The Emergence of Context

Try to get a kid to eat their green vegetables. Being the rational adult that we are we attempt explaining to the youth why eating their vegetables, drinking their milk, not doing drugs or smoking, or staying in school are such good things to do because they all factor into the context of how their future will play out. Don’t stay in school, for instance, and you will have limitations placed onto your for how you to succeed in the world; do drugs and things get worse. Life is tough enough; it only gets worse when someone stacks the odds against themselves.

A recent study of the brains of children shows a stark contrast in the biology—and through that, its mechanics—between the younger brain, the older brain, and the points in between. While the human brain physically grows to full size (but not volume) by the time a person is six years old, it does not finish developing until early adulthood. The examples of context and long-term thinking show that children are not apt to have the mental traits of grown-ups. They may not be able to recall context with such great ease, but they do have the ability to recall discrete facts with better ease.

Gray matter grows, flourishes, and neurons—brain cells—develop sheaths of fatty materials on their ends as the brain matures. This biological process forms the basis for growing from individuals of finite facts to people of great associations of context:

“But as people grow, their brains change. Before full volume is attained, the pruning starts. Grey matter gets picked away at different rates in different parts of the organ. Brain cells form white matter as their arms become covered in fatty sheaths that, like the plastic insulation around a metal wire, stop electrical signals leaking out as they zip along the nerve cells. As the grey matter diminishes, the white matter steadily increases. Which is why the brain can mature from an organ of overwhelmingly short-range connections into one with many long-distance links, as Bradley Schlaggar and his colleagues at Washington University, in St Louis, have found.”

Essentially, this process creates the basis for two separate networks—instead of two physical parts of the brain—which develop to be able to simultaneously work out the challenges we face in our everyday lives. Through the use of a technique called graph theory—a versatile tool to measure everything from neural activity to power grid usage—researchers were able to map with some success how these networks act on their own and in coordination with one another. It also offers insight to the notion that adults can better resist impulses in order to focus on long-term goals.

In the end, however, all this winds up summarizing a conclusion that has been in the annals of wisdom for quite some time: The brain is a muscle, like any other. While it will grow and mature over time, how we use it over any given time will help to develop it—or foment an environment in which it is less likely to develop—no matter which decade of age in which we find ourselves.

Human Mechanics: Awareness, Learning, and Context - Part 1

I have recently found myself picking apart the mechanics of fundamental human processes: Decision-making, learning, adapting, dealing with change, etc. To mention nothing of the psychology involved, it certainly has been a multi-disciplinary approach. Fields ranging from Information Theory to physics have found their way into my process and analysis of this academic study: One that I hope will have practical applicability.

Where to start?

General wisdom through the ages has passed on the adage that people have a tendency to do two things: Seek pleasure and avoid pain. Fueled by advancements in current technology this has been challenged. Dr. Gregory Berns of Emory University has dug more into the “what do humans want?” question. If pleasure is a sensational emotion that only happens occasionally then, it stands to reason, that something more substantive must exist along the way. Take from this that the ideal place to be is somewhere between pleasure and pain: Satisfaction. Let’s first examine this by looking at the definition of pleasure with a simple “define:” search in Google.

“· a fundamental feeling that is hard to define but that people desire to experience; "he was tingling with pleasure"

· joy: something or someone that provides pleasure; a source of happiness;”

Two definitions stand out, yes: The second pointing at joy, or a source of being happy. The first one points to the simple abstraction and how difficult it is to pin down the true meaning of pleasure. Of course, it’s a subjective term, but pleasure is always a positive thing—therefore finding a definition across a sampling of many individuals, many subjectivities, shouldn’t be impossible.

Next, satisfaction:

“· The human experience of being filled and enriched by their experience.”

And:

“ · act of fulfilling a desire or need or appetite”

Imagine moving up a hill: The hilltop represents the completion of the task, winning the prize for the effort that you’ve exerted. Although this supersedes satisfaction into pleasure, pleasure—especially in this context—is fleeting. There is also the downside that exposure to too much pleasure could desensitize its recipient to all but the most intense forms of it. Satisfaction, on the other hand, is achieved as a feeling of atonement for the accomplishment of component tasks of a larger pleasure-bringing project. In the long run, the seeking of satisfaction is better than the seeking of pleasure.

As with all behavioral mechanisms—satisfaction-seeking and pleasure-seeking, for instance, there is a “spectrum” to be observed. On one side of the spectrum of satisfaction there is complacency. Complacency is the maladaptive form of satisfaction. Destructive pleasure-seeking is the maladaptive form of pleasure. We’ll re-visit this topic later.

When we are trying to remember something one way of increase retention levels is to couple the proposed memory with something pleasurable. I’ve heard this recommended as coupling things you want to remember with thoughts of sex; while this might work (especially as a pleasurable form of memory utilization) , it fails to get to the heart of the matter and how memory really functions. Research into how people store memories show that the brain doesn’t store discrete pieces of data—such as the way a hard drive stores data as “1’s” and “0’s”. Instead the human memory is contextual in nature: When a topic was brought up by a person you were having a conversation with, did it make you remember something else? People have different types of memories. Among these are procedural and episodic. As you would imagine, episodic memory deals with the types of memories from your personal experiences and your past. Procedural memory, then, is what I often refer to as “drill memory,” or the type of memory that you utilize when you are doing something that is a set series of steps like brushing your teeth, combing your hair, arming a landmine, or formatting a report.

I read somewhere that people will remember about a third of what they read, half of what they see, and all of what they feel. Why does the “remember something alongside sex” trick work so well? Sex, generally, makes a person feel good: Thoughts that are coupled with satisfying or pleasurable feelings are well-retained. That is not to say, however, that data coupled with painful feelings doesn’t get remembered: It’s just that painful memories can be more easily forgotten and replaced with bad memories or otherwise repressed.