Understanding Psychology and Cognition

[stargroup100]

From as early as I could possibly remember to about a year or two ago, I've always been a very rational person, frequently seeking logical and rational justifications for my ideas, and evaluating the world around me from a rational point of view. I've always held mathematics and sciences in high regard, and considered scientific and logical truth one of the most important aspects of our reality.

Then around a year or two ago, this completely changed, and my life was basically flipped upside-down. While I did pay attention to what goes on in other people's minds ever since I was a kid, I never really considered the very major implications it had on certain philosophies that I've held onto. I learned that the world is not idealistic in any way, nor will it ever be (which seems obvious but I don't think people really understand the extent of this statement). I learned that everything that we interact with in this universe should be dealt with in moderation. I learned that there is a massive range of human psychologies, from the idiots to the geniuses, from the rational to the artistic, from the conventional to the strange, from the humble to the shocking, and I needed to consider all of these.

This means that while I consider myself rational and logical, not all people do, and we need to create a society that can give the people who are not as rational and logical as me the things they want, that they relate to, that they understand and accept. This was difficult for me to take in at first, because it meant that things I used to reject without a second thought (such as most religious practices, creationism, homeopathy, pseudosciences, etc), I needed to give them a proper chance to credit them where credit is due.

I wish to go into teaching and education reform in the future, and this also means that I need to seriously evaluate these fundamental ideas in order to truly understand my potential future students and be the best teacher I can be. It's easy for me to teach the smart kids, the rational minded ones, because we think alike. It's not easy to do the same for the others. Interestingly enough, this means that paradoxically, in many ways it's actually harder to understand how the less intelligent people think.


So this really isn't a thread strictly about the field of psychology, but in addition includes general philosophies about life, society, people, etc. There are a couple of talking points and ideas I'd like to introduce, but feel free to discuss whatever you like:

- Is the idea that there exists justification for non-rational concepts to be accepted by society difficult for you to accept? For example, I would argue that while homeopathy is pretty much almost universally shown to be falsified through empirical tests, it still plays an important role in societies that have already accepted it (such as the UK). It gives a certain placebo medication widespread knowledge and exposure, and therefore becomes easier for the public to accept, increasing the effectiveness of the placebo effect. Rather than try to get rid of it entirely, we should simply monitor its use in medical professions to prevent clear abuse cases (such as trying to treat AIDS or cancer). If you cannot accept something like this, why not?

- I believe that there is a certain limit to which the mental processes of the brain can be broken down and analyzed. Once you start reaching a particular level, it becomes more and more difficult to separate individual mechanisms because of how complex the organ is, the number of processes occurring at the same time (such as sensation and learning), and the "fuzzy logic" the brain uses. But the question now is where can we start drawing this line? If we were to analyze the mental processes of a less intelligent person who does not necessarily think rationally, to what degree can we understand his/her thinking process? It is plausible that we can come up with experiments and/or demonstrations that give positive empirical results in showing that understanding these kinds of people is possible, but to what degree can they be explained? What possible ways can we categorize cognition and different ways of thinking? What possible methods can we use to analyze a person's thinking process and classify them?

[dAnceguy117]

sorry for the non-CT response here, I'll try to fully chime in soon

Originally Posted by stargroup100

I wish to go into teaching and education reform in the future, and this also means that I need to seriously evaluate these fundamental ideas in order to truly understand my potential future students and be the best teacher I can be. It's easy for me to teach the smart kids, the rational minded ones, because we think alike. It's not easy to do the same for the others. Interestingly enough, this means that paradoxically, in many ways it's actually harder to understand how the less intelligent people think.

if you're mentally separating "smart and rational kids" from "the others," then I think you're starting off on the wrong foot.

[stargroup100]

Originally Posted by dAnceguy117

if you're mentally separating "smart and rational kids" from "the others," then I think you're starting off on the wrong foot.

What do you mean?

All I'm saying is that people learn differently because they think differently. Clearly not all people understand basic logic principles, so you have to figure out how to reach them. It's a meta problem. Is it wrong to think that different kinds of people should be taught differently?

And I'm not separating two groups of people as much as separating one thinking process from the others. Even most smart kids can have logic blocks, where there are concepts that are difficult for them to understand or grasp.

[Reincarnate]

One of my favorite videos on YT about a subject that doesn't get discussed too much

[awein999]

I think this all comes down to how little we understand about the brain. There is so much untapped that we don't understand yet about it that it's overwhelming. So of course we don't know any of the questions about what makes people think differently from other people. It's definitely possible to find the end game answers with enough time, funding, effort but probably not make significant progress for at least another couple decades. One interesting point is that depending on how you are raised you could be trained to think dramatically differently than someone who was raised in a different social setting. At the same time people are born with their limitations and intrinsic thinking traits. So it's interesting to ponder where the two begin and end.

[dAnceguy117]

Originally Posted by stargroup100

What do you mean?

All I'm saying is that people learn differently because they think differently. Clearly not all people understand basic logic principles, so you have to figure out how to reach them. It's a meta problem. Is it wrong to think that different kinds of people should be taught differently?

no, I completely agree with you there.

Originally Posted by stargroup100

And I'm not separating two groups of people as much as separating one thinking process from the others. Even most smart kids can have logic blocks, where there are concepts that are difficult for them to understand or grasp.

I just get the impression that you're describing one set of people as "smart" who think and learn a certain way. you wouldn't be doing the other kids any favors by thinking of them as unintelligent or irrational. I think you're right; it's up to you to reach all of your students, and no two students will be the same. you should be sure not to make assumptions about a student's potential.

[Spenner]

GAH I accidentally lost everything I just wrote, and I had a lot to say. I'll condense what I'd started before.

I don't think we can really get an accurate measure of the psychological structure of people just yet because in effect we'll be reading minds, and we just don't have the means yet. It's not even unrealistic; if we were to find a crucial link between the macro and micro processes of the brain, we can develop a much greater understanding of the cognition of people.

I think a problem is that, despite traits and patterns, everything is in constant change. Sometimes things develop to the same tangents that are relateable (depressions and anxieties for example) but the steps that preceeded those behaviours are, in detailed form, totally independent. In a way it's no different to trying to construct the geometry of the entirety of a pool of water based on one ripple. In the same regard that it IS possible to do that, under controlled conditions, we can certainly come up with some understanding of behaviours in a relateable sense. We test control and experiment groups to see if we can correlate what causes the difference. If we learn the behaviour of a wave in it's entirety, then given that the point in the pool is known, and the lifespan of the wave thus far, we can figure a lot of things out.

Figuring out those kinds of variables in a mind is really hard. The simultaneity of actions that are supporting one single frame in time is so great, for a mind or for anything for that matter. We've deduced a lot of things about the biology of the world by stopping all of the action, and analyzing things in one moment.

This is where I separate from a lot of the smarter, more logical people. A lot of people have the capacity to keep something in their minds and to break it down until it is at it's most abstract, and sometimes most understandable details. In my opinion, memory has a HUGE effect on how a person's perceptions are formed. A lot of people simply cannot juggle around so many variables at a time in order to allow the brain to draw correlations and to map out logical structures. If we all are to try to commit to learning in the way we are traditionally taught in school, we are quickly going to see a contrast between the different types of learners. A lot of the ones who don't excel probably aren't learning in the most optimal way for them.

I'm by far a visual learner, and it seems that I can only think in terms of visual information. Any time that I try to simplify things into abstract terms, like with mathematics, my visual thinking distracts the whole process. I can't do mental math well at all, and I am typically just working off pattern recognition with some sort of visual metaphor to help me arrange things in my head. But even still, relating back to memory, I can't keep a picture still enough in my mind for long enough to be able to solidify an arrangement, or to do the math. A lot of times I'll see two pictures attempting to squeeze against one another, and it just doesn't add up (!).

A lot of what I've learned about people comes from trying to relate their output to the possible input. Someone says something expressive; what provoked it? What perceptions build into someone's recognition of the beauty of a sunset? I'm not even looking for rational answers when I do try to read people in this way, because we are not rational a lot of the time when it comes to emotions. We associate with things whether we are logical in the correlations or not. Everyone has some sort of association of something that makes them feel emotionally pleased that for others it would seem off putting.

The placebo effect that you mention is part of this association process, and it's pretty obvious why. There's a general consensus or at least a perceived confidence that something works, so regardless of it's effectiveness, we have a positive response. In a way almost everything has some sort of placebo effect; imo, you can break pretty much anything down to an effect that is similar to a placebo. We think we like a lot of things, regardless of it's objective value of enjoyment, and that's enough to spark radical alterations in brain chemistry that simply turns into general behaviour. Homeopathy and whatnot is an exploitation of that placebo business though, as many businesses would try to do: if you can be perceived as something worth spending money on then that's obviously optimal. And it's easy to lie to make something appear more than it is.

I really don't consider myself smart, because I don't have the capacity to relate a lot of things together all at once. IQ tests have a lot of dependence on those sorts of tasks, although it's not just reliant on them.

If you couldn't tell, my attention span is pretty terrible, as I did hope I would be condensing the previous post that I'd deleted. I don't think that makes me a more clueless person than the next, I just think there are different things for me to digest than for others. Go with what works best for your brain if you seriously feel the limitations and futility of working with certain learning conditions. I think the most important thing to learn first before learning everyone else, is learning yourself (holy cliche phrase batman). Because you yourself are a constant example of the result of the complexity that we're trying to understand. There will always be ways that by reflecting on how you yourself work, you can understand behaviour in general a bit better.

[stargroup100]

Just wanted to add a quick comment that I'm glad to see people are replying and sharing. As soon as I find the time I'll read everything, and I'm very excited to watch the video Rubix linked, looks exactly like what I'm interested in.

[Hakulyte]

Originally Posted by stargroup100

What possible methods can we use to analyze a person's thinking process

People in general develop a toolset of thinking habits to solve problems given to them during life experiences. If I had to test out thinking processes, I would create an impossible scenario or a nearly impossible task to force the person to think at the solution. It could even just be a conflict, it doesn't even need to be mathematical.

After that, you note in which order/priority what thinking process would have been used. You can now look at what has not been used or poorly used. From this point, you can either fill that space by helping the other person develop new habits or you can make them improve what they're already good at.

Assuming I am faced by a difficult problem/situation, I rely heavily on pattern recognition(does it look familiar or a part of it?). If I don't find anything, I move to counter-logic and unorthodox thinking to try to spot what looks abnormal/ambiguity(am I facing an exception or a logical trap?). If the situation looks reasonably difficult, but not impossible, I try the "normal approach" which is to take the problem step by step and isolate it until it's simplified to a point where everything seems obvious(mathematical approach?).If that still fails, I try to visualize scenarios and possible alternatives, but at this point, I'm usually lost.

1. Pattern Recognition. (very good)
2. Sensing(Intuition?) (good)
3. Rational Thinking (average)
4. Conceptualizing/Visualisation (very poor)

I don't think people who are "less intelligent" are really that off from everyone else. They just have a different toolset which is less useful for what's happening in X situation, but possibly better in another situation.

Originally Posted by stargroup100

..and classify them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thought_processes

[stargroup100]

Originally Posted by awein999

It's definitely possible to find the end game answers with enough time, funding, effort but probably not make significant progress for at least another couple decades. One interesting point is that depending on how you are raised you could be trained to think dramatically differently than someone who was raised in a different social setting. At the same time people are born with their limitations and intrinsic thinking traits. So it's interesting to ponder where the two begin and end.

What do you mean by "end game answers" and why do you think we can even find them? There are lots of limitations to what science can accomplish and discover, and even pure mathematics has unsolvable problems.

Once you go into the quantum level, things begin to get "hazy". Particles can have multiple different states at the same time, or their particular properties cannot be determined (uncertainty principle). And yet, no matter how much we study quantum mechanics, it won't give us any insight into theories of biology, economics, or even other fields of physics like astronomy. Higher-level sciences can't be reduced to physics, and higher-level systems cannot be reduced to lower-level ones. Just because we can analyze the neurons and describe very high level behavior patterns does not necessarily mean there are intermediate systems that can be described and analyzed.

Originally Posted by Spenner

I don't think we can really get an accurate measure of the psychological structure of people just yet because in effect we'll be reading minds, and we just don't have the means yet. It's not even unrealistic; if we were to find a crucial link between the macro and micro processes of the brain, we can develop a much greater understanding of the cognition of people.

Again, I don't think it is necessarily realistic, and I don't believe it is. Reading someone's mind means being able to interpret and translate the experiences a person has. Not only do I think this is in itself is not possible, but even if it could be done, there is no guarantee that we would be able to have the capacity to understand someone's sensory experiences.

Originally Posted by Spenner

The placebo effect that you mention is part of this association process, and it's pretty obvious why. There's a general consensus or at least a perceived confidence that something works, so regardless of it's effectiveness, we have a positive response. In a way almost everything has some sort of placebo effect; imo, you can break pretty much anything down to an effect that is similar to a placebo. We think we like a lot of things, regardless of it's objective value of enjoyment, and that's enough to spark radical alterations in brain chemistry that simply turns into general behaviour. Homeopathy and whatnot is an exploitation of that placebo business though, as many businesses would try to do: if you can be perceived as something worth spending money on then that's obviously optimal. And it's easy to lie to make something appear more than it is.

Are you saying that everyone has an opinion and subjective experience about everything in this world? If so, then I agree with you, but I wouldn't call it a form of placebo. Placebo refers to something that would normally not work, but works due to psychological reasons. So in a sense, while this could be a sort of deception, by definition it still produces results, and so I think that's supposed to be the justification for things such as homeopathy. If are you say that it is an exploitation, how is it exploiting? I argue that it should be controlled in such a way that it should only handle things that are potentially curable with placebo, but should not be used where it is not appropriate. Is this still exploitation?

Originally Posted by Hakulyte

I don't think people who are "less intelligent" are really that off from everyone else. They just have a different toolset which is less useful for what's happening in X situation, but possibly better in another situation.

Very interesting proposition. I think I'm gonna investigate this more myself, sounds promising.

[awein999]

Humanity has made extraordinarily fast progress generally in recent history and there is no reason for that to slow, only expedite. We know very little about the quantum level either so making a judgement that we can never fully understand the brain based on our limited observations at the quantum level is simply a negative stance and probably a silly thing to ponder. It's a good idea to think you can get to "end game answers" because we don't know if we can or not, there is no reason it can't be knowable, or rather it's more productive to focus on the positives of trying to figure out as much as we can rather than labeling something as impossible to completely understand. Anything is knowable if you are smart enough and if it's there to be figured out. What we do or don't discover can't really be predicted but I'd bet we'd be surprised today by what we know in a couple decades because that is what has been happening the last couple centuries, especially this last 70 years.

I don't think science has any limitations, people do, but people can get smarter every day.

[stargroup100]

Originally Posted by awein999

We know very little about the quantum level either so making a judgement that we can never fully understand the brain based on our limited observations at the quantum level is simply a negative stance and probably a silly thing to ponder. It's a good idea to think you can get to "end game answers" because we don't know if we can or not, there is no reason it can't be knowable, or rather it's more productive to focus on the positives of trying to figure out as much as we can rather than labeling something as impossible to completely understand.

I'm not necessarily saying we shouldn't investigate it. I'm saying that we could be trying to understand something that can't be understood.

Originally Posted by awein999

Anything is knowable if you are smart enough and if it's there to be figured out. What we do or don't discover can't really be predicted but I'd bet we'd be surprised today by what we know in a couple decades because that is what has been happening the last couple centuries, especially this last 70 years.

That doesn't mean everything can be figured out. There are lots of pure mathematical problems that have no solution (halting problem) or cannot be proven true or false (generalized continuum hypothesis). Quantum mechanics (uncertainty principle) states that you cannot know the position and momentum simultaneously. How do you know some sort of limiting factor like this won't show up in the field of psychology?

And we actually can predict what we will know in a couple of decades. Most scientific advancements are almost methodical, and not only is the rate of growth predictable, but generally speaking, the level of complexity of new advancements can be predicted as well. A couple of potential breakthrough discoveries might be unpredictable, but these are far and few in between, and there is no guarantee that one of them will be related to the subject matter we're discussing.

Originally Posted by awein999

I don't think science has any limitations, people do, but people can get smarter every day.

Believing that science has no limitations is very naive. Once you understand more you'll realize that these limitations on what we can observe is simply part of the nature of reality.

[Spenner]

Originally Posted by stargroup100

Again, I don't think it is necessarily realistic, and I don't believe it is. Reading someone's mind means being able to interpret and translate the experiences a person has. Not only do I think this is in itself is not possible, but even if it could be done, there is no guarantee that we would be able to have the capacity to understand someone's sensory experiences.

To get a 100% precisely detailed map, I think is impossible due to the instability of measurements that could be done; however, I think we could get a portion of correlation that would give us insight into minds more than just the abstract stuff (measuring different levels of neurotransmitter and whatnot at different states and drawing a conclusion based on observation of the person's gestures in pair with their chemical portrait). Drug studies that depict models of character are very interesting for this sort of reason, they give insight into what chemical changes can lend themselves to emotional, psychological changes that depict some aspect of a person's character in the given moment. It is but a very very thin and wobbly slice of the human experience that we can measure by this. Simultaneity of measurements and some higher form of computing/quantum computing is probably necessary to even begin trying to analyze the amount of details and variables required for getting further with this.

If we have the capacity to understand our own experience pretty well on an individual level, I think that it's possible to at least find SOME commonalities between minds that are not just your own. Very blunt example of this would be getting punched, and having the capacity to realize you're probably not the only one who can be hurt by punches. In a nutshell, I think it's too early in our development to decide the possibility of understanding this stuff.

Originally Posted by stargroup100

Are you saying that everyone has an opinion and subjective experience about everything in this world? If so, then I agree with you, but I wouldn't call it a form of placebo. Placebo refers to something that would normally not work, but works due to psychological reasons. So in a sense, while this could be a sort of deception, by definition it still produces results, and so I think that's supposed to be the justification for things such as homeopathy. If are you say that it is an exploitation, how is it exploiting? I argue that it should be controlled in such a way that it should only handle things that are potentially curable with placebo, but should not be used where it is not appropriate. Is this still exploitation?

I suppose I was pointing out that deception is not really much different than believing a subjective experience is not unique. When you take a placebo drug, but are told it is the real thing, you anticipate it to not be a unique response to the drug. Food tastes good because of deception sometimes, and some moments feel certain ways entirely because of it. That being said "placebo" isn't really relevant to what I'm talking about, I'm just saying that our expectation of things creates a great deal of the experience. Not all of it of course, but our mind likes to paint over the things which are close to being objective. But yeah, this is another reason the mind would be INCREDIBLY difficult to map. We can't be looking for rational and logical decisions in people when we attempt to analyze them, because for the most part our decisions are not like that.

It's also like stepping into a big body of a fractal. At any given point there's an infinite amount of previous experience that has given the present one context. Without context, it's hard to judge why a behaviour or trait is happening, at it's core. It's very interesting how the building blocks of the universe just naturally have the capacity to develop into minds and such (I say naturally, but obviously it's not an independently grown phenomena; we have relied on so many other factors which have given our minds a context).

[stargroup100]

Originally Posted by Spenner

To get a 100% precisely detailed map, I think is impossible due to the instability of measurements that could be done; however, I think we could get a portion of correlation that would give us insight into minds more than just the abstract stuff (measuring different levels of neurotransmitter and whatnot at different states and drawing a conclusion based on observation of the person's gestures in pair with their chemical portrait). Drug studies that depict models of character are very interesting for this sort of reason, they give insight into what chemical changes can lend themselves to emotional, psychological changes that depict some aspect of a person's character in the given moment. It is but a very very thin and wobbly slice of the human experience that we can measure by this. Simultaneity of measurements and some higher form of computing/quantum computing is probably necessary to even begin trying to analyze the amount of details and variables required for getting further with this.

Come to think of it, I just made the mistake of somehow equating reading someone's mind with analyzing their subjective experience, and they could be fairly independent of each other.

Originally Posted by Spenner

If we have the capacity to understand our own experience pretty well on an individual level, I think that it's possible to at least find SOME commonalities between minds that are not just your own. Very blunt example of this would be getting punched, and having the capacity to realize you're probably not the only one who can be hurt by punches. In a nutshell, I think it's too early in our development to decide the possibility of understanding this stuff.

Ah, in which case I guess our objective views are more or less the same. Sure, I agree that we shouldn't decide on the possibility of understanding these things right now, but just as a personal prediction, I think that there will be difficult obstacles that will severely limit this search for answers.

Originally Posted by Spenner

I suppose I was pointing out that deception is not really much different than believing a subjective experience is not unique. ...I'm just saying that our expectation of things creates a great deal of the experience.

Fair enough. I generally agree.

[Cavernio]

Regarding Rubix post: My thought, in and of itself is highly abstract. Thoughts are connected, but not via any seemingly known sense.
I suppose the connection of one thought to another is partially an emotional event because I'll sometimes, when tired, I'll experience a fleeting emotion that I'd connected some thought to another thought, and then try and search through the thought itself for what it was that caused that experience. This is not the same as experiencing various thoughts as emotions though. My own thoughts are probably strongest tied into words, but I think only because if I can manage to form the thought into words it's far easier for my memory to store it and retain it. I definitely count and read verbally though.

2 of the oddest individual experiences of thought I've heard described are thoughts being connected to taste, and someone else who said their thoughts were emotions. Auditory thought and visual thought seem pretty standard.

As to stargroup's assertion that some people just aren't logical, I completely disagree. Someone who's not logical would not even have the capacity to understand something like speech, as speech is essentially riddled with logical operators. The difference is that seemingly irrational, illogical people are connected strongly to something that they identify with, and that logic is less salient compared to their identity, their feeling of belonging, their beliefs, their values, etc.

[stargroup100]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

As to stargroup's assertion that some people just aren't logical, I completely disagree. Someone who's not logical would not even have the capacity to understand something like speech, as speech is essentially riddled with logical operators. The difference is that seemingly irrational, illogical people are connected strongly to something that they identify with, and that logic is less salient compared to their identity, their feeling of belonging, their beliefs, their values, etc.

What I mean by "people aren't logical" is not that the things they think, say, or do are not consistent with their own ideas, beliefs, and values, or that they don't have a particular methodology of arriving at these things. I meant that they are not perfectly rational, in terms of pure formal logic.

Computers are perfectly logical (in a sense), so we can consistently write programs that will do exactly what we want them to. Basically, we can "teach" them whatever we want as long as we know how to do it. Humans on the other hand are not perfectly logical. If we want to teach a particular concept to a person, there could be many rational ways of doing so, but it's possible that none of them work for a particular individual, and more abstract (even "incorrect", paradoxically) approaches work better.

[Cavernio]

Originally Posted by stargroup100

Humans on the other hand are not perfectly logical. If we want to teach a particular concept to a person, there could be many rational ways of doing so, but it's possible that none of them work for a particular individual, and more abstract (even "incorrect", paradoxically) approaches work better.

example?

[Reincarnate]

Humans aren't logic engines. We use many heuristics and different mental imageries for all sorts of shit (whether it's recalling something, performing something, learning something, etc), and a lot of it is also dependent on the individual's physical state.

[stargroup100]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

example?

Just as a general comment, I notice that a lot of your arguments have this intellectual edge to them, but lack a realistic worldview. You think like a philosopher/physicist/mathematician, but when it comes to applying that knowledge to the real world, you make claims that an engineer would laugh at you for. It's like when Michio Kaku says that fusion is 20 years away. I recognize him as a brilliant physicist, but no matter how smart he is, engineers all over the world find this statement of his completely ridiculous. (And I'm willing to bet everything short of my life that we won't see fusion in 20 years.)

Ideally, we wish that the world is logical, structured, etc. However, the fact that there are subjective experiences tied directly to our detection of the world around us and the evaluation of logical propositions, as well as other particular properties of reality itself, we need to consider other aspects of the human condition. There are far too many things in this world that simply cannot be explained logically, no matter how much we try. We can make very general statements, or analyze particular examples in certain ways, but to think that science and logic can potentially figure out everything in the entire world is simply not realistic nor true.


As for an example, I once tried to teach a student the fundamentals of calculus, specifically the difference between position and derivative (velocity). After exhausting numerous ways of trying to explain the concept, what finally clicked for him was comparing the graph in question with taking pictures and putting the frames together to make an animation. To me, it barely made any sense, with only a very vague connection to the problem, but for him it totally worked.

[Reincarnate]

Aghh Michio Kaku. He's one of those guys who occasionally says cool shit, but then once in a while he'll say something completely ludicrous and I end up hating him for a while.