as phobias are victims of an overacting fire-together/wire-together tendency in their brains.

In the middle of the last century, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis developed a type of psychotherapy that uses this fire-together/wire-together tendency as a weapon against anxiety disorders. It's called cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The assumption behind CBT is that what you think governs what you feel.

For example, if you have a phobia of dogs, you have negative automatic thoughts about dogs (that's the thinking part), so when you see one, anxiety is generated (that's the feeling part), To have those anxious feelings go away, you first have to attack their source: your negative thinking. CBT calls this faulty thinking.

The therapy teaches you to entertain other not-so-self-defeating ways of looking at dogs. CBT does not ask you to block out the fearful feelings. You couldn't; they're wired. It does challenge you to start thinking consistently of alternative choices of viewing a tough aversive subject. You need to make it a habit.

If you successfully challenge faulty thinking on a regular basis, the faulty thinking eventually goes away. Research shows that applied consistently, the anxiety also goes away – and of its own accord,

When done consistently in the hands of a trained therapist, CBT is a potent weapon. Research shows that it's amongst the most effective therapies for anxiety disorders that exist. It's also helpful for depression and bipolar disorder, and even certain types of schizophrenia are responsive.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Genetics play a large role in determining intelligence, and both nature and nurture influence complex human behavior. We have yet to untangle the relative contributions of each to intelligence.

Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind

Symbolic reasoning is the ability to realize that one thing might actually stand for something else – that a logo, a sound or even the small pushes of a button may imply another thing entirely. Symbolic reasoning is so pervasive that it's possible to miss it. But it plays hardball with the rest of the plans. It may be the one thing that separates us from every other animal.

Symbolic reasoning is in the bones of artistic expression. It lies at the heart of advanced toolmaking. It's the brains behind mathematics. It's at the center of our language abilities, spoken or written. It's the ability to impute to something a series of characteristics that something does not intrinsically possess.

The sophistication of our symbolic reasoning may be the answer to the question of what separates us from animals. We speak uniquely because we can reason uniquely. But where did we get the ability to reason symbolically, to impute to something characteristics we cannot otherwise observe?

There is no end of speculation, but many researchers agree that social interaction is involved – perhaps as a direct result of our wimpiness. These researchers invoke something called a false belief test as an illustration.

There are many variations of the false belief test, but one is sometimes referred to as the Sally-Anne test. It shows that small children believe their perspective is everybody's perspective. After age four, however, children somehow realize that other people can have perspectives different from their own. The core cognitive gadget is that they have begun to virtualize a perception. 

The ability to understand the mental world of someone else requires the ability to virtualize, to imagine. If you can hold in your head something that isn't physically there, impute to something a series of characteristics not readily perceived, you are on the way toward uncoupling the signifier from the signified. This is the left ventricle of symbolic reasoning. Symbolic reasoning also uncouples the signifier from the signified.

This ability to understand the motivations and intentions of another person is called theory of mind. Although it's a complex concept, theory of mind has two major components: the ability to understand the rewards and punishment systems inside someone's else's head and the ability to understand the the rewards and punishment systems inside your head are not the same as another's, But that person won't react like you do; they react like they do.

Many researchers think that the false belief test measures aspects of theory of mind. Some think that theory of mind and symbolic reasoning dip their feet into the same cognitive pool.

It may seem odd, but there may be a direct link between our ability to understand each other and our ability to understand Shakespeare – and physics. Tucked into this linkage is a bombshell of an idea, an idea that has deep practical significance. It means that the things that make us human come directly from the things that make us relational.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina)

Some animals coordinate their behaviors with ease. Picture by Elena.

Long-Term Memory

Importance of Long-Term Memory

The importance of long-term memory to thought cannot be overemphasized. One of the earliest examples of its significance is still one of the best. In the 1930s, Sir Frederic Bartlett had people listen to folktales from foreign countries and later asked them to recount the stories. Not surprisingly, he found that these unfamiliar stories were not remembers very accurately. What was surprising was that the errors of recall were not random but were quite systematic. The subjects often rewrote the stories in their own minds, espcially parts that were particularly foreign to them, revising the plot to the point where it resembled a more familiar Western narrative.

To explain his findings, Bartlett proposed that “Remembering is... an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of past experiences.” He concluded that when we face a problem, we draw upon mental schemata, organized bundles of stored knowledge. For example, if you are asked a question about how baseball is played, you would draw upon a baseball schema, your collective knowledge of baseball obtained from specific direct experiences you've heard or read about baseball. Barlett's findings do not just concern the personal, idiosyncratic, and fallible nature of memory, but also emphasize how long-term memories, when retrieved into the temporary workspace of working memory, can guide our thoughts and actions, as well.

It has been known for centuries that we can only keep a few things active in our minds (in working memory) at once. George Miller, one of the pioneers in cognitive psychology, figured out, through psychological experiments, that the magic number is about seven pieces of information. Some people can hang on to eight or nine, whereas others manage only five, but, on average, temporary storage can hold about seven times. (It's probably no coincidence that telephone numbers within an area code were designed to have seven digits). But, as Miller noted, we can effectively expand that capacity by chunking or grouping information – it's about as easy to remember seven letters as seven words or ideas. No doubt one of the reasons human cognition is so powerful is because we have language in our brains, which exponentially increases the ability to categorize information, to chunk. A whole culture, for instance, can be implied by a name.

Damage to the frontal lobe interferes with the ability to plan and execute goal-directed behavior. Frontal lobes are involved in executive functions (planning, problem-solving, and behavioral control), as well as in short-term or temporary memory. Illustration by Elena.

The concept of working memory subsumes what used to be called short-term memory. But as the term workspace implies, working memory is more than just an area for temporary storage. It underlies mental work. As Minsky noted, thinking involves juggling of mental items – comparing, contrasting, judging, predicting. It is the job of the executive functions of working memory to do the juggling.

In the spirit of viewing the mind in terms of computer-like operations, some cognitive scientists like Time Shallice and Phillip Johnson-Laird have referred to executive functions as supervisory or operating system functions. A computer operation system is responsible for controlling the flow of information processing, moving information from permanent memory (ROM) to a central processing unit with active memory (RAM), scheduling tasks to performed using the active memory, and so on. Similarly, executive functions are involved in the constant updating of temporary memory, selecting which specialized systems to work with (pay attention to) at the moment, and then moving relevant information into the workspace from long term storage by retrieving specific memories or activating schemata pertinent to the immediate situation. Through executive functions, specialized systems are also directed to attend to certain specific stimuli and to ignore others, depending on what working memory is working on. In complex tasks involving multiple kinds of mental activities, executive functions plan the sequence of mental steps and schedule the participation of the different activities, switching the focus of attention between activities as needed.” Executive functions are crucially involved in decision-making, allowing you to choose between different courses of action given what is happening in the present, what you know about such situations, and what you can expect to happen if you do different things in this particular situation. Executive functions, in short, make practical thinking and reasoning possible.

The executive represents a powerful mental capacity, but is not all-powerful. Like the workspace, it has its limits. It basically can do one or at most a few things at a time, this is why you forget a phone number if you are distracted while dialing. With practice and training, we can learn to divide our attention between two mental tasks simultaneously, but only with difficulty. In this sense, the executive is more like an old-fashioned DOS operation system that can only run one program at a time than like a multitasking Windows operation system that can concurrently run word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar and other programs.

But there's also a sort of chunking that takes place in executive functions. As we've seen, the executive is involved in scheduling the sequence of steps in a complex task. Here, the executive is doing more than one thing at a time, but the things are all related to the overall goal. If the executive has to work on multiple unrelated goals at the same time, however, the system begins to fall apart, especially if the goals conflict with one another. An easy way to stress people is to make them do too much at once. Planning, decision-making, and other aspects of mental life suffer when the executive is overloaded. Working memory has come to be thought of as a function of neural circuits in the frontal lobes. 

(From Synaptic Self. How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Joseph LeDoux (author of The Emotional Brain).

Neural activity, as measured with devices such as PET and MRI scans, increases in the frontal cortex when humans perform tasks that require temporary storage and executive functions. Photograph by Elena.

Crystallized Vs. Fluid Intelligence

Crystallized versus Fluid Intelligence

The brain is a sophisticated survival organ. And, according to variable selection theory, we survived because we could adapt to rapidly changing circumstances – we adapted to change itself. What cognitive gadgets in the grain best aided our ability to survive the ever-changing environment of Northeast Africa?

A model that answers this question best is an old one, first championed by researchers Raymond Cattell and John Horn in the middle years of the 20th century. The idea that you use previous knowledge to improvise solutions to present problems lies at the heart of the ideas of Cattell and Horn.

The first category is called crystallized intelligence, which is the ability to learn from experience, constructing a database retrievable on demand. You got scorched when you put your hand on an orange-colored burner on a stove. You recall this experience the next time and see a hot stove – using your crystallized intelligence – and move away.

Crystallized intelligence is that suite of gadgets that allows you to memorize and recall. Those who could remember prior experience best might have distinct survival advantages over those who could not. Crystallized intelligence skills tend to get better as you get older.

The second category is called fluid intelligence, which is roughly the ability to improvise off the database established with your crystallized talents. You got scorched on an orange-colored burner on a stove. Now you see an orange-colored fire in a fire pit. That's not a stove, but still you stay away from it.

That's improvising: coming to conclusions in reaction to situations with which you have no direct experience. You create unique combinations from the database – in this case, solving a pattern-matching problem. Such creative, inductive problem-solving ability is the hallmark of fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence skills do not improve with age; the skills reach their maximum in your early twenties and then begin a long, slow decline. 

We obviously used both types of intelligence to survive the wild, woolly world of the meteorologically unstable Serengeti. Those people who had them working in concert, quickly absorbing the knowledge the world had to offer and then improvising off it, could adapt to changes much more quickly than those who could not.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Interpersonal intelligence is a social skill. It is the ability to understand and be sensitive to the emotions and feeling of others.

Understanding of Working Memory

Understanding of Working Memory

Our understanding of working memory owes much to the pioneering work of Alan Baddeley in the early 1970s. On the basis of his studies of short-term memory, he came to view the mind in terms of two kinds of cognitive systems: a set of specialized systems dedicated to specific mental tasks, and a general-purpose system utilized in all active thing processes.

Specialized systems come in two flavors. Verbal systems, like systems involved in speech comprehension, are mainly present in the human brain, whereas nonverbal systems are present in all brains. Nonverbal specialized systems are epitomized by sensory systems. Each is involved in processing unique kinds of stimuli (sights, sounds, smells, and so on). As part of their operation, the verbal and nonverbal specialized systems are able to retain what they've just processed for brief amounts of time (seconds.) This capacity aids in perception, allowing the system to compare what it is seeing or hearing now to what it saw or heard a moment ago. For example, when listening to a lecture, you have to hold the subject of each sentence in your mind until the verb appears, and sometimes you have to refer back to your memory of earlier sentences to figure out the referent of a pronoun.

The general-purpose system consists of a workspace and a set of mental operations called executive functions that are carried our on information held in the workspace. Although only a limited amount of information can be retained at any one time, the workspace can hold on to and interrelate information of different types from different specialized systems *the way something looks, sounds, and   smells can be associated with its location in external space and with its name). This ability to integrate information across systems allows for abstract representation of objects and events. It is especially well-developed in humans, and is likely to contribute to the uniqueness of human cognition.

The information in your working memory is what you are currently thing about or paying attention to. And because working memory is not a pure product of the here and now. It also depends on what we know and what kinds of experiences we've had in the past. In other words, it depends on long-term memory.

Synaptic Self. How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Joseph LeDoux (author of The Emotional Brain).

We forget too much and too often. Illustration by Elena.

The Mental Trilogy

The Mental Trilogy

Throughout much of history, the mind has been viewed as a trilogy, a tripartite amalgam that includes cognition, emotion, and motivation. For some, the trilogy was a description of different aspects of a single mental faculty, whereas for others, it represented three distinct, separate capacities. During most of the twentieth century. Both versions of the mental trilogy were out of favor. When the behaviorists reigned, psychology ignored the mind altogether, making the mental trilogy moot.

Later, the cognitive revolution brought the mind back to psychology, but thinking and related cognitive processes were (and for the most part still are) emphasized at the expense of emotion and motivation. Clearly, however, it is important to understand not just how we attend to, remember, or reason, but also why we attend to, remember or reason about some things rather than others. Thinking cannot be fully comprehended if emotions and motivations are ignored.

Mental Juggling

An idea, an image, a sensation, a feeling: each is an example of what psychologists call mental content – stuff that is in the mind. Mental content was the subject matter of experimental psychology when it first emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth century. But John Watson and fellow behaviorists replaced this focus on subjective states with a mind-less psychology of objectively measurable events (stimuli and responses). When the cognitive revolution later made the mind fair game again, it did not do so by reviving subjective psychology. The thinking process itself, rather than the conscious content that results from thinking, became, and largely remains, the subject matter of cognitive science.

Working memory is our inherent capacity to think. Photo by Elena.

“In order for a mind to think, it has to juggle fragments of its mental states.” This simple statement by Marvin Minsky, one of the architects of the branch of cognitive science known as artificial intelligence, gets right to the heart of the matter. Imagine, as Minsky suggests, rearranging the furniture in a room familiar to you. You shift your attention back and forth between locations. Different ideas and images come into focus, and some interrupt others. You compare and contrast alternate arrangements. You may concentrate your entire mind on a small detail one moment, and on the whole room the next. How does the mind do this juggling, and how does it keep track of the imaginary changes? The answer is that the mind uses something called working memory.

How many times have you looked up a phone number and then forgotten it after being momentarily distracted? The reason for this is that you put the number into working memory, a mental workshop that accommodates one task at a time. As soon as a new task engages working memory, the content of the old task in bumped out. For that reason, unless you keep rehearsing the phone number and manage to ignore other things that compete for your attention, it will not remain in your mind.

Working memory is one of the brain's most sophisticated capacities and is involved in all aspects of thinking and problem-solving. It allows you to read a menu and keep its various options in mind while also considering the specials announced by the waiter and the return to the thought you were having before the waiter appeared. It underlies your ability to hold a conversation, play board games like chess, or direct yourself to an unfamiliar destination on the basis of having just looked at a map. In addition to being used in such routine daily activities, working memory also contributes to special human endeavors, like composing music or solving complex mathematical problems, or any other situation in which information has to be held in mind in order to complete a task.

We must explore broad aspects of mental function, that is, to begin to assemble a neurobiological view of the self. Illustration by Elena.

Synaptic Self. How Our Brains Become Who We Are. By Joseph LeDoux (author of The Emotional Brain).