Kyle Nel
Growing up in the 1980’s I was told over and over that I was unique, special, exceptional, and that I could be and do anything I set my mind to. My generation was the first to get trophies no matter how badly you did, and ribbons just for showing up. I was taught that I was not just a cog in a machine but an actor in the greatest show on earth.
During my academic development and through my career as a researcher, I have come to see that people aren’t as unique as we have hoped and believed we were. As Dan Airely’s book so poignantly puts it we are “Predictably Irrational”. The operative word there is predictable.
The “predictableness” of people was very clear to me in a story I recently came across about Transient Global Amnesia.
Transient Global Amnesia is a sudden, temporary episode of memory loss that can’t be attributed to a more common neurological condition, such as epilepsy or stroke.
During an episode of transient global amnesia, your recall of recent events simply vanishes, so you can’t remember where you are or how you got there. You may also draw a blank when asked to remember things that happened a day, a month or even a year ago. With transient global amnesia, you do remember who you are, and recognise the people you know well, but that doesn’t make your memory loss less disturbing.
Fortunately, transient global amnesia is rare, seemingly harmless and unlikely to happen again. Episodes are usually short-lived, and afterward your memory is fine. – MayoClinic.com
The thing that struck me from the videos in the story was how almost mechanical the people were in the their responses, their phrasing, their tone, and their emotion. The woman in the video below seems to repeat the same track over and over again. Notice the same repetition questions she asks about her birthday, what day it is, and saying “that’s creepy”. (Each loop is about 2 mins. long.)
The problem with research is that we generally ask much and observe little. In my previous post I talked about the dearth of System 1 tools. As a buyer of research I would love to see more tools and methods to get to the core of what truly influences us to believe and behave as we do. Bottom line—we are predictable, but we’re not predicting very well yet. I believe that large leaps in neuroscience and big data modeling will give us a truer understanding and insight than we can presently imagine.
What tools and methods do you use to uncover our predictableness?
Kyle Nel is Head of International and Multicultural Research for Lowe’s Home Improvement in USA
3 comments
Dear Kyle, l
Looking up TGA for the first time your blog is the first I opened. Maybe you can guide me with some advise since my son only 19 suffered an episode and we ended up at the emergency room, not knowing what was going on!!!!.
I would greatly appreciate your comments since he is far from 50 and with what certainty can he live a normal live without having this reocurr he seems to be in that low % of exeption to the rules. Will he be a ticking bomb for life?? Concerned Mom
Hi Kyle,
Great post! I guess you would appreciate knowing about another phenomenon well covered in neuropsychology and neurology, entitled “confabulation”. In this condition, we see that patients not only have deficits but also make up stories that seem to make sense and coherence to them.
Take for example one of my previous patients: he had suffered a stroke to his right parietal lobe and was paralysed in most of the left side of his body. Consequently he was in a wheelchair. Besides this, everything to his left side did not exist to him: his left visual fiel, the left side of his face, all a condition well known as unilateral neglect.
But here are some interesting observations. When asked to wave his right hand, he did so fine. But when asked to wave his left hand, nothing happened, of course, but after a few second he asked if he could take down his arm. Furthermore, he was unaware of his state and claimed that he could in fact walk and work. When confronted with the fact that he was in a wheelchair, he replied that that was only because he liked being pushed around by the cute nurses…
Thee instances of make believe in neuropsychology are well documented and quite frequent events for a practitioner. But the problem is that it does not stop there: it also happens to us in our everyday lives. Examples such as the illusion of control is just one of many, in which our internal narrator makes up a story that is incoherent with external facts.
Dear Kyle,
as a psychologist I have always known the importance of system 2, in the words of Kahneman.
The influence of emotion on memory, either explicit or implicit, are well known.
Now we have to take a step forward and look at the development of cognitive modeling, the study of the formalization of cognitive phenomena.
Tools such as act-r (http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/) ACT-R is a cognitive architecture: a theory for simulating and understanding human cognition. Researchers working on ACT-R strive to understand how people organize knowledge and produce intelligent behavior. As the research continues, ACT-R evolves ever closer into a system which can perform the full range of human cognitive tasks: capturing in great detail the way we perceive, think about, and act on the world.
Researchers have developed models related to decision making and the role of emotions.
At Demologics (the evolution of aicon.me) we provide market research tools that apply the latest discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive modeling without forgetting the rules and methods of social research.
There are interesting models which we are applying that explain the relationship between emotions and memory, we read emotions through a software for decoding facial expressions and process the data in relation to the models developed by the cognitive neurosciences with predictive interesting results.