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Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others | Scientific American

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Published: 04/03/2017

Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others

Researchers provide the first evidence for a theory first put forward in the 1970s.

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Illustration by blocberry / Getty Images.

People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. After four decades, Trivers and his colleagues published the first research supporting his idea.

Psychologists have identified several ways of fooling ourselves: biased information-gathering, biased reasoning and biased recollections. Their research, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, focuses on the first—the way we seek information that supports what we want to believe and avoid that which does not.

In one experiment Trivers and his team asked 306 online participants to write a persuasive speech about a fictional man named Mark. They were told they would receive a bonus depending on how effective it was. Some were told to present Mark as likable, others were instructed to depict him as unlikable, the remaining subjects were directed to convey whatever impression they formed. To gather information about Mark, the participants watched a series of short videos, which they could stop observing at any intermission. For some viewers, most of the early videos presented Mark in a good light (recycling, returning a wallet), and they grew gradually darker (catcalling, punching a friend). For others, the videos went from dark to light.

When incentivized to present Mark as likable, people who watched the likable videos first stopped watching sooner than those who saw unlikable videos first. The former did not wait for a complete picture as long as they got the information they needed to convince themselves, and others, of Mark’s goodness. In turn, their own opinions about Mark were more positive, which led their essays about his good nature to be more convincing, as rated by other participants. (A complementary process occurred for those paid to present Mark as bad.) “What’s so interesting is that we seem to intuitively understand that if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we’ll be more effective at getting others to believe it,” says William von Hippel, a psychologist at The University of Queensland, who co-authored the study. “So we process information in a biased fashion, we convince ourselves, and we convince others. The beauty is, those are the steps Trivers outlined—and they all lined up in one study.”

In real life you are not being paid to talk about Mark but you may be selling a used car or debating a tax policy or arguing for a promotion—cases in which you benefit not from gaining and presenting an accurate picture of reality but from convincing someone of a particular point of view.

One of the most common types of self-deception is self-enhancement. Psychologists have traditionally argued we evolved to overestimate our good qualities because it makes us feel good. But feeling good on its own has no bearing on survival or reproduction. Another assertion is self-enhancement boosts motivation, leading to greater accomplishment. But if motivation were the goal, then we would have just evolved to be more motivated, without the costs of reality distortion.

Trivers argues that a glowing self-view makes others see us in the same light, leading to mating and cooperative opportunities. Supporting this argument, Cameron Anderson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, showed in 2012 that overconfident people are seen as more competent and have higher social status. “I believe there is a good possibility that self-deception evolved for the purpose of other-deception,” Anderson says.

In another study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, von Hippel and collaborators tested all three arguments together, in a longitudinal fashion. Does overconfidence in one’s self increase mental health? Motivation? Popularity?

Tracking almost 1,000 Australian high school boys for two years, the researchers found that over time, overconfidence about one’s athleticism and intelligence predicted neither better mental health nor better athletic or academic performance. Yet athletic overconfidence did predict greater popularity over time, supporting the idea that self-deception begets social advantage. (Intellectual self-enhancement may not have boosted popularity, the authors suggest, because among the teenage boys, smarts may have mattered less than sports.)

Why did it take so long for experimental evidence for Trivers’ idea to emerge? In part, he says, because he is a theorist and did not test it until he met von Hippel. Other experimental psychologists didn’t test it because the theory was not well known in psychology, von Hippel and Anderson say. Further, they suggest, most psychologists saw self-esteem or motivation as reason enough for self-enhancement to evolve.

Hugo Mercier, a researcher at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences in France who was not involved in the new studies, is familiar with the theory but questions it. He believes that in the long run overconfidence may backfire. He and others also debate whether motivated biases can strictly be called self-deception. “The whole concept is misleading,” he says. It’s not as though there is one part of us deliberately fooling another part of us that is the “self.” Trivers, von Hippel and Anderson of course disagree with Mercier on self-deception’s functionality and terminology.

Von Hippel offers two pieces of wisdom regarding self-deception: “My Machiavellian advice is this is a tool that works,” he says. “If you need to convince somebody of something, if your career or social success depends on persuasion, then the first person who needs to be [convinced] is yourself.” On the defensive side, he says, whenever anyone tries to convince you of something, think about what might be motivating that person. Even if he is not lying to you, he may be deceiving both you and himself.

 

Highway Through Hell | Pocket

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Published: 10/23/2017

Highway Through Hell

The human-smuggling route across the Sahara may have been the deadliest on Earth. Then the EU paid Niger’s army to shut it down — and made it even more treacherous.

The city of Agadez, located at the gateway to the Sahara in northern Niger, has been a place of exchange since the Middle Ages. Now it is at the heart of the human-smuggling trade. Photo by Aldo Pavan / Getty Images.

AGADEZ, Niger — Ali leaned into the accelerator and squinted into the darkness. It was 3 a.m. on the southern edge of the Sahara, still another three days’ drive through dizzying heat and shifting sand dunes to get to the border with Libya. He was doing 60 miles per hour with the headlights off, maneuvering the black Toyota Hilux around steep ravines and past rocky outcroppings by starlight in order to avoid detection. In the back, 25 Europe-bound migrants, all of them from Nigeria, clung to each other and to a handful of wooden poles that were wedged into the open bed of the truck.

A solemn 33-year-old with stained teeth and heavy bags under his eyes, Ali had made the perilous trip to Libya more than 100 times before — but never by this route. A few months prior, after Niger’s government struck a deal with the European Union to shut down one of the world’s most heavily trafficked human-smuggling routes, the army had begun intercepting convoys of migrants. The soldiers arrested the drivers and impounded their trucks. Sometimes, Ali and other drivers said, they opened fire on vehicles that tried to flee, aiming for tires but hitting people as well. So the drivers stopped using the main road across the desert, a well-worn national route that runs more than 600 miles to the Libyan border, and forged their own paths across the vast and uninhabited Sahara.

Each time he crested a dune, Ali imagined the army lying in wait. He had long dreaded desert bandits, notorious for carjacking travelers along the old national route and then leaving them to die of thirst or exposure. Now he imagined new ways to suffer at the hands of a military that had once profited from human smuggling by levying an unofficial tax on each vehicle but which had recently begun to hunt drivers like Ali with the same urgency that it pursued al Qaeda militants.

Ali’s mind was running wild with terrifying possibilities of what he might encounter in the dark when he felt the ground fall away and the vehicle pitch to the side. For a moment, he was airborne. Then the truck hit the ground with crushing force, careening to a halt on its side at the bottom of a gully he had missed in the darkness. He heard the groans before he wriggled himself free from the wreckage. Then he saw the trail of people thrown from the truck at odd intervals behind him. Two of them lay prostrate under a 50-gallon fuel tank. Their bodies were still.

Shaken but unhurt, Ali pulled out his Thuraya satellite phone and called a friend in Agadez, the age-old caravan city in Niger that has become inextricably linked with the modern migrant trade. He gave the friend his coordinates so that a search party could find them and then fished a trowel out of the truck. As the injured migrants looked on, he buried the two dead Nigerians in a shallow grave in the sand. “I don’t remember their names,” Ali said. “There are too many who come and go. I can’t keep them in my head.”

Until 2016, Agadez was the epicenter of massive waves of migration from Africa that began in 2011, when the fall of Libya’s dictatorship opened a clear path through weak and failing states to Europe’s southern border. In 2016, a record 181,000 people arrived on Italy’s Mediterranean coast. Most of them were sub-Saharan Africans fleeing poverty, war, and oppression. More than half of them likely traveled through Agadez on their way.

Comprising a dense warren of mud-brick compounds that bear the same shade of cocoa brown as the surrounding Sahara, Agadez has been a place of exchange for more than 600 years. Like Timbuktu in neighboring Mali, it was a center of Islamic learning in the Middle Ages and an important transit point for caravan traders. But whereas the cargo of old was gold, salt, and slaves, now it is weapons, narcotics, and migrants. The trade touches almost everyone in the city, whether they are directly involved or living off the service industries that have developed around it. Grocers, hoteliers, the police — all of them are to some extent dependent on this illicit flow of people and goods. Before the crackdown began, the Nigerien army openly escorted the smugglers’ convoys into the desert in exchange for a share of the profits. Sometimes hundreds of Toyota Hiluxes loaded down with young men made the crossing in a single day.

In its heyday as a smugglers’ paradise, from 2013 to 2016, Agadez was crawling with profiteers who had money to burn. They would flock to the bars and nightclubs, Tuaregs and Toubous in flowing traditional jalabias mixing with Nigeriens of other ethnicities in high-tops and skinny jeans, dancing and draining $4 cans of Heineken until the call to prayer echoed through the city at dawn. But when I visited in May, the city no longer felt like a freewheeling frontier boomtown. Market stalls sat empty in the 110-degree heat while drivers lounged all day in their yellow three-wheeled taxis without scoring a fare. The nightclub at the Hotel de la Paix, a garish modern fortress rumored to have been financed by Muammar al-Qaddafi, still opened each night around midnight, the purr of a diesel generator audible over the rollicking pulse of Tuareg music. But every time I went in, the place was mostly empty.

The collapse of Agadez’s economy was just one of the unintended consequences of Europe’s bid to halt the flood of unwanted migrants and refugees toward its shores. In 2015, as the European Union was struggling to cope with what would amount to a record 1.3 million asylum-seekers that year — a 122 percent increase from 2014 — EU officials held a series of emergency talks with African leaders. In November of that year, they announced a $1.9 billion EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa designed to combat the root causes of migration, including poverty and conflict. The EU also struck bilateral agreements with several African countries that migrants depart from and travel through on their way to Europe, aiming to strengthen border controls and disrupt smuggling networks. It designated Niger a priority country as part of a partnership framework agreement it made with the government in 2016, paving the way for a pledge of $633 million in exchange for stopping the flow of migrants through its borders.

In addition to funding development projects designed to wean the economy off trafficking, the EU, along with some of its member states, delivered training and equipment to Niger’s security forces to help them clamp down on smugglers. Soon the same army that once escorted smugglers to Libya was putting them behind bars to be sentenced under a new anti-trafficking law passed with the encouragement of European governments.

From behind a broad wooden desk stacked with files, Yahaya Godi, then the secretary-general for the governorate of Agadez, explained his government’s abrupt change of heart. “We must fight against migration and human trafficking because it has many consequences,” he told me. “For instance, there is insecurity. It may also be connected to terrorism or the traffic in weapons.”

Surrounded on all sides by conflict and instability — the country shares borders with Nigeria, Mali, and Libya, all of which harbor significant terrorist threats — Niger has positioned itself as a key counterterrorism partner for Western nations, including the United States and France, both of which have military bases in the country. As a result, it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance from those nations. The migration crisis has presented Niger with a similar opportunity to line its coffers, and it has happily adopted Europe’s view of human smugglers as a threat to regional stability.

“It’s very impressive how they fight for security,” said Ambassador Raul Mateus Paula, the head of the EU delegation in Niger, when I went to see him in Niamey, the capital. “This is very, very important because they are in the middle of problems: Libya, Mali, and Nigeria. So they have to increase dramatically their security expenditures. That’s one of the reasons why the European Union is making a huge effort of budget support.”

Paula seemed pleased with the government’s efforts to halt migration so far. He pointed to the dramatic drop in migrants recorded transiting through Niger en route to Libya and Algeria, key jumping-off points to Europe, as evidence that the partnership is working. Between February and May 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has received funding from the EU to open transit centers where migrants are encouraged to return home, recorded 116,347 “outgoing” migrants in Niger. During the same period this year, it recorded less than a quarter of that number. In press releases, the EU has touted the number of smugglers arrested and trucks impounded by authorities. “I think that they made very, very important reforms,” Paula said. “And I think we have to keep working with them, support them, to fight terrorism [and] traffickers.”

What is clear is that Niger’s EU-funded crackdown has heightened the risks for smugglers, as well as for migrants. One of those who paid a price for defying the authorities was Garba Hamani, a coxeur, or connection man, who was arrested last year as he loaded 49 migrants into trucks. They were eventually released and taken to the IOM transit center, but Hamani spent nine months and 20 days behind bars. He said the jail in Agadez was filled with people connected to the migrant trade — smugglers, drivers, and coxeurs like him. But the smuggling business hasn’t stopped; it’s just been driven deeper underground. “You cannot stop this thing. If the government stops people here, they will just go another way,” he said.

The new routes are both longer and more dangerous, according to nearly a dozen drivers I interviewed in Agadez. Some pass through mountainous regions outside the city before crossing vast stretches of desert. Some hug the border with Chad. One area where many of the new routes converge is in a desolate region some 20 miles outside of Dao Timmi, an old military installation in the far north of the country. Here, the trucks slow to a crawl and pass single file through a minefield that dates back to an uprising by ethnic Toubous in the 1990s. Used for years by weapons and drug smugglers because authorities stayed away, the route is now commonly taken by migrants. “They made it a crime, so now it follows the criminal routes,” Hamani said.

Ali, who like most of the smugglers I spoke with asked to be identified by only his first name, started taking the road through the minefield soon after the crackdown started last year, a few months before his deadly nighttime crash. So did Laminou, a muscle-bound 25-year-old with short dreadlocks. Laminou deals in cars, specifically stolen cars from Libya that he smuggles in without papers. One day, he came upon a nightmarish scene: the obliterated remains of a pickup truck surrounded by the dead bodies of multiple migrants. “We couldn’t tell them apart. It’s one man’s leg, one man’s arm — all black,” he said. He and another driver did their best to bury the remains. Then they prayed together and set off again in their trucks.

No one knows how many migrants have died in the desert. Trucks get lost, break down, or are attacked by bandits all the time. Often, nobody finds out until another driver happens upon the human remains. “We know that many people are dying in the Mediterranean. But many are dying in the desert as well, and we have not many statistics,” Paula said.

In addition to being more dangerous, the new routes are also more expensive. Where it once cost around $300 to travel to the next staging post in Libya from Agadez, it now costs more than double that amount. As a result, many more migrants are finding themselves stuck in the squalid compounds known as “ghettos” that smugglers have set up in secret locations throughout the city. This was the predicament Sheriff Sonko had been facing for the past nine months. A baby-faced 21-year-old, he left Gambia without telling his parents so they couldn’t try to talk him out of making the journey. But he hadn’t counted on the price of crossing the Sahara to skyrocket overnight. “If my parents don’t pay, I won’t leave here,” he told me.

Increasingly raided by the authorities, who arrest the smugglers and turn the migrants over to IOM, the ghettos are getting smaller, and they are constantly being moved so they won’t be discovered. Gaining access to the one where Sonko was living took days of negotiation because the smugglers feared I would be followed or would otherwise inadvertently reveal its location. The day I visited the half-finished compound in a largely abandoned neighborhood on the farthest margins of the city, just four other migrants besides Sonko were there — two from Cameroon and two from Guinea. A group of 29 West Africans had departed for Libya the night before. The structure itself was crumbling and covered with a thick dusting of sand. The dirt floors were bare except for a few empty water bottles, plastic bags, and a broken sandal — the detritus of an unknown number of previous inhabitants. On the walls, migrants had scribbled phone numbers, presumably of family members, drivers, and coxeurs. In one corner, someone had left a message in block letters: “The road of success never smooth.”

New routes pose new risks for those who attempt to ply them. But just as dangerous is the climate of fear that has settled over the Sahara in the wake of the crackdown. Ali blames himself for the deaths of the two migrants killed in the crash. But he also feels resentment toward the EU for having forced him to drive with his headlights off. “When they arrest you, that’s not a law coming from here,” Ali said. “That’s a law coming from Europe.”

When faced with the choice between ensuring their own freedom and saving their human cargo, many drivers choose freedom. Sometimes that means leaving migrants behind in the middle of the desert and speeding off to avoid a military patrol. According to Azaoua Mahaman, an IOM official based in Agadez, more and more migrants are being abandoned in this way. Since the beginning of the year, he said in May, IOM had worked with Nigerien authorities to facilitate nearly a dozen rescue operations. “The main reason we see abandoned migrants is because of the patrols,” he told me. “[The smugglers] are afraid of going to prison, so they drop the migrants and flee.”

This is hardly an irrational response. Unverified reports that the military has opened fire on migrant vehicles have circulated widely. Three different drivers told me that they knew of such incidents, though none had been present when they occurred.

One migrant was there when soldiers lit up a vehicle carrying two dozen passengers: In April, a slender 21-year-old Nigerian named Yinka was traveling through the desert in the back of a Hilux when suddenly gunshots rang out. Bullets shredded the tires beneath her and punched through the side of the vehicle. One hit her friend in the stomach, and she doubled over. Auntie Biola, as the six other women traveling together from Nigeria’s Oyo state called her, bled to death as Nigerien soldiers looked on.

The driver fled the scene, and the migrants were all taken into custody. But first, the soldiers, who Yinka said were wearing uniforms, beat them all and raped the six surviving women. She said they were beaten and raped again when they arrived at the police station in Madama, one of the last settlements before the Libyan frontier. Because the other survivors of this ordeal had all been repatriated to Nigeria by the time I met Yinka in the IOM transit center in Agadez, I was unable to verify her claims. But her account was consistent with testimony from other migrants at the center and with reports by rights groups on abuses, including rapes, committed by the Nigerien military as recently as 2007. Niger’s military and its ministries of defense and interior did not respond to written requests for comment; Paula, the EU ambassador, told me that he was not aware of any reports of abuse. “The traffickers,” he said, “are the real criminals.”

Most Nigeriens would disagree. Smugglers — known as passeurs, or “ferrymen” — are widely regarded as providing a vital service. (Migrants who send home remittances are seen as heroes in this part of the world.) Still, passeurs are often involved in other forms of criminal activity — weapons and drugs, for instance — and now many of them are out of work. The crackdown hasn’t stopped the flow of migrants, but it has diverted much of the human traffic away from Agadez and pushed most of the profits toward smugglers with the highest appetite for risk. For those who are still making the trip, the EU has laid out a feast. For everyone else, it’s famine.

“Today, [illegal migration] generates more money than before,” Rhissa Feltou, the mayor of Agadez, told me. But the profits go to “small mafia groups” instead of to a broad cross-section of society as they did before. The new policy, while necessary in his view, means that Agadez will suffer because its residents have historically been dependent on smuggling.

The EU has pledged to fund job trainings and other development projects to help former smugglers transition to new careers. But the crackdown commenced more than a year ago, and former drivers, coxeurs, and ghetto owners all said in May that they had yet to receive any assistance. (The EU said the programs were on track and that the job trainings would begin soon.)

“We are very angry with the EU because they promised to help us. We even declared that we stopped the job,” said Mohamed, a lean, weather-beaten man in his early 40s who used to run a lucrative migrant ghetto out of his home. “But the promises have not been met. They have destroyed the life of Agadez.”

Eighteen months ago, Mohamed was moving more than 300 migrants a week through his ghetto, for a weekly profit of around $10,000 to $13,000. Business was so good that he decided to knock his house down and build a bigger one so that he could fit more migrants in his courtyard. But before the new house was finished, the crackdown was underway, and he was forced to take his business underground.

Today, he lives with his wife and children in a single room in the courtyard of his younger brother’s house in Agadez’s old town, not far from the ancient mosque whose conical minaret towers over the rest of the low-slung city. Mohamed comes from noble Tuareg lineage, and his older brother was once a famous musician in Agadez. (Posters of the brother in traditional Tuareg dress hung from the walls of the compound, alongside a framed photograph of Qaddafi in aviators and a flowing headdress.) But the family appeared to have fallen on hard times; goats pranced through the living space, and pigeons clucked from inside a coop made of mud and straw.

“The way I live now and the way I lived one year ago is very different,” Mohamed said, leading me out of the compound and across a narrow alleyway between crumbling mud walls to a larger, half-finished complex made of rectangular brown bricks. A stray dog roused itself from a sandy depression to snarl at us and then slunk off into a corner. This was once his home, he explained, and where he had made a small fortune housing migrants before they were smuggled to Libya.

Ty McCormick (@TyMcCormick) is Foreign Policy’s Africa editor. Nichole Sobecki (@nicholesobecki) is a photographer based in Nairobi.

 

Scientists Say You Can Cancel the Noise but Keep Your Window Open | NY Times

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Published: 07/11/2020

Scientists Say You Can Cancel the Noise but Keep Your Window Open

Researchers in Singapore developed a system that’s sort of like noise-canceling headphones for your whole apartment.

Car alarms, jackhammers, a drunken argument and the rumble of the No. 7 train passing overhead. It is the glorious urban symphony that pours into a typical New York City apartment building day and night.

Sure, closing the window can help, but there goes your natural ventilation.

What if there were technology to cancel the offending clamor, like a pair of giant noise-canceling headphones for your apartment?

Researchers in Singapore have developed an apparatus that can be placed in a window to reduce incoming sound by 10 decibels. The system was created by a team of scientists, including Masaharu Nishimura, who came up with the basic concept, and Bhan Lam, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“I grew up in Singapore,” Dr. Lam said in a Zoom interview from his apartment there. “It’s a small city with a lot of noise, so I have some motivation to solve this problem.”

Their results were published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. The prototype is not yet the most practical device in real world conditions, but it points the way toward the development of technologies that may help ease the strain of noisy city living.

Borrowing from the same technological principles used in noise-canceling headphones, the team expanded the concept to fit an entire room by placing 24 small speakers in a window. The speakers emit sound waves that correspond to the incoming racket and neutralize it — or, at least some of it.

The system is based on the frequency of the sound waves and, for now, the optimal range is between 300 and 1,000 hertz.

In Singapore, a city near the Equator where temperatures are often high, overlapping transportation systems and the desire for natural ventilation in modern high-rise apartment towers can pose a healthy-living conundrum.

Dr. Lam explained that “in places like Singapore, we want to keep the windows open as much as possible” to reduce the use of carbon-intensive air-conditioners and to prevent buildup of stale air that can pose health risks for some people.

But with windows open, the constant din from city traffic, trains, jets passing overhead and construction equipment can rattle apartments. The Anti-Noise Control Window, as it is called, is the sonic equivalent of shutting a window.

With any sound, the best way to reduce it is at the source, like a gun’s silencer. So the researchers treated the window aperture itself as the noise source, because most noise enters a room that way.

The system uses a microphone outside the window to detect the repeating sound waves of the offending noise source, which is registered by a computer controller. That in turn deciphers the proper wave frequency needed to neutralize the sound, which is transmitted to the array of speakers on the inside of the window frame.

The speakers then emit the proper “anti” waves, which cancel out the incoming waves, and there you have it: near blissful silence.

“If you sit in the room, you get that same feeling like when you flick on the switch of noise-canceling earphones,” Dr. Lam said, splaying his hands to denote the calming effect.

The system is best at attenuating the audible blasts from the types of steady noise sources found within the optimal frequency range.

Unfortunately, human voices do not fit within most of that range. One of the next hurdles will be to find a way to silence loud conversations from across the way.

Another limitation is that the system is not good at neutralizing sporadic noises, like firecrackers, car horns or the occasional earsplitting crash of metal storefront shutters — the kinds of noises that drive many New Yorkers to slam their windows shut.

One reason for the limitation on frequency is the size of the speakers. To cancel out lower frequencies would require larger bass speakers. But those would interfere with ventilation and your ability to see through the window.

It’s a trade-off, and one solution might be installing larger windows, or discovering a way to make it work with smaller speakers.

As it is, the 24 speakers, each about 2 inches in diameter, are a bit of an aesthetic hindrance.

“One complaint that we get is that it’s ugly,” Dr. Lam said.

But if it can neutralize the sound of the jet taking off from Runway 13 at LaGuardia, that is (soft) music to the ears.

 

 

Moody World – Archive

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Moody World – Archive

Walking down the road covered with raindrops

As I go in a trip down the place archiving memories

Of the resplendent past when it was still at the top

Of my once minuscule mind, enjoying with unity

 

Looking through all the books and old paperworks

Filled with cobwebs as they age and lurk

Some lasted fugaciously, others lasted a long while

With me, as I grow up and walk many more miles

 

I’ve enjoyed reminiscing each and every one

That gave such an impact to me when I’ve just begun

My prosperous journey through all the time frames

And I still survive, thankfully not lame

 

It has sent me into a sweet, recurring euphoria

When I’d enjoy everything in such a utopia

Memories trickling down as the joyful tears

I’d hold onto them forever as valuables so dear

 

Once again, a once-in-a-while trip to my archives

Is always a great pleasure as I’m still alive

Thawing the cold days with its cherishable moments

That’ll never make my permanent history descend

 

How to hack your brain to remember almost anything | Wired

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Published: Neuroscience
 

How to hack your brain to remember almost anything

Four-time USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis and psychological scientist Julia Shaw explain how to use the memory palace technique to boost your memory skills.

Many people complain about having a terrible memory. Shopping lists, friends’ birthdays, statistics for an exam – they just don’t seem to stick in the brain. But memory isn’t as set in stone as you might imagine. With the right technique, you may well be able to remember almost anything at all.

Nelson Dellis is a four-time USA Memory Champion and Grandmaster of Memory. Some of his feats of recollection include memorising 10,000 digits of pi, the order of more nine shuffled decks of cards and lists of hundreds of names after only hearing them once.

But with a little dedication, Dellis says that anyone can improve their memory. Here are five steps to follow that will get your filling your head with information.

1. Start with strong images

Let’s start with a fairly simple memorisation task: the seven wonders of the world. To memorise these, Dellis recommends starting by turning each one of those items into an easily-remembered image. Some will be more obvious. For the Great Wall of China, for example, you might just want to imagine a wall. For Petra, you might instead go for an image of your own pet.

“Using juicy mental images like these is extremely effective. What you want to do is create big, multi-sensory memories,” explains Julia Shaw, a psychological scientist at University College London and the author of The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory. You want to aim for mental images that you can almost feel, smell and see, to make them as real as possible.

There’s science behind all of this. “Images that are weird, and maybe gross or emotional are sticky,” says Shaw. “When looking at the brain, researchers found that the amygdala – a part of the brain that is important for processing emotion – encourages other parts of the brain to store memories.” That’s why strong emotions make it more likely that memories will stick.

2. Put those images in a location

The next step is to put those strong mental images in a place that you’re really familiar with. In Dellis’ example, he places each one of the seven wonders on a route through his house, starting with a wall in his entryway, then Christ – representing Christ the Redeemer – lounging around on his sofa. “The weirder the better,” Dellis says. In the kitchen, you might imagine a Llama cooking up a meal.

This technique of linking images with places is called the memory palace, and it’s particularly useful for remembering the order of certain elements, says Shaw. “A memory palace capitalises on your existing memory of a real place. It is a place that you know – usually your home or another location that you know really well.”

If it’s a list with just seven items, that space can be relatively small. But when it came to memorising 10,000 digits of pi, Dellis had to widen out his memory palace to the entirety of his hometown, Miami. He divided the 10,000 digits into 2,000 chunks of five digits each, and placed them all across 10 different neighbourhoods.

“Neuroimaging research has shown that people show increased activity in the [occipito-parietal area] of the brain when learning memories using a memory palace,” says Shaw. “This means that the technique helps to bring in more parts of the brain that are usually dedicated to other senses – the parietal lobe is responsible for navigation, and the occipital lobe is related to seeing images.”

3. Pay attention

Remembering seven weird images for the wonders of the world shouldn’t be too hard, but when you’re memorising 10,000 digits of pi you might need a little more motivation. “I would tell myself this mantra. I want to memorise this, I want to memorise this,” Dellis says. “It’s a simple mantra but it would align my attention and focus on the task at hand and help me remember it better.”

4. Break things up

With very large numbers like pi – or a long sequence of cards, for example, it also helps to break things up. Dellis turned each five digit chunk of pi into an image that he could easily remember. “Words are easy, you see a word and it typically evokes some kind of imagery in your mind. But things like numbers, or cards or even names are a little trickier,” he says. “And those have systems that we’ve developed and learned so that whenever we see a name or a number or a card, we already have an image preset for it.”

For Dellis, the first five digits of pi after the decimal point are represented by Sam Neill wearing an Iron Man suit (“It’s just the way it goes” he says). The second patch is represented by an image of his friend dressed as the emperor from the movie Gladiator, with his thumb down.

5. Finish up by reviewing

Once you’ve got your images sorted and your memory palace populated, you just need to really make sure that they’re going to stay in your head. “Most memories never make it into your long-term memory,” says Shaw. “That’s why it’s so important to repeat the information, to transform a short-term memory into a long-term memory.”

And sadly there is no easy hack for that. It comes down to repetition, and hard work. “To become a memory champion I had to work at it every day. Train very hard and make it something that was just instinctive to me. And that only came with practice,” says Dellis. And if that sounds like a lot of work, well, you’d be right.

Matt Reynolds is WIRED’s science editor. He tweets from @mattsreynolds1

 

The Creativity of ADHD | Scientific American

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Published: Scientific American
 

The Creativity of ADHD

More insights on a positive side of a “disorder.”

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Photo from metamorworks / Getty Images .

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is typically described by the problems it presents. It is known as a neurological disorder, marked by distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity, which begins in childhood and persists in adults. And, indeed, ADHD may have negative consequences for academic achievement, employment performance and social relationships.

But ADHD may also bring with it an advantage: the ability to think more creatively. Three aspects of creative cognition are divergent thinking, conceptual expansion and overcoming knowledge constraints. Divergent thinking, or the ability to think of many ideas from a single starting point, is a critical part of creative thinking. Previous research has established that individuals with ADHD are exceptionally good at divergent thinking tasks, such as inventing creative new uses for everyday objects, and brainstorming new features for an innovative cell phone device. In one study, college students with ADHD scored higher than non-ADHD peers on two tasks that tapped conceptual expansion and the ability to overcome knowledge constraints. Together with previous research, these new findings link ADHD to all three elements of the creative cognition trio.

Prior knowledge can be an obstacle to creativity. When we look to a prior model or example for inspiration, we may actually become stuck: designers refer to this as “ fixation.” In creative generation research, when participants are given examples before a task that requires them to invent something new, such as a new toy, their inventions tend to incorporate aspects of the examples—and thus are less novel. The ability to overcome recently presented information is therefore essential to creative thinking.

Similarly, knowledge of the world can stunt one’s ability to imagine it differently. For instance, if asked to invent an animal or fruit that might exist on another planet, most people would start by thinking of a typical animal or fruit on Earth and then modify it somewhat into an “alien” version. Research suggests that when people invent alien creations based on specific Earth examples, the creations are rated as less original compared to those not inspired by specific examples. The key to being creative under these conditions is conceptual expansion, or the ability to loosen the boundaries of concepts. For instance, a paperclip is designed to hold papers together. By conceptual expansion, one might think beyond this definition and imagine a paperclip as something else—such as a tool to pry open the battery compartment of a wristwatch. In creating an alien animal, one might assume that the animal would need to be bilaterally symmetrical, as most Earth animals possess this attribute. Conceptual expansion might allow one to imagine an animal with an asymmetrical form, which differs from a typical Earth animal.

Evidence suggests that ADHD may offer some protection from the constraining effects of knowledge. In a study of adolescents, a group with ADHD was compared to a group of non-ADHD peers on a toy invention task. Participants were first shown a set of example toys that shared specific features (e.g., a ball), then asked to invent new toys that were very different from any existing toys. The toys invented by the ADHD group included fewer elements of the task examples compared to toys created by the non-ADHD group. In the same study, there were no differences between the ADHD and non-ADHD groups on a conceptual expansion task. However, a study of college students found that, compared to non-ADHD peers, ADHD students showed a broader scope of semantic activation—which is the “turning on” of concepts and ideas that are stored in memory—and is correlated with conceptual expansion in other research. Given evidence that linked ADHD to higher divergent thinking and ability to overcome the constraining effect of task examples, it seemed intuitive to look more closely at the relationship between ADHD and the third element of creative thinking, conceptual expansion.

I compared college students with and without ADHD on two tasks. In the first, I told participants to imagine they worked for an advertising agency and that they’d been asked to invent names for new products in three categories (pasta, nuclear elements, and pain relievers). For each category, six examples were provided that shared certain endings (e.g., pain relievers ending in –ol, such as Midol, Tylenol, and Panadol). I then instructed participants to invent a name for a new product in each category without using any aspects of the examples provided. And then, to explore conceptual expansion, I asked participants to draw and describe a fruit that might exist on another planet very different from Earth. The creations were to be as creative as possible and not duplicate any fruit that existed on Earth.

As expected, the ADHD students were less constrained by task examples on the product label invention task; compared to non-ADHD peers, ADHD students were less likely to include the example endings, yet invented labels that were equally descriptive of the product category. On the alien fruit task, the ADHD students invented fruits that were rated as more original and less representative of Earth fruit, compared to non-ADHD students. And while the groups were comparable in their inclusion of typical fruit features, such as seeds and stems, the ADHD students were more likely to include atypical features such as antenna, tongues, straws, and hammers. The ADHD students also demonstrated higher conceptual expansion by violating conventional boundaries of the fruit category—for instance by making the fruit poisonous or adding properties of nonliving things such as tools. Similar results have been reported for gifted individuals in a non-ADHD population.

At first glance, nonconformity and conceptual expansion may not sound very impressive. But, in the context of creative innovation, a small change may unlock a breakthrough. Take the sewing needle, for example. The basic design (eye on the blunt end for threading) dates back to our Denosoyan ancestors, at least 50,000 years ago. Then, in the early 1800s, inventor Balthasar Krems flipped that design upside-down to create the world’s first eye-pointed needle—which paved the way for the sewing machine.

ADHD may create difficulties for individuals in many contexts that required focused, sustained attention—such as school, where students are expected to sit still and pay attention. On the other hand, the same distractibility and chaotic mind can give people with ADHD an edge when it comes to creative, original thinking. This new study suggests that ADHD may be especially beneficial when the goal is to create or invent something new without being locked into—and constrained by—old models or conventions. The innovative, original thinking style of people with ADHD may be a great fit for innovative fields where it’s an advantage to be on the cutting edge.

Holly White is a research scientist in the psychology department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include creative cognition, divergent “outside-the-box” thinking, neurodiversity and cognitive exercise.

 

 

Scientists Say Your “Mind” Isn’t Confined to Your Brain, or Even Your Body | QUARTZ

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Published: Unknown
 
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The mind is more than just the brain. Photo from The Regents of the University of California.

You might wonder, at some point today, what’s going on in another person’s mind. You may compliment someone’s great mind, or say they are out of their mind. You may even try to expand or free your own mind.

But what is a mind? Defining the concept is a surprisingly slippery task. The mind is the seat of consciousness, the essence of your being. Without a mind, you cannot be considered meaningfully alive. So what exactly, and where precisely, is it?

Traditionally, scientists have tried to define the mind as the product of brain activity: The brain is the physical substance, and the mind is the conscious product of those firing neurons, according to the classic argument. But growing evidence shows that the mind goes far beyond the physical workings of your brain.

No doubt, the brain plays an incredibly important role. But our mind cannot be confined to what’s inside our skull, or even our body, according to a definition first put forward by Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of the 2016 book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.

He first came up with the definition more than two decades ago, at a meeting of 40 scientists across disciplines, including neuroscientists, physicists, sociologists, and anthropologists. The aim was to come to an understanding of the mind that would appeal to common ground and satisfy those wrestling with the question across these fields.

After much discussion, they decided that a key component of the mind is: “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.” It’s not catchy. But it is interesting, and with meaningful implications.

The most immediately shocking element of this definition is that our mind extends beyond our physical selves. In other words, our mind is not simply our perception of experiences, but those experiences themselves. Siegel argues that it’s impossible to completely disentangle our subjective view of the world from our interactions.

“I realized if someone asked me to define the shoreline but insisted, is it the water or the sand, I would have to say the shore is both sand and sea,” says Siegel. “You can’t limit our understanding of the coastline to insist it’s one or the other. I started thinking, maybe the mind is like the coastline—some inner and inter process. Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind.”

The definition has since been supported by research across the sciences, but much of the original idea came from mathematics. Siegel realized the mind meets the mathematical definition of a complex system in that it’s open (can influence things outside itself), chaos capable (which simply means it’s roughly randomly distributed), and non-linear (which means a small input leads to large and difficult to predict result).

In math, complex systems are self-organizing, and Siegel believes this idea is the foundation to mental health. Again borrowing from the mathematics, optimal self-organization is: flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. This means that without optimal self-organization, you arrive at either chaos or rigidity—a notion that, Siegel says, fits the range of symptoms of mental health disorders.

Finally, self-organization demands linking together differentiated ideas or, essentially, integration. And Siegel says integration—whether that’s within the brain or within society—is the foundation of a healthy mind.

Siegel says he wrote his book now because he sees so much misery in society, and he believes this is partly shaped by how we perceive our own minds. He talks of doing research in Namibia, where people he spoke to attributed their happiness to a sense of belonging.

When Siegel was asked in return whether he belonged in America, his answer was less upbeat: “I thought how isolated we all are and how disconnected we feel,” he says. “In our modern society we have this belief that mind is brain activity and this means the self, which comes from the mind, is separate and we don’t really belong. But we’re all part of each others’ lives. The mind is not just brain activity. When we realize it’s this relational process, there’s this huge shift in this sense of belonging.”

In other words, even perceiving our mind as simply a product of our brain, rather than relations, can make us feel more isolated. And to appreciate the benefits of interrelations, you simply have to open your mind.

 

Coronavirus Interactive Map | John Hopkins University & Medicine | http://www.jhu.edu

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Published: 2020

 

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The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What’s Coming from the Corona Virus | WIRED

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Published: 03/19/2020

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.

Larry Brilliant says he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick,” he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”

Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.

We talked by phone on Tuesday. At the time, President Donald Trump’s response to the crisis had started to change from “no worries at all” to finally taking more significant steps to stem the pandemic. Brilliant lives in one of the six Bay Area counties where residents were ordered to shelter in place. When we began the conversation, he’d just gotten off the phone with someone he described as high government official, who asked Brilliant “How the fuck did we get here?” I wanted to hear how we’ll get out of here. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Steven Levy: I was in the room in 2006 when you gave that TED talk. Your wish was “Help Me Stop Pandemics.” You didn’t get your wish, did you?

Larry Brilliant: No, I didn’t get that wish at all, although the systems that I asked for have certainly been created and are being used. It’s very funny because we did a movie, Contagion—

We’re all watching that movie now.

People say Contagion is prescient. We just saw the science. The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn’t a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when. It’s really hard to get people to listen. I mean, Trump pushed out the admiral on the National Security Council, who was the only person at that level who’s responsible for pandemic defense. With him went his entire downline of employees and staff and relationships. And then Trump removed the [early warning] funding for countries around the world.

I’ve heard you talk about the significance that this is a “novel” virus.

It doesn’t mean a fictitious virus. It’s not like a novel or a novella.

Too bad.

It means it’s new. That there is no human being in the world that has immunity as a result of having had it before. That means it’s capable of infecting 7.8 billion of our brothers and sisters.

Since it’s novel, we’re still learning about it. Do you believe that if someone gets it and recovers, that person thereafter has immunity?

So I don’t see anything in this virus, even though it’s novel, [that contradicts that]. There are cases where people think that they’ve gotten it again, [but] that’s more likely to be a test failure than it is an actual reinfection. But there’s going to be tens of millions of us or hundreds of millions of us or more who will get this virus before it’s all over, and with large numbers like that, almost anything where you ask “Does this happen?” can happen. That doesn’t mean that it is of public health or epidemiological importance.

Is this the worst outbreak you’ve ever seen?

It’s the most dangerous pandemic in our lifetime.

We are being asked to do things, certainly, that never happened in my lifetime—stay in the house, stay 6 feet away from other people, don’t go to group gatherings. Are we getting the right advice?

Well, as you reach me, I’m pretending that I’m in a meditation retreat, but I’m actually being semi-quarantined in Marin County. Yes, this is very good advice. But did we get good advice from the president of the United States for the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible act of an elected official that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. But what you’re hearing now [to self-isolate, close schools, cancel events] is right. Is it going to protect us completely? Is it going to make the world safe forever? No. It’s a great thing because we want to spread out the disease over time.

Flatten the curve.

By slowing it down or flattening it, we’re not going to decrease the total number of cases, we’re going to postpone many cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there’s nothing in the virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18 months. Eventually, we will get to the epidemiologist gold ring.

What’s that?

That means, A, a large enough quantity of us have caught the disease and become immune. And B, we have a vaccine. The combination of A plus B is enough to create herd immunity, which is around 70 or 80 percent.

I hold out hope that we get an antiviral for Covid-19 that is curative, but in addition is prophylactic. It’s certainly unproven and it’s certainly controversial, and certainly a lot of people are not going to agree with me. But I offer as evidence two papers in 2005, one in Nature and one in Science. They both did mathematical modeling with influenza, to see whether saturation with just Tamiflu of an area around a case of influenza could stop the outbreak. And in both cases, it worked. I also offer as evidence the fact that at one point we thought HIV/AIDS was incurable and a death sentence. Then, some wonderful scientists discovered antiviral drugs, and we’ve learned that some of those drugs can be given prior to exposure and prevent the disease. Because of the intense interest in getting [Covid-19] conquered, we will put the scientific clout and money and resources behind finding antivirals that have prophylactic or preventive characteristics that can be used in addition to [vaccines].

When will we be able to leave the house and go back to work?

I have a very good retrospect-oscope, but what’s needed right now as a prospecto-scope. If this were a tennis match, I would say advantage virus right now. But there’s really good news from South Korea—they had less than 100 cases today. China had more cases imported than it had from continuous transmission from Wuhan today. The Chinese model will be very hard for us to follow. We’re not going to be locking people up in their apartments, boarding them up. But the South Korea model is one that we could follow. Unfortunately, it requires doing the proportionate number of tests that they did—they did well over a quarter of a million tests. In fact, by the time South Korea had done 200,000 tests, we had probably done less than 1,000.

Now that we’ve missed the opportunity for early testing, is it too late for testing to make a difference?

Absolutely not. Tests would make a measurable difference. We should be doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out where the hell the virus really is. Because we don’t know. Maybe Mississippi is reporting no cases because it’s not looking. How would they know? Zimbabwe reports zero cases because they don’t have testing capability, not because they don’t have the virus. We need something that looks like a home pregnancy test, that you can do at home.

If you were the president for one day, what would you say in the daily briefing?

I would begin the press conference by saying “Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Ron Klain—he was the Ebola czar [under President Barack Obama], and now I’ve called him back and made him Covid czar. Everything will be centralized under one person who has the respect of both the public health community and the political community.” We’re a divided country right now. Right now, Tony Fauci [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] is the closest that we come to that.

Are you scared?

I’m in the age group that has a one in seven mortality rate if I get it. If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention. But I’m not scared. I firmly believe that the steps that we’re taking will extend the time that it takes for the virus to make the rounds. I think that, in turn, will increase the likelihood that we will have a vaccine or we will have a prophylactic antiviral in time to cut off, reduce, or truncate the spread. Everybody needs to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It’s not a mass extinction event.

Should we be wearing masks?

The N95 mask itself is extremely wonderful. The pores in the mask are three microns wide. The virus is one micron wide. So you get people who say, well, it’s not going to work. But you try having three big, huge football players who are rushing for lunch through a door at lunchtime—they’re not going to get through. In the latest data I saw, the mask provided 5x protection. That’s really good. But we have to keep the hospitals going and we have to keep the health professionals able to come to work and be safe. So masks should go where they’re needed the most: in taking care of patients.

How will we know when we’re through this?

The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we’re only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we’re not testing enough, and we’re just blind to it, then we’re in a world of hurt. Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.

And instead of saying “No, you can’t visit anybody in nursing home,” we have a group of people who are certified that they work with elderly and vulnerable people, and nurses who can go back into the hospitals and dentists who can open your mouth and look in your mouth and not be giving you the virus. When those three things happen, that’s when normalcy will return.

Is there in any way a brighter side to this?

Well, I’m a scientist, but I’m also a person of faith. And I can’t ever look at something without asking the question of isn’t there a higher power that in some way will help us to be the best version of ourselves that we could be? I thought we would see the equivalent of empty streets in the civic arena, but the amount of civic engagement is greater than I’ve ever seen. But I’m seeing young kids, millennials, who are volunteering to go take groceries to people who are homebound, elderly. I’m seeing an incredible influx of nurses, heroic nurses, who are coming and working many more hours than they worked before, doctors who fearlessly go into the hospital to work. I’ve never seen the kind of volunteerism I’m seeing.

I don’t want to pretend that this is an exercise worth going through in order to get to that state. This is a really unprecedented and difficult time that will test us. When we do get through it, maybe like the Second World War, it will cause us to reexamine what has caused the fractional division we have in this country. The virus is an equal opportunity infector. And it’s probably the way we would be better if we saw ourselves that way, which is much more alike than different.

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A Johns Hopkins Study Reveals the Scientific Secret to Double How Fast You Learn | John Hopkins

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Published: Unknown

A Johns Hopkins Study Reveals the Scientific Secret to Double How Fast You Learn

Making one small change to the way you practice can make a huge difference in how quickly you gain new skills.

Inc. | Jeff Haden

When you’re trying to learn something new — like, say, making that new sales demo really sing — you need to practice. When you’re trying to gain expertise, how much you practice is definitely important.

But even more important is the way you practice.

Most people simply repeat the same moves. Like playing scales on the piano, over and over again. Or going through the same list of vocabulary words, over and over again. Or, well, repeating anything over and over again in the hopes you will master that task.

Not only will your skills not improve as quickly as they could, in some cases, they may actually get worse.

According to research from Johns Hopkins, “What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.”

Why? The most likely cause is reconsolidation, a process where existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge.

Here’s a simple example: trying to get better at shooting free throws in basketball. The conditions are fixed. The rim is always 10 feet above the floor. The free throw line is always 15 feet from the basket.

In theory, shooting from the same spot, over and over again, will help you ingrain the right motions into your muscle memory so your accuracy and consistency will improve.

And, of course, that does happen — but a better, faster way to improve is to slightly adjust the conditions in subsequent practice sessions.

Maybe one time you’ll stand a few inches closer. Another time you might stand a few inches to one side. Another time you might use a slightly heavier, or lighter, ball.

In short, each time you practice, you make the conditions a little different. That primes the reconsolidation pump — and helps you learn much more quickly.

But Not Too Different — or Too Soon

But you can’t adjust the conditions more than slightly. Do something too different and you’ll simply create new memories — not reconsolidated ones.

“If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation,” the researchers say. “The modification between sessions needs to be subtle.”

And you’ll also need to space out your practice sessions appropriately.

The researchers gave the participants a six-hour gap between training sessions, because neurological research indicates it takes that long for new memories to reconsolidate.

Practice differently too soon and you haven’t given yourself enough time to “internalize” what you’ve learned. You won’t be able to modify old memories — and therefore improve your skills — because those memories haven’t had the chance to become old memories.

So if you want to dramatically improve how quickly you learn a new skill, try this.

How to Learn a New Skill

The key to improvement is making small, smart changes, evaluating the results, discarding what doesn’t work, and further refining what does work.

When you constantly modify and refine something you already do well, you can do it even better.

Say you want to improve a skill; to make things simple, we’ll pretend you want to master a new presentation.

  1. Rehearse the basic skill. Run through your presentation a couple of times under the same conditions you’ll eventually face when you do it live. Naturally, the second time through will be better than the first; that’s how practice works. But then, instead of going through it a third time …
  2. Wait. Give yourself at least six hours so your memory can consolidate. (Which probably means waiting until tomorrow before you practice again, which is just fine.)
  3. Practice again, but this time …
  • Go a little faster. Speak a little — just a little — faster than you normally do. Run through your slides slightly faster. Increasing your speed means you’ll make more mistakes, but that’s OK — in the process, you’ll modify old knowledge with new knowledge — and lay the groundwork for improvement. Or …
  • Go a little slower. The same thing will happen. (Plus, you can experiment with new techniques — including the use of silence for effect — that aren’t apparent when you present at your normal speed.) Or …
  • Break your presentation into smaller parts. Almost every task includes a series of discrete steps. That’s definitely true for presentations. Pick one section of your presentation. Deconstruct it. Master it. Then put the whole presentation back together. Or …
  • Use a different projector. Or a different remote. Or a lavaliere instead of a headset mic. Switch up the conditions slightly; not only will that help you modify an existing memory, it will also make you better prepared for the unexpected.
  1. And then, next time, slightly modify another condition.

Keep in mind you can extend this process to almost anything. While it’s clearly effective for improving motor skills, the process can also be applied to nearly any skill.

Don’t do the same thing over and over again in hopes you’ll improve. You will, but not nearly as quickly as when you slightly modify the conditions in subsequent practice sessions — and then give yourself the time to consolidate the new memories you’ve made.

Keep modifying and refining a skill you already do well and you can do it even better.

And a lot more quickly.

That’s the fastest path to expertise.

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