Fallacies and Biases of our Imperfect Mind

Our mind is the most advanced computer we know about. It can perform tremendous feats. Yet, it is fooling us a lot more than most of us would care to admit. The reason for this is that the mind takes shortcuts to save energy and speed up our thinking.

In this article I will present how science now believes that the brain works, the problems it has, and suggestions about what to do about it.

Our Incredible Mind

Imagine you are riding a bicycle into an intersection. Cars, motorcycles, mopeds and other bikes are coming from all directions. Your brain takes in the whole scene and makes instantaneous decisions about what route to take. You communicate both consciously and unconsciously with the other drivers and you cross the intersection as if it was nothing.

This is an example of what our incredible mind can do. But, in order to do this it takes shortcuts and these shortcuts are not always appropriate. The rest of this article will discuss the problems that occur when the shortcuts are not to our advantage.

Belief

What is belief? Why do we believe the things we do? What do we truly know? When we start to really analyze our beliefs we often realize that we don't know why we believe in something, we just do. And, we may also know that something is not correct but still act as if it is.

Can you get a cold from being cold?

No! The only way to get a cold is by being exposed to the cold virus. If you catch a cold after being cold it is only a coincidence. Yet, many of us tell our children to dress warmly to avoid getting a cold!

Perception

We think that our perception is infallible. We think we see what is real! This is not the case, our senses are easily fooled and also affected by what we expect to experience.

Shadow Illusion

Which one of A and B is lighter?

It is a trick question, they are both the same color as we see in this picture. Yet, even when we know this, it is impossible to see!

Pattern Illusion

Can you see anything in this image? Can you see the dalmatian?

If we draw the contour of the dalmatian it becomes obvious. But now, if you look at the above picture. Can you not see the dalmatian? Our perception is influenced by what we expect to see.

Attention Test

Watch this film and try to count the passes made by the white-dressed basketball players.

Did you get the count right? Did you see the gorilla? In the original study about half of the people that were shown this film didn't see the gorilla! Being focused on one thing can make us completely miss another.

This happens to us all the time in real life. People look at the same situation and interpret it completely differently.

Memory

We believe that we remember things as they actually were, but in reality our memories are reconstructed every time we remember something. We fill in new details.

Source and Truth Amnesia

We have a tendency to forget the source and the truthiness about facts that we know. We remember the facts, but we don't know where they come from or if they are true or not!

We may have heard about a correlation between vaccines and autism. But, we forgot, the minor detail, that there is a not even a very weak correlation between them. Hence, we refuse to vaccinate our kids since we don't want them to become autistic.

Vivid Memories

Vivid memories, memories involving strong feelings, makes us remember things more strongly. It makes us more confident about our memories being correct. Just because the memories are stronger does not mean that they are more correct. We simply believe in them more.

Memory Fusion

Memories also fuse together to form new composite memories, that may not resemble what really happened at all. Do you remember your tenth birthday or do you remember what your mom told you or what you have seen in pictures?

Fake Memories

We cannot tell if our memories are fake or if they really happened. Everything we remember seems real to us!

Pattern Recognition

Humans are also very good at pattern recognition. This allow us to detect and categorize people, animals, and things. But, our pattern recognition also shows us things that are not there. Was there really a dalmatian in the spotted picture above?

Agent Detection

Agent detection is an inclination for humans and animals to detect an intelligent agent in situations that may or may not involve one. We see and hear things that aren't there.

We detect a bush blowing in the wind as a person hiding. We see a rope lying on the trail as a dangerous snake.

Confabulated Consciousness

Our mind processes our perceptions and memories and creates our reality into a coherent story. The story need not be correct, it must only be consistent. In order to keep the story consistent our mind makes up the details it needs to.

In a study of split-brain patients, the patients were shown images. One image per eye. The split-brain condition prevents the two parts of the brain from communicating with each other.

In the depicted example, the patient was shown two images: one eye was shown a chicken foot, the other eye was shown a snowy landscape. The patient then had to pick a related image from a number of other pictures. The patient in the study picked a hen and a snow-shovel with each hand respectively.

When asked why he picked the images, his verbal side of the brain answered. "I picked the hen because I saw a chicken's foot and I picked the shovel because I need a shovel to clean out the hen house."

His mind made up story that was consistent with why he had a shovel in his other hand.

Our mind can make things up to make our life story consistent!

Bias

A bias is a prejudice. A cognitive bias is a type of error in thinking that occurs when we are processing and interpreting information in the world around us.

Cognitive biases are often a result of our attempt to simplify information processing. They are rules of thumb that help us make sense of the world and reach decisions with relative speed.

Unfortunately, these biases sometimes trip us up, leading to poor decisions and bad judgments.

Anchoring

The anchoring effect describes the human tendency to rely to heavily on the first piece of information offered, the anchor, when making decisions.

If I ask a group of people "If more or less than 20 percent of the mammals have four legs?" and then ask the same group to guess the specific percentage of animals that have four legs. I commonly get a lower percentage than if I initially had asked "If more of less than 80 percent of the mammals have four legs?".

We anchor to the number presented to us. This is the same technique that is used by salesmen when they offer you a good deal of only 20 thousand dollars for the second-hand Volvo.

Availability Heuristic

How many percent of the population do you think are allergic to gluten? How do you go about making such an estimation? What I often do is to think about the people around me. How many of them are allergic to gluten? It seems like quite a lot. I would guess about 10 percent of the people I know are allergic, so that is my reply.

This is the availability heuristic at work. Why should my tiny number of acquaintances have anything to do with the rest of the population in the world? But, this information is readily available to me and it is easier for me to just guess from this information than to think through the problem thoroughly.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Say you are walking in the street and stumble and fall. The common way we react to this is that we make up an excuse to why we fell, a hole in the pavement, etc. It is not my fault, there was a hole in the pavement. Perhaps, we even get angry, someone should really fix that!

If someone else stumbles and falls in the same spot, we readily label that person as being clumsy or careless.

We attribute our mistakes to external causes and other's mistakes to the person. We also give ourselves credit for good things we do, but other people's good deeds we attribute to luck or coincidence. This is the fundamental attribution error.

Hindsight Bias

Hindsight bias is also known as the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect. It is the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened. (This picture does not really convey this bias, as the outcome can probably be predicted beforehand :)

An example of this is the 9/11 bombings, when the event had happened it was easy to find clues that informed about a coming attack. Clues like this exist all the time for things that never happen, but we don't focus on those because they are not relevant.

Confirmation Bias

This is the mother of all biases! A bias that we, all of us, fall into every day. It is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms our beliefs. Or, to notice events that confirms our beliefs while ignoring events that disconfirms them.

Do I put the seat down when I have been on the toilet? All the time, I say. Never, my wife says. How can this be? How can I and my wife come to completely different conclusions from the same data?

The reason is that I notice the times when I remember to put the seat down, since I have to think about this and therefore remember it. I don't remember the times when I don't do it since, I don't even notice them.

For my wife it is the absolute opposite, she only notices when I forget to do it and doesn't notice when I do.

When we read an article that we agree with, it is easy to think, "Yes, that is the way it is!" and move on. If we read an article that we don't agree with, we can go to great lengths to examine the "erroneous" arguments to disconfirm them.

Innumeracy

The human mind is really bad at working with large numbers and probability.

Gambler's Fallacy

The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged.

Flip a coin ten times in a row and it turns out tails every time? How likely is it that we will flop a heads the next time. The answer is, of course, 50%. In this scenario most of us will know this is correct, but in many other scenarios we tend to think that the other option is due and hence calculate it as more likely to occur.

Lottery Fallacy

What is the odds of one person winning a lottery? Not very high, maybe one-in-a-billion, depending on which lottery it is. But often times this is not the real question to ask ourselves. We should often ask: What is the odds of anyone winning the lottery? It turns out that the odds for this are, usually, pretty good.

Imagine you dream that someone dies. When you wake up the next day it has really happened. What are the odds of this happening to you? I must be a miracle. No! The correct question is: What are the adds of this happening to anyone?

Base Rate Neglect

John is a man who wears Gothic inspired clothing, has long black hair, and listens to death metal. How likely is it that he is a Christian and how likely is it that he is a Satanist?

We have a tendency to answer that it is more likely that he is a Satanist. But, this ignores the base rate. The fact that there are 2 billion Christians and only, maybe, 2 million Satanists. With that base rate in place, it is much more likely that John is a Christian who likes wearing Gothic clothing, has long black hair and listens to death metal.

Clustering Illusion

This is the tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data.

The clustering illusion explains the "hot-hand" in basketball. The hot-hand is the belief that a player who has made a few baskets is more likely to make the next basket since he is on-a-roll.

Probability

Imagine a disease that 1% of the population has. Assume there is a test with 99% certainty of being correct. 1% false positives and 1% false negatives.

What is the probability that you have the disease if after taking the test it shows positive?

Our natural inclination to answer this question is, "Bloody sure!". But, in reality the probability of us having the disease is only 50%. Google it, if you don't believe it!

So What?

So, we believe things, but we don't know why. Our perception is severely influenced by what we already believe. Our memories are flawed. We see patterns and agents that don't exist. So what? This doesn't apply to us anyway, right?

It turns out that it does. Smarter people are better at rationalizing their beliefs than other's. We still make the same mistakes, but we are better at coming up with credible explanations as to why it is not a rationalization.

Skepticism

"I doubt it!" is not only a proper response to what other people say. It is also an appropriate response to our own thought and ideas.

Scientific skepticism holds that science is the best way to find out things about the world and ourselves. Scientific skeptics don't trust claims made by people who reject science or who don't think that science is the best way to learn about the world.

Scientific skeptics don't say that all extraordinary claims are false. A claim isn't false just because it hasn't been proven true.

It's possible pigs can fly, but until we see the evidence we shouldn't give up what science has taught us about pigs and flying.

Meta Cognition

Thinking about thinking! When you learn new facts, be aware of all the fallacies and biases mentioned in this article. This will help prevent you from making some mistakes.

Bias Blind Spot

The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to compensate for one's own cognitive biases. Even if we know everything I've written about here, we have a tendency to underestimate our potential for self-deception. To see ourselves as rational beings is the greatest self-deception of all.

Richard Feynman

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -
and you are the easiest person to fool.  
-- Richard Feynman

References

• Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases
• Thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman
• How we know what isn’t so, Thomas Gilovich
• Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb
• The Drunkards Walk, Leonard Mlodinow
• Naked Statistics, Charles Wheelan
• The Five Elements of Effective Thinking, Edward B. Burger, Michael Starbird

References from Habits of a Responsible Programmer

A list of references from my talk, Habits of a Responsible Programmer at Øredev. First out is the blog post that inspired the talk

Habits

Some books about habits and how our brain works in good and not so good ways.

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Typing

Steve Yegges blog post that made me realize that it is time to learn to touch type along with some tools that can make it fun to learn.

• Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret by Steve Yegge
• aTypeTrainer
• Type Racer

Clear Code

It is worth learning Smalltalk, just to understand the book, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns.

• Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck
• Clean Code by Bob Martin

Programming Techniques

SICP is a classic and it deserves to be read but Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming is just as good if not better.

• Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Peter van Roy and Seif Haridi
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Jay Sussman
• The Little Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen
• The Seasoned Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen
• Javascript Conditionals by me

Read Code

Source code to a number of projects with beautiful code.

• CloudFoundry - beautiful Ruby code, OS Platform as a Service.
• Levelup - Node wrapper for the LevelDB key-value store.

Explicit

A good short article by Marin Fowler on the tradeoffs involved with writing explicit or implicit code.

• To Be Explicit (pdf) by Martin Fowler

Refactoring

The book by Fowler is a timeless reference book and it is required reading for anyone serious about programming. Kerievsky's book gives more in depth examples and finally Reg's blog post discusses reasons for not refactoring just to please your own ego.

• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
• Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky
• The Narcissism of Small Code Differences by Reginald Braithwaite

Simple vs. Easy

Great talk!

• Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey

Testing

I like Sandi Metz way of explaining why testing is important.

• Magic Tricks of Testing by Sandi Metz
• Practical Object Oriented Desgin in Ruby by Sandi Metz
• The Craftsman Articles by Bob Martin (click on the Craftsman link).
• The Scientific Method

Documentation

Documentation matters, but keep it simple.

• Readme Driven Development
• DDD Context Map

Git

The original gitcasts.com is no longer available, but the videos are uploaded to You Tube.

• Articles on Git from my blog.
• Git Casts on You Tube

Scripting

• Unix Power Tools by Tim O'Reilly et al.
• Bash Cookbook by Carl Albing et al.
• Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby by David Copeland

Generating Code

Tools for generation code. Here documents are the simplest possible way, but if you want to generate multiple files it is better to use Thor or Yo.

• Here documents (Bash)
• Thor (Ruby)
• Yo (Javascript)

Environments

The ultimate book on continuous delivery, a must read for anyone interested in automation. And, that should be everyone!

• Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley

Projects

Wonderful book about different people stereotypes.

• Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies by Tom Demarco et al

Estimation

Two articles on estimation by Martin Fowler and Dan North.

• Blink Estimation by Dan North
• The Purpose of Estimation by Martin Fowler
• No Deadlines by me

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Books about happiness, the mind, and other things.

• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Your Brain at Work by David Rock
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• The Silva Mind Control Method by José Silva
• Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
• Opening the Door of your Heart by Ajahn Brahm

Notes on "Your Brain at Work"

I just finished reading Your Brain at Work by David Rock and it is really good. If you haven't read it I can highly recommend it. Since I think it is so full of good ideas, I decided I wanted to write down my understanding of it while it is fresh. I also recently finished reading Blah, Blah, Blah by Dan Roam and I'm going to use his Vivid style in this text.

The Prefrontal Cortex

Our consciousness is located in an area of the brain called the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC).

The Prefrontal Cortex main responsibilities are: recalling, memorizing, understanding, deciding, and inhibiting.

Recalling, getting information from long term memory into the PFC.

Memorizing, storing information from the PFC into long term memory.

Understanding, connecting new information to the information already stored inside our brain.

Deciding, comparing two or more different items and deciding which one is most suitable.

Inhibiting, preventing information from other parts of our brain and outside interferences from entering the PFC.

Attention is Limited

Paying attention consumes energy and the brain has limited resources available. The more ideas we try to hold in our head at once the less attention we can pay to each of them.

One especially energy consuming task is prioritizing, since it involves most of the ideas that the PFC has to do. In order to be able to prioritize well, we should do this when our minds are fresh. We need to prioritize prioritizing!

In the sixties George A. Milner, experimented with consciousness and came up with the idea that we are only able to hold 7±2 items in attention at once.

The problem with this is that he probably overestimated our abilities. It is more likely that the number is less than four, and the less the better.

Preserve Resources

The more information we can get our of our PFC, the better we will be able to focus on what is in it. Good ways to get things out of our PFC are: write them down or draw them. Visuals are especially good since our brain is very good at dealing with visual information and consumes less resources when dealing with visuals.

Another important task to do to preserve resources is to inhibit low prioritized thoughts. Write them down so that they don't consume your resources any more. Tasks that are not well-defined consume a lot more energy than they are worth.

When comparing items, the less items you need to compare the better. The optimal number of items to compare is two. And, it is important to get the ideas out of your head and onto paper, so that you don't have to try to remember the other things while you are debating the merits of one.

New ideas consume more energy than old, since old ideas are just references into long-term memory.

Two techniques for limiting the amount of information you hold in you PFC are chunking and simplification.

Chunking means grouping information into one chunk. It is easier to remember 1978 than to remember 1, 9, 7, 8.

Simplification is a way of ignoring the complexity of something by just labeling it.

Multi-Tasking

Armed with this information it is easy to see that multi-tasking is a very bad idea. Dual-task interference happens when we try to do two or more things simultaneously. When this happens we loose precision. If accuracy is important don't divide your attention.

If you do need to multi-task, here are some techniques that helps.

• Order things and only work from the front of the queue.
• Explicitly suspend-resume. Do one thing, stop, do another thing, stop, etc. It is a good idea to let others know that you are switching between tasks to let them know when you are paying attention or not.
• Automate it! This means learn it well enough so that you can do it without thinking consciously. More about this in my blog, Rationality is Overrated

Distractions

The brain is easily distracted. It has survived thousands of years by reacting to "a rustle in the bushes".

In our modern world similar, external, distractions come in the form of mobile phones, email, twitter, colleagues, friends, family, etc.

Avoiding distractions, inhibition, consumes energy, so, it is best to not let the distractions distract you in the first place.

Along with external distractions we also have internal distractions, impulses. It is not as easy to turn off the internal distractions. To do this we need to practice self-control. But self-control is also a limited resource. When you have resisted one impulse, it gets harder to resist the next.

Internal distractions are often triggered when we are thinking of ourselves. We can reduce the likelihood of internal distractions by clearing our mind before we set out on a new task.

We can improve our mental breaking system by practicing, and re-enforce it by doing something physical along with the mental braking.

Getting Stuck

Getting stuck on a problem is called an impasse. To resolve an impasse, we need to let the brain idle. This gives the unconscious part of the brain a chance to solve the problem.

To have insights involves hearing subtle signals and making loose connections. This requires a quiet mind with minimal electrical activity.

Insights occur more frequently when you are relaxed and happy. Take a break, do something interesting. Focus on connections between information instead of details. Simplify problems into a very high-level description.

The Networks of the Brain

In the brain we have two main networks: the narrative network and the direct experience network.

The Narrative Network is the default network when nothing is happening. It keeps a conversation going in the mind. It makes assumptions and figures out plans from them. It is very sequential in the way it works. If I think of this, then this, then this, then this, etc., etc., etc. By just tuning in to this network, we make us very busy indeed. All the time. When we receive information through this network, it is filtered, and interpreted before we can do anything about it.

The Direct Experience Network is our other main network. It is triggered when we let the brain idle, and just "listen" to what our senses tells us. This is often called mindfulness. This network is not sequential like the narrative is. It is immediate and it makes use of the full processing power of the brain and not just the pre-frontal cortex. The sensory information that is received through direct experience include information about the self, about thoughts, feelings, emotions, and internal states.

When we need to get unstuck or unstressed, it is very wise to try to shift over to direct experience. This can be done by focusing on sensory information, such as how the chair feels on our buttocks, how the wind feels on our cheeks, or listening to the sound of birds singing or our own breath. This simple act will allow the brain to get unstuck of its previous ideas. The act is actually not that simple, it is not easy to focus on one thing for more than a few seconds.

Mindfulness

A part of working memory called the executive function "sits above" the other functions monitoring our thinking, choosing how to best allocate resources. Mindfulness is about living in the present and it gives us "the ability to pause before we react." When you are being mindful you are also noticing information about yourself.

When you notice that you are not doing what you should, you are being mindful. You are noticing information about how and what you are thinking. You are noticing inner signals.

"Mindfulness isn't hard, the hard part is to remember to be mindful." -- John Teasdale

Practice, you can be mindful anywhere and with anything.

"The unexamined life is not worth living" --Socrates

Danger and Rewards

The brain tries to minimize danger (away response), and maximize rewards (toward response).

The away response is stronger, faster and longer lasting than the toward response. The away response can reduce cognitive resources, making it harder to think about thinking, making you more defensive and mistakenly classify situations as threats. Trying to suppress an emotion often makes it worse and often makes other people feel uncomfortable.

Labeling an emotion, giving it a name, often reduces the emotion. The label needs to be symbolic, short and succinct.

Reappraisal

Reappraisal is a powerful method for managing increased arousal. It means that you evaluate a situation and see it from a different perspective than you first do. Four forms of reappraisal are: reinterpreting, normalizing, reordering, and repositioning.

Reinterpreting is something we do every day. When we are late for an airplane, we feel worried and hurry our steps, to avoid missing the plane. When we can see the gate and the people waiting for the plane, we automatically reinterpret the situation since we see that we have plenty of time. Nothing has changed, except our interpretation of the situation.

An example of normalization, is when we are at a new job, we may feel worried, since everything is new to us. It is easy to overreact to trivialities that otherwise wouldn't bother us. Normalization is when someone tells you, or you figure it out for yourself, that it is normal to feel worried at a new job. Everybody feels worried, it is normal! We immediately calm down. Nothing, again, has changed, except our interpretation of the situation

Reordering is a larger form of reappraisal. It involves changing the way we prioritize what is valuable to us. If we value two things, such as autonomy and responsibility, they may come in conflict. An example would be working as a member of a team where you are allowed to make independent decisions about how to do your work, allowing you to feel in control of the situation. When you are suddenly offered the job as team lead, you will lose control of the situation, since other people will be responsible for doing the work that you used to do. Your autonomy has decreased since you have to rely on other people to get the work done. You have to reappraise the situation, reorder your priorities, in order to be comfortable with this new situation.

The last form of reappraisal, repositioning, involves putting yourself in someone else's position. In order to understand why they are reacting the way they do. If someone thinks all your ideas are worthless, they obviously don't see the world the way you do. In order to understand why they feel the way they do, you have to try to put yourself in their shoes.

Perhaps they have tried the ideas, you are suggesting, and failed previously. The reason they don't want to you to try it may be in the best interest of everyone; they don't want the project to fail or, it may be simple jealousy; they don't want you to succeed with what they failed with before.

I does not matter what the reason is. By putting yourself in their position you will be in a better position to deal with the arguments when they come.

If you find it dishonest to change your view of the world, you must remember that:

"All the brain can know, it knows from inside itself." --Walter Freeman

If you recognize that all interpretations of the world are just that, interpretations your brain has made, then, having a choice about which interpretation to choose at any moment makes more sense.

People who reappraise more tend to live happier lives. One way to reappraise a situation is to think "It's not me, it's my brain!"

It is also worth noting that reappraisal uses a lot of energy and it is best done when the brain is fresh. But, reappraisal, like everything else, is something you can practice until it becomes habitual.

Expectations

Expectations are the brain paying attention to a possible reward or threat. Expectations alter the way you perceive the world. It is common to fit incoming data into expectations and to ignore data that don't fit.

Met expectations generates a small increase of dopamine. Exceeded expectations generate a large increase of dopamine. And dopamine makes you feel good.

Unmet expectations generates a large drop in dopamine level, and a strong threat response.

The dynamics of expectations can generate upward and downward spirals.

A general feeling of expecting good things generate healthy levels of dopamine and may be the neurochemical marker of feeling happy.

If your expectations are not met, try reappraising, remembering that it is your brain reacting to the dopamine levels.

Collaboration

Maslow's hierarchy of needs may have been wrong and other needs may be as important as the primary needs that he identified.

Social connections are a primary need, as vital as food and water. We know other people by experiencing their states ourselves. Safe connections with others are vital for health and for healthy collaboration. People are classified as friend or foe quickly. Foe is the default. You need to work hard at creating connections to create good collaboration. Connect to people on a human level, by sharing experiences, to create better collaboration.

In order to collaborate well with others it is a good idea to take into account the major areas that we care about socially. The can be summarized by the SCARF model, SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

Status, is a significant driver at work and across life experiences. Status changes affect our threat and reward circuits. People pay a lot of attention to building and protecting their status. When everyone is trying to achieve higher status, there is a decrease in relatedness. Playing against yourself increases your status without threatening others. You can decrease the status threat in others, by sharing your humanity or mistakes.

Certainty is when you feel sure about yourself, your environment, and the people around you.

Autonomy, the feeling of control, is another primary reward. Note that is the feeling of autonomy that is important, not the actual autonomy. The feeling of autonomy can be increased by letting people understand that they have choices.

Relatedness is the feeling of being part of something. The feeling of being part of a team or of a cause. The feeling to belong.

Fairness, can be a very strong drive indeed. People go to war in order to make a wrong right. Treating people fairly may increase several of the other primary social domains.

Problems and Solutions

Trying to solve problems is less effective than trying to find solutions. When solving problems we narrow in on a specific area rather than trying to creatively find a solution that we are really looking for.

When helping others to solve problems, it is often not helpful to suggest possible solutions. People don't want to be fed a solution that they are not buying into.

This can be explained in terms of the SCARF model in that it:

• Threatens the status, since it implies that they are incompetent.
• Threatens the autonomy, since they cannot come up with their own solution.
• Threatens the relatedness, since it is harder to relate to someone else's solutions than to your own.

It is better to bring people to their own insights. To do this it can be helpful to ask questions that make them think about their own thinking or to think of the problem at a very high level. Some ways to do this is to ask questions about what strategies people have been thinking about for solving the problem or to ask them to summarize the problem in one sentence.

Creating Long-term Change

The brain constantly changes itself. This is called neuroplasticity. Focused attention changes the brain. Attention is lost very quickly if we feel threatened by something. To induce change try to move attention away from the perceived threat by posing good questions. Creating long-term change requires paying attention regularly to deepen the new circuits.

Don't try to influence people in a strong away state. Use elements of the SCARF model to shift people into a toward state. Practice using solution-focused questions that focus people's attention on the specific circuits you want to bring to life. Invent ways to have people pay repeated attention to new circuits.

Recommendation

Your Brain at Work is as you may tell from my notes not only about the brain at work. It is about the brain. It is a really good book and I highly recommend it to everyone!

Mastery

Here is a wonderful story, told by Ken Robinson in his book The Element, about an 8 year old girl, Gillian Lynne, who everyone sees as a problem child.

Gillian and her mother went to a psychiatrist and the mother describes her daughter's difficulties with concentrating, sitting, and doing her homework.

The doctor listened to the mother and then he told Gillian that he wanted to talk to her mother alone. When they left the room, the doctor turned on some music on the radio. Outside the room, the doctor said to the mother "Just stand her and watch her!" As they watched, the girl started moving to the music with a grace that anyone would have been impressed by.

After watching for a few minutes, the doctor turned to the mother and said: "There is nothing wrong with your daughter, she's a dancer, take her to a dance school!"

Gillan grew up to become one of the most accomplished choreographers of our time.

This is a story about how people shine when they are allowed to do what they are meant to do, when they are in their element. But, what it does not take into account is work, hard work!

Thomas Jefferson put it nicely:

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have!

This post is not about talent, it is about mastery, the hard work of mastery!

Talent is not a requirement for Mastery, in fact talent can get in your way on the path of mastery, if it is too easy in the beginning we may not be able to put in the hours needed for true mastery when it get hard or boring.

Many of the ideas for this post come from the book called Mastery by George Leonard and he describes it well.

We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It's about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

Leonard identifies five keys to mastery. They are instruction, practice, surrender, intentionality, and the Edge.

Instruction

Instruction is vital. How do we know that what we are doing is the right thing. As a programmer I am always confronted with new things. How do I tell the good from the bad? After you reach a certain level of experience it gets easier to make an educated guess, but it is still just a guess. And before we have a lot of experience, we are liable to fall into traps all the time, (EJB anyone?).

My way of dealing with new things is to read books, papers, and blogs, listen to podcasts, watch screencasts, and if I can find the time, attend workshops at conferences. But, it is important to listen to critique as well as praise of a new technique. If it seems reasonable to you, by all means, give it a shot. And then, not until you have actually used a system for quite a while, can you tell if it is good or not for you. Because that is another aspect of mastery, we are all on our own path, what is right for me may not be right for someone else!

Practice

Practice is the true essence of Mastery. Without it, everything else falls to pieces. Practice is the path that build the foundation for mastery. Another quote from Leonard:

How do you best move toward mastery? To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself.

An interesting fact about practice is how the normal learning curve looks.

Do you recognize it? Long periods where you practice and practice but you don't seem to get any better. Then suddenly there is a small improvement and you feel like you finally get it, and then after a little while you are back to normal again.

The more I know, the more I know that I don't know. --Socrates (misquoted:)

Surrender

What Leonard calls surrender I would call humility. A Zen Master would probably call it Beginners Mind.

Beginner's Mind. It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.

It can be very hard to give up your hard earned skills in order to grasp a new concept. But, sometimes, the only way to improve is to start over with a completely different approach.

How do we expect to learn something new if we are not willing to look like an idiot for awhile?

Intentionality

You gotta be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there. -- Yogi Berra

Intentionality means a lot of things. It means character, discipline, stamina or willpower. But it also means knowing what you want.

Do you know what you want? Unless you do, it is very hard to stay on the path. In my mind intentionality is not necessarily goals, it is more a direction. If I stop for a while and look around, I can tell if I am on the path, because if I am, I will, slowly, be moving in the direction I intend to go.

When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing. -- Chinese proverb

The Edge

Here's another quote that I like, from the book, Zorba:

No you're not free! The string that you are tied to is perhaps longer than others'. You're on a long piece of string boss, but you never cut the string in two, you need a touch of folly to do that... A man's head is like a grocer, it keeps accounts. It never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. But if a man never breaks the string, tell me what flavor is left in life? Nothing, but the flavor of weak camomile tea. Nothing like rum that makes you see life inside out!

In order to make the really big leaps like, for example, Einstein's Relativity Theory, we need to be a bit crazy. It is impossible to analytically reach certain conclusions. They can only be reached by thinking so far outside the box, that most people would consider us insane.

Conclusion

I will conclude with another quote from Leonard:

It is easy to get on the path of mastery. The real challenge lies in staying on it.

Choices, Habits and Awareness

Every second, the human brain is bombarded with information, the conscious part of the brain is only able to handle a tiny percentage of this. The rest is handled by our unconscious.

A habit is an automatic reaction to a given situation. Habits allow us to do things automatically, without being consciously aware of what we are doing. But, to form a new habit takes time, and during that time we must choose to do what we want to make a habit of. And, to be able to make this choice we must be aware of the choice in the first place. We must be aware to be able to become unaware!

Here is an algorithm to illustrate this:

# Sequential
if not habit?(choice) or aware_of?(choice)
  make_decision(choice)
else
  automatic_response(choice)
end

Of course, it is not that simple. The brain is not sequential.

The brain is massively parallel and almost everything in it happens unconsciously. Every second our senses are fed with more than 11 million bits of information, while the conscious part of our brain is only able to process less than 50! All other information is filtered out by our unconscious. Scary! But, here comes the cool part, we can consciously change our filters by creating new habits.

Here is parallel version of the code above.

# Parallel, unconscious
if habit?(choice)
  automatic_response(choice)
end

# Parallel, conscious
if aware_of(choice)
  make_decision(choice) # Practice
end

Choices

Every single moment of our life, we are given choices. Some choices are obvious (the choices are, the answers may not be) such as:

• Should I use Ruby or Python for my next project?
• Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?
• Should I learn a new programming language that I have no hope, whatsoever, to use in a live project?
• Are the kids allowed to play with fire?

Other choices are not so clear, such as:

• Do I get up now or press snooze another time?
• Should I step on the white lines when crossing the street?
• Do I put the right foot in front of the left or jump on the left?
• Should I remove the hand from the hot stove or not?
• Should I react by being angry or not?

What's cool, and scary, with choices is that every time we make one, our brain changes. It literally changes physically every time. It actually changes every time we think a thought.

Every time we make a certain choice, that path through the brain gets wider, and thus the choice gets easier to make. It is easier to make the same decision, over and over, than it is to make new decisions all the time.

Another thing about choices is that it is often painful to make them. The reason for this, I believe, is that we often know, intuitively, what the right choice is, but that choice involves more work. This is why we should form good habits, because habits free us from the agony to choose.

Habits

When we have made a decision many times; when a path through the brain has become wide enough, we don't have to make a choice any more! We have formed a habit. Psychologists say that it takes 21 days. We have both good habits and bad ones. And most of the habits we have, we are unaware of.

A great thing about good habits is that they are performed by the unconscious part of the brain. They allow us to do things without consciously thinking about them. And since we are not consciously thinking about them, it is almost as if they do themselves. :D

A sad thing about bad habits is that they are performed by the unconscious part of the brain. We do things without consciously thinking about them. And since we are not consciously thinking about them, it is almost as if they do themselves. :(

That is why we should nurture our habits. We should create habits of things that we want to do, like writing our tests first, and complimenting people when they do good. We should make habits of boring things, that we have to do, like doing the dishes and writing documentation. Once they become habits they are not boring anymore.

This is also why we should be grateful when someone points out our bad habits, because they help us become aware of something that we may want to change.

Awareness

The key to forming new good habits and getting rid of bad ones, is awareness. We cannot change what we are not aware of. We cannot train what we are not aware of. But what are we aware of? We are aware of things we are trained to be aware of. Our awareness is learned, it is dependent on our habits! Ah, recursion!

When we are creating habits, we define ourselves.

Are you aware that there is a programming language designed for programmer happiness?

Are you aware that touch typing is a habit? That sitting in front of a computer eight hours a day without being able to touch type sucks? If you're not, read this blog post by blogger extraordinaire, Steve Yegge. I wasn't aware two years ago but now I type 50 WPM (which is not great, but I get better every day).

Are you aware of that your habits form your thoughts, that they form you?

We are what we repeatably do. --Aristotele

Conclusion

Can you imagine a day without googling for code-related things? When you don't have to think at all about the signatures of methods, the key combinations that moves you to the right position, or the inner workings of the authentication library. Can you imagine how good you would feel, and how fast you would work? Can you imagine eight hours of continuous flow?

Linus Torvalds, allegedly, wrote the bare bones of Git in two weeks. How could he do this? Because he has been living and breathing C and Linux, for the last 20 years!

So, where am I going with this? I want flow! I want eight hours of continuous flow while I'm working. In order to achieve this, I have to train my brain to know, really know, unconsciously know, the tools of my trade.

I am going to select a small number of tools that resonates with the way I am and want to work.

I have previously been a generalist when it comes to programming. I am proficient in many programming languages, but I have yet to become a true expert in one. With a true expert I mean someone who doesn't have to lookup anything. Everything, the language constructs, the built-in libraries, the major third-party libraries, the tools, should be intuitively known, habitual.

I aim to become an expert in the languages Javascript and Ruby.

This doesn't mean that I'll give up other programming languages. I will still dabble with interesting programming languages like Clojure, Scala, Mirah, etc., but my main focus will be on Ruby and Javascript.

Why Ruby and Javascript? Because they are languages that resonates with my brain. They are dynamic, interpreted and give lightning-fast feedback. They also allow me to express my concepts clearly and succinctly.

Some thoughts from "A Theory of Fun"

I just finished reading the book A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. It is funny how everything comes together once you start focusing and noticing certain patterns. It is a good book and worth reading even if you're not into game design.

I already learned from personal experience and from other books, that our conscious mind is terrible at multitasking. It is however very good at internalizing things, learning things so that the brain can perform them unconsciously, without conscious supervision. Raph calls this chunking.

The act of learning is about turning many steps into chunks that we don't need to think about as separate entities.

When we don't see something, we don't perceive it, but once we become aware of a certain pattern, we see it everywhere. Koster calls this noise.

Noise is any pattern that I don't understand.

A good game keeps us on the edge of our abilities constantly and once we learn something the game will become harder. This is a variant of flow. But since a game cannot continue for ever it is doomed to become boring once we have mastered it.

The destiny of games is to become boring, fun is the process and routine is its destination.

Koster also mentions some of his grandfathers carpentry practices.

• Work Hard on Craft
• Measure twice, cut once.
• Feel the grain, work with it not aginst it.
• Create something unexpected, but faithful to the source from which it sprang.

That is not bad advice for anything.

Notes on The User Illusion, part Two

This is part two of a summary of the fantastic book. The User Illusion

Our conscious mind consists of symbols that map into the rest of our mind. Every second more than 11 million bits are reduced to less than 50 bits of meaningful information at apparently no time at all.

Half a second before we try to do something consciously our brains has started its activity. Half a second!

Experiment

• Sit down and hold one finger up.
• Whenever you feel like it, bend your finger.

Half a second before your finger is bent, your brain has started its activity! It does not feel like half a second does it? There is no way! 0.1 second is more likely. But the data has been reproduced and it is undeniable.

The consciousness of wanting to do something appears almost half a second after the brain has initiated its activity.

Our actions are initiated unconsciously.

Benjamin Libet

Benjamin Libet performed some experiments, in the sixties, while a friend of his was performing brain surgery. Libet stimulated the brain with electrical impulses and found that if the brain was stimulated less the half a second, it was not noticed at all. If the brain was stimulated more than halv a second the patient felt it. It appeared to the patient as if a certain area of his body had been touched, since there are no normal sensors inside the brain.

Libet then performed some other experiments. He stimulated a part of the brain that related to the left hand and at the same time he stimulated the right hand and the patient was to say which hand was stimulated first.

The hand had to be stimulated half a second after the brain to give the appearance to the patient that they where stimulated simultaneously.

The conscious experience is projected back in time so that the conscious mind believes that they are almost simultaneous. The brain is fooling itself.

The conscious is delayed, but it does its best to hide it. For itself. It is very convenient since it gives the mind the time to perform the reduction of the sensory data to what is needed to get a full experience.

Everyone knows that it doesn't take half a second to remove a hand from a hot stove, but it takes half a second to get the conscious back-dated experience.

So does this mean that we don't have free will? Libet does not think so. He says that there is time for the conscious mind to veto the unconscious decision.

The conscious is not a top-level unit that gives orders to its underlying processes. It is a selecting mechanism that chooses between the different options that the unconscious provides.

As long as the unconscious action-proposals work in sync with the conscious thoughts and feelings, they are hardly noticed. They are merged together with the conscious motives that take all the credit! --Harald Høffding

The conscious veto is often associated with an uncomfortable feeling, we usually feel best when we are not making conscious decisions. Compare this with for example Flow

I and Me

Nørretranders defines I as the conscious mind and Me as the rest of us.

I have free will, but it is not my I that has it, it is my Me.

The conscious mind is allowed to use its veto in situations where the Me allows it to. In situations where speed is critical, for example when something is threatening us, the conscious mind is left out of the loop.

A comfortable state of mind is when the Me is allowed to do what it does automatically without interference of the I. This state is neither associated with nervousness nor shyness, but with comfort and carelessness.

The User Illusion

The user illusion is a term coined by Alan Kay of Smalltalk fame. He used it to describe the metaphor of the desktop that was invented by him and his colleagues at Xerox PARC. His great idea was that it does not matter what really happens inside the computer as long as the interface presented to the user is useful and consistant.

Nørretranders argues that our consciousness is our user illusion. Our consciousness is our map into ourselves and our possibilities to affect this world. I am the user illusion of Me.

The conscious mind may appear when the brains' simulation of the world has become complete enough to require a model of itself. --Richard Dawkins

Experiments with split-brain patient has shown that the mind doesn't think twice about making up a story that is consistent with something that does not have anything to do with reality. An example of this is:

• A split brain patient is shown two images
  • The right eye was shown a snowy landscape
  • The left eye was shown a chicken's foot.
• The patient pointed to two images.
  • The right hand a snow-shovel.
  • The left hand a chicken.
• When the patient was asked why he pointed at the two images:
  • He said that he picked the chicken because it matched the chicken's foot
  • And that he picked the shovel because you need the shovel to clean out the chicken house.

The mind lied without hesitation to make the selection of images consistent.

Our consciousness is delayed to allow it to perform the required calculations. First we sense, then we simulate, then we experience. But we have no notion of the simulation. Consciousness is depth appearing as shallow.

Learning and Knowing

There are lots of things that we know how to do that we cannot explain. How do you ride a bike? How do you walk? How does your mother look? Its impossible to explain, but simple to know, once it has been learned.

The I's role in learning is to have the disciplin to learn by repetition, and the foresight that when I have learned this I will enjoy practicing it. The consciousness, usually, gets in the way while learning and, certainly, gets in the way when we practice what we have learned.

Science, usually, clarifies what we already know. It explains what we already know but cannot explain to each other.

Science is just refinement of everyday knowledge --Albert Einstein

The relationship between the conscious learning and the non-conscious ability is similar in both practical areas, such as ballet, and theoretical areas such as science; in both cases we must put in a lot of hard work for something we don't completely understand, but that we still can share with others.

The Rise of Consciousness and Religion

Nørretranders brings up another researcher, Julian Jaynes, who argues that the consciousness of man didn't exist 3000 years ago. He has various theories to prove this. Among other things he brings up the Oracles of Ancient Greece and the voices religious people hear as examples of people who are acting without a consciousness. A pre-conscious man is just a me, and a conscious man thinks he is just an I.

He also makes an interesting point about religion. The I has to recognize that there is something greater than itself. But it is not a god it is the me. God is the part of man that the I cannot explain. Religion is too important to be left to the religious. It is the struggle between the carefree me and the worrying I.

The Limits of Consciousness

Most of the processes that go on inside our bodies we know nothing about. We cannot feel the blood flowing in our legs or our immune system attacking viruses, until the problems become large enough for the body to raise the temperature to increase the effect. We cannot hold our breaths long enough to kill ourselves. The unconscious part of us wont let us

The Beginning of the Universe

In the Universe there is as much negative matter as positive matter. The sum of it all is Zero. According to the laws of quantum mechanics it is possible for Nothing to split into something for a very short while. The less it is the longer it is allowed to exist. So, it the sum of everything in the Universe is Nothing can exist forever.

Emergence

Emergence is the appearance of group characteristics when the number of elements increase. An example of this is Temperature. There is no temperature when there are only a few molecules but when the number of molecules increases the Temperature property emerges. In the book Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter talks about the emerging properties of the brain, the thoughts that cannot be described at a lower level.

Gödels proof suggests the possibility that an view from a higher level may have an explanation capacity that is totally missing at a lower level. --Douglas Hofstadter

A larger system consisting of simple rules can show characteristics that cannot be deduced from the rules.

It is impossible to know how yourself or another human will react, because it requires you to have access to all the information yourself or this other person has had and this is impossible since human being mostly function unconsciously.

The Liars Paradox, "I'm lying" is not a liars paradox. It is the truth about our consciousness. --Thor Nørretranders

Notes on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Andy Hunt has written a good book on thinking and learning. It contains light reading about how our minds work. Here are some gems from it. This is by no means a review of the book it is just my notes on things that I had not heard before or felt I needed to remind myself of.

Always consider the context.

Nothing happens out of context. Nothing! There is no objective truth.

Learn by synthesis as well as by analysis.

This is learning by doing instead of by studying. Instead of dissecting a frog, try to build one, to figure out how it works.

Every read is a write!

This has to do with our thinking and it means is that every thought we think affect our brains and thus all the rest of our thoughts. No wonder thinking positively has profound effects on us.

Our brain works in two modes, linear and holistic.

To take advantage of the holistic part we need to defocus and allow the “back” of our brain to do its work. The R-mode as the holistic part is called cannot verbalize its thoughts and we are therefore forced to use the L-mode to be able to talk about the ideas that R-mode may have come up with. Beware that details may be lost in the process.

Are you making a logical argument, an emotional one or just a familiar one?

It is an interesting question to ponder every time you get into an argument.

SQ3R – Scan, Question, Read, Recite, Review

To get the most out of a book, use SQ3R.

It is by logic we prove; it is by intuition we discover. —Henri Poincaré

It is important to acknowledge that the seed to our knowledge have nothing to do with logic at all.

You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there. —Yogi Berra

Set goals!

SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-boxed

Goals that are not SMART are visions, important in the large, but they need to be complemented with SMART goals.

Documenting is as important as documentation.

Writing documentation brings out problems and clarifies what the code or product is supposed to do. The insights from this process may greatly improve it.

Establish rules of engagement to manage interruptions.

Since context-switching is very expensive it is very important for teams to have clear rules for when, where and why anyone can be disturbed.