The Power of Expertise
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Let’s say you’re working on your computer and it starts acting strangely. You get errors that don’t understand or it crashes for no apparent reason. If you aren’t sure what to do at first, where will you look for help? You might perform a web search for the symptoms to see if it’s a known problem and other people have solved it before you. You might run some diagnostic program or an antivirus scan because those are the tools you happen to have.
If you can’t fix it easily and you aren’t confident with computers you’ll probably start looking for help from another person at some point. Who? If it were me, I probably wouldn’t head down to the local college and find the top honors student or someone in the local Mensa chapter. I probably wouldn’t look for someone with great SAT scores or someone really good at Sudoku or even a master electrician. I’d look for someone with a lot of experience with computers and a proven track record fixing them. I’d look for an expert, and an expert specifically in that area, not just a smart person or an expert in a related area.
I stacked the deck a little bit with this question, because I picked a problem that is probably going to be technical in nature. That is, it seems like it will require some specialized knowledge to solve because it involves computers which are complicated devices that are a little mysterious to the average person and far less so for someone who has worked extensively with them.
It turns out, though, that my guess is pretty accurate for a wide range of fields, not just highly technical ones. Knowledge about the job turns out to be a far better predictor of performance than how high our IQ is or any other general disposition, not just in certain kinds of jobs but across a wide range from complex technical work to manual labor.[1] Just as I’d rather have a computer expert help me rather than my friend with an astronomical IQ, in most cases I’d prefer someone who has job experience rather than someone very smart but inexperienced. And I can point to research evidence that supports my preference.
Seeing Differently vs. Seeing More
Even in many areas where we would tend to expect pure reasoning ability to play a large role, it turns out that on average experience tends to win out consistently over any more general ability or measurement we have come up with.
The research that inspired the modern study of expertise began with the game of chess. Think about chess for just a moment. Chess is an activity with a small number of relatively simple rules. Yes chess has the reputation for being a difficult game. But that’s not because chess is hard to play. Nearly anyone can learn the game. It’s because we soon discover that differences in individual ability are immense.
The difference between someone who plays chess for fun who doesn’t study the game seriously, and an average tournament player, is like night and day. It doesn’t seem like much of a competition most of the time. The difference between an average tournament player and a strong one is just as large, which is why there is a rating system.
Ratings allow people of similar ability to play relatively evenly, or to estimate handicaps as they do in golf. The difference between a strong player and a master is similarly imposing as is that between the master and a grandmaster, and between the average grandmaster and a world champion.
How can a game with a handful of simple rules end up with people playing at such astronomical differences in ability? This was the question that intrigued early researchers trying to figure out how people solve problems. The obvious answer is that the stronger players must be seeing more on the board. But what are they seeing differently?
When most of us look at the chess board we see a collection of pieces in different places that are allowed to move in particular ways. We know what we have to do to win; we have to trap the king. We also know some ways to accomplish that. For example we can capture the opponent’s pieces so we have a bigger army, and we can harass the opponent’s pieces so that they are forced into a less defensible position, allowing us to attack the king. Everyone who plays the game, even for fun, knows these things. Still most of us pretty much have to guess at how to get from some arbitrary position to that result.
If I move here, I’ll attack this piece, but how do I know that my opponent doesn’t have some better move in response that is even stronger? More insidiously, is that move by my opponent actually setting up a surprise for me later? If so, what are my options? These kinds of considerations quickly lead to the very intuitive notion that being better at chess is really about calculation, about being able to imagine a lot of different moves, and what might happen if we made them, and keeping track of all that imagining. The better player must be seeing more moves on the board, figuring out what the options are more accurately, and then predicting the outcome.
This is indeed how early chess software played the game well. It looked at the possible moves, looked at the possible responses to each move, evaluated the resulting positions, and chose the move that seemed to give the best outcome based on what the opponent was able to do. The trouble was that trying to do this more than a couple of moves ahead turned out to be a very demanding calculation. More demanding than even the most powerful computers could handle. Researchers were curious as to whether seeing more moves in their mind is really what good players were doing.
Maybe the human brain is really that much more powerful at calculation than we thought. Or maybe the brain is doing something else entirely?
In a pioneering study of chess players in the 1940’s[2] a Dutch psychologist found the surprising answer. I say his work was pioneering not just because it was early but because it led to entire fields of research based upon it and validating his basic findings. The most compelling and surprising findings:
...Weaker players examined the same number of moves as stronger players, and equally thoroughly (!)
...Stronger players could recognize an actual game position far better than weaker players.
...Stronger players were just as bad as weaker players at recognizing an arbitrary configuration of pieces.
This may not seem so earthshattering at first, but think about the implications. Experts at chess consistently beat weaker players, but without examining more moves and without examining the outcomes of those moves more thoroughly. They aren’t “looking ahead more” and they aren’t “reasoning better” and they aren’t even remembering more in general. They do remember more about chess in a sense but not because they have a better memory. And looking ahead is important, but not by keeping track of moves. Their ability is a result of their mind being better trained to remember chess configurations in particular and to use that knowledge quickly and efficiently to evaluate moves.
So what are chess experts seeing that the rest of us aren’t? They aren’t seeing more moves ahead, they are seeing the board in terms of chess configurations instead of seeing it in terms of individual pieces. Their mind has been trained to see meaningful configurations of pieces instead of individual moves. They are not seeing more per se, they are seeing differently. They are seeing in terms of larger and more meaningful groupings. Experts with extended experience acquire a larger number of more complex patterns and use these new patterns to store knowledge about which actions should be taken in similar situations.[3]
The result is profound. We have a game where a few simple rules results in an incalculably large number of possible sequences of moves. But we become good at this game of many, many moves not by thinking about more moves but by thinking in terms of larger patterns: patterns of pieces rather than movements by individual pieces.
Through practice, chess masters have trained their mind to recognize the unique meaningful patterns that apply to their game. Further, the ability to learn to recognize new patterns (along with a huge capacity to remember them) seems to be something we all possess, not just chess masters. It is a fundamental principle of learning, at least learning to be a chess expert.
Even more interesting, we don’t recognize this as knowledge, in the sense of things we recognize that we know. I know that I know some things. I know that I know all sorts of facts like the capital of some of the U.S. states and the number of sides in a triangle and Newton’s formula relating force and mass and acceleration. These sorts of things are considered explicit knowledge.[4]
Chess masters can’t write down most of the patterns they know, both because those patterns are so vast and because they use them without thinking about them. The patterns they learn become part of their chess intuition in a manner of speaking. A common technical term for this is tacit knowledge.[5] We use tacit knowledge in our thinking without realizing that we are using it. This is why it took focused research to discover what was going on in the minds of chess masters.
Tacit knowledge becomes part of our perception. Chess masters see the board differently; for example they often immediately see positions as good or bad without having to do the kind of analysis that the rest of us would have to rely upon.[6]
Tacit knowledge is also used automatically in our thinking. When chess masters guess at the best move in a given position, their guess is informed by their vast database of tacit knowledge, so it is very different from the guess made by a weaker player. Experts make better guesses in their area of expertise. This is what I mean by their “chess intuition” above.
Trained Intuition and Better Guesses
You might be wondering at this point why I’ve spent so much time talking about chess experts. Or you may have guessed the answer. The most interesting conclusions from the research on chess masters are by no means limited to chess masters. Very similar or consistent results have been obtained across a staggeringly wide variety of fields from physical pursuits like wrestling and ballet to intellectual subjects like calculus and philosophy to artistic activities like painting and violin playing, to a wide variety of everyday jobs, to oddball activities like picking the winners at the horse races.[7] Even among scientists, where the role of abstract reasoning is particularly central and the subject matter particularly challenging, productivity doesn’t seem to be predicted on the whole by supposed general ability measures such as IQ.[8]
The chess findings are a particularly useful rhetorical device here because chess seems like it should be so dependent on reasoning and analysis. It turns out that experts analyze chess positions with the help of a vast mental database of chess configurations that apply without any recognition that they know them. The resulting perception and memory of the board just seems natural to them as a result of practice. Examined closely, in spite of its natural appearance for some people, the effortlessness of deep expertise seems to be an extreme kind of skill acquisition[9] far more than an expression of talent.
Even if you interpret all of these findings from different fields very conservatively, collectively they still tell us something of tremendous importance about how we become good at things. We modify the way we perceive the activity. In effect, we train our intuition about the activity.
In all of these activities, researchers have found that time spent in the activity lets us acquire a new way of perceiving patterns in that activity that let us transcend the limits of our working memory and sequential reasoning capacity. That’s why expertise consistently outperforms IQ or working memory capacity or other general measures as a predictor of performance in virtually every activity that has been studied so far. And expertise is not just specialized knowledge or skills; it is also more importantly an accumulation of organized tacit knowledge that lets us make better guesses.
[1] (Hunter, 1986)
[2] (de Groot, 1965)
[3] This has been the most common interpretation of the chess research findings amongst expertise researchers, based on the influential theory of Chase and Simon. (Chase & Simon, 1973), (Simon & Chase, 1973)
[4] “Explicit knowledge,” basically just means things we know that can be easily identified and written down. The descriptor declarative is sometimes used as well, meaning that we can declare it.
[5] In contrast to “explicit knowledge,” this is often referred to as “tacit knowledge,” meaning things we know but we can’t easily express, especially things that support action. Tacit knowledge is usually assumed to be useful for doing things more than for taking part in our conscious reasoning processes. The descriptor procedural is sometimes also used for tacit knowledge because we think of it as involving procedures for doing things rather than declarations about things. For this reason, a common rule of thumb is that tacit knowledge refers to “know how” whereas explicit knowledge refers to “know that” (i.e. I know that grass is green). The casual rule of thumb is troublesome because we don’t really know how we do those things we call procedural, the usage of the word “know” in “know how” is very different than the word “know” in “know that.”
[6] Following the pioneering chess research, research into other areas reinforced the same finding: expert performance depends heavily on a large accumulated memory of patterns that give us a different “intuitive perceptual orientation” to tasks. “Experts can ‘see’ what challenges and opportunities a particular situation without affords.” (and without doing any analysis) (Perkins, 1995, p. 82)
[7] One of the leading and best known figures in the study of expertise is K. Anders Ericsson, whose research encompasses a particularly wide range of fields. An excellent and accessible overview of work in diverse areas of expertise research is Ericsson’s edited collection: The Road to Excellence (Ericsson, 1996).
[8] (Taylor, 1975)
[9] (Proctor & Dutta, 1995), (VanLehn, 1996)
Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts
Monday, August 29, 2011
Sunday, June 05, 2011
Book Review: "The Hypnotist" by Jake Shannon
"The Hypnotist: Healer, Head-Hacker, & Headliner"
by Jake Shannon
https://www.createspace.com/3623853
Jake Shannon is a fascinating multi-talented man with a rich and partly enviable life experience. He has also lived through extraordinary pain and illness which were a big part of his initial inspiration for his deep study of hypnosis. As in the life story Dan Ariely, whose life with severe burns helped shape his fascination with psychology, Jake turned to the study of the mind for healing and pain relief. Hypnosis served Jake, as it has served many, as a way to alter the way they experience pain and discomfort.
If "hypnosis" simply referred to a straightforward technique for altering our perception, and that were the end of the story, then Jake's book would have been much more narrow in scope. The intentional structure of the human mind as we understand it pretty much ensures that any any discussion of perception also overlaps with a discussion of beliefs, behavior, communication, and social interaction. This network of concepts has far reaching implications in areas that fascinate all reflective people.
Topics as deep and diverse as the nature of "free will" and responsibility, the sources of extraordinary (and ordinary) human abilities, the role of social compliance in human life, and the malleability of perception all have some meaningful dependence on the ideas that underlie contemporary theories of hypnosis in terms of things like suggestion and expectancy. That interaction, and those dependences, are where the story gets really interesting, and Jake stands out to me in the broad way he has captured them.
Jake surveys the key concepts from a wide range of hypnosis theories, but he does not stop there. He also explores their use in daily life and their implications for social and political issues. When we extend our scientific theories to less directly empirical questions like the implications for social and political issues, of course we tend to incorporate our own distinctive leanings along the way.
Jake's distinctive leanings are strongly libertarian, and libertarian philosophy does not map neatly onto the usual political spectrum but has its own distinct principles. In his book "Justice," Michael Sandel argues that libertarian philosophy revolves crucially on the idea of self-ownership, and I think this is borne out in Jake's perspective on hypnosis. Jake is starting with the central notion that we own the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our role in it, and that we can and should take responsibility for guiding our own self-talk and for filtering the inevitable influences that impinge on it.
For Jake, the crux of hypnosis is entering into and redirecting the conversation we all have with ourselves in our own thoughts, thus shaping the inner stories we tell ourselves. This emphasis on the language aspects of hypnosis are particularly complementary with the communications theories of hypnosis, such as the ideas derived from the studies of Milton Erickson's hypnotherapeutic methods. Jake wants to tie the concept of hypnosis together with a host of other phenomena of importance to self-ownership, particularly social compliance phenomena, so the emphasis on communications and language seems to be strategic.
Hypnotic phenomena are all about changes in our perception as a result of "suggestion," and it is notoriously difficult to distinguish changes in perception from their related mutual influences on belief, behavior, attitude, and emotional associations. So Jake is working from very fertile ground in adopting the broad view of hypnosis as a class of psychological phenomena with interesting social implications. The question that arises about the role of "hypnosis" (in the broad sense Jake uses the term) in human life is whether the sorts of focused suggestions we associate with hypnotism really have a lasting and systematic effect. This is where the topic has historically gone astry in the public mind, with many people attributing much greater and more mysterious power to hypnosis than it deserves, and others attempting to debunk it out of existence as a distinctive class of phenomena of any importance.
Jake would seemingly focus on hypnotic suggestion as a situation where the someone's existing inner conversation is entered into and guided or redirected by the voice of the hypnotist. In the communications view, the explanation for what is going on in the situation (our self-talk about the situation) seems to be a driver for what will follow. We explain the situation to ourself in a particular way, and as a result we act in the situation as if that explanation were true. I think this primacy of the role of explanation in behavior in Jake's thesis is tied tightly to his committment to libertarian self-ownership. It provides a focus point where we can more clearly see how we can influence our own behavior, and how we influence each other. In psychological terms, it centers around *compliance* rather than the _experience_ we have from hypnosis.
Jake's summary illustrates this focus on compliance very clearly: "The hypnotist accesses the subject’s self-conversation through specific rhetorical techniques and subject similar-body language while leveraging the effects of expectation and authority in the subject’s mind in order to achieve compliance."
Explanation is just one albeit critical aspect of human mind, but it clearly isn't the primary driver of behavior in a wide range of situations. Jake refers to the work of John Bargh and others who have demonstrated this experimentally. Jake seems to give the non-language aspects of hypnotic phenomena a secondary role as influencers on our inner dialog. Importantly, he sees hypnosis as "leveraging the effects ..." of expectancy rather than expectancy being the central distinction of effective suggestion.
A less communications-oriented view might see the same situation as if our expectations were altered first, through various language and non-language means, and then our experience and behavior followed our expectations, followed at last by some explanation. In the expectancy view promoted by Irving Kirsch (for example), the explanation for why we responded to a suggestion is an artifact, not a driver of the behavior. We follow a suggestion, and then explain why we followed it. Experiments have sometimes deliberately imposed a conflict between an explicit suggestion and an implicit expectancy, and Kirsch interprets those as demonstrating that the expectancy (rather than the language per se) is what drives the resulting behavior. Jake sees automaticity as "the ability to do habitual tasks with little active thought." Kirsch, in his writings on automaticity, has gone much farther and described it as the default state for daily life, where active thought arises only under limited conditions. The non-communications views tend to focus more on the _experience_ of hypnosis and especially why **our experience of control** differs from situation to situation.
This is to some extent a chicken and egg problem, since we can find circumstances where behavior is more clearly driven by the (potentially) self-owned stories we tell ourselves, and also circumstances where our explanations for our own behavior are completely at odds with a more compelling cause. The stronger-self-ownership view of the mind will of course tend to emphasize the role that we play in guiding it. The stronger-automaticity view emphasizes the small, critical windows where active guidance actually takes place. These are not mutually exclusive ideas, something that I think Jake does manage to get across in his book. Again, though, there is that important difference in emphasis, and the different role of language in the human mind that this difference in emphasis represents.
It seems plausible that we can reconcile these different views by seeing the mind as having multiple different parallel systems, perhaps one speciallized for explanations, and others speciallized for motivating and guiding behavior as such. This is part of the role that Jake seems to attribute to bicameral theories of mind. As good promoters of natural science, we want to somehow try to map the features of the mind onto the brain, and bicameral theories take a big swing at that. I think the process of mapping mind onto brain is, while laudable, problematic in practice for various reasons perhaps better identified by philosophers than scientists. Also I don't personally step onto the train of thought that views the anatomical division of many of the brain's "higher" structures as also being a fundamental infrastructure of psychology, nor do I think it plays a particularly fundamental role in explanations of hypnosis, but I do think it is likely that it plays at least some secondary role. My difference with Jake here seems to be mostly one of emphasis.
I don't criticize Jake for taking on the language-focused view of hypnosis here, and I understand how compellingly it fits into the bigger picture of ownership for our own thinking and behavior. In various notable attempts to naturallize consciousness, various reflective thinkers such as Daniel C. Dennett have also described the meaning-making function of the mind largely in terms of stories we tell ourselves, and this does seem to imply a huge role for language as well.
The remaining question is the relationship between language and experience, and in the case of Jake's thesis in this book, especially the experience of *control* and its relationship to compliance. Understanding the phenomena of hypnosis (broadly defined), Jake empahsizes, can help us gain better control of our own mind, and better understand the influences that others are having. I would say that compliance and self-ownership of our mind is a larger topic than is hypnosis, but that Jake is right on target in pointing out the crucial importance of understanding how our mind is shaped and influenced, and how much we can learn about this from the phenomena of hypnosis.
I would actually go farther and say that I think the phenomena of hypnosis have potentially much more to tell us about the nature of the mind than just about the issues pertaining to compliance and influence. I wouldn't entirely define hypnosis in terms of compliance or language, I would define it more primarily in terms of expectancies, and in revisioning the workings of the mind in terms of expectancies I would expand Jake's thesis to include even broader implications of our shifting sense of control for law, medicine, philosophy, economics, and so on. Still, this is a great start and a very worthwhile research effort with both a depth and breadth of ideas you won't easily find elsewhere and which most people will find surprising, fascinating, often troubling, and most importantly, useful in understanding ourselves. I urge you to learn from Jake's experiences and reflections.
by Jake Shannon
https://www.createspace.com/3623853
Jake Shannon is a fascinating multi-talented man with a rich and partly enviable life experience. He has also lived through extraordinary pain and illness which were a big part of his initial inspiration for his deep study of hypnosis. As in the life story Dan Ariely, whose life with severe burns helped shape his fascination with psychology, Jake turned to the study of the mind for healing and pain relief. Hypnosis served Jake, as it has served many, as a way to alter the way they experience pain and discomfort.
If "hypnosis" simply referred to a straightforward technique for altering our perception, and that were the end of the story, then Jake's book would have been much more narrow in scope. The intentional structure of the human mind as we understand it pretty much ensures that any any discussion of perception also overlaps with a discussion of beliefs, behavior, communication, and social interaction. This network of concepts has far reaching implications in areas that fascinate all reflective people.
Topics as deep and diverse as the nature of "free will" and responsibility, the sources of extraordinary (and ordinary) human abilities, the role of social compliance in human life, and the malleability of perception all have some meaningful dependence on the ideas that underlie contemporary theories of hypnosis in terms of things like suggestion and expectancy. That interaction, and those dependences, are where the story gets really interesting, and Jake stands out to me in the broad way he has captured them.
Jake surveys the key concepts from a wide range of hypnosis theories, but he does not stop there. He also explores their use in daily life and their implications for social and political issues. When we extend our scientific theories to less directly empirical questions like the implications for social and political issues, of course we tend to incorporate our own distinctive leanings along the way.
Jake's distinctive leanings are strongly libertarian, and libertarian philosophy does not map neatly onto the usual political spectrum but has its own distinct principles. In his book "Justice," Michael Sandel argues that libertarian philosophy revolves crucially on the idea of self-ownership, and I think this is borne out in Jake's perspective on hypnosis. Jake is starting with the central notion that we own the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our role in it, and that we can and should take responsibility for guiding our own self-talk and for filtering the inevitable influences that impinge on it.
For Jake, the crux of hypnosis is entering into and redirecting the conversation we all have with ourselves in our own thoughts, thus shaping the inner stories we tell ourselves. This emphasis on the language aspects of hypnosis are particularly complementary with the communications theories of hypnosis, such as the ideas derived from the studies of Milton Erickson's hypnotherapeutic methods. Jake wants to tie the concept of hypnosis together with a host of other phenomena of importance to self-ownership, particularly social compliance phenomena, so the emphasis on communications and language seems to be strategic.
Hypnotic phenomena are all about changes in our perception as a result of "suggestion," and it is notoriously difficult to distinguish changes in perception from their related mutual influences on belief, behavior, attitude, and emotional associations. So Jake is working from very fertile ground in adopting the broad view of hypnosis as a class of psychological phenomena with interesting social implications. The question that arises about the role of "hypnosis" (in the broad sense Jake uses the term) in human life is whether the sorts of focused suggestions we associate with hypnotism really have a lasting and systematic effect. This is where the topic has historically gone astry in the public mind, with many people attributing much greater and more mysterious power to hypnosis than it deserves, and others attempting to debunk it out of existence as a distinctive class of phenomena of any importance.
Jake would seemingly focus on hypnotic suggestion as a situation where the someone's existing inner conversation is entered into and guided or redirected by the voice of the hypnotist. In the communications view, the explanation for what is going on in the situation (our self-talk about the situation) seems to be a driver for what will follow. We explain the situation to ourself in a particular way, and as a result we act in the situation as if that explanation were true. I think this primacy of the role of explanation in behavior in Jake's thesis is tied tightly to his committment to libertarian self-ownership. It provides a focus point where we can more clearly see how we can influence our own behavior, and how we influence each other. In psychological terms, it centers around *compliance* rather than the _experience_ we have from hypnosis.
Jake's summary illustrates this focus on compliance very clearly: "The hypnotist accesses the subject’s self-conversation through specific rhetorical techniques and subject similar-body language while leveraging the effects of expectation and authority in the subject’s mind in order to achieve compliance."
Explanation is just one albeit critical aspect of human mind, but it clearly isn't the primary driver of behavior in a wide range of situations. Jake refers to the work of John Bargh and others who have demonstrated this experimentally. Jake seems to give the non-language aspects of hypnotic phenomena a secondary role as influencers on our inner dialog. Importantly, he sees hypnosis as "leveraging the effects ..." of expectancy rather than expectancy being the central distinction of effective suggestion.
A less communications-oriented view might see the same situation as if our expectations were altered first, through various language and non-language means, and then our experience and behavior followed our expectations, followed at last by some explanation. In the expectancy view promoted by Irving Kirsch (for example), the explanation for why we responded to a suggestion is an artifact, not a driver of the behavior. We follow a suggestion, and then explain why we followed it. Experiments have sometimes deliberately imposed a conflict between an explicit suggestion and an implicit expectancy, and Kirsch interprets those as demonstrating that the expectancy (rather than the language per se) is what drives the resulting behavior. Jake sees automaticity as "the ability to do habitual tasks with little active thought." Kirsch, in his writings on automaticity, has gone much farther and described it as the default state for daily life, where active thought arises only under limited conditions. The non-communications views tend to focus more on the _experience_ of hypnosis and especially why **our experience of control** differs from situation to situation.
This is to some extent a chicken and egg problem, since we can find circumstances where behavior is more clearly driven by the (potentially) self-owned stories we tell ourselves, and also circumstances where our explanations for our own behavior are completely at odds with a more compelling cause. The stronger-self-ownership view of the mind will of course tend to emphasize the role that we play in guiding it. The stronger-automaticity view emphasizes the small, critical windows where active guidance actually takes place. These are not mutually exclusive ideas, something that I think Jake does manage to get across in his book. Again, though, there is that important difference in emphasis, and the different role of language in the human mind that this difference in emphasis represents.
It seems plausible that we can reconcile these different views by seeing the mind as having multiple different parallel systems, perhaps one speciallized for explanations, and others speciallized for motivating and guiding behavior as such. This is part of the role that Jake seems to attribute to bicameral theories of mind. As good promoters of natural science, we want to somehow try to map the features of the mind onto the brain, and bicameral theories take a big swing at that. I think the process of mapping mind onto brain is, while laudable, problematic in practice for various reasons perhaps better identified by philosophers than scientists. Also I don't personally step onto the train of thought that views the anatomical division of many of the brain's "higher" structures as also being a fundamental infrastructure of psychology, nor do I think it plays a particularly fundamental role in explanations of hypnosis, but I do think it is likely that it plays at least some secondary role. My difference with Jake here seems to be mostly one of emphasis.
I don't criticize Jake for taking on the language-focused view of hypnosis here, and I understand how compellingly it fits into the bigger picture of ownership for our own thinking and behavior. In various notable attempts to naturallize consciousness, various reflective thinkers such as Daniel C. Dennett have also described the meaning-making function of the mind largely in terms of stories we tell ourselves, and this does seem to imply a huge role for language as well.
The remaining question is the relationship between language and experience, and in the case of Jake's thesis in this book, especially the experience of *control* and its relationship to compliance. Understanding the phenomena of hypnosis (broadly defined), Jake empahsizes, can help us gain better control of our own mind, and better understand the influences that others are having. I would say that compliance and self-ownership of our mind is a larger topic than is hypnosis, but that Jake is right on target in pointing out the crucial importance of understanding how our mind is shaped and influenced, and how much we can learn about this from the phenomena of hypnosis.
I would actually go farther and say that I think the phenomena of hypnosis have potentially much more to tell us about the nature of the mind than just about the issues pertaining to compliance and influence. I wouldn't entirely define hypnosis in terms of compliance or language, I would define it more primarily in terms of expectancies, and in revisioning the workings of the mind in terms of expectancies I would expand Jake's thesis to include even broader implications of our shifting sense of control for law, medicine, philosophy, economics, and so on. Still, this is a great start and a very worthwhile research effort with both a depth and breadth of ideas you won't easily find elsewhere and which most people will find surprising, fascinating, often troubling, and most importantly, useful in understanding ourselves. I urge you to learn from Jake's experiences and reflections.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Subliminal or Marginal Perception - its current scientific status
Subliminal perception is a deeply ambiguous concept, which is perhaps appropriate if you think about it!
This is partly because the concept caught on originally as the result of a hoax. The now infamous "eat popcorn, drink coke study" was a planted story by marketing consultant James Vicary which became a wildly successful urban legend about selling products subliminally in movie theatres. Vicary's model wasn't entirely impossible in theory, but as he later admitted, he made up (or exaggerated?) his results to sell his consulting services and seemed honestly surprised that people got so excited about his planted news stories. He thought of it as a rather subtle effect and the concept caught fire beyond his wildest expectations.
It is also partly because of how much the concept has been abused to make the self-help industry more lucrative. It seems like less work and more exotic to listen to music rather than repeat affirmations or use suggestions, and people like less work and are attracted to the exotic.
Of course part of the ambiguity is because we are naturally fascinated and afraid of something that can potentially influence us without being aware of it. All sorts of paranoia (and also some justified fear!) results from this, especially since it is at least theoretically a real possibility. We don't trust many people who might have a technology like this, and for good reason.
Finally, it is partly because there are legitimately difficult technical issues to resolve within the perceptual research.
Some thoughts on the technical issues in subliminal perception.
First of all, it is important to understand that subliminal perception is real. Sometimes the term "marginal perception" is preferred because the concept of a single sensory boundary is not really accurate. In either case, these terms refer to the theory stating that perception can occur without conscious awareness and have a significant impact on later behaviour and thought.
Second, most of the research on this has been on visual perception, especially using rapidly flashed images and masking stimuli. Auditory subliminal perception is not as popular in experiments for two reasons. First, it is technically much more difficult to control what is going on in order to produce repeatable results, and second, because of those problems and the lack of interest in doing real auditory subliminal research, there have been no convincing repeatable demonstrations yet that there is an auditory subliminal perception effect of the same sort as in the visual experiments. That's why the claims for auditory self-help subliminal programs are not based on any legitimate research, because there really isn't much, and because practical tests have all turned up no evidence of effects beyond placebo. Enough on that. You can check the archives of any good Skeptic magazine to find the research by Phil Merikle and others that tested many of these products.
Third, getting to the legitimate phenomenon and the technical issues, the biggest ambiguity is in how we think of perception. Is it an all-or-none phenomenon or a gradual shift between different levels? This is an important question because it tells us whether effective stimuli can really be hidden from awareness or "unconscious," or whether they just fall into the shadows of our mind but we are dimly aware of them.
This isn't as easy a thing to test as it might seem. Different experimental situations produce clear but different results, and sorting out the overall picture is an interesting but challenging job for theorists. This article from Consciousness and Cognition suggests a perspective I tend to agree with, that if some experiments show gradual levels of awareness and others show all-or-none, then the underlying phenomenon probably consists of levels. It's easier to come up with a model of how levels can become all-or-none under some conditions that a model that creates gradual levels out of an all-or-none effect.
There is a recent experimental tool called the perceptual awareness scale that has been useful so far distinguishing whether something is actually perceived or not, and to what degree. Its implications for understanding subliminal perception are described in this article from Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
This is just a quick intro to a very deep and very tricky topic that has fascinated me for decades. The choice of the two articles which share an author was not a coincidence, I was inspired to write this after checking in on Thomas Ramsoy's work after I noticed that his wonderful Science and Consciousness Review site had been down for a while. I hope it comes back up in some form, it was once one of the best resources for research news on mind and brain topics.
Also posted at: http://www.scientificmindcontrol.com/forum/topics/subliminal-or-marginal
This is partly because the concept caught on originally as the result of a hoax. The now infamous "eat popcorn, drink coke study" was a planted story by marketing consultant James Vicary which became a wildly successful urban legend about selling products subliminally in movie theatres. Vicary's model wasn't entirely impossible in theory, but as he later admitted, he made up (or exaggerated?) his results to sell his consulting services and seemed honestly surprised that people got so excited about his planted news stories. He thought of it as a rather subtle effect and the concept caught fire beyond his wildest expectations.
It is also partly because of how much the concept has been abused to make the self-help industry more lucrative. It seems like less work and more exotic to listen to music rather than repeat affirmations or use suggestions, and people like less work and are attracted to the exotic.
Of course part of the ambiguity is because we are naturally fascinated and afraid of something that can potentially influence us without being aware of it. All sorts of paranoia (and also some justified fear!) results from this, especially since it is at least theoretically a real possibility. We don't trust many people who might have a technology like this, and for good reason.
Finally, it is partly because there are legitimately difficult technical issues to resolve within the perceptual research.
Some thoughts on the technical issues in subliminal perception.
First of all, it is important to understand that subliminal perception is real. Sometimes the term "marginal perception" is preferred because the concept of a single sensory boundary is not really accurate. In either case, these terms refer to the theory stating that perception can occur without conscious awareness and have a significant impact on later behaviour and thought.
Second, most of the research on this has been on visual perception, especially using rapidly flashed images and masking stimuli. Auditory subliminal perception is not as popular in experiments for two reasons. First, it is technically much more difficult to control what is going on in order to produce repeatable results, and second, because of those problems and the lack of interest in doing real auditory subliminal research, there have been no convincing repeatable demonstrations yet that there is an auditory subliminal perception effect of the same sort as in the visual experiments. That's why the claims for auditory self-help subliminal programs are not based on any legitimate research, because there really isn't much, and because practical tests have all turned up no evidence of effects beyond placebo. Enough on that. You can check the archives of any good Skeptic magazine to find the research by Phil Merikle and others that tested many of these products.
Third, getting to the legitimate phenomenon and the technical issues, the biggest ambiguity is in how we think of perception. Is it an all-or-none phenomenon or a gradual shift between different levels? This is an important question because it tells us whether effective stimuli can really be hidden from awareness or "unconscious," or whether they just fall into the shadows of our mind but we are dimly aware of them.
This isn't as easy a thing to test as it might seem. Different experimental situations produce clear but different results, and sorting out the overall picture is an interesting but challenging job for theorists. This article from Consciousness and Cognition suggests a perspective I tend to agree with, that if some experiments show gradual levels of awareness and others show all-or-none, then the underlying phenomenon probably consists of levels. It's easier to come up with a model of how levels can become all-or-none under some conditions that a model that creates gradual levels out of an all-or-none effect.
There is a recent experimental tool called the perceptual awareness scale that has been useful so far distinguishing whether something is actually perceived or not, and to what degree. Its implications for understanding subliminal perception are described in this article from Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
This is just a quick intro to a very deep and very tricky topic that has fascinated me for decades. The choice of the two articles which share an author was not a coincidence, I was inspired to write this after checking in on Thomas Ramsoy's work after I noticed that his wonderful Science and Consciousness Review site had been down for a while. I hope it comes back up in some form, it was once one of the best resources for research news on mind and brain topics.
Also posted at: http://www.scientificmindcontrol.com/forum/topics/subliminal-or-marginal
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