Learning How to Learn

We're back. Sorry it's been a little while, but Conversation Topic Tuesday is up and running again. This week, in honor of John going back to school in the fall, I thought we could read up a little on how our brains learn. Turns out it's really interesting.

Sleep affects learning. According to the Society for Neuroscience, sleeps helps to secure procedural memories, which are important for learning skills. In one study, a group was trained to type a sequence on a keyboard. They were then tested 12 hours later with no significant improvement in performance. They then got a full night's sleep, and the next morning their performance was nearly 20 percent better. A second group was taught the sequence in the evening. The next morning, after getting enough rest, they also showed about a 20% improvement in skill. They were then tested 12 hours later that day and showed no significant progress.

When learning physical movements, like playing a piano piece or a dance or a sport, imagining is almost as good as going through the motions physically. Dr. Norman Doidge wrote about the phenomenon in his book The Brain That Changes Itself (which is definitely worth reading, if you have the chance). In the experiment he references, two groups of people who did not play the piano were taught a sequence of notes to play. They were shown how their fingers should move and were played the notes that should result. Then one group practiced the music for two hours a day, playing it on a keyboard. The other group spent the same amount of time practicing every day, but instead of playing the music physically, they sat in front of a keyboard and imagined playing and hearing the notes in the sequence.

Doidge writes that the study "found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes. Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece. By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual  players were on their third day." So it's not exactly as good, but for not moving, it's pretty good. In Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology, Bryan Kolb and Ian Whishaw drew the same conclusion.

And we know that exercising helps.

We learn different things at different times. This interactive graphic from The New York Times does a great job of illustrating the stages of learning in people between ages 4 and 21. Then as we move into middle age, our brains get better at understanding and recognizing big picture ideas, which helps identify the significance of thing and find solutions.

That's according to an article by Barbara Strauch in The New York Times. In the article, she quotes Dr. Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary's College. Dr. Taylor suggest that as a result of this different brain functioning in middle age, rather than focusing on learning facts during this stage of life, deeper levels of learning are fostered when we are exposed to people and ideas that are different from what's common to us and from what we already agree with.

"As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses," Dr. Taylor says. "We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you'll have an overlay of complexity you didn't have before—and help your brain keep developing as well."

Mortgage Rates and Kissing Fannie and Freddie Goodbye

Lately for work I've been writing about the fiscal announcements Obama's been making, like the plan to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the budget announcement. And maybe it's just from being in Washington, but I think it's kind of interesting to talk about, so I thought maybe this Conversation Topic Tuesday could cover what the president and Congress are doing with tax dollars. (I really don't mean for this to be taking political sides; really just a discussion of what happens to be going on.)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

• These are names we hear a lot. In case you're looking for a little background on what they do, here's how it goes: Banks give people loans to buy houses. However, these loans are usually very long term (say, 30 years) and in the U.S. the way it works is you lock in an interest rate when you sign up for a mortgage loan. If the rates go down, you can refinance to get the lower rate. But if rates go up, there's not much banks can do to charge you more. So this makes banks not like these loans because it creates risk for them. However, the U.S. government steps in to encourage banks to make 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loans by having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac come in and buy loans off of the banks. Fannie and Freddie then repackage those loans and sell them to investors, who make money on them when people pay off their mortgage and lose money if people don't. The thing about Fannie and Freddie is, they've been kind of guaranteed by the government, so when too many people were not paying their mortgages a couple years ago and Fannie and Freddie were about to go bankrupt, the government steeped in with a whole lot of money and kept them afloat.
• The fact that Fannie and Freddie currently back more than 90% of the mortgages that are being made right now makes it pretty obvious why the government stepped in; if they hadn't, the housing market would have come to a complete and utter standstill and no one would be able to get a loan and people would have lost even more money on their homes, which would have caused the economy to tank further and more people would have lost their jobs.
• However, the fact that Fannie and Freddie are backing more than 90% of mortgages also makes it really clear that the government needs to find a way out of this, because mortgage making is not the government's job. For once, both Democrats and Republicans have decided they can agree on this, but since if the president were to put out one plan for how to solve the problem, Republicans would just shoot it down, he proposed three plans and now people can talk about them until they find a consensus.
• No matter what happens, Fannie and Freddie are going to be history in ten years or less. The president's plan is to sell off their assets over the next ten years. Tim Geithner was saying five to seven years. The point is, they won't be around a decade from now.
• Obama has put forward three possibilities for what could replace them
• Under the first plan, the government would pretty much pull out of home financing, but would retain some presence, focusing only on low- to moderate-income level and very credit worthy borrowers. This sounds really great. The only trouble is that we would pretty much have to kiss the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage goodbye and mortgages would be more expensive. However, taxpayers wouldn't be on the hook if things headed south again.
• Under the second plan, the government would focus mostly on low- to moderate-income, credit worthy borrowers, but would also include a government backstop that could "scale up" (as the report to Congress put it) to provide more financing when the economy tanks and banks don't want to lend. However, 30-year fixed rates will still get more expensive.
• Under the third plan, the government would again offer mortgage-backed securities just fewer of them and there would be very tight oversight. Thirty-year fixed rates will be more expensive, but less so. However, tax payers will be more on the hook.
• The thing is, as much as people talk about getting the government out of financing mortgages, if push comes to shove, if the economy tanks as bad as it has recently, the government will step in. So realistic lawmakers kind of have to add that into the mix, too.
• To sort of sum things up, the government is going to be withdrawing from home financing. How dramatic that withdraw will be remains to be seen. Loan prices will go up, which may sound like a bad thing, but there are positives, too: As we've seen, when anyone and everyone can get a home loan, prices go up like crazy. So even though financing is going to get harder and a bit more expensive to come by, that will also mean that builders and home sellers won't be able to charge as much for their homes because people won't be able to get approved for as much, and that will hopefully help keep home prices tethered to earth. So there are pros and cons both ways.

Ok, it's bed time. I think this will have to be a two-part series and we'll cover Obama's budget tomorrow.

Sports Muckraking, Vol. 1

In a 1955 interview with Walter Cronkite, Sam Huff, a New York Giants linebacker summed up the strategy behind the sport: "We try to hurt everybody."

It's not a big surprise. We know it's about injuries as well as NFL insiders, and everyone just accepts it. Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, wrote in his column "The Daily Beast" that "violence is not only embedded in football; it is the very celebration of it. It is why we like it. Take it away, continue efforts to curtail the savagery, and the game will be nothing, regardless of age or skill." But if we look at the NFL's history of attempts at making the game more civilized, fans will quickly realize they have nothing to worry about. As players' face protection has gone up, they've also learned to tackle with their heads instead of their arms. In 1970, the average weight of an offensive tackle was 260 lbs; in 2006 that number was 314. Last year James Harrison, linebacker for the Steelers stated his understanding of the game: "I try to hurt people." In more than 50 years, nothing has changed.

I hesitated before writing on this for Conversation Topic Tuesday for a while. But it's something that affects the safety of citizens of every age and in almost every town in the nation.

So here are a few talking points:

• A 2009 study conducted by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research reported that former NFL players are 19 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases than a normal man between the ages of 30 and 49.
• Alan Schwarz of The New York Times reports that the only helmet standard to have been written was put together by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment--a volunteer consortium that receives a large part of its financial backing from the helmet manufacturers. This standard has not changed since 1973, even as concussion rates in youth football have risen.
• Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition experts believe results from both large collisions and the accumulation of small collisions (such as those sustained in football practice but not large enough to be recognized as dangerous) has been known to develop as young as 21 years old. Since CTE can only be diagnosed through autopsy, it is unclear how many football players suffer from the disease. However, Christopher Nowinski, a concussion expert, told The New Yorker that a prediction of 20 percent of NFL players having CTE seemed conservative.
• According to the National Center for Catastrophic Injury research, between 1982 and 2009, 295 fatalities resulted either directly or indirectly from high school football.
• The New York Times reports that "more than 100,000 children are wearing helmets too old to provide adequate protection — and perhaps half a million more are wearing potentially unsafe helmets that require critical examination, according to interviews with experts and industry data."

Perhaps more easy to digest are the human stories:

• The first diagnosis of CTE was made on the brain of Mike Webster, former center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who died homeless living out of a truck.
• The second diagnosis of CTE was made on ex-Steeler offensive lineman Terry Long, who killed himself drinking antifreeze.
• CTE was also diagnosed in Justin Strzelczyk, who died when his car hit a tanker truck after he drove the wrong way down the New York Thruway. 
• Ted Johnson, a retired New England Patriots linebacker, was 34 years old when he began locking himself in his apartment with the blinds drawn for days at a time. His neurologist told him he was already showing early signs of Alzheimer's disease.
• Markus Koch, retired defensive lineman for the Washington Redskins, can't stand for too long or his legs go numb. He suffers from depression and is sometimes unable to leave his bed for long periods of time.

The evidence goes on and on and on. The more I've thought about it, the more the differences between football and the Roman spectacle begin to disappear. Except in the American version, by the time the athlete is defeated, all the crowds have left him to suffer alone.

(Sources: The New Yorker, The New York Times)

Finding Happiness the New Old Fashioned Way

When your own mother stops reading your blog, something needs to change.

I don't know why I expected my mom to keep checking my blog daily when I only posted once every couple weeks. I also don't know why I suddenly turned into one of those people that expects other people to use their time to read her blog, when those other people have their own lives to live and reading about your life is not their most important task. But I found myself floored that my mom hadn't read the post I'd put up the night before. Then she gave me a really good suggestion. She said that if I want people to actually read this blog, I need to post in it with some kind of regularity, and the more consistency the better. She's right. And I've been wanting to be better about posting conversation topics anyway, so in an effort of consistency I'm going to start Conversation Topic Tuesdays. Hopefully this way we'll all have something interesting to say by the time our weekend dinner parties roll around.

This week, as I was trying to figure out what to write on, an enormous gold brick of conversation fodder landed in my lap--or actually my mailbox--in the form of David Brooks' article "Social Animal" in this week's edition of The New Yorker. Brooks, of New York Times op-ed fame, has long been fascinated with social science research. And lucky for us, he has combined some of his favorite findings into an article on what geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, and the like have learned about what makes us tick.

The main thrust of his argument is something most of us have known or at least wanted to believe for a long time: that standard measures of achievement (intelligence, impressive grades, prestige) don't align very well with either fulfillment or great accomplishments. Rather, our happiness and even our seemingly logical decisions are far more steeped in emotion than we generally acknowledge. Happiness and even mental ability come from relationships, and it starts when we're babies.

Turns out our brains are wired by love. Perhaps most critical is the love from our mom. Science says so: the more a baby rat is licked and groomed by it's mama rat, the more synaptic connections are made in its rat brain. Children are listening to their mothers before they're even born. Babies that develop inside a French-speaking mother cry differently than those that develop inside a woman speaking German. Once born, a baby watches its mother, mimics her, and most importantly learns to feel confident in the world by learning to trust that when he or she sends out a signal, someone will respond. That confidence is key for a child, who will need it to go out into the world with a sense of security and the confidence to feel they are worthwhile and capable of making good choices. Brooks mentions a study at the University of Minnesota where researchers, looking at the attachment patterns of 42-month-old children could predict with 77 percent accuracy who would go on to graduate from high school. He goes on to say, "People who were securely attached as infants tend to have more friends at school and at summer camp. They tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less need to puff themselves up in others' eyes."

And it doesn't stop with infancy. As we get older, people learn from people they love, Brooks contends. And that's probably for the best, considering that if we love something about someone, that means they've taken a principle we think is valuable and internalized and developed it. That is far more reliable a source for wisdom than your standard expert in any field, since people generally grossly overestimate how right we are on a given topic. Brooks references a study done by Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo, who questioned more than two thousand executives about their industries. Advertising managers gave answers that they reported they were 90 percent confident were right, and yet their answers were wrong 61 percent of the time. Computer industry executives gave answers they reported to be 95 percent confident of being correct, and 80 percent of the time they were wrong. Ninety-nine percent of those questioned overestimated their accuracy.

Research over the past thirty years has just reinforced what I think most of us have suspected all along (and yet what society continually fails to recognize the importance of): that what the inner mind wants most is connection. A person who joins a group that meets once a month will experience the same increase in happiness as would have been produced if they had doubled their income. And researchers Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others have found that the activities most closely associated with happiness are social, extending a person out to connect with peers, rather than focusing laterally to move upward in a career.

So go on, get happy.

L'art de la Conversation

A few years ago U.S. News and World Report ran an article on what America can learn from other countries. (I'm definitely moving to Taiwan.) And of course the ever-fabulous French were spotlighted as masters in the art of conversation. Their superiority is attributed to several factors, some of which are easily adopted (avoiding discussing one's vacation/paycheck/recent big purchase, and leaving the weather out of it) and others that are not (a 300-year-old tradition of courtly banter and a public education system that lauds the study of philosophy, for starters). However, despite our lack of vous form, there are apparently some ground rules we can follow:

Rule 1: "A conversation is an end in itself, with no purpose."
Rule 2: "Rhapsodies of brilliance are to be avoided at all costs for fear of disengaging one of the participants, who may feel excluded or humiliated." (Can we please extend this to one-uping?)
Rule 3: "[Good-natured] disagreement is permitted and even encouraged."

In a New York Times op-ed, Dan Ariely of Freakenomics applied behavioral economics to awkward first-date conversation. He suggests that just as some restricted marketplaces can yield more desirable outcomes than completely open ones, conversations get better when the options of discussion are limited to items of actual interest; whereas, when left alone, people will naturally gravitate to a safe—albeit boring—exchange.

So the hostess's challenge becomes finding interesting topics of conversation she can corral her guests into; topics that can be disagreed upon and yet are not so lofty that no one will have a background in it or anything informed to contribute. (And no matter what the French say, I refuse to allow politics at the table: otherwise-rational people get too angry, too quickly.) Maybe a refresher course in philosophy would do us all some good. I'll see what I can find.