watertank | Entries tagged with kogan

There are two different types of achievements. Regaining muscle strength after recuperation from a broken leg and making the last payment on a thirty year mortgage are victories with fixed features that allow pride when-attained. But the desire to be rich or have higher status lacks this quality, for there , are always others with morc wealth or higher status. Hence, many who seek these goals arc never satisficd and experience chronic uncertainty instead of pride. They discount the present moment, for all that matters is tomorrow, next month, or next year. And when those times arrive, they, too, are trashed by the next set of future dates.

. Listen to Friedrich Hayek, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1974, "Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which. . . opens an astounding range of choices to the poor man."* Kogan, p 143.

*quoted from F.A. Hayek, The Road to Sefdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)

The important point, however, is that individuals try to maintain consistency between the features of the categories to which they belong and their evaluation of the actions that define each category. The detection of an inconsistency can be accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling of shame or guilt. A disloyal thought toward a friend can provoke guilt because of the inconsistency between the thought and the features that define "a good friend." Many college-educated women who are enjoying professional careers experience more inconsistency than their grandmothers ove the category "mother." Adults with parents who belonged to different religious categories are also vulnerable to the tension of inconsistency. J. D.Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, had a Jewish father and a Catholie mother, and his daughter has described the uncertainty her father felt as an adolescent in the 1930s when American anti-Semitism was virulent. [Kogan, 139]

After exchange of the usual niceties, I asked him [Skinner] why he had chosen psychology. His reply surprised me, br Skinner said that as an undergraduate he had no interest in psychology. His ideal was to change the world and he thought this was best accomplished by writing - Sartre came to the same conclusion. After he read John Watson's book On behaviorism, however, Skinner changed his mind and decided that psychology was the better strategy to achieve that prized goal. ibid. 137.

- domain change as an explicit goal

A preference for one object or event over another is usually a function of the relation between the object and the category to which it is assigned. Stated differently, every human judgement, whether a feeling, person, or event, is colored by what the agent chooses as a comparison.
Optimists have a habit of selecting a desirable category; pessimists choose an undesirable one; realists, who see both sides, are usually ambivalent. ibid. p.93
Traditional Chinese lawdistinguishes between stealing from a close relative an sealing from a stranger because the social relationship between one person and another dictations the propriety of a behavior. Western law, which is indifferent to the relation of the criminal to the victim and is concerned only with the decontextualized act of steaing, fails to honor this distinction. ibid. p94

relates to low quality of solutions/ideas generated during brainstorming session, when people tend to zoom into a specific issue.

When a child answers an adult's question the interrogator's first task is to figure out what question the child was answering. ibid. 87

One reason for the current attractiveness of spirituality is that, because its source in intuition is so radically different from the densely factual, rational nature of science, it generates a feeling that people interpret as a sign of truth and leads to a vitality that reassures those disheartened by a materialism that challenges each person's free will and the anomie of contemporary life. ibid. p. 85

The increase in attention to unfamiliar events toward the end of the first year, which is now an established fact, implies a maturational change in brain organization and a parallel change in the ability to relate the representations acquired in the past to the present moment. This ability is called working memory. We now know that one component of the maturation involves the establishment of connections between structures in the temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex.... The more mature brain enables eight-month-olds to hold in a working memory ciruit the schema of the objects they saw moments earlier.
...
A few years latr Nathan Fox and Sally Weiskopf affirmed this conclusion by repeatedly administering twelve problems requiring working memory to eight infants across the period from five to fourteen months of age. The results were beautiful. The robustness of working memory improved most between seven and ten months in each of the eight infants. The evidence from more than a hundred studies in different labs pints to the same conclusion. Sometime between six and ten months infants begin to "think" for the first time because brain sites that were unconnected in the young brain have become connected. The more mature brain permits the infant to find the representations relevant to a current experience and to keep the tow schemata active until they can be combined. If the cannot, the infant turs away. ibid. p. 77.

The mothers of children born after World War II and entring the workforce in greater numbers needed surrogate care for their young children. This new form of rearing, discrepant from the tradition of their mothers and grandmothers, evoked uncertainty because of the verity that infants needed the loving care only a bilogical mother could provide.
Jean Piaget's ideas on cognitive development were as second reason for the interest in children. These ideas were not initially popular, either in Europe or in the United States, because Piaget was interested in the growth of logic and reasoning rather than in emotions, morality, and friendships, and he was indifferent to the influcence of caretakers.
Finally, the Soviet launch of a space vehicle, which in the United States provoked a wring of hands over the disheeartening quality of science education in American schools, catalyzed concern with the growth of intellectual talents.
Each of those forces - working mothers, Sputnik, and the writings of Erikson, Bowlby, and Piaget - came together, like the components of a perfect storm, to generate a broadly based curiosity about young children, and private philanthropies and the federal government were ready to provide ample funds for research on children. ibid. 70-71.

this is relevant to the timing problem, and also as a dilemma: a child needs his mother (tradition) and the child doesn't need his mother (Piaget)

The two hemispheres of the brain make differential contributions to perceptual and semantic representations, with the right hemisphere playing more significant role in perceptual structures - scenes, melodies, body sensations - and the left having a bigger role in the semantic forms of words and sentences.
Futrher, the right hemisphere is preferentially activated by events whose features have relatively lower spatial frequences ( coarser features), like the wide eyes and open mouth of a person surprised by a spider. The left hemisphere is activated more fully by events whose elements have higher spatial frequences, like a series of very brief eyeblinks.
Although the left hemisphere is more proficient at separating words in the rapid flow of speech, it needs help from the right hemisphere in interpreting the meanings a speaker intended. ibid. p. 46.

clearly, my right hemisphere is more dominant in this type of tasks

...uncommon names were rated as less ethical and less successful than common names*. Deviance is often judged as less desiarable if no other information is available. I recognized as a child that Jerome was an uncommon name in my community and regularly signed my school papers "Jerry". ibid. p. 41

*Mehrabian,"Characteristics Attributed to Individuals on the Basis of Their First Names," Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 127 (2001); 59-88

A fundamental principle governing the brain is that neurons respond to change. Changes in illumination or motion automatically activate circuits and provoke attention to the site of change, for that is where information is likely to reside. A reward, therefore, does not have to be something the animal needs, such as food, water, a mate, or relief from pain. Essintially, many events called "rewards" are punctiation marks that, like a white streak in a blue sky, interrupt the stream of experience and, through activation of many brain structures, facilitate the establishment of assosiations. ibid. 21

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