In today’s excerpt – even a Jeopardy uberchampion like Ken Jennings uses basic ‘associative’ reasoning techniques to answer many of the contest questions. Because only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second, all of us regularly rely on the “gist” of things in our reasoning: “A century ago, the psychologist William James divided human thought into two types, associative and true reasoning. For James, associative thinking worked from historical patterns and rules in the mind. True reasoning, which was necessary for unprecedented problems, demanded deeper analysis. This came to be known as the ‘dual process’ theory. Late in the twentieth century, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton redefined these cognitive processes as System 1 and System 2. The intuitive System 1 appeared to represent a primitive part of the mind, perhaps dating from before the cognitive leap undertaken by our tool-making Cro-Magnon ancestors forty thousand years ago, Its embedded rules, with their biases toward the familiar, steered people toward their most basic goals: survival and reproduction. System 2, which appeared to arrive later, involved conscious and deliberate analysis and was far slower. When it came to intelligence, all humans were more or less on an equal footing in the ancient and intuitive System 1. The rules were easy, and whether they made sense or not, everyone knew them. It was in the slower realm of reasoning, System 2, that intelligent people distinguished themselves from the crowd. “Still, great Jeopardy players like Ken Jennings cannot afford to ignore the signals coming from the caveman quarters of their minds. They need speed, and the easy answers pouring in through System 1 are often correct. But they have to know when to distrust this reflexive thought, when to pursue a longer and more analytical route. In [one] game, … this clue popped up in the Tricky Questions category: ‘Total number of each animal that Moses took on the ark with him during the great flood.’ Jennings lost the buzz to Matt Kleinmaier, a medical student from Chicago, who answered, ‘What is two?’ It was wrong. Jennings, aware that it was supposed to be tricky, noticed that it asked for ‘each animal’ instead of ‘each species.’ He buzzed for a second chance at the clue and answered, ‘What is one?’ That was wrong, too. The correct answer, which no one came up with, was ‘What is zero?’ “Jennings and Kleinmaier had fallen for a trick. Each had focused on the gist of the clue – the number of animals boarding the biblical ark – while ignoring one detail: The ark builder was Noah, not Moses. This clue actually came from a decades-old psychological experiment, one that has given a name – the Moses Illusion – to the careless thinking that most humans employ. “It’s easy enough to understand. The brain groups information into clusters. People tend to notice when one piece of information doesn’t jibe with its expected group. It’s an anomaly. But Noah and Moses cohabit numerous clusters. Thematically they are both in the Bible, visually, both wear beards. Phonetically, their names almost rhyme. A question about Ezekiel herding animals into the ark might not pass so smoothly. According to a study headed by Lynn Reder, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, the Moses Illusion illustrates a facet of human intelligence, one vital for jeopardy. “Most of what humans experience as perception is actually furnished by the memory. This is because the conscious brain can only process a trickle of data. Psychologists agree that only one to four ‘items,’ either thoughts or sensations, can be held in mind, immediately available to consciousness, at the same time. Some have tried to quantify these constraints. According to the work of Manfred Zimmerman of Germany’s Heidelberg University, only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second. Many psychologists object to these attempts to measure thoughts and perceptions as digital bits. But however they’re measured, the stark limits of the mind are clear. It’s as if each person’s senses generated enough data to run a 3D Omnimax movie with Dolby sound – only to funnel it through an antediluvian modem, one better suited to Morse code. So how do humans re-create the Omnimax experience? They focus on the items that appear most relevant and round them out with stored memories, what psychologists call ‘schemas.’ “In the Moses example, people concentrate on the question about animals. The biblical details, which appear to fit into their expected clusters, are ignored. It’s only when a wrong name intrudes from outside the expected orbit that alarms go off. In one experiment at Carnegie Mellon, when researchers substituted a former U.S. president for Moses, people noticed right away. Nixon had nothing to do with the ark, they said. Author: Stephen Baker Title: Final Jeopardy Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Date: Copyright 2011 by Stephen Baker Pages: 45-47

Because of our slow processor (brain) aka 50 bits per second, many/most of our perceptions are furnished by our memories that ‘fill in the gaps’ in our brain’s ability to process information coming in to it.  Our sensory system aka 11 million bits per second, on the other hand, literally floods our system 24/7.  As a coach, this information is fascinating as well as useful to confirm the power (and weaknesses) of our perceptions and to reaffirm the power of coaching methods that work with our senses, memories, and perceptions.

We have always been enamored by the really smart people that are able to remember so many things, but the truth is that we ALL have roughly the same short term memory capacity. It is how we use our short term memory that makes the difference.

Studies show that those who have what appears to be an incredible memory actually use tricks. They use what they know (long term memories) to turbo boost their short term memories. All of us if asked to remember a list of numbers are limited to about a list of 10 numbers. But chunking the numbers together, an average person can learn to remember a list of up to and beyond 80 numbers! People with this skill will use their long term memory. For example, a runner will remember the sequence of numbers: 5, 3, 2, 8 as a timed run of 53 minutes 28 seconds. A school teacher will memorize all her students names rapidly if she learns to associate each name with a different room in their house…etc.

So don’t sell yourself short, don’t think that you can’t memorize, don’t worry about not having the capacity to remember all those things for the next test….instead KNOW that you will be able to remember all those important things by being creative and using your long term memory to turbo boost your short term memory via neumonics, etc.

I love Thanksgiving not for the food, but it provides me with a reminder to thank and be thankful.

The excerpt below is a great reminder that our perspective can significantly change our understanding of the truth of the story.  I was raised on the North American Indian being primitive when in reality, we, the Northern European settlers, were the primitive ones in many ways.

‘In today’s excerpt – Thanksgiving. The meeting in 1621 between “Squanto,” other Native Americans and the Pilgrims, as seen from the perspective of those Native Americans:

“On March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. At the head of the party was an uneasy triumvirate: Massasoit, the sachem (political-military leader) of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of southeastern Massachusetts; Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north; and Tisquantum [‘Squanto’], a distrusted captive whom Massasoit had reluctantly brought along as an interpreter.

“Massasoit was an adroit politician but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated [from disease] – indeed the foreigners ahead now occupied one of the empty sites. It was all he could do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies – the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon Massasoit feared they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness and overrun them.

“Desperate threats require desperate countermeasures. In a gamble Massasoit intended to abandon, even reverse, a long-standing policy. Europeans had been visiting New England for at least a century. Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods – copper kettles, glittering colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets – unlike anything else in New England. Moreover they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of the sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for customers’ used socks. …

“Over time the Wampanoag, like other native societies in coastal New England, had learned how to manage the European presence. They encouraged the exchange of goods, but would only allow their visitors to stay ashore for brief, carefully controlled excursions. … Now Massasoit was visiting a group of British with the intent of changing the rules. He would permit the newcomers to stay for an unlimited time – provided they formally allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.

“Tisquantum the interpreter had shown up alone at Massasoit’s home a year and a half before. He spoke fluent English because he had lived for several years in Britain. But Massasoit didn’t trust him. … And he refused to use him to negotiate with the colonists until he had another independent means of communication with them. … Their meeting was a critical moment in American history. The foreigners called their colony Plymouth; they themselves were the famous Pilgrims. As schoolchildren learn, at that meeting the Pilgrims obtained the services of Tisquantum – usually known as ‘Squanto.’

“[In our high school texts the story is told that] ‘a friendly Indian named Squanto helped the colonists. He showed them how to plant corn and how to live on the edge of the wilderness. A soldier Captain Miles Standish taught the Pilgrims how to defend themselves against unfriendly Indians.’ The story isn’t wrong so far as it goes. But the impression it gives is entirely misleading.”

Author: Charles C. Mann
Title: 1491
Publisher: Vintage
Date: Copyright 2005, 2006 by Charles C. Mann
Pages: 34-36