Hand-in-Hand, Up and Down, Back and Forth For Best Problem Solving Results

 I'm hooked on The Agile Mind by cognitive neuroscientist Wilma Koutstaal Ph.D. and am planning to drop quick pieces of information, quotes, useful techniques, and interesting research findings from her book about thinking on the next several Mondays.


 Koutstaal tells us that highly effective problem solvers know how to move flexibly from intuitive to rational and back again and from specific to abstract thinking — and back again — regardless of what type of problem needs solving. Intuitive problem-solving, a preferred mode of thinking for a majority of women, has been soundly validated as equal to, but different than rational problem-solving (preferred by a majority of men) in producing creative solutions to problems. But using both is best; all the time.


 Intuitive thinking is an unconscious process and therefore difficult to describe or explain, even for the person who comes up with the great aha solution. Rational problem solving is conscious and easily learned, taught, and described, so for years it seemed more real, serious, and academic. Intuitive women can probably learn rational problem-solving more easily than rational men can learn intuitive thinking, just because of the less explicable process but still, learning to do the mental gymnastics that agility of problem-solving requires seems almost impossible.


I know that some of you out there already know how and have a preference that includes both styles of problem-solving.  Please comment with a story, a success experience, or a tip on how to do what Koutstaall suggests — move flexibly between levels of control (automatic and intentional) and levels of representation (abstract and concrete.) I'm still in the novice stage, working on upping my intuitive thinking. So far it's still random for me!

Kristin Neff on Self-Compassion as a Way to Reduce NST

 

Here's a different (than my approach) perspective on eliminating negative self-talk, although the principles remain the same. Self-talk, self-criticism is a bad habit and needs to be altered: self-compassion, problem-solving, detachment, or whatever works for you to reduce, diminish, demolish, evaporate, explode and/or eliminate the NST habit and replace it with a good habit like self-compassion. I like Neff's stuff  in general although I haven't read her book yet. If you want to read more she's a PT blogger.

 The Power of Self-Compassion

The path to caring for yourself.

by Kristin Neff, Ph.D.

Is it self-indulgent to be self-compassionate?

Motivate yourself with love not fear

Published on April 17, 2011 by Kristin Neff, Ph.D. in The Power of Self-Compassion

When people ask me what I do and I tell them that I study self-compassion, they often get a hesitant expression on their face. I guess self-compassion is a good idea, they say, but can't you be too self-compassionate? In fact, the number one reason people give for why they aren't more self-compassionate is that they're afraid if they're too soft on themselves, they'll let themselves get away with anything. They really believe that their internal judge plays a crucial role in keeping them in line and on track. In other words, they confuse self-compassion with self-indulgence.

     As I've defined it in my academic writing, self-compassion involves three components: being kind and caring toward yourself rather than harshly self-critical; framing imperfection in terms of the shared human experience; and seeing things clearly without ignoring or exaggerating problems. Self-compassion also enhances rather than undermines motivation. While this may not be obvious at first, it's easier to see if we think of how a mother might best motivate her child. Let's say her son comes home with a failing exam grade, and she tells him "you're so stupid and lazy, you'll never amount to anything!" Will that be an effective motivator? Of course not. It might make him work harder temporarily, but ultimately it will just depress him and make him lose faith in himself. The mother would be more successful if she emotionally supported her child. "I know this is disappointing for you, but everybody messes up sometimes. It's important that you improve your grades if you want to go to college, so let's see if we can figure out a new study routine that works better. I know you can do it." This type of kind encouragement will be more efficacious and long-lasting because it will give her child the confidence and backing needed to succeed.

 
      It's exactly the same with ourselves. When we are kind and supportive when we fail or notice something we don't like about ourselves, we'll want to make changes for the better. Not because we feel inadequate or worthless as we are, but because we care about ourselves and want to alleviate our own suffering. While the motivational power of self-criticism comes from fear, the motivational power of self-compassion comes from love. When we care about ourselves, we'll try to change any behaviors that are causing us harm. We'll also be much more likely to admit those areas of needed change because it's emotionally safer to see ourselves clearly. If we're harshly self-critical, we're likely to hide the truth from ourselves - or even better yet - blame our problems on someone else, in order to avoid self-flagellation. If it's safe to admit our own flaws, however, we can more clearly see the areas that need work.
 
 Research strongly supports the idea that self-compassion enhances motivation. For instance, many studies show that people who are self-compassionate are less depressed and anxious than self-critics, meaning their state of mind is more conducive to putting forth effort. They also have higher "self-efficacy" beliefs, which means they have more confidence in their ability to succeed. Also, self-compassion has a strong negative association with fear of failure, whereas self-criticism exacerbates this fear. Who wants to take risks in life when you know failure will be met with harsh self-judgment? It's much easier not to try. When you have self-compassion, however, you'll trust that any failures will be met with kindness and support. You'll remember that failure is part of life. This means you'll be able to learn from your mistakes and grow from them.
  
In fact, research indicates that self-compassionate people are more likely to take personal responsibility for past mistakes than self-critics, but are also less emotionally upset by them. Other studies show that when people have self-compassion after failing at a task, they're more likely to pick themselves up again and work towards new goals. Research demonstrates that self-compassionate people tend to set goals related to personal learning and growth rather than trying to impress others. They're also more successful at their goals: self-compassion has been shown to help people remain motivated to exercise, quit smoking and to stick to their diets.
So don't worry. If you start treating yourself with compassion you won't sit around all day watching TV and eating buckets of Kentucky Fried chicken. Rather than encouraging self-indulgence, self-compassion helps motivate us to reach our full potential. And it sure feels a lot better than the whip!

 To learn more or to order Neff's new book "Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind," go to www.self-compassion.org

Rebuttal to "The Brain on Fiction" article

I had posted an article about neuroscience and fiction previously. http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5630711609871539058#editor/target=post;postID=730063957582045987Here's a rebuttal of that original article; a broad criticism. The author of The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media, says that her problem is "the flippant use of neuroscience as it is bandied about in our popular consciousness by the media." She coins the phrase "neuro-pop crowd" and adds, "While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is particularly dangerous, it’s misleading." 

Although I hadn't given it a thought when I read the original article, this rebuttal made sense. Neuroscience, well translated into practical information and how-tos is most relevant for clinical diagnosis and treatment and/or learning about thinking, emotions, behavior, and their interactions — not for the arts and humanities. It was fun to see both articles by good writers, smart women, making good points, but in strong disagreement.

 

 

The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Katheryn Rivas

The New York Times and many other respected, well-known newspapers seem to have an unending love affair with the fMRI machine and what it can supposedly tell us about who we are. In the past two weeks alone, we were blessed with the following gems—“The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction” and “The Brain on Love,” both of which try to explain complex human phenomena, like the pleasure of reading or the feeling of being in love, using brain scans. Now don’t get me wrong. Neuroscience is indeed a fascinating field that has and will help tremendously in discovering how the brain works and the reasons which cause it to malfunction. The brain has historically been a mystery to scientists, so to knock neuroscience as a legitimate field is not at all what I’m trying to do.
Most of these “Your Brain on X” or “The Neuroscience of X” articles use the same exact formula—they talk about a study using brain scans, and then they triumphantly conclude that a subjective experience is “real” because parts of the brain light up on the scan. For example, an article will suggest that because the region of your brain that processes pleasure lights up with activity when you eat something fattening, it means that –wait for it—fatty foods really are pleasurable!

Another common thread among the neuro-pop crowd is the mixing of often irreconcilable disciplines to come to some sort of higher truth about both disciplines. Almost no humanistic field of study has escaped the scourge of someone or another trying to explain the field in terms of firing neurons. There’s neuroeconomics, neuro-literary criticism, even neuro-aesthetics. While conciliense—the attempt to unify different bodies of knowledge—can yield interesting results, it’s only possible if the two different fields ask similar questions. Neuroscience and literary criticism do not have the same aims. Raymond Tallis most engagingly criticized this in his article “A Suicidal Tendency in the Humanitiies”:

A mode of literary studies that addresses the most complex and rich of human discourses, not with an attention that aims to reflect or at least respect that complexity and richness, but with a simplifying discourse whose elements are blobs of the brain (and usually the same blobs), wheeled out time after time is the kind of contempt that, along with the mobilization of other disciplines half-digested, in this case bad biology rather than bad philosophy and worse linguistics that we saw in Theory. If literary criticism is to serve any worthwhile function, it won’t be concerned with putative mechanisms of grotesquely reduced and traduced neuralised reader responses or Darwinised authorial motives but with helping readers to make sense of, and put into larger context, a work that repays careful attention.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is particularly dangerous, it’s misleading. It incorrectly reduces both the human self and the field of neuroscience to something simple and easily digested in a 500 word newspaper article. In a world saturated in skin-deep media, this is not what the public needs.

What do you think about neuroscience in the media?

Do You Know What A Breadwoman Is?

I'd never heard the term breadwoman before I read the NYTimes book review of The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy. I've grown to laugh with it as a shortened version of female breadwinners. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "wives are breadwinners or co-earners in about two-thirds of American marriages". Of course we also know that marriage is a shrinking institution and many income producing single women choose to have kids on their own; needing only a sperm donation not money.

Questions came to mind!

• Does more money brought home equal more power in many relationships?
• Is this a seismic change that will alter the culture for centuries like global climate change?
• Do men feel emasculated when women make more money than they?
• Are women overly concerned that men will feel emasculated — and thus men will look for a less powerful sweetie on the side?
• What are the causes of this apparent change in economic coupling?
• What are the unintended consequences in the business world?
• Will women increase practice of some of the egotistical, greedy, and devious behavior that men, with power and bucks, have engaged in over the decades?
• How will the relationship between women and men change when the coin(s) of the realm change? Who needs/wants what from each other?
• Will money and the power that comes with it finally get women to stop negative self-talk? Will they take credit graciously for their skills and accomplishments?

H-m-m-m. Makes me think. I have been in two very different relationships with men where I made more money. Neither partner seemed bothered in the slightest. What about you?

Code to Joy Book Review

If you’re a flexible thinker, a self-help aficionado, intrigued by new approaches to solving life’s problems and eager to move toward daily, stable happiness, Code to Joy may be your new cup of tea. If your mind is already full of other  successful approaches to increasing the joy in your life, there may not be room for this full-to-capacity teapot of a book.

George Pratt and Peter Lambrou, psychologists and innovative thinkers, have developed a specific four-step approach to rediscover the happiness that they believe we are all designed to experience. The first step, identify your strongest self-limiting beliefs, feels familiar to readers who have experienced therapy or high levels of self-awareness. However, the authors focus on energy psychology rather than cognitive psychology, a more traditional approach for treatment of anxiety and depression. "Energy Psychology (EP) is a family of evidence supported modalities that balance, restore and improve human functioning by combining physical interventions (using the acupuncture system, the chakras and other ancient systems of healing) with modern cognitive interventions such as imagery-based exposure therapy."*

Starting with step two, rebalance your body’s energy system and prepare it for repatterning, the advocated process emphasizes the significance of the biofield, “a conductive medium that overlaps and integrates body and mind together.” The authors introduce and explain the science of energy psychology: body polarity, the electromagnetic field of the body, meridians, and chakras.

Step three, release negative beliefs and install new empowering beliefs in their place, can feel comfortable to cognitive therapy buffs, because the techniques are similar to dismissing negative thoughts and substituting new realistic thoughts. To ensure that the results of the first three steps are deep and long-lasting, step 4, describes regular refreshing of previously suggested techniques such as crosshand breathing, balancing polarity, and visualization. Code to Joy contains interesting and unusual ideas for getting happy, putting together a unique approach that combines aspects of yoga, hypnotic communication, psychology, kinesthetics. The book contains diagrams along with clear explanations of the how-to’s:  crosshand breathing, alternate nostril breathing, and grounding, for example. 

As a believer in self-help, I’m confident interested readers can follow the four steps easily. It might be more fun and productive to go through the process with a like-minded friend. As you know, with any learning, disciplined practice is required — and more easily acquired when you’re committed to the process with a buddy.

The book’s elaborations about the anatomy of the brain and energy psychology left me with a wandering, wondering mind. Do I really need to understand this? If I do, I would have liked better instructions for using the “Notes” at the back of the book — and an index. If I don’t need to know, then perhaps the explanations could have been shorter and snappier.

 Readers may be as successful with the energy psychology approach as the authors' 45,000 successful patients, but from my experience as a psychologist, one size, one approach doesn't fit all, whether it's fitness, diet, therapy, or a self-help book. However, if this fits your style and need, you'll find Code to Joy fascinating.

* From the web site of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology

 Here's a whole article about writing and neuroscience, followed later this week by a whole article rebutting this article. The honeymoon with neuroscience my be already s-o-o-o over, although not for me and intelligentwomenonly.com Here's a quickie overview if you don't have time or interest to read the details.

• "Your Brain on Fiction" describes what regular readers may already know. Good writing, using metaphors and adjectives which appeal to the senses increases the activation of the brain in general and specifically in the areas of the sense. e.g. "The muddy, grimy flavor of the coffee reminded Hal of camping days with his high school buddies."

• More brain activation occurs with unusual combinations of words, phrases, and in metaphors. E.g. "The water felt icy on his feet", vs. "The mountain stream numbed his feet".

• A friend, quoting college professors, sent me some random quotes to illustrate the article's point. "The improbably named professors,  Jordan, Virtue, and Maddox,  cited, intoned, and lingered lovingly over lines from prose and poetry which I still remember and treasure today."  I'm looking for more on my own. Here are a few of her favorites.

     *"Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving"  *"the ocean's long withdrawing roar"  *"a drowsy numbness steals my soul"   *"squeeze the universe into a ball" 

Your Brain on Fiction

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

Published: March 17, 2012

AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Back to flexibility — the buzz word in the world of cognitive science as well as social science. In our world of change, change, change, sticking to beliefs/formulated as children or young adults doesn't work. e.g. CEOs (just heard this Monday at a presentation) who have relied on administrative assistants to keep up with technology.

• Familiar only with Blackberries, these CEOs are flummoxed when required to deal with an i-pad or i-phone.
• In my own field of psychology, I maintained a firm grip on the belief that rational problem-solving thinking was the only, the best, the king; intuitive thinking was sub par. I was wrong for years.
• Buyers of hybrid cars often go back to the old standard gasoline cars in part because of familiarity.

Cognitive science has recently demonstrated that people who speak two languages are smarter than people who speak only one — primarily because they have learned brain flexibility. Interference can occur between the language systems, necessitating the brain to resolve the conflict, which ultimately strengthens the brain's function and flexibility.

" The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age . . . " according to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. Here's the link to the whole article:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html

I'm searching for specific ways that we can acquire greater brain flexibility and help our kids, or students, our clients or coworkers gain more flexibility in their thinking even if they're monolingual. A fantasy? Perhaps.

Real Life, Everyday, Negative Thinkers

Just finished informal interviews with women of different ages and stages, all of whom I consider regular, un-neurotic, intelligent women.
Here's a sample:

 12 year old Ella doesn't know what negative self-talk is until it's explained to her — then quickly recognizes the pattern. She says that she gets into NST particularly when she goofs up in sports or when she gets a bad grade on a test or paper at school. It's a rare occurrence for her and she can usually move on fairly quickly from the yuk. Now that she knows what it is, she's aware of how much her mother gets into the negative thinking zone, particularly about appearance.

17 year old Lucy knows immediately what I'm talking about and acknowledges quickly that she engages in NST at a mild to moderate level, as do most of her friends. They do much of their negative self-talk out loud together, sometimes followed with reassurance, other times with laughter, never with affirmation of the self-criticism. Lucy says that her stuff never gets to the rumination level. She finds that distraction, purposefully arranged or randomly occurring, often works to change her thinking. If the NST hangs around for too long, she realizes she needs to "fix it", which basically means to do some problem-solving. Both techniques produce psychological distance enough so she can shed the NST, although not eliminate it. It does come back, perhaps in a different outfit.

Lucy added that she has a friend who has been a heavy duty NSTer for the last couple of years and is now on medications for depression and anxiety. Her friend became almost obsessed with the negative self-talk and wasn't able to develop skills to reduce or eliminate it.

50 year old Gwen identified herself as a Moderate negative self-talker, particularly about appearance and could quote her own stuff very specifically. " I look dumpy." "I should exercise more." "I'm looking old." "I need to lose weight and get more fit." On and on.
The general distractions of life, work, schedule, kids, generally move her beyond the moment's NST — or she moves herself out of the dressing room, away from the mirror, and abandons the shopping trip. Gwen understands, doesn't like the NST tendency, and has been too busy to make a plan for eliminating the nasty habit.

I'm continuing to interview people of different ages and life stages, occupations, and yes, maybe even of a different gender to find out if they have a goal, a plan to get rid of the NST habit, and what techniques they are using.

For Ann Patchett fans Only — The Getaway Car, Reviewed

Here's an article I wrote for fictionebooks about Ann Patchett's book, The Getaway Car. I heard her speak at Town Hall Seattle last year when her book State of Wonder came out. She was a very real, accessible, down to earth person altogether; open, funny, unaffected.

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing by Ann Patchett.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Ann Patchett, starting years ago with Bel Canto and continuing through 2011’s State of Wonder.  I heard her speak at Town Hall Seattle and was wowed by her comfortable, open, engaging presentation. She was real and pleasantly confident as is this memoir of her writing life. “I was always going to be a writer,” she announces. She knew even before she could tie her shoes.

Patchett begins by giving us lots of advice, based on her experience of course. She’s careful to say that this e-book is not an instruction manual but a disclosure of how she writes fiction.

• She maps out every book in advance, often taking a year of two to get the full picture. This is her happiest time. There are no written notes or outlines, just mental mechanisms, gyrations, decisions. She says, “In short, the story is in use, and all we have to do is sit there and write it down. But it’s right about there, the part where we sit, that things fall apart.”

• The difficult part comes when the writer decides to “. . .reach into the air and pluck the butterfly up.” . . . “Suddenly, all the excitement, the color, the movement is gone.” Patchett explains how tough it is to get a two –year old vision translated into words. “The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.”

• Her love of poetry has been useful to Patchett and should be mandatory for all writers in her opinion

Patchett goes on to tell readers about her studies and mentors. She attributes much credit to Allan Gurganus at Sarah Lawrence, who dictated the necessity of hard work and disciplined practice. “Had I been assigned a different sort of teacher, one who suggested we keep an ear cocked for the muse instead of hoisting a pick, I don’t think I would have gotten very far.” Teachers and their lessons changed her life.

Patchett’s next message is one that follows my own strong beliefs, in different words. My blog http://intelligentwomenonly, although touching on many topics, focuses on women and the necessity to give up negative self-talk, a bad habit. She touts forgiveness as the key to finding happiness in life. “I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I’m capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”

 “I am a compost heap and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know, and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow. I could make a case for the benefits of wide-ranging experience, both personal and literary, as enriching the quality for the compost, but the life of Emily Dickinson nearly dismantles that theory.”

And from my perspective, so does the life of Ann Patchett; a Catholic girl from the South who went to Sarah Lawrence, lives in Nashville, and recently opened an independent book store.

“Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.” No wonder I like her as a person and as a writer. She’s smart, forgiving, normal, expressive, appreciative, and practical; not arrogant, not silly, down to earth, sane, sound. Can’t wait for her next book.

Sian Beilock Touts Alcohol as a Route to Creativity

Yes, we've been talking about the benefits of flexible thinking, the agile mind on IWO, but whoa — getting drunk as a technique to increase creativity? Here's the whole article, followed in the near future by more details about developing a better (it depends, I guess) path to creative thinking that doesn't require a hangover! Interesting too in all the research past and present — smart, knowledgeable flexible thinkers do better than smart, knowledgeable rigid thinkers. Not a surprise. If your mind-popping is going along well and you can dip into rational problem-solving when needed, you're in the swing, you're cool, even without alcohol.

Here's Beilock's article. Interesting — and a bit odd.

 Alcohol Benefits the Creative Process

Being moderately intoxicated gets people to think “outside the box.”

Published on April 4, 2012 by Sian Beilock, Ph.D. in Choke Creative thought is something we often aspire to. Whether it’s in terms of artistic products, scientific discoveries, or business innovations, creative accomplishments drive advancement in much of what we do. But what sorts of things enhance creativity?

A popular belief is that altered cognitive processing, whether from sleep, insanity, or alcohol use, sparks creativity among artists, composers, writers, and problem-solvers. Perhaps due to the fact that the rarity of great accomplishments make them hard to study, however, little research has actually shown how creative processes change when people, for example, have a few drinks.

Why might being intoxicated lead to improved creativity? The answer has to do with alcohol’s effect on working memory: the brainpower that helps us keep what we want in mind and what we don’t want out. Research has shown that alcohol tends to reduce people’s ability to focus in on some things and ignore others, which also happens to benefit creative problem solving.

Think about the flip side of the coin. Having a lot of working memory means that a person is good at screening out peripheral information. This screening can be very useful for solving analytical problems—problems that require the solver to grind out the solution by systematically working towards a goal, incrementally narrowing down the problem search space. However, being good at blocking out extraneous information may actually be a disadvantage in situations where gathering information only loosely related to the problem at hand, or even outside the perceived problem space, is useful. This seems to be even more true the more you know about a given subject.

When people with lots of baseball knowledge, for example, are asked to come up with a word that forms a compound word with “plate,” “broken,” and “shot,” they are pretty bad at this task. Baseball fanatics want to say the word is “Home” (home-plate, broken-home, home-shot ?!?). This isn’t correct. The real answer is “glass” (glass-plate, broken-glass, shot-glass). What’s interesting is that baseball fans who also have a lot of cognitive horsepower relative to their peers—those higher working memory baseball fans—are the ones most likely to dwell on the wrong baseball-related answer. It’s as if these guys (and girls) are too good at focusing their attention on the wrong baseball information. As a result, they have trouble breaking free of their knowledge and coming up with the correct answer that has nothing to do with baseball. Baseball fanatics high in working memory have problems moving beyond what they know.

So, could being intoxicated really help people to think more creatively? In a recent study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, psychologist Jennifer Wiley and her research group at the University of Illinois at Chicago set out to find an answer to this question.They recruited people (ages 21-30) who drank socially, via Craigslist, to come into their lab and, well, they got some of them drunk. Some people were served a vodka cranberry drink until their blood alcohol level was approximately .075 and others were kept sober. The researchers then had everyone complete a creative problem solving task similar to the baseball example I gave above. People were given a series of three target words such as "peach", "arm", and "tar," and were tasked with finding a fourth word, such as "pit," that forms a good two-word phrase with each of the target words. This puzzle is thought to involve creative problem solving because the most obvious potential response to the problem is often incorrect, and people must look for more remote words in order to reach a solution.
What Wiley and her colleagues found was that intoxicated individuals solved more creative word problems, and in less time, than their sober counterparts. Interestingly, people who drank also felt that their performance was more likely to come as a sudden insight, the answer came all at once, in an “Aha!” moment of illumination.

Research has shown that the more working memory people have at their disposal, the better they perform on all sorts of analytical tasks that pop up at school and at work. But, interestingly, wielding more working memory may hinder performance whenever thinking creatively or “outside the box” is necessary. Simply put, people’s ability to think about information in new and unusual ways can actually be hampered when they wield too much brain power. What Dr. Jennifer Wiley and her team have found is that one way to get around this is to have a couple of drinks.
For more on the link between brain power and performance, check out my book Choke.

Are you a Mind-Popper?

Ideas that occur to us in moments of non-focused attention are identified as "mind-popping" in The Agile Mind.  I like the term because it's so descriptive. Occasionally, a thought literally pops up or a light pops on without a clear link to anything. It's a sign of intuitive problem-solving thinking, although it can be "released" even when you're deeply engaged in rational problem-solving — if you have an agile mind.

Most women have experienced a bright idea appearing out of nowhere and apparently connected to nothing of the moment: in the shower, watching the kids play at the park, just waking up in the morning, watching a boring TV program.  The passive "pop" isn't preceded by a purposeful intent to solve a problem or be creatively innovative. It tends to happen when people are in activities that don't require great concentration or focus: the mind can wander because the activity is routine, repetitive, habitual.

In contrast, concentrating on a new, unfamiliar topic, learning a new language for example, can cause your brain to unconsciously reach out to varied, divergent, loose associations in your mind —  and link them up in an unusual way to create a mind-pop. Because it isn't a conscious process, you can't figure out how you came up with this crazy, smart, far-out, wild thought, problem solution, or possibly useless idea, but it's fun.

Keeping a quick daily list of mind pops creates a game and maybe a strategy or solution to a problem. Go forward or backward. Where did the pop come from? What does it lead to? Maybe from nowhere and to nothing. Maybe the mind pop comes from a variety of old memories of mothering people in your life and leads you to solving a parenting problem in your life. Exercising and massaging your brain is as good and maybe more fun than exercising and massaging your body?!

The Agile Mind Means Intuitive Problem-Solving Gains Credibility and Pizaz

 The Agile Mind, by Wilma Koutstaal Ph.D, an encyclopedic description of brain processes and functions, supports the benefits of flexibility in thinking. What's an agile mind do for you, you might wonder? Koutstaal promotes collaborative processing of problem-solving rather than the intuitive vs. rational problem-solving thinking, the topic I've posted about recently, spoken about publicly, and have obsessed about privately.

In my informal research, and also in academic research, women are in the majority of people who state and demonstrate a preference for intuitive, automatic, System 1 thinking, all somewhat similar. Men are in the majority of those preferring rational, deliberate, System 2 thinking. Before neuroscience research burst  into public awareness, rational, step-by-step problem-solving was the generally accepted "correct" thinking process for intelligent thinkers. Other styles were often dismissed: far out, la-la land thinking, silly, certainly unscientific —  and female.

"What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency," is an old saying. Even in the second decade of the 21st century, you don't hear about men's intuition and women's logical thinking.

 "The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware."

"Men have been found to deny woman intellect; they have credited her with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk."

"I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason."

( all quotes above from http://www.wisdomquotes.com/topics/men/)

The good news for women is that the intuitive style is gaining credibility — and pizaz. You might even find men asking you to teach them how to be more intuitive. Unfortunately, it's a tough thing to teach, but some bright woman out there will figure out a way to do so and become a rich, famous guru!