Radical Mutual-Improvement

I joined Toastmasters a while ago and after accidentally forgetting about my last couple meetings it looks like I'll be giving my first speech tomorrow morning at 9am.  The basic premise of the organization is that it's very cheap to join ($, is volunteer-run, and is all about stepping you through a series of 10 public speeches, each with a different focus, and receiving immediate peer feedback.  After your ten speeches, you become a CTM (Certified Toastmaster), and can move on to more ambitious advanced toastmaster stations such as bronze, silver, and gold toastmaster.

I found the group I'm going to by searching on this page for clubs in my area.  After trying a couple out, I settled on one that seemed regular enough, and had enough advanced members, to invest in for however long it takes to do 10 speeches (I'm guessing about a year perhaps, though I'm going to try to do them as quickly as possible, signing up for the next one as soon as I complete the previous one).

My first speech is called the "Ice breaker" and is a 5-7 minute speech that's pretty open other than that the speech has to be about myself somehow. I think I'm going to do it on the topic of how my answers to the question of "what I want to be" have changed over the course of my life.  There are a couple reasons why I want to do my speech this way:

1. It's easy.  I'm much more able to talk about what I want to be than I am about who I actually am.  The first is accessible to my consciousness, the latter is not.  Who I actually am is easier determined by friends, family, and people other than myself… so rather than address this topic directly, I can talk about who I want to be, and let the evaluaters come to their own conclusions about who I actually am.
2. It's a story.  Who I want to be creates a very colorful, yet simple, narrative of my life.  It's easy to explain what kind of drama and self-realizations had to take place for me to move from bug collector to video game tester, and from video game tester to genetic biologist, and from genetic biologist to painter, etc.  They are easy, but core stories in my personal narrative.
3. It's informative.  I think about it a lot.  Few things take up more mental energy and time than the daydreams of our ambitions.  Few things have roots so deep that they can inform us on our own personal prejudices, biases, pet peeves, opinions, and ethical behavior than explaining who we want to be and why.

Well, I can say all of this because I haven't actually written out the story yet.  And my last weekend was a complete whilrwind of amazement that has my personal ambitions inflated to the size of giant parade balloons.  I'm going to record the speech and podcast it hopefully.  But first, I have to write it.

This is the tendency to not see your own cognitive biases.  A bit of a cheat, I think this one is, since a bias that you saw would probably not really be a bias anymore.  So we'll pass over this one lightly, and move on.

Since thinking about Daniel Gilbert’s talk about how we tend to make errors of odds and errors of future value about things, I thought it would be sort of fun to walk through many of the known cognitive biases and logical fallacies that our brains are susceptible to. Why not? Here we go.

We all know the bandwagon of popular opinion and its magical allure. Literally, bandwagons are wagons that carry the band in a parade. Being on the bandwagon was a very convenient way to experience the parade since you got to listen to the music and didn’t have to walk. Since William Jennings Bryan used the phrase “hop on the bandwagon” during his 1900 presidential campaign, it has itself become a trendy term to express the naive adoption of popular trends simply because they are popular.

Why is the bandwagon so alluring?

It has to do with certainty, and the odds of your own judgment being challenged. If you don't have a strong preference for a particular thing, it is easier to agree with the majority than it is to disagree. Disagreement usually requires a solid stance to support your side. The more people on the bandwagon, the more solid your argument about why you're not on it has to be. Try arguing for the war in a liberal city and you will need to have much more information to back up your opinion than you would if you were against the war. And vice versa, if you try arguing against the war in a conservative city the same burden of proof will lie on you.

The bandwagon, literally and figuratively, is for resting your feet. Letting the trend carry you forward, while being able to listen to the music and enjoy the company of friends at the same time.  It's not a bad thing, but the feet and preferences do need to be stretched once in a while.

The opposite of the bandwagon effect

The opposite of the bandwagon effect is just as silly as the bandwagon effect itself.  While some of us pride ourselves on avoiding bandwagons, it's as much folly to avoid bandwagons simply because they are popular.  

Try catching yourself falling hopping on and avoiding bandwagons.  Try to stop seeing them altogether, and judging the band and parade on their own merit rather than on their popularity or unpopularity.  It's really difficult! 

Daniel Gilbert, who I just saw speak last night, also published a new article yesterday: The Science of Happiness.

I think he likes taking on controversial topics. Here are a few:

The study of happiness is a science

What does it take to study something scientifically? One word: Measurement. If you can measure something, you can study it scientifically. Can we measure a person's subjective emotional experience? You bet. People can tell you with both words and actions what they are experiencing — what they are seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking, and feeling—and these reports are the essential data on which the science of experience is built. If you don't think such reports are reliable or valid, then you should feel free to discard my research papers.

But just to be consistent, you should also discard your glasses or contact lenses, because optometry is another one of those sciences that is built entirely on people's reports of subjective experience. The one and only way for an optometrist to know what your visual experience is like is to ask you, "Does it look clearer like this or (click click) like this?"

On the basis of your answers, the optometrist is able to create a lens that corrects your vision quite precisely. Indeed, without your report of your subjective visual experience, optometry would be impossible. No "objective test" — no eye test, no blood test, and no brain test — can provide this information. In short, people can reliably report on their subjective experiences and those reports can be objectively collected and analyzed. As long as people can say how happy they are at the moment you ask them, you can build a science of happiness. In fact, there is no other way to build such a science.

People don't care about anything other than being happy

First, people clearly value many things — from the base to the sublime, from Belgian chocolate to marital fidelity — but I believe they value these things entirely because of their hedonic consequences. Plato was very clear about this when he asked us to think about what it is that makes anything good. "Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?" I'm with the guy in the toga on this score. To my mind, "positive hedonic experience" is what valuing means. We can't say what's good without saying what it is good for, and if you look at all the many things people think are good, you will notice they are all good for making people happy.

There is only one kind of happiness that spans selfish happiness and selfless happiness

Yes, the experience of saving money is not the same as the experience of saving orphans. But both experiences can be described as a set of locations on multiple dimensions, and one of those dimensions is happiness. The two experiences give rise to different amounts of happiness, but not different kinds. The reason the experiences feel so different is that they entail different amounts of happiness as well as different amounts of everything else.

This sounds like a semantic abstraction, and it isn't. It is a deeply important point. Science is an attempt to replace qualitative distinctions with quantitative distinctions. Once upon a time there were two kinds — hot and cold — and it was a huge breakthrough when scientists realized that these two kinds were simply manifestations of different amounts of molecular motion. The same was true when scientists realized that oxygen and iron were not different kinds of stuff, but rather, were different amounts of stuff, namely, protons, neutrons, and electrons. Similarly, different subjective experiences contain different amounts of happiness, which is a basic dimension or basic ingredient of experience. Experiences that have different amounts of happiness can feel as different as air and iron, as different as hot and cold. But if orphan-saving and money-saving feel different, that fact does not invalidate my claim any more than the different rigidities of iron and air invalidates atomic theory.

I admire his willingness to take on controversial topics. The main reason they bristle with our instincts is that they are not initially aesthetic statements. They don't provoke a "ah, that's a warm happy truth" response from most people, except maybe lost souls like us. Some of us take a strange glee in statements that seem cold and brutal, and attack the sacred cows of our own sense of self, and our own desire to live a pleasing and engaging life amongst equals. It's the opposite of soft, happy, marketing, and perhaps we've been trained like Pavlov's dog to respond to information that feels like the opposite of a lie or a trick or an advertisement.

Daniel Gilbert related reading:

• The Science of Happiness [Edge]
• The Futile Pursuit of Happiness [New York Times]

This is the formula that Daniel Gilbert (Harvard professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness) told us was the centuries old formula for doing precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. I guess people had more noble ambitions back then.  Every gamble, risk, action, goal, or even thought has an expected chance of happening and an expected value if that thing actually happens. The premise of his talk yesterday was that though the formula seems simple, the brain is unfortunately pretty awful at doing these calculations in real life.

Errors of Odds

We don't store odds in our brain very easily. Instead of storing something like "there's a .001% chance of being struck by lightning" the brain stores "I can remember 2 stories of people being struck by lightning within the last 2 years". Events or information that is easy to recall will have inflated odds (disasters, news stories, and other information that is easy to recall, like words rhyming with "at") while events and information that is difficult to recall will have deflated odds (death by boring events like asthma, drowning in a pool, etc, stories that aren't good news, and other information that is difficult to recall like words that have an "r" as the third letter).

Your ability to predict the possibility of something happening is going to be wrong almost all of the time due to the way our brain stores odds. We are designed to overaggressively seek or avoid memorable events and information while being blind-sided by unmemorable events and information.

Errors of Value

As bad as we are about storing odds, we are even less skillful at predicting how much something is worth. We think we will be happier when our goals are realized than we actually are, and we think we'll be sadder when fortune fails us than we actually are. This is because we make decisions of value through comparison rather than by trying to determine objective value. We go to the coffee shop that serves the cheapest or the best coffee and never consider if it is actually worth its price. What does "worth its price" even really mean? Much more powerful than the idea of how much $1.89 is worth is the idea that $1.89 is less than the $2.25 that coffee costs across the street, and much less than the $3.50 that it would cost to get a mocha. We are therefore getting a deal. This is easily manipulated by well known tricks of retailers who put "aspirational brands" near commodity brands in order to make people more comfortable with purchasing the high-end commodity brand.

Implications

I came away from this talk (actually, it was the second time I saw the talk… I also saw him speak in Austin at SXSW this year) with a couple questions, the most articulate of which is "So what?"  An error is an error only if it causes us some strife.  One obvious form of strife is that if we aren't consistent in our ability to make decisions, then people will exploit the inconsistencies of our decision making.  Which we know is pretty much the case with the current state of the media and advertising.  But, an error is also only useful to point out if there is some way to correct our behavior by rooting out the error and making better decisions.  Daniel Gilbert side steps this question and offers no simple keys to happiness and good decision making.  One leaves with a sense of urgency… we need to figure this out, and soon!  Before we reach the inevitable end of our collective poor judgement calls… a world of misleading advertisements, lotteries, casinos, disasters, and debt.  He warns us that we're the only ones with the ability to control our fate, by predicting the future and altering the present… and if we as a species fail to do so, it will be a result of this poor decision making.  He sure has a funny way of stumbling on happiness.

The title of this exercise is a bit misleading.  Watching what you eat usually refers to counting calories.  I mean it more in the literal sense… looking and noticing what you are eating.  Acting on that knowledge may or may not happen, but it's not important for the purposes of this exercise.

Watching what you eat will tell you a lot about your current mental and physical state.  Have you noticed that your appetite for food will be different depending on your mood and your state of current health?  When I exercise, I crave different foods than when I've just gotten into a fight with a friend.  Also, my appetite will be different when I haven't eaten in a long time than it is when I have just finished a meal.  There's a reason salads typically come first and ice cream comes last… the body's appetite when full is less for less healthy food than when your body is actually trying to get energy for vital functions.

You can pretty much take the types of foods you're currently craving as a literal expression of your mood and health.  A healthy mental state will crave healthy foods, and vice versa.  Take note of the things you are craving for a day.  In particular, notice:

• How sensitive are you to hunger?  Do you eat at the first sign of hunger, or do you put up with hunger longer?
• Do you eat more healthily when you satisfy hunger immediately, or when you wait it out?
• When do you eat most the most junk food and what is your mental and physical states at those times?

How much can you tell about people around you if all you had to go on was the food that they eat?  How much of this serves as a personality test for others and for yourself?  Most people believe that you can become more healthy by eating more healthily… but is it possible that the reverse is true as well?  Healthy people eat healthily.  Chicken or egg?  Lest we confuse correllation with causation once again, let's start with merely watching the food we eat and watching our moods. 

The purpose of this exercise is to learn more about why you like some things and don't like others. Preference is a very powerful force in our personalities, and by taking it apart a little and looking to see which mechanisms are at work when creating your preferences, you can learn to fiddle with the algorithm a little to make sure you like things that you actually want to like, and that you don't like things that you don't want to like.

Sounds complicated, but a very important aspect of preference (and desire in general) is that there are two levels to it:

1. What you want
2. What you want to want

You might want chocolate, but want to want salad. You might want television, but want to want exercise. When thinking about this exercise, try to figure out if the thing you are retrying is something you want, or something you want to want. The happiest life is one where you both want, and want to want, the same things while also not liking the things you don't want to like.

The sources of like:

What causes us to like something and what causes us not to like something? Are things inherently likable and dislikable, or is there something that happens between the thing and yourself (a relationship, or an aesthetic) that creates a likable or dislikable quality to emerge? I argue the latter. Here are a few things that might influence your judgement of a new thing:

1. Do you already like or dislike this thing? If you know that you dislike brocolli, you will most likely continue to dislike it each time you come across it, even if you do not taste it each time.
2. Do you already have a preference for the general class of thing? If you come across a new green vegetable, and you have an existing dislike of green vegetables, it's likely that you will apply the general rule to the specific new vegetable.
3. Does the environment or group your in have a preference? If you are in a group that strongly prefers sipping expensive wines, and you are relatively new to the field of wine-tasting and have no overwhelming preference for cheap or expensive wines, you may be influenced to adopt the group's preference for expensive wines. Likewise, if you live in a liberal city, you will most likely adopt liberal views. This happens because the environment will influence the evidence and data you receive for making a preference… you will only get good evidence and data about expensive wines when you're around people that love expensive wines, and you will only hear bad data about conservative viewpoints when you're around liberals. It's not that you necessarily adopt the views of those around you, it's just that the environment filters the information you receive about the thing being judged to favor the decisions that the group made.
4. Is there pressure to form a quick opinion? In some social situations, making a decision is difficult because none of the choices stand out as distinctly better than the others. For example, when choosing which new blockbuster movie to watch on a Sunday afternoon. In these situations, people with preferences are rewarded by being decision makers and leaders. It doesn't really matter which option is taken, as long as it provokes action in the group. After a decision is made, it's then much easier to confabulate reasons that it is the best option, strengthening the power of the preference that was originally weak.

In this way, preferences can be created by cascading down a series of decision making systems. The interesting thing is that because preferences are reinforced each time they are invoked, what quickly began as a weak preference will strengthen over time into a much more powerful preference. The possibility then exists that there are very strong preferences in our own personalities that may or may not justify the strength of their preference.

Identify a few strong preferences of your own

I used to strongly dislike zoos. It all went back to one childhood experience where I felt bad about an animal at a zoo. Over the years, disliking zoos became "a thing", if you know what I mean. A thing that felt as much a part of me as my sense of self. I was a zoo-disliker. I was a also a Halloween-disliker. I was an avocado-disliker. However, once I started retrying these things, I often found that the only reason I continued to dislike them was because I had disliked them at some point in the past.

By letting go of that past preference, and the opinion that blossoms from it, I get to let the object cascade once again down the waterfall of experience to see if there was any continuing evidence supporting the preference. In the case of zoos I discovered that my dislike of them was a little lopsided and that while I may object to some of the principles behind the caging of beautiful natural animals, that I could enjoy learning about animals and engaging them in person. My preference, it turned out, had been more positively reinforced by the personal satisfaction I got from stating the opinion and being the kind of person that cared for animals than it had by the actual zoo itself. There's a strange kind of pride in preference. Which isn't necessarily bad in itself, but it might be worth investigating which things you store your pride in… are they all things you want to take pride in? And are you consistently interested in the object of pride? In the case of zoos, why did I take self-righteous pride in not supporting the enslavement of animals when I took opposite pride in eating meat? It's important to notice inconsistency in yourself and acknowledge it, not necessarily to reconcile it right away, but simply so that you can learn to not take yourself and your preferences so seriously.

Related Links:

• Preference [Wikipedia]
• Do Something Scary [Creating Passionate Users]

Interesting little test to see whether or not you can recall details of a picture that's only flashed for a quarter of a second.  I failed miserably but maybe you'll do better.

Link: What can you remember in a glimpse? [Cogntive Daily via Mind Hacks] 

The exercises for lost souls are an attempt at articulating a spirit to self-improvement that I believe to be missing from the world at the moment.  For me, that spirit is mostly one of play, and one that is built on an already good life.  Self-improvement isn't only for people with problems.  Landlords only pay attention to their tenants' apartments when they break, but people that own a house might continue to improve the house even as they live in it, and even if nothing is broken.  We are obviously living in this life ourselves, but then why do we too wait for things to break before we  consider improving them?  I think it has to do with overload… there are too many things to consider, so we back up and just make sure nothing terrible happens.  The spirit of these exercises is to take ground back and gain positive momentum rather than simply prevent negative momentum.  Getting back to the front is tricky, and that's what I'm experimenting with here.  Some exercises might work better for you than others.  I'd love to hear from anyone that has novel or counter-intuitive tricks for gaining this momentum, and also of anyone who's currently implementing these exercises.  The other day, I discovered a few posts from MSC related to a few of the exercises (numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 so far), and I've been really interested in seeing his take on this.

Each of our physical possessions has room not only in our homes or offices, but also in our brains.  Each couch, car, and book is something you have to manage, much in the same way that people managers have to care for the needs of their direct reports.  A couch might need a cleaning, or it might need to be moved, or it might need a replacement.  These unfinished tasks are open loops in our brains that will continue to surface in our working memory until they are completed or dropped.  We all know the relief we feel when we sell that car that has been a burden for years.  It is the pleasurable quiet resulting from all the whispering open loops finally shutting up.  The whispering open loops are actually quite a burden on our mental clarity and our daily ability to focus. 

Take a look around your office or home today and ask random objects, “What are you whispering to me?”  You may be surprised at how many things are whispering to you to be read, put away, given away, replaced, or otherwise attended to.The quickest and easiest way to stop the whispering is to get rid of stuff.  Now that summer is coming, why not have a garage sale, or take a few trips to Goodwill to give away a bunch of stuff that you really don’t need.Most people identify themselves as either purgers or collectors.  Get rid of that identity for yourself.  To simplify yourself to that extent is to do yourself a disservice.  Instead of deciding when to keep something and when to get rid of something, simply ask one of the following questions (depending on the amount of whispering you’re willing to take from your possessions):

1. What future project of mine is this attached to?  Am I really dedicated to completing that future project?
2. What if I didn’t get this?  Or didn't have this?
3. Which part of my ideal scene for myself does this possession satisfy?
4. If I had this, and I lost it in a fire, would I get it again?

What are your weak spots with possessions?  Do you abhor people who collect needleess camping equipment but find that you enjoy collecting kitchen appliances?  Do you pride yourself on your book, music, or DVD collections?  Find the possessions you enjoy having the most and listen to the tasks that they’re giving you… throw a party for this movie, read this book, get a bigger bookshelf for us, etc.  What if you didn’t have them, what would change?  What if your house burned down… which of these lovely things would you buy again?  How will these possessions play into your ideal scene of the next couple years?

Instead of having all of these things, think about outsourcing them.  Use the library for books, listen to the radio or convert all of your music to mp3s, and use Netflix and other rental outlets for DVDs. Let them handle the whispering, and with your new clarity of mind, know that if you ever do get around to that project, these things will be available at that time.  But maybe you'll find that the project isn't even that important anymore once the  whispering is gone.

Ryan Carson has a great article over at A List Apart about working only four days a week. I've only worked four days a week for the last year and a half and think it is a significant contributor to my enjoyment of life. This is despite the fact that I love my job as well. Things are easier to love when you are at your best while doing them. Many parts of our corporate culture have become focused on productivity, and yet the tools for productivity aren't present. Instead of encouraging people to be productive, many corporate environments are time prisoners. You have to be there 40 hours, if not longer. If you're in one of these environments I encourage you to challenge the system and see if you can convince them that you will can be more productive while spending less time in the office by working a four day work week. Some excellent tips in the article mentioned above, as well as in the comments.

Links:

• The Four-Day Week Challenge [A List Apart]
• Comments on the article at A List Apart
• Comments on the article at Lifehacker

Eustress is what they call good stress. The kind you feel when you get a raise, or buy a new house, or go on a great first date. Good in the sense that it makes you feel good, that the stress is enjoyable. Challenges and projects create eustress, overload and problems create distress (bad stress).

However, eustress is not the same as serenity and blissfulness. Eustress is still stress. It still has many of the same symptoms of distress, including:

• Raised adrenaline levels
• Raise corticosterone levels (a steroid hormone)
• Increased heart-rate
• Increased respiration
• Higher blood pressure

Good stress will also just as easily lead to physical problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, enlargement of the adrenal glands, and other illnesses (according to Wikipedia, and when are they wrong).

Stress is a big deal. If you look at the list of 15 ways to live longer, you’ll quickly notice that almost all of them are related to mental or physical stress. Be optimistic, have a pet, be rich, chill out, laugh a little, manage stress, and meditate are all about managing mental stress. Don’t oversleep, have more sex, get a VAP (cholesterol test), stop smoking, eat your antioxidants, and exercise are all about managing your physical stress. What I’m saying, I guess, is be stressed about stress!

What is the purpose of eustress?

I used to believe that my purpose in life was to find reasons to celebrate. It was a general theory I had that by seeking reasons to celebrate that I would seek worthwhile things. Everyone likes to celebrate… our society is pretty much built on this premise: happy hours, Fridays, dessert, holidays that we don’t even know much about other than that we get the day off or get presents, New Years, etc. In a society where we say anything is possible if you work for it, celebration is the carrot of success.

Celebration involves a shift in priorities… up until now you have been focused on working, saving, building, designing, and planning… celebration involves the opposite: playing, spending, taking down, relaxing, enjoying. It involves partying and drinking and perhaps being a little crazy.

If you think about it, celebration and eustress work to bring you back to normal levels. Eustress is a form of negative feedback designed to spend excess energy, success, money, happiness, and alcoholic tolerance and bring you back to a level that you’re more comfortable with. This is not necessarily a bad thing… saving money your entire life without ever enjoying the benefits of spending it sounds like a life wasted. On the other hand, you can see the symptoms of this with people who rise quickly in fame or wealth… many times they will end up spending it all wildly and quickly end up right where they started.

What is the alternative to eustress?

It makes sense for some systems to maintain homeostasis. For example, our bodies need to regulate on the principles of homeostasis for a number of things such as body temperature, oxygen levels, hydration, etc. When we’re hungry, we should be distressed and seek food. When we’re full, we should feel satiated and energized and expend energy. When we’re cold, we should shiver and when we’re hot we should sweat.

However, there are other systems that may seem to be homeostatic but which sometimes are not. The money in our bank for example. Oftentimes our incomes will remain fairly fixed, and so we know when we’re spending too much and when we have some money that we can safely spend. This triggers the eustress/distress principles of spending… who doesn’t sometimes feel the pinch right before payday and decline on the spontaneous trip to Vegas, and who hasn’t celebrated on a payday with a few extra drinks or a nicer meal? But, if you think about it, there’s no reason why a bank account has to have a particular dollar amount comfort zone. Some people maintain their balance near zero, and others maintain their balance near $100,000… and it makes no qualitative difference if you still feel as distressed at $99,990 as you do at -$10. I’ll give you two choices. Who would you rather be:

• Someone who spends money whenever they get it, but never has savings.
• Someone who saves all their money and never enjoys it.

Celebrator or scrooge… those are your two options. Well, of course, everyone wants to be somewhere in between. How does “in between” avoid the problem though? How much should you save? How often should you celebrate? The scroogier you are, the more quickly you’ll amass riches! But what use is amassing riches if you never have fun? The dilemma continues.The answer is simple. Know what you’re working towards. If you know what your ideal scene is, you’ll know why you’re saving, and you’ll also preserve the spirit of the scene that you’re working towards. Use distress and eustress to your advantage… they are tools for promoting change and all you need is a direction to point it.

More about stress:

• The Human Brain and Stress [The Franklin Institute via Lifehacker]
• Stress Management [WebMD]

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to have guests over in your mind. But wouldn't that be neat? At the very least, if it were possible, perhaps we would tidy our mind’s workspace as frequently as we tidied our home and office workspaces. As it is, the mind’s workspace is more like that basement closet that we stuff thing’s into in order to hide them from guests, investors, friends, family, etc. It is the black box of a productive environment, and as such one of the most neglected aspects of our daily maintenance, weekly reviews, self-evaluations, life hacking, and attempts to get things done. At the same time, the roots of most of our problem can be traced (like a bad smell) back to the mind’s workspace.

Some of the moving parts involved in your mind’s workspace include:

1. Working memory
2. Habits
3. Visualization
4. Bodily and mental stress

David Allen in Getting Things Done does a great job of addressing the mind’s workspace with a couple key phrases. The subtitle of the book is even “the art of stress-free productivity”, which encapsulates both the method and the result of setting up the proper workspace in your mind. Turn your mind into a beautiful room that you are comfortable sitting in. Another great phrase is “mind like water” which is about having an organized mental workspace that is able to react to every event in perfect proportion to the event’s weight. It doesn’t overreact or underreact. Both of these phrases emphasize the aesthetics of a well set-up mind. Perhaps they are a bit too zen wacky for some though, so I’ll try to come at it from a couple different angles.

What is your mind's workspace like?

How does it feel to sit in your mind's workspace? Try it. What do the walls look like? What kind of chair are you sitting in? How does the desk look? Do you have 12 monitors up… each blaring different scenarios, conversations, reminders, news reports, and soap operas? How much information is there lying around, and how organized is it? Is it sunny or dark? Warm or cold? Crazy or calm? All of this is simply an exercise in confabulation of course, as the real structure of working memory is mostly obscured from us. But hopefully what it can help reveal is how your mind feels. Most likely, unless you've already learned the art of mental clarity, this space feels a bit like a dark room full of wild yet familiar things. The cobwebbed attic of the brain metaphor is overused, but strangely appropriate for most of us.

As was mentioned in the post about setting up your physical workspace a couple days ago, there is some projection of your mind's workspace out onto your environments. If you need some help knowing exactly how your mind's workspace is, then, it doesn't hurt to look at your home and office workspaces. What does your desk look like, what does your wallet or purse look like, what does your garage look like?

What do you want your mind's workspace to be like?

What does a perfectly productive mind feel like to you? A good exercise for this is to imagine a virtual reality machine that you can design for yourself. This virtual reality machine will be replaced with your own mind when you are satisfied with it. You'll never need to set another alarm clock because your new mind will have an accurate clock in it that will let you know when to wake up, or when that next meeting is, or when the headlining band is really going on. You'll never need another PDA or pocket book because your new mind will be able to store grocery lists, email addresses, phone numbers, names and faces, and personal affirmations appropriate for every adversity or problem that might come your way. Your mind will have the ability to remember things it wants to remember, and forget things it wants to forget. It will be able to filter out all information that it doesn't need, and focus on tasks that are set when they are set. It will remind you to buy batteries for the dead flashlight when you are at the store passing the battery rack, not when the thunderstorm knocks the power out of your house. It will be an awesome mind, and it will never accidentally fall in the toilet or get left in the cab.

But that mind doesn't exist!

After you've designed the perfect mind, perhaps you're now saying that the exercise was futile because that kind of mind isn't possible. In Getting Things Done, for example, one of the primary goals of the system is to remove all of these distracting and stress-inducing things from your mind because it is not the right tool for the job. I don't actually think this is always the case. Getting your mind in order may allow your to reap wild benefits in productivity and focus in proportion to the level of disorganization it is currently in. The truth is that people are often failing at creating a good GTD system simply because they can't afford to take the productivity hit of writing each thing down when just remembering them seems to work so well. Only, it doesn't always work. And it causes stress. But how much of this is just because we don't know how to use our minds?

Memory is the best list-making tool

What's easier: keeping a grocery list on a piece of paper, or keeping a grocery list in your mind? Well, it depends. Factors include:

• When you realize you need to buy something, is it easier to find the paper and write it down, or easier to remember it?
• When you're at the store, do you have the piece of paper or can you recall the list.

There are two actions involved: saving the list and retrieving the list. Both tools have their pros and cons both for saving information and retrieving information.

To save something to a list, you need to make sure the list is with you. It might take physical energy to find the list if it's nearby, or otherwise you'll have to remember to put something on the list. If you can remember to put something on the list, how much easier is that than simply remembering the thing that you were going to put on the list? To save something to memory, on the other hand, you need to have memory tools at your disposal, which we'll talk about soon. This also takes energy to do, but it's mental energy.

To retrieve something from a list, you again need to make sure the list is with you when it's needed. This, again, will take physical energy, and, it might take additional mental energy to remember where the list is, as well as a mental reminder to get the list before it is needed (it's no good if you remember to get the list when you're already at the store, unless it's already with you). To retrieve something from memory requires mental energy as well as confidence that your list was properly saved into memory.

Another way of thinking about it is this: why does each method fail? Physical memory fails when they are incomplete (you didn't add something to the list when you were supposed to either because you didn't want to expend the physical energy or because you didn't successfully remember to add something to the list) or not present when you need them. Mental memory fails when an item isn't properly saved or is lost before it is retrieved.

How to improve your memory

Most people will say that they don't have a good memory and that's why they have to write things down. But how many of us have really worked on improving our memory? How many of us were taught to memorize things by repeating them over and over? That's actually one of the worst ways to memorize something, especially because our brain learns to ignore things that are repeated repeatedly… in the same way that it'll learn to filter out noise from a loud room. It's possible to remember something the first time you encounter it… if there's a vivid sensation attached to it. Particularly powerful sensations include:

• A striking image
• A powerful emotion
• A new smell

All you have to do to remember something is associate it with a striking image, a powerful emotion, or a new smell. Using these techniques, people have recited the first 83,431 digits of pi, the entire Koran, the entire Guinness Book of World Records, the weather and day of the week for any date in a person's life, and many other ridiculous things. These people are labelled as having photographic, or eidetic, memory.

But, even more amazing and not as much of a scientific anomaly is the fact that each of us can remember an insane amount of information every day without any effort at all. You can remember scenes from movies, quotes from television shows, the lyrics to songs, the clothes people wear, people you've run into at a coffee shop or bar, and any number of details. What separates this information from your grocery list and what you had for lunch last Tuesday? The former are associated with striking images, powerful emotions, and (okay, maybe not that often) new smells. The later, are not.

Here's how you remember something after experiencing it once

Associate it with a striking image. Of the three options given above, this is the one that is most universally applicable. It's not that easy to evoke a powerful emotion or new smell on demand… but it is easy to think of a weird striking image on demand (after a little practice).

There are several well-established ways to do this. Here are a few pointers to great resources:

• Memory Master — I love this site! [via Steve Pavlina]
• The Memory Book [Harry Lorayne]
• The peg system [Wikipedia]
• The major system [Wikipedia]

I'll be exploring some of these techniques more in future entries, as well as ways to continue to explore the possibility of using your brain instead of, and in addition to, technology and things that are expensive and which you are suspicious of.

Your working memory (some people call it their short-term memory) is one of the weirdest tools of the mind. It is that mental space at the forefront of our minds where we put everything that we want to have available to us but don't yet know if it's important enough to keep in longer term memory. A few characteristics of this mental fanny pack (David Allen calls "psychic RAM") include:

• Urgent, unfinished: The information is usually attached to some urgent, unfinished, task. Your brain assumes that it will get done soon, so doesn't bother trying to find any more permanent storage for the information.
• Constantly recalled: This information acts like a rotating merry-go-round of information constantly circling back around to consciousness. This needs to happen or else it will fall out of memory and be lost. As a result, information in your working memory is constantly distracting you.
• Stressful: Each piece of information carries with it a teaspoon of stress… this stress is the energy that it sends to you in order to give in another ride on the merry-go-round. Without the stress, you would stop caring about the information and it would fall out of memory. With the stress, you give the information a ticket to ride the merry-go-round one more time and hope that next time it comes around you might be more inclined or able to resolve the issue that the information is being saved for.

Realizing the characteristics, limitations, and strengths of your working memory is essential to making sure you use it correctly. For example, because this information literally uses distraction and stress as the mechanism for keeping itself in memory, you should make sure that the information you keep there is not only urgent but also important. Or, if you subscribe to the Getting Things Done model, you should attempt to remove almost all information from your working memory and capture it in ways that do not rely on stress and distraction for their survival. The desire to call your mom for Mother's Day need not make 100 cycles through your mind before you actually do it… just capture that information on a calendar once, make sure that you regularly check this calendar, and make it through the next three days with that much less stress and that much less distraction.

Link: Working Memory [Wikipedia]

Confabulation is what happens when your imagination works with your memory to generate a story, in particular it is the confusion of imagined details with true events. The interesting thing about confabulation is that you cannot avoid it. Imagination and memory are two heads of the same coin. Every time you access a memory, your brain will load it up into the imagination, fill in any missing details, and re-write it back into memory. As a result, stories will change and crystalize over time. In addition to this imagination/memory link, there are a couple other interesting processes at work here:

Mirror neurons. Mirror neurons our one of our brain's greatest inventions. They allow us to learn from other people's successes and failures without having to experience them directly. Your brain stores details about stories heard from others (depending on your level of empathy) in the same way that it stores facts about things you saw and experienced personally. Have you ever told a story that you thought happened to you only to realize later that it had actually happened to someone else and you had in fact related to it to the extent of adopting it as your own, unintentionally?

Choice blindness. We are often not given direct access to the reasons we act the way we do. We will sometimes say something we do not want to say, or choose something based on a "gut feeling" or and impulse. One of the most active portions of our conscious mind is its ability to attach stories to our behavior… to explain it both to ourselves and to others. Choice blindess is a psychology term coined by Petter Johansson to explain the slight confabulation that must occur whenever we attempt to explain why we chose something that we do not know exactly why we chose.

Confabulation is a wonderful thing. Confabulation is nothing to feel guilty about… it's more of a revelation than a confession to realize just how integral our imaginations are in processing and relating stories and experiences in our daily life. Enjoy your own confabulation, and the confabulation of others… it makes life feel a little more playful.

If you're interested in reading more about confabulation:

• Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task [Science]
• Choice Blindness Lab [Lund University Cognitive Science]
• Truth about Confabulation [Memory Loss & The Brain]
• Confabulation, Mirror Neurons, and False Memory [Wikipedia]