Choose to be Focused

If you want to make great strides and achieve a truly extraordinary life, you need to reinvest your free time into learning new skills, putting in the work, and being productive.

Hyper-focused mental efforts help to make fast progress. 

It won’t last forever, but you need to put in the time now, so later you can have the life you want.

Grist to the Mill

Keeps your eyes open.
Listen.
Follow your curiosity.
Ask questions.
Sniff around.
Remain open.
Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvellous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

January 1st can be the first data point towards a new Goal.

Last year had its ups and downs, but has personally ended so badly and I've noticed I'm honestly losing interest in even the smallest things in life that used to carry such meaning up to now.

So I'm reminding myself how there are opportunities in just about every experience. Things I can learn from. Things that will help me grow.

A good friend recently said to me, what's meant for you won't pass you by. So whenever you have a negative experience, ask yourself, where is the opportunity in this? What is good about this situation? Opportunity won’t knock until you build that door.

Wishing everyone the best in the years ahead.

G

Applied Behaviour Analysis

Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) is an effective behavioural treatment programme widely used with children with autism to improve socially significant behaviours.

 

ABA makes meaningful changes in people's lives through the use of procedures that have been demonstrated to work. The goal of an ABA teaching environment is to build socially significant behaviours in a meaningful way and to a meaningful degree. Generalisation, spontaneity and fun are essential components of successful intervention.

  

A few years ago, Ireland was in the fortunate position of having 12 ABA schools that had been set up and staffed in a way that made possible comprehensive programmes for children with autism (Leslie, 2013). However, the changes implemented from 2010 mean this is far from being the case now. Members of the Division of Behaviour Analysis are either in or in close touch with these schools. They are now termed special schools and, because of the rules they operate under none of them can meet the specifications for an ABA school.

ABA aspires to help with serious behavioural problems. A serious behavioural problem is one that impairs the quality of life of the person to a significant degree, impacts negatively on the lives of others, is persistent (thus rarely goes away of its own accord), and is not readily removed by some simple or brief treatment or intervention.

Some of the problems of many children with autism meet these criteria. If help is not provided or not adequate, their behavioural problems may leave them trailing far behind their peers of the same age in personal, social and educational development.

 

For more information see the following links:

 

AutismIreland.ie

RainChild.ie

AbaSupport.ie

ABA Schools in Ireland & UK

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''If they can't learn the way we teach, we teach the way they learn''  ~   O. Ivar Lovaas

Learned Helplessness and Depression

One cognitive account of depression is the Learned Helplessness Theory (Seligman, 1975). It argues, that depression occurs when people expect that bad events will occur and that there is nothing they can do to prevent them, or cope with them.

Learned Helplessness Theory emerged through Martin Seligman's work with laboratory dogs. He designed an experiment which consisted of three individual dogs, all restrained by harnesses. Dog group (a) was the control group, receiving no electric shock. Dog groups (b) were paired up. One dog in a pair was administered with a mild electric shock and at any time the dog could cease the electric shock by stepping their paw upon a lever. Dog group (c) were too paired up, however one of the dogs was a wired up to a dog in group b and the shocks they received were in congruence with that of group (b). The idea of this was that the group (c) dog would receive a shock that was erratic in timing, unavoidable and inescapable. The tests resulted in groups (a) and (b) recovering quite promptly from the experience. As predicted however, group (c) dogs were left meek and subdued; portraying symptoms similar to those of clinical depression and thus conforming to Seligman’s predictions: that helplessness can be learned. 

Learned helplessness results from being trained to be locked into a system. It can involve a state of apathy or passive behaviour induced by negative conditioning. People may believe that their personal 'defects' will render them helpless to avoid negative events in the future, and their sense of hopelessness places them at significantly greater risk for depression.

Although Seligman theorized that learned helplessness and depression had similar origins, the theory was widely criticized and he has since revised his ideas in his 'Explanatory Style'. This proposes that depression is linked to how we attribute causalities of certain events in our life or traits of our existence (i.e. whether we attribute events to internal, stable or global aspects) (Yen, 1998). Therefore, it is interesting to ask whether learned helplessness is in fact a cause of depression or a correlated side effect of becoming depressed.

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"Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better" ~ Martin Seligman

Fear Conditioning

One form of learning that plays a prominent role in consumer’s behaviour is fear conditioning.

In Watson and Rayner’s seminal experiment with “Little Albert” (1920), they showed how fear can become a conditioned emotional reaction. Marketers may also be incorporating some of Watson and Rayner’s behavioural theories to influence their consumer’s behaviour.

People often learn by information and instruction which situations to fear (Rachman, 1977). Mowrer (1939) argued that fear “may effectively motivate human beings” and that the curtailment of fear “may serve powerfully to reinforce behaviour that brings about such a state of relief or security”.

Accordingly, companies that market their products often use forms of fear conditioning in an attempt to increase their revenue.

Clearasil, a skin care product for the treatment of acne, ran television advertisements portraying spotty teenagers looking glum and downbeat; but joyful and surrounded by attractive women once the product had been discovered. Similar advertising themes exist with Lynx body spray. The product is advertised as a potent solution for men to acquire more attention from women, a “spray more - get more” mantra of fear conditioning.  

Both advertisements suggest an attempt at fear conditioning to promote their product to possibly insecure adolescent males. The fear can be conditioned by frequent repetition of the association between the new conditioned stimulus and the fear. Therefore, individuals (consumers) are driven to purchase these products in an attempt to avoid negative outcomes and successfully reduce their fear (Rachman, 1977). It can be further argued that avoidance conditioning is employed in these advertisements; as the consumer learns a response (buy product) and thus avoid an aversive stimulus (e.g. not being attractive).

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"...because then you're watching television, you're watching the news, you're being pumped full of fear, there's floods, there's AIDS, there's murder, cut to commercial, buy the Acura, buy the Colgate, if you have bad breath they're not going to talk to you, if you have pimples, the girl's not going to fuck you, and it's just this campaign of fear, and consumption, and that's what I think it's all based on, the whole idea of keep everyone afraid, and they'll consume." ~ Marilyn Manson (Bowling for Columbine, 2002).

The Turing Test

This hypothetical test, named after the English mathematician Alan Mathison Turing (1912 - 1954), is to clarify the question as to whether computers can think. Turing introduced it in an article in the journal Mind in 1950, where he called it the imitation game.

A person A and an interrogator in a different room engage in a dialogue by typing messages over  an electronic link. At some point A is replaced by intelligent software that simulates human responses. Turing argued that if the remaining human being is free to ask probing questions (such as ''Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge'') but is unable to determine reliably whether the replies are generated by a human being or a computer, then the computer will have passed the test.




Working hard or hardly working?

 

Turing considered the question Can machines think? to be 'too meaningless to deserve discussion' and argued that his test, which replaces it, poses a more meaningful problem. But passing the Turing test came to be interpreted by many of his followers as amounting to being able to think. Some of the most sustained attacks on this approach have focused on the Chinese room argument.

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''Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination''     ~ Albert Einstein

''What is my name?'' ~ The Rumpelstiltskin Phenomenon

''Look at the head on that'', she thought.
''It looked as if he slept face down in a
box of pineapples''

This is the tendency for the naming of something to create an impression of imparting an understanding of it.

 

 

It applies, for example, to the naming of mental disorders: a person who tells implausible lies may be said to be suffering from pseudologia fantastica, but that term is nothing more than a name for implausible lying, and any impression that it imparts an understanding of the phenomenon is a cognitive illusion.

 

 

The phenomenon is named after Rumpelstiltskin. In a famous fairy tale called 'Rumpelstilzchen' in the German version collected by the brothers Grimm, a strange dwarf exerts a baleful influence over a miller's daughter until she eventually gains power over him by learning his name.
                                                                                                                                              (Colman, 2009)

Zasetsky

L. Zasetsky was a technical student completing his education when World War II began and hurled Germany and Zasetsky's Soviet Union into battle. Like many other young men, Zasetsky became a soldier. Sublieutenant Zasetsky was 23 years old on the second of March 1943, the day a bullet entered his brain as he crossed the icy Vorya River. Zasetsky did not die. He received emergency surgery and then began a process of recovery that was to last for the rest of his life. He kept a written record, a pile of notebooks totalling over 3,000 pages and spanning three decades. These notebooks describe the effects of a terrible brain injury. Of his earliest days, he later wrote:

Right after I was wounded, I seemed to be some new-born creature that just looked, listened, observed, repeated, but still had no mind of its own. ...Because of my injury I'd forgotten everything I ever learned or knew. ...Mostly because of my memory that I have so much trouble understanding things. You see, I'd forgotten absolutely everything and had to start all over trying to identify, recall and understand things. ...

I'm in a kind of fog all the time, like a heavy half-sleep. My memory's a blank. I can't think of a single word. All that flashes through my mind are some images, hazy visions that suddenly disappear, giving way to fresh images. But I simply can't understand or remember what these mean.

Again and again I tell people I've become a totally different person since my injury, that I was killed March, 1943, but because of some vital power of my organism, I miraculously remained alive. Still, even though I seem to be alive, the burden of this head wound gives me no peace. I always feel as if I am living in a dream - a hideous, fiendish nightmare - that I am not a man but a shadow.
                                                                                                                  (Luria, 1972, pp. 10 - 12)

The story in Zasetsky's notebooks tells of a courageous, continuing effort to restore his lost mental functions. Zasetsky's torment illustrates clearly the critical importance of learning and memory in the normal activity of the human brain.
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''Every man's memory is his private literature''   ~  Aldous Huxley
 

Hunger - The sauce for sharpness.

Research at the National Institute of Ageing in Baltimore, Maryland has examined the idea that sporadic bouts of hunger actually cause new neurons to grow.

 

In a 2003 mouse study overseen by Mark Mattson, head of the National Institute on Aging's neuroscience laboratory, mice that fasted regularly were healthier than mice subjected to continuous calorie restriction; they had lower levels of insulin and glucose in their blood, for example, which signified increased sensitivity to insulin and a reduced risk of diabetes.

 

Sunday was 'treat' day

Recently Mattson and other researchers have championed the idea that intermittent fasting probably lowers the risks of degenerative brain diseases in later life. Mattson and his colleagues have shown that periodic fasting protects neurons against various kinds of damaging stress, at least in rodents. One of his earliest studies revealed that alternate-day feeding made the rats' brains resistant to toxins that induce cellular damage akin to the kind cells endure as they age.

In follow-up rodent studies, he found that intermittent fasting protects against stroke damage, suppresses motor deficits in a mouse model of Parkinson's disease and slows cognitive decline in mice genetically engineered to mimic the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

A decidedly slender man, Mattson has long skipped breakfast and lunch except on weekends. ''It makes me more productive,'' he says. The 55-year-old researcher, who has a Ph.D. in biology but not a medical degree, has written or co-authored more than 700 articles.

 

If you think about this in evolutionary terms, if your hungry, you will better increase your cognitive ability because that will give you a survival advantage - if you can remember the locations of where the food is.

 

It seems fasting stresses your brain matter the way exercising stresses your muscles, thus ''hunger actually makes you sharper'' (Mosley, 2012). However, while this may be true in mice, human trials would need to be done to see if it is true in us.

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''An empty stomach is not a good political adviser'' ~ Albert Einstein

If you're not learning science...then shut the hell up!

Struggling to learn something? Can't quite get your head around that theory? That's your problem. . Sometimes I'm truly glad that I did not devote myself to studying science. Because theories are always being changed to account for new observations, they are never properly digested or simplified so that ordinary people can understand them. You have to be a specialist, and even then you can only hope to have a proper grasp of a small proportion of the scientific theories.

 

Further, the rate of progress is so rapid that what you learn at school or college is always a bit out of date. Only a few people can keep up with the rapidly advancing frontier of knowledge, and they have to devote their whole time to it and specialize in a small area. The rest of the population has little idea of the advances that are being made or the excitement they are generating.

 

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As the biggest library, if it is in disorder - is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself    ~ Arthur Schopenhauer