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.

Learning and the Authentic Assessment

Imagine yourself with a jeep that has a radiator that needs to be patched before you can get away from a batch of bad guys. All you have in your possession is the standard fare of a jeep and some eggs and water. What do you do? In the 1980s the television show “MacGyver” exposed us to the Richard Dean Anderson character that could, supposedly, use the strangest objects to get out of jams. Not one for guns, MacGyver showed us that the ability to use applied wisdom and a keener intelligence than one’s opponent can be the key to getting out of life or death situations.

In high school most of us took (or are taking) science classes and the like which mixed a combination of traditional lecture and “lab time.” When I took physics in high school, for instance, Mrs. Harriet Howe not only went over the metrics of the solar system with us, she also found a unique way to show us the scale of it by taking us outside with balls of varying sizes and placing each of us with our balls at distances from one another that were proportional to the sizes of the planets and distances between them in our own solar system. Seeing the numbers in a book is something completely aside from seeing the proportional relationships in a real world environment. Of course, this is not a lone example. Surely most (if not all) people reading this must have dissected a frog in their years as a student? Done various experiments with Bunsen burners? Constructed pottery from start to finish in art class?

As we move from being children and being able to acquire knowledge through lecture, to becoming adults and thus becoming more experiential, kinesthetic learners we see the value of the way certain things were taught to us when we were younger. As adults, we wouldn’t imagine learning many things without taking a hands-on approach: From learning new languages to learning to work on the Internet, adults are, by their very nature, hands-on learners.

Why is this?

In educational theory there are contrasting types of learning, or “assessment:” Traditional and authentic. Traditional assessment works such that an isolated skill or retained fact is assessed through testing to evaluate a skill or capability that has been learned. Examples of this are readily available in our experiences: Needing to go through rote memorization of technical specifications or some such so you can recall them at a later date. Real world situations rarely call for this kind of knowledge, however. More often than not our activities call upon multiple disciplines and are a collection of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Relevant, real-world situations are the essence of what authentic assessment is.

I’ll admit: I’m a geek. I may not look the part, but for some reason I have been one to take the seemingly mundane details and remember them for later recollection. In many cases, ever since I was a child I was able to soak up material like a sponge and, despite an improper mental state, recall these details for a situation that called for them. I’ve often been asked why it is I have committed to memory such details of subjects that are often on distant ends of any spectrum. From my youngest years, I’ve ascertained, I determined that various types of knowledge would have relevance someday. Perhaps the situations in my life that I was facing at those times didn’t call for the active use of such things as Planck’s Constant (h=6.626 x 10 -34 joule seconds) or how to conjugate verbs in German, but I always told myself and lived by the notion that “knowledge is power,” and later “there is no knowledge which is not power.” Knowledge became a tool from which to develop skills, both allowing me to derive a sense of self-worth, confidence, and personal power from.

When people inquire about the relevance of the mundane details, I often find a voice in the back of my head telling me to tell the person that I am currently engrossed in conversation with to seek relevance in everything: You never know when it might come in handy.

Maybe you, too, will someday find yourself in the situation that MacGyver found himself in above. First you would need to dump some water in the radiator, jump start the Jeep. This would cause the water to heat up. A few minutes later, you would dump in the egg whites which the water cooks. Once cooked, the egg whites naturally plug the holes in the radiator making the Jeep temporarily usable.

Self-Efficacy

“Play the game—You know you can't quit until it's won,
Soldier on—Only you can do what must be done”
—John Parr, “St. Elmo’s Fire”

When you are confronted with a task, what is your paradigm: Do you view a potentially difficult task as something to avoid or something to be overcome? How you have learned and continue to learn new tasks is not solely done through the effects of your own actions: Instead, humans being the social creatures that they are, we learn through coding information that we see modeled in our everyday lives. New information has greatly become democratized in the world of today: Much more so than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago. Our ability to take in this information and apply it towards our success has not increased along with the availability of the information, however.

Social learning has pre-requisites: Many of them being tied closely to the communication model of sender-message-receiver with their associated barriers. While many environmental factors can cause a person to be less apt to take in new information en route to success, there is—as is nearly always the case—at least one thing able to overcome any barrier to success.

Mental states are a vital part of the learning process: Intrinsic factors such as self-motivation, self-discipline, and a sense of—you guessed it—self efficacy all contribute to a person being in the proper paradigm to take away ample return from their learning activities.

Adults, for the most part, are experiential learners: We learn with a kinesthetic approach as opposed to visual or auditory. In most adults this not only contributes to the usefulness of a skill set, it also helps with retention and continued motivation: When you are successful at something, your proclivity at being successful increases: Success begets success.

Success is all about the behaviors that we have and how they converge with our environment. The relationship between individual, behavior, and environment are all intertwined in an interdependent yet causal interaction with one another: Each can have a bearing on any of the others in the triad. The individual can affect the behavior can affect the environment can affect the individual or the environment can affect the behavior or any other combination therein, for example.

The trick is to take charge and make the individual have more bearing on all else instead of allowing the individual to be controlled by all else.

So, the next time you see that task that you’ve been dreading think of it in terms of personal growth and having a high amount of internal drive with the end in sight.