Change Blindness Videos

Change Blindness Video Links

UK Public Service Announcement Series
~1 min

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4&NR=1

~2 min

http://www.youtube.com/user/dothetest#p/a/u/0/ubNF9QNEQLA

~2 min

http://www.youtube.com/user/dothetest#p/a/u/2/2cd63P54PaI

Entertainer Darren Brown's version on the streets of New York
~4 min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBPG_OBgTWg

A Psychologists version
~3 min.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE&feature=player_embedded

Excerpt from a BBC production explaining a particular experiment
~6 min.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/Time2Shine/videos/21/

Moral Thought Studies and Morality Without Religion

This Situationist post has a three part video of Mark Hauser talking about studies of moral psychology that demonstrate the current insights about the universality of unconscious moral thoughts. The "Rational" moral thought versus "Emotional" moral thought debate is shown to be wrong on both counts because unconscious moral thought processes precede and crucially shape both emotion and rational justification. Culture (potentially in the form of religion) influences the emotions felt and the actions that will be taken, but much of the moral framing of how we understand the nature of the situation occurs unconsciously.

TED Talk on the Role of Metaphor

Here is a fella named James Geary talking about the role of metaphor:


I find it interesting but I'm not sure if it's sufficiently clear about how fundamental metaphor is to our thought processes, but of course, there are severe limitations in the format TED offers.

Alva Noe's Embodied Philosophy

Here's a set of videos featuring Berkeley professor of philosophy Alva Noe, author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Body and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness.

Seeing Compassion

Here's a talk that really helps me envision the moral foundations of governance.

Institutional Corruption

Here is Lawrence Lessig defining an important aspect of our current political and social situation, the subtle forms of corruption that are promulgated by institutional arrangements:


I really appreciate his take on responsibility, it's not just individuals, we have to hold our institutions equally accountable.

Perspective on Homelessness

Since I have been involved with homeless shelters for youth here in Portland years ago and more recently helped with the establishment of a seasonal homeless shelter for adults in Port Townsend, WA, I have some interest in the issue. Here's a TED Talk that relates a first hand experience of one woman's bout with homelessness:

Song of Connection

Here's a delightful music video about our interconnectedness with the universe:

Leadership styles on public display

Here's another great conductor providing valuable insights into leadership and the heights of accomplishing it in a complex endeavor. The great thing about this talk is that he shows through video examples of different leadership styles and demonstrates with the audience several of them.:

Situationism in the New York Times

Here's a quote from this op-ed in the NYTimes:

Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”

The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context.

I appreciate this piece as a particularly concise explanation of the importance of situationism. It's unfortunate that he paints all of philosophy as dispositionist and inherently based on a priori assumptions, but it's understandable in the context of having to be concise.

Hat Tip to The Frontal Cortex Blog.

Structured Freedom

In response to the Free-Range Kids Blog post called "Hugging Instructions? Yep." I am re-reading this report.

One of the things they point out is how structured this kind of freedom actually is, despite the shallow view that emphasizes "freedom" from coercion normally found in schools.

Here's an excerpt:

Far from the “free” image with which we started this account, Summerhill school has invisible boundaries, powerful inspections, binding agreements, and redemptive public rituals, as well as a set of visible sanctions that prompt and reinforce acceptable ways to live together. These all act as an “outside-in” pressure that frames and disciplines interactions while developing identities and
relationships, yet always with the possibility of change or resistance. We have suggested something of the total nature of students’ engagement with these structures. Summerhill is a powerful mechanism, generating discipline from within, and without the coercive relations of a “normal” school. The school orchestrates a vortex of engagements, from which there is no “backing away”, as one student put it. Everyone is ‘in touch’ with everyone else, more or less.

Wry insight into bureaucratic teaching

Here is the first of six categories of help that this teacher wants an assistant to do:

Must be willing to make and receive numerous phone calls on a daily basis. Subject of phone calls can be, but is not limited to:

• scheduling parent conferences with 100% success rate
  
• scheduling parent conferences with 100% of the parents
  
• scheduling parent conferences with 100% of the parents to be completed within a 10-day window
  
• scheduling parent conferences for parents that can't actually come on parent conference night
  
• scheduling alternative times for parent conferences during teacher's planning period, before school, or after school (when even the teacher doesn't even know what days he/she will actually HAVE a planning period, or when the teacher only has 1-day lead time as to whether or not they will have morning duty the following week, or when the teacher doesn't know when a last minute after school frivolous meeting will be scheduled)
  
• tracking down missing paperwork/documentation for records
  
• communicating information to parents about missing/incomplete student work
  
• communicating information to parents about their child's negative behaviors in school

Illusions or Reality

Here is a TED Talk by Beau Lotto that makes an important point about how we are embodied minds embedded in reality, not disembodied minds apprehending reality:



Here's the first ten minutes of a longer presentation via Fora.tv that goes into more detail and explores more of his sense of the consequences of these ideas, click Watch Full Program to see the whole thing:

Evidence to Support Nature Deficit Disorder Social Effects

Here's a video that I found via The Situationist Blog on the findings of a recent study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on the effects of communing with nature:

Developmental Psychology of Schoolchildren

The field of developmental psychology seems to be about the development of school children, not the development of children in general, according to Peter Gray. Here is a post he wrote in response to his trying to find out what the "definitive" book set on the field of developmental psychology has to say about the subjects of play, curiosity and exploration.

The Consequences of Standardization

Marion Brady, a long time curriculum critic, gives a good overview of the situation that has lead most of our schools to the place of kowtowing to standardized tests in this article from Education Week. Here's his conclusion:

Here’s a prediction: If implemented as it’s being advocated by spokespersons, the national standards-reform effort will fail. Period. It won’t fail because subject-matter specialists can’t agree on standards. And it won’t fail because of teacher incompetence, weak administrators, “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” union resistance to change, parental indifference, inadequate funding, lack of rigor, failure to employ market forces, too few charter schools, too little technology, or any other currently popular explanation of poor performance.

It will fail for the same reason the No Child Left Behind Act failed—because it will be driven by data derived from simplistic tests keyed to simplistic standards keyed to a simplistic, dysfunctional, obsolete, 19th-century curriculum.

Raising Important Questions About Testing

Here is a post by Diane Ravitch that raises crucially important questions about the effects of high stakes testing regimes:

This raises the question: With scores so often rigged and fraudulent, how can we use them to pay bonuses or to close schools? New York City's last round of phony test scores (noticed as phony even by the august New York Times) triggered a payout of $33 million in bonuses to teachers; the union is laughing all the way to the bank! So millions are awarded in fraudulent bonuses at the same time that school budgets are cut to the bone. Is this the way that big business operates? If so, it is no wonder that we had a financial meltdown.

I fear that American education has now entered into a twilight zone, where nothing is what it appears to be, where numbers are meaningless, where public relations and spin take the place of honest reporting, where fraud is called progress.

How long to form a habit?

Here is a post about a study that looked at the formation of habits.


The average time to a plateau was 66 days but the variation was 50 to 254 days. This is way more than the 20-30 days usually touted in self-help circles.

Slippery Slope of Wearing Knockoffs

Here's Dan Ariely talking about the moral consequences of wearing fake fashion sunglasses:

Social Network Effects on Our Health and Happiness

Here are two articles that discuss a study of social network effects:

Are Your Friends Making You Fat?- New York Times

Buddy System- Wired Magazine

Morality on the Brain

Here's a cognitive neuroscientist with a short TED talk about the brain area that deals with moral judgement:

Hoping for a Strong America

Hi Mom,

I saw that quote from Margaret Thatcher you included at the bottom of your last e-mail. At first I brushed it off because it seems to refer to some of the gross mischaracterizations that are going around in some circles these days, but then it seemed to stick in my craw which suggested that there was something much deeper at stake. So here's what came out when I thought about it more thoroughly:

The United States of America today is some wierd amalgam of capitalism, democracy, socialism, federalism, republicanism, and numerous other isms. That's just the way reality is, so simplistic labels are all wrong. But more important than the label for the complex system is our moral sense of what that system is supposed to do. All the wisdom teachers throughout the world agree that we have a moral duty to care for one another. The last administration's policies seem to be dedicated to wasting our resources on hating one another. When you pick your favorite ism to make it the enemy then you are attacking part of America. Some people pick on socialism, some of my friends pick on capitalism or conservatism. They're all wrong. Caring for each other is the right thing to do, even when it's hard. And there is no harder time to care and no harder person to care for than someone who has hurt you. Ask Jesus, he knows all about that. And it seems shameful to me that some people are determined to allow the systematic denial of health care for millions of Americans by private insurance companies to continue.

The problem with recent government policies (which Thatcher, Reagan, Bushes 1&2, and probably even Clinton implemented) is that making the rich richer interferes with our ability as citizens to care for one another. I want the government to be a strong part of a society that encourages us to have empathy for each other and provides the infrastructure (roads, regulated markets, law enforcement, schools, military, universal health care, etc.) that makes it possible to express the responsibility I feel to act to help those in our nation who are vulnerable and/or in need. I believe in having a strong government that uses it's power to build positive relationships with other people, organizations, and governments, especially when they disagree with us.

Here's a short blog post I wrote a while back that addresses this concern with a youtube video.


The point is this, caring takes strength and hating is a sign of weakness. The whole reason for the 9/11 attacks was the weakness of the terrorists, that's why nothing comparable has happened since. Then we succumbed to the same weakness by seeking revenge instead of justice. The neo-conservative haters who are hysterically opposed to health care are showing their weakness. The question is whether or not the majority of Americans who want to express care can muster the courage show their strength.

Here's hoping America can be strong again.

Music Fun

With piano:


Without piano:

Domesticating Disease

This guys idea keeps cropping up in conversation and so it is time to blog it for easier access:

Parent Involvement That Gets Results

If you take the assumptions of mainstream schools for granted then parental involvement seems to be important. Then the question becomes, "What kind of involvement should the parents have?"

What makes the difference is...

“academic socialization” mean[ing] that parents communicate their expectations for education to their kids and highlights education’s value and utility, like by linking schoolwork to current events. They also help their children create academic and career goals, discuss learning strategies with them, and make plans and preparations for the future.

As opposed to home-based or school-based involvement.

Hill and Tyson looked at three different types of parental involvement: home-based involvement, school-based involvement, and what they call “academic socialization.” In home-based involvement, parents talk to their kids about school, try to help them with their homework, take them to educational places like museums, and make sure they have access to books and newspapers. School-based involvement consists of attending school events, becoming a part of the PTA, volunteering at school, and building relationships with teachers.

Hat Tip to the Greater Good Blog.

Why Do These Kids love School?

Which Reality Counts?

Dan Ariely explores very briefly the view that subjective reality is more important than objective reality:



Here's another video of him talking about morality and how the salience of moral thinking makes a difference in behavior:

TED Talk on Motivation by Dan Pink

He's saying basically what Kenneth W. Thomas said in his 2000 book Intrinsic Motivation at Work, but it's good stuff:



Here's the RSA Animate version of basically the same content in another fun visual style:


And here's the Monday Dots Summary.

Friends Don't Let Friends Know Everything

[O]ne of the nicest things a friend can do is let us misunderstand them just a little.

“If you don’t know everything about someone else, you still enjoy the time you spend with each other,” says Delia Baldassarri, a sociologist and assistant professor at Princeton who has studied people’s perceptions of their friends’ political attitudes. “In certain ways, you may even enjoy it more.”

Fascinating insights into the illusion of knowing your friends.

Thanks to Mind Hacks for pointing out this correction:

The article has a bit of a quirk, however, by supposedly explaining "Psychologists call this projection: in situations where there’s any ambiguity, people tend to simply project their feelings and thoughts onto others".

Except, they don't. The effect discussed by the article, where we over-estimate the extent to which people share our own mindset, is called the false consensus effect.

Projection is a unverified psychological defence mechanism where people supposedly misperceive psychological states in other people that, in reality, they have themselves but unconsciously want to hide from their conscious mind.

Music on the Brain

I just happened upon these two fascinating resources on the connections between music and our brains:

Harper's Interview with Musicophilia author Oliver Sachs.

Five part video of Notes & Neurons from the World Science Festival featuring Bobby Mc Ferrin, 3 brain scientists, a science journalist, and a few other musicians.

Kicks off with a set from Bobby McFerrin then goes into a fascinating discussion of the brain science of music for a non-technical, non-musician audience including demonstrations of many of the concepts.

Video on the Difficulties of Success and Failure

TED Talk by Alain de Botton about key challenges in modern life in terms of success and failure, meritocracy and justice.

He seems keenly aware of the role of randomness, the arbitrariness of both succeeding and failing.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Here's an insightful article from Paul Graham that gets at a key problem that occasionally pops up in my world.

"There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done. ...

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off."

Discussion of Morals in a Market Society

Here's a Fora.tv video of Harvard Professor Michael Sandel's Chautauqua talk on the morality of market mechanisms for solving social problems:

The Problem With Infinite Possibilities

Here is a talk by Social Scientist Professor Barry Schwartz that points out the difficulty of having infinite choices.

@ Yahoo! Video

Why We Overeat

Here's an overview of the problem:



David Kessler, MD, served as commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Kessler, a pediatrician, has been dean of the medical schools at Yale and the UCSF. He has more detailed view of how we fall into the trap.

Cognitive Cartography in 6 minutes

Here is a video that scratches the surface of what I mean by cognitive cartography:


Here's a link to an Australian news show video that presents a demonstration of cognitive body mapping and a syndrome of dysfunction to the brains mapping structures. (Hat tip to Mind Hacks) This is the basis for the cognitive cartography idea. What I posit is that the brain not only maps the body image, it also maps a social image. That mapping defines the extent of our capabilities in our social context in a similar way that our body image defines the extent of our capabilities. Just like when we extend our capabilities with tools, then the brain incorporates the tool into the image. So when we extend our social influence our brains incorporate the social context into our social image.

Recent Geroge Lakoff Videos

Thom Hartmann Radio Show:


Commonwealth Club:



Derivative of Lakoff's work on health care:

Primary Health Care Platform on the Web

Here's a new brilliant innovation for primary care doctors:

@ Yahoo! Video

LINK to Hello Health

PsyBlog on Groups and Leadership

Here are a series of posts on group dynamics and leadership from PsyBlog:

Why Groups and Prejudices Form So Easily: Social Identity Theory

10 Rules That Govern Groups

Social Loafing: When Groups Are Bad for Productivity

Effectiveness of Mutual Support Groups

Social Facilitation: How and When Audiences Improve Performance

Leaders Emerge by Talking First and Most Often

7 Reasons Leaders Fail

Lacunae Illusion Done Right

This is a one minute video that demonstrates the blind spot in your left eye with an added bit of trickery to reinforce the weirdness of it. Thanks to Richard Wiseman at Quirkology for this:

Mathematician's Lament

Hat Tip to Bruce Smith at Education.Change.org for linking to this pdf file:

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he is in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.

As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely.

One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way. ...

Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.”

The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right."

Click on the "pdf file" link above the quote for the full 25 page document.

End Faith, But Hold on to Violence?

Responding to Sam Harris' Book The End of Faith

Through all but the next to last chapter of this book I could generally concede his main points about the necessity for a broad cultural movement to counter the absurd claims in religious doctrine about how the world works. I found that he framed some of his arguments in unpleasantly divisive ways, but the essential points were good.

In regard to the framing of his arguments he made the same basic error as his anti-religion compatriots, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, they focus exclusively on objecting to the doctrinal/ creedal dimension of religion (referring to Ninian Smart's seven dimensions of religion) and ignore and/or minimize the value of the mythic, social, ritual, experiential, ethical and material dimensions of religion. I consider this error as equivalent to how the anti-evolutionists conveniently ignore the nuances of evolutionary science and pick exclusively on the most stereotypical misrepresentations.

But that's par for the course, what really got my britches in a tangle was his treatment of violence. In chapter 6, entitled A Science of Good and Evil, Harris presents his argument for the moral necessity of violence in general and torture in particular. He contends that we have no practical alternatives by showing how war is a moral necessity and since that is the case then effectively torture is no different, morally, from collateral damage (the wartime killing, maiming, and terrorizing of innocents). If war is morally acceptable, then so is torture, if we are consistent in our beliefs. The premise of his argument about the moral equivalence of collateral damage and torture is necessarily based on the lack of an effective, that is morally acceptable, alternative means to achieve the same ends. So he takes pains to show that the pacifist alternative to war is not reasonable and appears to be ignorant of alternative interrogation techniques.

His refutation of the moral credentials of pacifism relies on an absurd caricature of pacifists who would ignore their personal safety in the presence of a mass murderer and then takes an isolated quote from Gandhi (suggesting that the Jews should have committed mass suicide in opposition to the Holocaust) to dismiss pacifism as patently absurd.

He also recounts how he intervened to prevent further violence against a Czech woman who was being forced into a car. He discounts his act as cowardly and morally worthless because he interprets his actions as failing to deliver a message to the perpetrators of the violence. As someone who formerly trained in martial arts for several years I found his creative engagement in the situation to be a very excellent example of using the most effective tools at hand to preserve the health and safety of another person. He discounts the moral value of his actions because he was not Super Hero enough to deliver a “lesson” to the thugs he thwarted. There are several problems with this view. First of all, he is delusional about the efficacy of one intervention, no one learns that kind of “lesson” from one isolated incident. Second of all, I have no way to imagine what he could have done to “teach” the “lesson” he expects. In my understanding of human beings and how they learn, when you do violence to them they will be focused on the violence you did to them, not whatever they happened to have done before you came into the situation with your violence. Here's an ex-cop who not only attests to the accuracy of this view of how humans behave, but teaches people to do deliberately what Harris did instinctively. Thus, in my estimation his account of this incident is a perfect example of how non-violence successfully thwarted violence and ultimately undermines his argument against pacifism. Here's a video that illustrates verbal judo from the movie Fort Apache: The Bronx:


To refute his premise in regards to torture, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been using effective and efficient non-violent means of interrogation since World War Two. According to a scholar who has studied the modern history of torture in the form of the psychological techniques made famous by the Abu Ghraib scandal, the FBI's methods are a viable alternative. My blog post entitled Psychological Dark Side provides access to some of the key videos that have informed my opinion on this matter.

As for his portrayal of pacifists, his claim that pacifists would refuse to act in self-defense against a lone murderer is absurd. Pacifism as I understand it is specifically an opposition to the use of state power to wage war. Pacifists are clear that there are crucial differences between the moral situations when one person kills another 1) for immediate self-defense, 2) for personal gain, and 3) for the purposes of a state that authorizes the killing. Just like everyone else they accept the moral necessity of the first, and abhor the second. Where they differ from many other people is consciously rejecting the third.

I reject Harris' arguments about the acceptability of violence and the necessity of torture. My opposition to both violence, in general, and torture in particular are based on my belief that morally acceptable alternatives are available and that they are also practical and effective. The real problem is that, as a society, we just haven't gotten out of the knee-jerk habit of reacting with violence. If we take Harris advice of grounding our religions in empirically valid spiritual practices that are aimed at accurately characterizing the facts of consciousness then we will make progress towards the true aim of religion which is to bind people together for mutual nurturance, not drive them apart. The trick is to get Religion to forsake it's claims to authority over matters better addressed by other institutions and focus what it is best suited to address. Unitarian-Universalism is leading the way as the only non-creedal religion (that I am aware of.)

Shame on U.S. for failing to provide healthcare

There is no excuse for the richest nation in the world to be so negiligent of the needs of so many people that a non-profit, all volunteer emergency medical crew that normally serves third-world countries has to run missions here. I only thank god that I have not gotten sick and even if I do there are people who can help (if it's not catastrophic.) I give a tip of the Hat to Frameshop for bringing this video to my attention and if you want more analysis I recommend his article:

Psychological Dark Side- Torture

I have acquainted myself with the situation of torture through a combination of hearing lectures online and reading Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect.

Here are the videos that I have found to be the most enlightening (from shortest to longest):

~20 minutes with Senator Carl Levin responding to former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism of President Obama's Policies and claims about "aggressive interrogation"



~20 minutes with Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo on exactly how the situation, not the individuals, determined that abuse would occur at Abu Gharib. WARNING: graphic images of torture. But there is a redeeming message at the end!



~1 hour with history Professor Alfred McCoy from University of Wisconsin on the 50 year history of CIA secret psychological torture techniques. WARNING: highly academic presentation with graphic video segments and descriptions of torture.



The Long Version of Zimbardo's presentation. 1 hr. 10 min. WARNING: graphic images of torture.



Reed College (my alma mater) Political Science Professor Darius Rejali gives a thorough examination of torture (1 Hour, 45 min):


A New Yorker reporters perspective on the recent torture issues:

Links to Democratic Education Resources

Yaacov Hecht, Isreali Institute for Democratic Education founder, Video.

Eyal Ram on Teacher Education for Democratic Schools.

Bruce Smith on his experiences as a disempowered public school teacher.


Essay on technology in school by and an interview with Daniel Greenberg that includes a lot of Sudbury Valley School information.

Lefty Parent Blog post on national educational standards.

Interview with Daniel Greenberg on Bnet

Mothering article by Daniel Greenberg

Utne Reader article on Sudbury by Rachel Anderson

Psychology Today article by Hara Estroff Marano 2006

EUDEC Media List

ADD/ ADHD Study

Here's an important review of and ADD/ADHD study by respected science journalist Jonah Lehrer.

They found that ADHD is largely a developmental problem: the brains of kids with ADHD develop at a significantly slower pace than normal. For instance, the median age by which 50 percent of the cortical points attained peak thickness for the ADHD group was 10.5 years, while the median age for the control group was 7.5 years. This lag was most obvious in the lateral parts of the prefrontal cortex, which is a brain area essential for most of the executive functions that appear to compromised in children with ADHD. (On average, their frontal lobes were three and a half years behind schedule.) The good news, however, is that the ADHD brain almost always recovers from its slow start.

Commencement Comedy

LINK

Teaching Disabilities

Breaking News from The Onion:
Report: Increasing Number Of Educators Found To Be Suffering From Teaching Disabilities

Teacher Magazine on Teacher Empowerment

Here's a discussion that addresses what I consider to be a central issue in education today. I made a comment, too.

Illusion of Time & Space

Here is an NPR story on the fact that our experience of a sensory world is unified into a coherent temporal unity (a singular time line and a consistent space) despite the fact that the raw data is streaming in across different time scales and from many different sources spread out across the space of our bodies.

The Secret Advantage Of Being Short on Krulwich On Science by Robert Krulwich

Here's a detailed article from The Edge about our illusion of time.

And another video on the perception of time:

A Mom Stops The Bribery

These three posts are a nice account of how and why one Mom chose to give up on bribes:

Unhappiness is a Bad Habit

Punished By Rewards?

How to get kids to do boring (but necessary) tasks

Rewiring the Brains of Kids and Old People

This talk is not a sparkling presentation, but it is very interesting regarding brain plasticity and how kids develop certain kinds of learning disabilities. There are a couple other presentations that I have seen on Fora.tv and others that talk about how these findings are applied for kids. They have shown how auditory processing speed is crucial, for instance.

The Illusion of Punishment

This article takes an interesting look at how we tend to think of punishment as an obvious solution but then have to reverse ourselves when it turns out to be an absurd abuse of the dignity of those who are punished.

"The key finding of this study is that people fail to recognize that the deterrence policy will violate their intuition of justice until after they see it in practice." That is, we like the idea of zero tolerance and don't realize how unfairly it can treat people until we are slapped in the face with the disproportionate results of what at first seemed like a clear and simple policy.

In the end, the psychologist concludes, "when it comes to introspection, we are all 'strangers to ourselves.'"

The professor asked participants about a case like a real one in which a 13-year-old girl shared a Midol pill with a friend at school to relieve the friend's menstrual cramps. The 13-year-old was expelled for violating a school rule against distributing drugs. The survey asked whether expulsion or student-parent conferences with a guidance counselor would be the better response to such an incident. Once they heard the details of the Midol case, fully 88 percent of those who had earlier endorsed the idea of a zero tolerance policy reversed themselves.

Low Doses Matter

This talk about the presence of toxic chemicals is really an eye-opener:

Kid-Safe Chemicals Act: 10 Americans @ Yahoo! Video

On Justice: If You Want War, Work for Justice

I was fascinated by this reversal of the bumper sticker "If you want peace, work for justice" and had to work out my objection to it. The crucial point of the original post is that war can be caused by the application of mutually exclusive definitions of justice. Here's how I responded:

I see what you mean about the apparent incompatibility of definitions of justice. I think your analysis neglects the crucial feature of holding strictly to abstract ideals when there is the option of grounding a conversation in concrete circumstances and the morality of specific actions.

The essence of morality is the prevention of harm and the promotion of beneficial behaviors and circumstances. This essence is cognitively driven by five apparently universal criteria based on mostly unconscious assessments of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. (Taking Jonathan Haidt's model of moral cognition as a starting point.)

The problem that you point to is the incompatibility of abstract notions. As long as both sides are exchanging abstractions then you are absolutely correct war is likely, if not a foregone conclusion.

When you have a concern for the safety of your child, then if you meet someone with a concern for their child's safety, then it's likely you can work together for that common cause. The possibility for resolution of conflicts is to frame the conversation in terms of the concrete harm that is inevitable given that the parties to the conflict insist on dealing exclusively with abstractions and strongly avoid observing the concrete details of the situation. It is often possible to find common moral ground in the concrete details. One common moral concern is that everyone wants to protect their children from harm, for instance. There are probably many other avenues for finding common moral ground from which to have a discussion. The art of creating this kind of conversation successfully rests in framing the conversation in the concrete and minimizing the abstract, except to reinforce lines of moral thought that converge on workable outcomes.

This was demonstrated at the Camp David Accords. There is a section of the documentary “Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains” in which they are talking about how he helped craft the Camp David Accords (I hope that's the right source) and apparently when the difference was made, it was made for concrete reasons of emotional importance to the people in the conversation.

Jimmy Carter was working for justice, meaning the concrete reality of reducing the harm caused by violent conflict. He was not there imposing an abstract ideal. He was holding a gracious space in which a meaningful conversation could be had. He was focused on relating to each man in the conversation as a fellow human being concerned with the welfare of others. It was holding that gracious space in which the focus was on creating real meaningful relationships that was an act of justice. When the men could see the concrete reality of suffering, then they could reframe their position to accommodate first seeing the other as a fellow human being and then as a representative of other human beings who also deserve not to be harmed. Normal people easily fight against abstractions, but they resist fighting when they see someone just like them being hurt.

For me a just world is one in which we honor the inherent dignity and worth of every individual. The criteria of justice I want to hold you accountable to, and that I expect you to hold me accountable to, as well, is whether my actions cause harm, real concrete harm in the world. Not imagined harm to dead or imaginary people, but real harm to living people. That's a reasonable criteria for justice, I think.

Embodied Education

This talk does not appear to be about education, but it is. She gets around to it very near the end.

Video on the Future of Education

Here's a Teacher's TV production that looks at a variety of innovations in education, including Sudbury Valley School. 30 minutes.
School Matters- Tomorrow's Teacher, Tomorrows School

Emotional Cues in the Environment

Here is a TED Talk by Don Norman, cognitive scientist and author of "The Design of Everyday Things," that addresses emotional cues in the environment.

His design goals are emotional, functional and reflective. These levels occur to us as the visceral [non-conscious], behavioral [sub-conscious], and reflective [conscious].

A Perspective on Surviving Creativity

This is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, on the modern problem of surviving gracefully as an artist.

Summerhill Video

Just found this video on Summerhill School in England. I am glad to see that the presentation has dispensed with the cliche of the "free school" as chaos and anarchy theme. In fact, this presentation seems to emphasize as many visual images of kids being studious as playful. I also like how they brought out some of the philosophical issues and how the school has fared in relation to the larger system in which they are embedded.

LINK

This article on Summerhill goes the opposite direction and even calls it "strict" and says they have 150 to 230 rule!

Attitude First From Barry Schwartz at TED

Here's Barry again at TED on Practical Wisdom:


Here's an earlier talk he gave on the Paradox of Choice:

Oregonian on The Village Free School

Here's a nice article about The Village Free School (where I am volunteering these days.)

Attitude in the News

In the aftermath of the disaster-that-wasn't (US Air 1549's Hudson River Landing) Jonah Lehrer explains that it was the Captain's attitude that saved the day and his attitude was a learned response.

'Deliberate Calm' Guided US Air Crew

My First Movie: Bones of Contention

This is a one day movie. Noah and I decided to make a movie in the early afternoon, outlined a script, and started shooting. We finished shooting that night after dinner and I edited and scored it, finishing up around 2AM. About 13 hours start to finish. Noah was the cinematographer and he happens to be 10 3/4 years old (or so.) The score has been changed because of copyright issues, but the new one is even better.

Kristina, Richard, and the lady at the Joy Luck Chinese Restaurant were very enthusiastic recruits into the process. Kristina created the prop used at the very end, too.

Irrational Decision-making Video

Hat Tip to Channel N

Here's the TED version:

The Answer to Scams is Trust More not Less

In this article by a leading expert on gullibility (who was taken in by the Madoff Ponzi scheme) comes to the surprising conclusion that the answer to having your trust betrayed is not to trust less, but trust more. Actually, trust more in a diversity of people so that when one of them betrays your trust then you have the strength of all the others to carry you through. The situation of losing one amongst many investments (financial, relational, or otherwise) is a lot less tragic than the situation of losing the only investment you have.

School As Extended Mind

This post at Mind Hacks about the extended mind idea has me thinking about what it means for schools if we accept the premise. When we put children into a new classroom every year then we effectively wipe out their ability to externalize their mind. We cut them off from the possibility of school enabling them to maximize the benefits of externalizing. They know that whatever investment they make in utilizing this year's classroom as a medium for extending their personal capabilities, it will be wiped out at the end of the year.

That's not good.

Are You Aware? Probably not.

This London-based cycling safety campaign is a brilliant demonstration of how unaware we can be.

The Curse of Knowledge in Teaching

This post is an excellent summary of how the curse of knowledge can be a significant obstacle to good teaching.

Understanding The Basis Of Business

I occasionally ruminate on the evolving basis of our economy. If you follow business culture you will know that we have gone through transformations from commodities to goods to services and that a new level is emerging. The following TED Talk by Joseph Pine gives the best explanation I've ever heard or read. And it provides a basic lesson to me as I am about to launch my Attitutor Services Attitude Adjustment Program in Portland.



LINK

Briefing The President on Attitude in Education

Here is a link to my submission for the Citizen's Briefing book.

The idea is that everyone can submit ideas that we all vote on and the top ideas get included in the presidents daily briefing.

Windsor House Video Documentary

Here is a short documentary about Windsor House, a democratic school in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

There is one hyperbolic statement that should be corrected:

This is one of hundreds of democratic schools around the globe, and it is not even unique to Canada. If you would like to know where democratic schools are I recommend The Online Directory of Democratic Education.

Attitude Science- Synchrony

Here's a synopsis of some studies done on synchronous behaviors in people.

Below are some additional videos of the synchronization of metronomes:

Dan Gilbert on Our Everyday Irrationality and its Global Impact

This lecture from author Dan Gilbert is less than 15 minutes but paints a clear picture of why we humans are not responding to looming global challenges.

Compassion & Power Study

This brief on the findings of a study that looked for correlations between a person's sense of power and their feelings of compassion has me thinking about what it means.

Are Power and Compassion Mutually Exclusive?"

The answer to the provocative title is no, but having a sense of your own power does seem to correlate with maintaining emotional distance from those who tell you a sob story. This seems to me to be an important validation of a tenet I learned from BJ Dohrmann, the founder of CEOSpace. It goes something like this "Money is attracted to success and repelled by desperation." When making appeals for money or anything else, if you want the attention of the rich and powerful, don't be desperate. The rich and powerful will automatically maintain a distance. When the rich and powerful invest in someone (financially or with their influence) they are looking to increase their success, therefore they are going to be attracted to someone on a path to success. They do have compassion, but in order to get them to access that compassion in your favor you have to appeal to the part of your sob story that they can relate to, the part that is overcoming the difficulty and rising to meet the challenges.