Imagine a major-league baseball game. Your favorite batter steps up to the plate. The pitcher rears back and throws. From the moment the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand to the moment it crosses the plate, approximately 500 milliseconds (ms) will elapse. That’s half a second. In that time, the batter must evaluate the pitch headed his way, adjust his stance (150ms), and swing the bat (200ms). He is left with 150ms—half the time it takes to blink his eyes—to determine what kind of pitch it is and to decide whether and how he should swing, or indeed if he should fling his body out of the way of a wild pitch.
Author: Brain Admin
Multi-word Expressions Made Easy or Difficult: What L1 and L2 Processing Tells Us
When I wrote an article for the “Emotion” issue of the Think Tank in 2018, I learned that emotions are predictions our brain makes, not reactions to some stimuli from the outside world (Barrett, 2017). Although this claim sounded somewhat surprising and went against common beliefs about how our minds work, neuroscientific evidence has accumulated that our brain is, in fact, a prediction-making machine. The brain constantly creates predictions about our senses, cognition, and behaviors, let alone our emotions, and creating predictions is indeed its main function. Simply put, our brain is using statistics in order to make better and more fine-tuned future predictions, and when the predictions are found to be wrong, the brain adjusts and renews the model. This is indeed learning.
Predictive Processing: The Grand Unifying Theory of the Brain
The brain does so many amazing things. So, deciding which is the most amazing is not easy. Is it memory, in which even its faults are part of the design (see my piece in Think Tank on Forgetting), or emotion, the mechanism that steers us through life (see Think Tank on Emotion), or maybe even language, the tool that allowed our species to exploit the social environment (see Pagel’s TED Talk)? Any of these choices would be good, but I am going to select something else: the miraculous way the brain changes raw sensory signals into Picassos, parties, and poems.
Eggs to Dopamine: The Shock of the New
New city. New country. Time to explore. This is one of the best feelings I know: arriving in a place I’ve never been to before, checking into my accommodation, and heading out to wander the streets and see what I can see. The fewer preconceptions the better. Let the new place speak to me, teach me, surprise me.
The plane arrived in Manila just after lunch time. The taxi didn’t take long to reach my hotel. Shower, change of clothes, camera in my pocket. Past the hotel security check and out onto the streets. What did this new city have in store for me? Sights. Sounds. Traffic rules. All worth leaving home for. A Japanese department store, a soccer game in the middle of the street, Christmas decorations in September, and purple eggs. Purple eggs? That made me pause. I knew the white kind and the brown kind (my wife insists they taste different) but what was with the purple ones? What mysteries did this new experience hold?
The Think Tank We Always Wanted To Do
This is the issue we have been wanting to do for years. Predictive processing (also called “predictive coding”) is one of the most interesting perspectives on what the brain does, and it veers heavily away from traditional views. You only get an inkling of that if you watch the Lite intro video choice, but if that short Part 1 catches your fancy, continue on with the next two or three in Jones’ set. Then, if your level of interest keeps rising and you feel brain-strong, go on to the master himself, Andy Clark, in the Deep intro video choice. As you will discover, Andy and his colleague, Karl Friston, are not the easiest people to understand, and that may be why the theory is not more widely known. I don’t think I would have looked into it had I not had my curiosity piqued years before by a short statement from a psychologist: “Our brains are always predicting.”
Call for Contributions: Ideas & Articles
Become a Think Tank star! Here are some of the future issue topics we are thinking about. Would you, or anyone you know, like to write about any of these? Or is there another topic you’d like to recommend? Do you have any suggestions for lead-in, or just plain interesting, videos? How about writing a book review? Or sending us a story about your experiences? Contact us.
The Anxious Elephant in the Room
One of the most painful experiences for us as teachers is seeing students crippled by language anxiety. Halfway through the 2018 academic year, one of my intermediate freshman communication classes was struggling to make progress, and there were signs that anxiety was taking a heavier than usual toll on the students.
We all have students who go red-faced, visibly tremble, or break out in a sweat when they communicate in a second language. When things get bad, weekly failures can reinforce learned helplessness that can be difficult to change. In my case, attempts to reduce apprehension, such as creating a warm and accepting atmosphere and being conscious of error correction methods, were not enough. Structured group and pair activities that other classes had taken to with relative ease were often met with unenthusiastic stares and I was afraid that attendance would begin to suffer.
Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect
Social: Why our Brains are Wired to Connect is a book about how our brain and nervous system shape cognition and behavior. The book consists of twelve chapters with three main sections that cover three critical evolutionary brain adaptations that motivate us toward social connection and to form unified social groups and organizations. These adaptations are: the overlap between social and physical pain systems in the brain (connection); how we are constantly paying attention to what other people think (mindreading); and how we adapt to and are influenced by our environments and are motivated to help other people more than ourselves (harmonizing). The last three chapters of the book provide an additional section that takes the scientific discussion and roots it in practical applications for work and education.
Tapping into the Social Brain to Tackle Classroom Incivility: Emotional and Social Intelligence
Tapping into the Social Brain to Tackle Classroom Incivility: Emotional and Social Intelligence By: Harumi Kimura Among the Best of 2020 Readers chose this article as one of the five
The Social Brain in Practice: 36 Questions for Making Friends
Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist and researcher at State University of New York–Stony Brook, with colleagues, published an article about a series of 36 questions that he says can increase people’s emotional connection (Aron et al., 1997). The questions are in three parts of twelve questions each. At each level, there is a deepening of the content of the questions. For example, at the first level, there are items like, “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” and “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” Not that the questions are superficial small talk. In set one, an item asks, “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?” But by the time in interlocutors get to set three, they are talking about things like, “Complete this sentence: ‘I wish I had someone with whom I could share…’” and “When did you last cry in front of another person?” Aron and colleagues describe the deepening of topics as “escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure, and intimacy-associated behaviors” (p. 364).