Seth's Blog

In Jonah Lehrer’s article about the benefits of depression, nothing seemed solid until I came across this:

[Joe] Forgas [an Australian psychology professor] placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To [vary] mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.

I found the scientific article that reports this experiment, in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Memory for the trinkets was measured two ways — recall and recognition — and both ways the “sad” shoppers did much better. I didn’t know about this; the size of the effect suggests it’s important. Calling it variation in “memory” is odd, since the remembered event was only a minute ago. Variation in attentiveness is a better summary.

Whatever you call it, I like the general point made in the scientific article. When you are in a good mood, you pay less attention to your surroundings than when you are in a bad mood. When you’re in a good mood, the model of the world in your head is working well. No need to change it. When you’re in a bad mood, the model of the world in your head isn’t working well. Time to gather more data and revise it.

My colleagues and I have studied a different effect along these lines (in rats): When things aren’t going well, you vary your actions more. You try new things more. That’s another way to update your model of the world.

This comment on my boring+boring=pleasant post persuaded me to look for research on how movement affects learning. I found this comment by Anne Green Gilbert:

Movement is the key to learning. I first became aware of this as a third-grade student . . . Movement was central to my teacher’s curriculum. . . . Everyone liked school that year, we all got along, and the knowledge imparted is still in my memory bank forty years later. . . .

When I became a third-grade teacher myself fifteen years later . . . I remembered this concept and used movement and dance to save myself from drowning in a classroom so heterogeneous I felt I was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. Spelling words by forming the letters with bodies, forming punctuation marks and expressing the feeling of sentences through movement, learning multiplication by moving in sets of threes and fours, discovering the difference between lunar and solar eclipses through planet dances, and choreographing our way across the Oregon Trail somehow made everyone equal. The gifted children discovered a new and exciting way to learn, the slower learners quickly became actively engaged and successful, the non-English speaking students could finally understand the curriculum through our new nonverbal approach. Instead of dreading the long school day, we eagerly awaited our next movement experience. Attendance went way up; test scores rose substantially: there was laughter; racial tension dissipated. . . .

Five years after my own experience as a third-grade teacher in Illinois, I was training teachers at the University of Washington and received a federally funded grant to conduct research in the Seattle Public Schools. During the 1977 school year, 250 students from four elementary schools studied language arts concepts through movement and dance activities for twenty weeks. The third grade students involved in the study increased their MAT [?] scores by 13 percent from fall to spring, while the district wide average showed a decrease of 2 percent! The primary grade project [?] students also showed a great improvement in test scores. Most significant was the direct relationship the research showed between the amount of movement the classroom teacher used and the percentage increase of students’ test scores.

I find this very convincing: three situations, many measures. The way the movement lessons attracted diverse students is especially interesting; IQ tests were invented to reduce diversity in classrooms.

Partly I’m struck how this idea seems to have been ignored . “Everyone liked school that year.” Which seems to imply less liking of school other years. So the third-grade teacher used lots of movement, her kids loved it, but somehow second- and fourth-grade teachers didn’t imitate her. (Perhaps they did later.) “When I became a third-grade teacher myself . . . I remembered this concept.” Implying it wasn’t taught in her teacher-training program. On the other hand, it was emphasized in the teacher-training course that the commenter took (“I remember learning in my M.Ed that people learn better while moving and that we should therefore incorporate kinesthetic activites into instructional design”).

I’ve read many studies about learning by experimental psychologists and never encountered any study of the hedonics — what makes learning more or less pleasant. Learning is one topic, motivation (e.g., thirst, hunger) is another. There are a few studies of curiosity (in animals, not people) but they don’t show how to vary it. A professor of psychology might pooh-pooh the Gilbert stories: Sure, third-graders don’t like to sit all day. But my treadmill/language-learning story suggests it’s not that simple.

• kaleidoscope game
• The Transfer Book. Helpful for college students thinking of transferring.
• Some medical schools have trouble disclosing their disclosure policies! In the case of an NPR show The Infinite Mind, which I liked, the founder, Frederick Goodwin, whom I took seriously, “received over a million [undisclosed] dollars from pharmaceutical companies to give promotional talks.” Details. This is especially horrifying because Goodwin co-authored the “bible” of bipolar disorder research. His influence is great. His co-author was Kay Jamison, who writes a lot about the subject for popular audiences. To me, she’s now tainted by association.
• Robert Woodward, the great chemist. A terrific biographical essay.

Yesterday I worked in a Berkeley cafe. The student sitting next to me said she was taking a course from Robert Reich called Wealth and Poverty. Most famous profs she’d found disappointing, she said, but not him. I was impressed that Reich was teaching undergraduates. Most profs in the Goldman School (UC Berkeley’s public policy school) don’t teach undergrads. The class is once/week for 1.5 hours (followed by a half-hour “salon” — meaning discussion) in a large lecture hall (Wheeler, 5 pm Wed). It met in a few hours. I went.

The topic was communities attracting large businesses, such as Boeing. Today’s topic should make you feel bad, Reich said. That was one of his goals, clearly — to make students neither complacent nor despondent. And he wanted them to be sophisticated: He didn’t want them to have a “bad-guy theory of the world”. Fine. I liked the way he walked around the big room, instead of staying on stage, and he had a great conversational manner. I also liked the way he used the first ten minutes to sum up what he’d said earlier.

What I didn’t like was the content. It was example-free — unless you count saying that Boeing moved to Chicago. As the lecture continued, my eyes widened: Is this what a good undergraduate lecture at Berkeley is like? There were no stories! Not one. He discussed, in purely hypothetical terms, how Boeing might decide where to move. They’re considering a number of cities, Chicago, Long Beach . . . Los Angeles. What will Los Angeles offer them? Tax breaks and subsidies, said Reich.

STUDENT What about good weather?

Reich didn’t answer. He went on to ask, rhetorically, were the tax breaks and subsidies a good thing? No, because they left less money for education. At this point I left. Except for being surprised by the low-quality content and amused by the student’s comment, I’d been bored. As education, it was thin gruel. The disjunction between Reich’s excellent intentions, great reviews (the room was packed), and great manner and his dreary content didn’t remind me of the name-dropping throat-clearing Yale prof but of the Los Angeles graduation where none of the speakers told a story. Somehow this simple point about how to teach — tell a story — had been forgotten.

• Does Robert Greenwald have a subtle sense of humor? See for yourself. Ted Sorenson, one of the interviewees, is widely thought to have ghostwritten Profiles in Courage. He denied it, but later told American Experience: “The author is the man who stands behind what is there on the printed page.”
• Researchers fail to grasp that a spoof is a spoof. For instance, a case report involving a cartoon character was taken seriously. A Science News writer made this sort of mistake several years ago. I wrote to the magazine pointing it out. The editor who replied didn’t agree with me but said that the person who had written that piece was no longer working there.
• “The mature product”. The truth about expiration dates.
• Participatory science: “He drew the line at eating stewed mole.”

Thanks to Tyler Cowen and Ben Casnocha