Tag Archives: decision making

Eye and Body Movement for Problem Solving?

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Directing a person's eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems.

Directing a person’s eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems.

A new study appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, is the first to show that a person’s ability to solve a problem can be influenced by how he or she moves.

“Our manipulation [of the body] is changing the way people think,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who along with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas, conducted the study. “In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are – unbeknownst to them - directing the way they think about the problem.”

“The results are interesting both because body motion can affect higher order thought, the complex thinking needed to solve complicated problems, and because this effect occurs even when someone else is directing the movements of the person trying to solve the problem,” Lleras said.

According to Lleras, this type of consciousness, “embodied cognition,” describes the link between body and mind in a new and insightful way.

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Don’t Stop?

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It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

Thinking, that is! A study out of Case Western Reserve University shows that it takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it. No wonder it’s so hard to stop smoking or stop berating yourself or stop that tune that got stuck in your head. It just takes too much energy!

Some years ago, I underwent a year of intensive thought transformation in which a group of us focused attention on catching each other or sometimes even catch ourselves saying the “wrong” things – things that detracted us from our goals. “Try” was on the taboo list of words for obvious reasons – it holds a built-in failure. So, each time we’d hear one of us say the word, “try”, we’d say, “Cancel that!” The process seemed horribly difficult as we were catching each other often over that year. In the end, however, the goal was attained and my speech cleared up so much.

I wonder if we were unintentionally making it harder on ourselves by canceling (stopping) our thoughts instead of reframing them – sort of like nudging an asteroid instead of hitting it head-on.

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Choice and Accountability – Maybe NOT?

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Brain regions (shown in green) from which the outcome of a participant’s decision can be predicted before it is made.

Brain regions (shown in green) from which the outcome of a participant’s decision can be predicted before it is made. (Illustration from original press release)

From the Max Planck Institute press release:

Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. “Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings.” (Nature Neuroscience, April 13th 2008)

Did I read that correctly? My brain is making a decision a full 7 seconds before I’m aware of the decision? Wait a minute!! What about choice and accountability? That is, how can the universe (“God”) hold me accountable for a choice when I didn’t consciously make it? What the hey!!!??!!!

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Amplified Rewards Lead to Success

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If your end result imagery is vivid and compelling enough, you'll achieve it.

If your end result imagery is vivid and compelling enough, you’ll achieve it.

Want to succeed at something? Will it take some time? Then you need vivid, compelling outcome rewards!

Research out of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a part of the brain implicated in reward-based decision making, together with the hippocampus took part in predicting the degree to which forward thinking impacted current decision making. Further, the researchers discovered that the more vivid and compelling the end result imagery, the stronger the degree of impact on short-term distractions. In other words, the more vivid and compelling the end result imagery, the more likely the subjects of the research were to modify their behavior toward achieving the end result and declining short-term distracting rewards.

Let’s work with an example. Suppose you want to lose a few pounds but are faced with the temptation to eat something you know you shouldn’t. The short-term reward is obvious while the long-term reward fades away into what feels like the very distant future – “out of sight – out of mind”.

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