Data Mining and Jeopardy!

Roger Craig won a quarter of a million dollars on the TV game show Jeopardy! this year, setting the all-time record for money won in a single game. Here's how he did it: The Computer scientist decided to focus his study on the most common topics that come up during a game. He downloaded an online database of all the past questions and then created a pattern recognition program to look for the types of questions that were most likely to come up again - and then studied accordingly. World capitals are more likely to come up than questions about fashion, so he spent more time studying capitals. And instead of trying to learn every capital, he focused on the most statistically popular. He told NPR, "You can practice haphazardly or (you can study) efficiently."

The lesson here: before throwing yourself into a project haphazardly, spend some time identifying its critical parts and organizing how you will attack them to prioritize your effort.

There is a video of Craig in action here and you can hear an NPR story here.

The Path to Greater Success

Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?

(A new study detailed in Psychological Science) is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using EEG. The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up . The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

(note: This finding has a practical implication. Studies show that when students are praised for their intelligence rather than their hard work, they will choose easier paths in order to maintain that success. But students who are told their success is the result of hard work are more likely to select more difficult pathways. They possess greater confidence that a similar effort of hard work will bring them continued success - Stephen Goforth).

Praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity (in the brain) a few hundred milliseconds after the error), directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence.

Jonah Lehrer writing in Wired Magazine

Learning From Mistakes

People with a genetic mutation that reduces the number of dopamine receptors in the ACC suffer from a similar problem; just like the monkeys, they are less likely to learn from negative reinforcement. This seemingly minor deficit has powerful consequences. For example, studies have found that people carrying this mutation are significantly more likely to become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Because they have difficulty learning from their mistakes, they make the same mistakes over and over. They can't adjust their behavior even when it proves self-destructive.

John Lehrer
How We Decide

Finding Our Way

A Nokia Maps survey named London the most confusing city in the entire world. So, it comes as no surprise that the cities cab drivers, who must memorize some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks in order to pass a driving test for the job, have a larger hippocampus than most of us. That’s the part of their brain dealing with spatial relationship. According to University College London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, the longer they had been driving, the larger the cabbie’s hippocampus.

Even more curious was Maguire’s finding that the drivers' back side of the hippocampus was large while the front was smaller. Could it be, they are paying a price for proficiency? Is the brain so easily shaped by the demands we place on it that we lose agility in one area by concentrating our efforts in another?

Is this the unintended consequence of our blind obedience to GPS devises, disconnecting us from the world around because there’s really need to pay attention? It’s worth noting that studies have tied a shirking hippocampus to increased risk of dementia.

Perhaps we should take time to enjoy the freedom of getting lost, so we can practice the adventure of finding our way back home. And since we must exercise this skill in the physical world to keep it.. does this mean we must practice finding our way in the spiritual world as well?

Stephen Goforth

Acting The Part

The late Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack once told me that he was at a loss when he first moved behind the camera, so he simply acted like a director.

The feeling of not being up to the job, the belief that the role is too big, is something every leader has felt. It is evidence that the role is greater than the individual—and thus worth taking on. Pollack made the leader's requisite leap into the unknown, accepting the risk of failure that is the first step in becoming a leader—and he excelled.

That adaptive capacity is the most important attribute in determining who will become a leader. It's also the defining trait of the best actors. Inhabiting roles other than the one most of us think of as self is essential to both. So is the empathy needed to project yourself into someone else's skin.

Like great actors, great leaders create and sell an alternative vision of the world, a better one in which we are an essential part. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that Churchill idealized his countrymen with such intensity that in the end they rose to his ideal. Mahatma Gandhi made India proud of herself. Washington and the other Founding-Fathers shared that great leader's gift of making people believe they could be—and were—part of a great nation. Martin Luther King Jr. had that same genius.

When you consider such towering and theatrical leaders, you realize leadership may be the greatest performing art of all—the only one that creates institutions of lasting value, institutions that can endure long after the stars who envisioned them have left the theater.

Warren Bennis
The Essential Bennis

Parenting Advice

The billion-dollar industry of quote-unquote educational toys that are supposed to make your baby smarter is a boondoggle. There's no evidence that any of those things make a difference. Children are learning the way that other people's minds work, which is much more important to learn than even letters and numbers. I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Alison Gopnik in an interview with TIME magazine about her book The Philosophical Baby

Geography in Cognition

“Why do you find, in a music conservatory, a lot of Asian would-be concert pianists but comparatively few Asian opera-singers-in-training? There's a physical limit to how many hours a day a person can sing but not to how many hours one can practice sonata.” (Forbes, May 11 issue).

That’s the view of Richard Nisbett, who outlines his view that I.Q. is more malleable than we typically think in his book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.
He says Asian-Americans score higher on the SAT and Asian students perform better on math and science exams than American students because of their culture and educational system. It emphasizes connectedness. Asian schools have a students work out math problems on a chalk board while classmates make suggestions. American businesses recognize this by using different advertising strategies in the US and Asia. Samsung’s message in the US is "I march to the beat of my own drum," appealing to American individualism while the company’s Korea ad campaign focuses on families staying connected.

Stephen Goforth