I’ve just returned from the Summer Holidays and practice is commencing again from after the Bank Holiday. (Tuesday 28th August.)
Normal service will resume – clients scheduled in already before the summer should have recieved a text message to confirm your appointment.
To book a 1st appointment (at least 7 days in advance), just give me a call on 07738088632.
(Blogging to resume shortly)
This blog and a few planned for the future have been inspired by a little book called “Mind” by John R Searle.
Fantastic in it’s provocation of ideas even if I don’t entirely agree with all it’s content.
It’s a whistle stop tour of various philosophical ideas of the mind featuring particularly on materialists vs dualists.
It can get a little bit introspective at times and the geek in me enjoys the logical loops; but we”ll leave that to another day. I much prefer to blog how specifically it can give the therapist an insight into how they work with people and the client or potential client an insight into how they can run their own lives.
One of the first things it got me thinking about is the difference between Observer Independent Phenomena and Observer Dependent Phenomena.
The former being anything that would happen without human behaviour or interaction. It’s the whole “If a tree fell down in an empty forest, does it still make a sound?”
The latter being anything that we’ve created in society or in our perceptions.
So what are examples of independent phenomena? Well gravity would happen whether we influence it or not, so would the solar system and photosynthesis.
So, what are observer dependent phenomena? These are essentially our social constructions. Our family, the Government, Money. Things that whilst they exist in most of our lives, would not happen if we didn’t create our perceptions of them either individually or within the small or larger community.
So, all very nice but how is this useful or helpful?
Well, when someone has a problem for instance.; Consider maybe they’re depressed, anxious or just not feeling as confident as they can be? How much of their problem is related to Observer Independent Phenomena and how much on Dependent Phenonema?
In the possible but unlikely event someone is anxious about gravity, or photosynthesis – you have a problem on your hands and that’s for another blog.
But how often do we allow ourselves in life to get hung up on family issues? How often do we place anxiety within our relationship to someone or something? And the biggie, how often do we create a world of difficulties around money?
It doesn’t mean these things can just go away; but it does mean that when you start to consider that they were only observable dependent phenomena in the first place- you have a few more choices.
You could choose not to observe them.
This is the ‘bury your head in the sand’ approach that’s coveted by millions all over the world. It’s a great, economic and clever solution. There’s a problem, though. It rarely works for a long period of time. It’s going to come back, sneak up and bite you some time. Sometimes not quite in the same form, but it will find a way.
A good example is someone who wants to lose weight. If they take the run away approach- sure, they’re not going to notice for a while their ‘problem’ but they’ll certainly notice if they run into health issues or self-esteem issues projected on them by other people in the long run.
So what else is there to do? Well we know they’re observable…so how about changing the way we observe them? We often talk about ‘positive thinking.’ This is one way of observing things differently. Again, though forcing a positive tint to everything can often be a little similar bury the head in the sand/run away approach.
So what’s left? Well we don’t have to positive think (all the time) but we could choose to think differently. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got – so it’s time to do something different.
If it’s weight loss- maybe it’s to exercise more or change your relationship with food; for anxiety- working on what makes you anxious in the future and what’s worth your energy and time and for depression- sometimes it can be about reassessment of perceptions. Changing how we observe those dependent phenomena.
Isn’t it about time rather then you being dependent on them, they start to depend on you? After all, they only exist in your perception anyhow.
So maybe the real question is ‘If a tree falls in the forest and does or does not make a sound, how much does anyone care?’
And, how much time and effort do we all give to the things in life that are dependent and/or independent of us?
Zack Polanski is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, Master Prac and New Code NLP Practitoner at 1 Harley St, London.
For more information, call on 07738088632 or e-mail info@zackpolanski.com
Article by a friend (Helen Thomson) in the New Scientist Magazine on Alpha, Beta and Gamma Waves.
Really interesting, stuff. There’s nothing particularly new per se, yet it’s described from a slightly different perceptual position and I think it lifts the whole thing.
Let me know what you think.
I’ve just had a brainwave. Oh, and there’s another. And another! In fact, you will have had thousands of them since you started reading this sentence. These waves of electricity flow around our brains every second of the day, allowing neurons to communicate while we walk, talk, think and feel.
Exactly where brainwaves are generated in the brain, and how they communicate information, is something of a mystery. As we begin to answer these questions, surprising functions of these ripples of neural activity are emerging. It turns out they underpin almost everything going on in our minds, including memory, attention and even our intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, haphazard brainwaves may underlie the delusions experienced by people with schizophrenia, and researchers are investigating this possibility in the hope that it will lead to treatments for this devastating condition.
So what exactly is a brainwave? Despite the way it is bandied about in everyday chit-chat, the term “brainwave” has a specific meaning in neuroscience, referring to rhythmic changes in the electrical activity of a group of neurons. Each neuron has a voltage, which can change when ions flow in or out of the cell. This is normally triggered by stimulation from another cell, and once a neuron’s voltage has reached a certain point, it too will fire an electrical signal to other cells, repeating the process. When many neurons fire at the same time, we see these changes in the form of a wave, as groups of neurons are all excited, silent, then excited again, at the same time.
At any one time, a number of brainwaves are sweeping through the brain, each oscillating at a different frequency, classified in bands called alpha, theta, beta and gamma, and each associated with a different task (see diagram). This rhythmic activity turns out to be the perfect way to organise all the information hitting our senses. Every sensation we feel, from the itch of a sweater to the buzz of a cellphone, triggers a shower of neural signals. Brainwaves may provide clarity in this electrical storm by synchronising all the activity corresponding to a single stimulus – the words on this page, say – to a particular frequency, while neurons attending to another stimulus fire at a different frequency. This would allow brain cells to tune in to the frequency corresponding to their particular task while ignoring irrelevant signals, in much the same way we home in on different waves to pick up different radio stations.
“Brains have problems distinguishing signal and noise,” says Karl Deisseroth, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “We’ve found that in order for neuron A to talk with neuron B, it can better transfer information if it can synchronise its activity.”
The importance of signal synchronisation becomes clear when you consider that the different aspects of a sensation – colour and shape in vision, for example – are processed in different parts of the brain before being sent to another region that binds them back together. “Imagine you are looking at an apple,” says Deisseroth. “The apple’s redness and roundness are picked up by different cells in the brain, but you don’t see a red thing and a round thing – it’s one item.”
The rhythmic activity of brainwaves ensures that all the relevant signals relating to the sensation arrive at the binding region at exactly the same time. This allows the receiving neurons to process the signals together, recombining them into a single sensation. “If neurons are oscillating at the same frequency, signals from a stimulus would be treated together because the firing came in at the same time, and at the same point on the oscillation, so that the object is perceived as a whole rather than the separate details,” explains Laura Colgin at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
Beyond their role in binding together all aspects of a sensation, however, the properties of brainwaves had remained murky. How, for example, do their specific characteristics, like the timing of each wave’s rhythm, influence what we see, hear or remember? “We are only just beginning to understand these mechanisms,” Deisseroth says.
Last year, Niko Busch, then at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse, France, found that the activity of a certain kind of brainwave determines whether something is seen or not. He used electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity through the scalp, to assess the neural activity of 12 volunteers exposed to rapid flashes of light. Surprisingly, the volunteers’ brainwaves could be used to predict exactly which flashes they would see. If the flash coincided with the peak of a wave in the alpha or theta frequencies, they saw it, but if it occurred when the wave was at its trough, they didn’t (Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 7869). That fits, says Busch, since neurons are more likely to fire in response to visual input if they are already excited.
The relative rhythms of various regions may also determine what we perceive. This was shown by Lucia Melloni at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and colleagues when they measured the brainwaves of 15 students while they worked out whether a “test” word was the same as one they had already glimpsed briefly. The task was simple enough, except that the initial word was preceded and followed by a “visual mask” – a geometric pattern that confused the brain so the volunteers did not always perceive the word consciously.
Somewhat surprisingly, the team found roughly the same level of brain activity, in the same regions of the brain, whether the word was perceived consciously or not. The difference lay in the synchronisation of the brainwaves within those regions. When the volunteers consciously perceived the word, brainwaves in the gamma frequency range in all the relevant brain regions were in sync. When the waves were out of sync, however, the word lurked in the subconscious (Journal of Neuroscience, vol 27, p 2858). “It appears that to consciously perceive a stimulus, you need coordination not only in local activity but also in long-distance areas in different parts of the brain,” says Melloni. That adds up, she says, since consciousness needs the integration of multiple sources of information into a single unified experience. What’s more, the strength of synchronisation between the individual neurons can also determine how strongly we perceive certain characteristics of an image, such as its brightness (see “Synchronising brightness”).
Perhaps the most significant function of brainwaves, however, is their role in memory. Last year, Colgin and her colleagues managed to pin down the way gamma brainwaves control the flow of stored information in the brain. The team looked at two areas of the hippocampus – CA3, which is known to evoke memories of past experiences, and the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), which deals with information about the present moment. Both regions appear to transmit their information to a third region, called CA1, through brainwaves in the gamma frequency band. Importantly, the team found that the specific frequency of the gamma waves marked what type of information was being transmitted, with low-frequency gamma waves sending the old memories from CA3, and high-frequency gamma waves sending information about the present from the MEC (Nature, vol 462, p 353).
The hippocampus switches between these two brainwaves rapidly and sporadically over time. “It’s as if CA1 tunes into the different frequencies to receive the different types of information,” says Colgin. This fits with previous experiments that show fast oscillations produce the long-lasting connections between cells fundamental to memory formation. In contrast, the slow gamma waves from CA3 are too slow to strengthen these connections, “so it’s likely [someone] can retrieve an old memory without interfering with its previously formed storage pattern”, says Colgin.
Out of rhythm, out of mind
Together, these findings could go some way to explaining disorders like schizophrenia, says Deisseroth. Numerous experiments have found that the brainwaves of people with schizophrenia differ from those of people free of the disorder; they either don’t spread far enough in the brain, or aren’t tightly synchronised with one another. These differences have been linked to various symptoms. For example, reduced synchronisation, and therefore communication, between the different parts of the brain involved in planning, executing and then sensing speech could mean that a person with schizophrenia fails to recognise the words they have uttered as being their own, leading them to attribute the voice to someone else instead.
Faulty gamma waves in the hippocampus, on the other hand, might lead to an “inability to clearly distinguish thoughts that are formed within their own heads (like memories) from sensory events that are actually driven by what is going on in the outside world”, according to Colgin.
Deisseroth agrees. People with schizophrenia “often ascribe too much importance to random environmental stimuli, or misattribute the cause of something”, he says. “They may confuse memories or think they did something they actually didn’t do, and such hallucinations can lead to paranoia and delusions.”
The big question, then, is whether anything can be done to retune these brainwaves and restore normal brain function. First things first, says Deisseroth. “Before we consider rewiring the brain, we need to understand what might be generating the waves in the first place.”
To investigate, Deisseroth’s team focused on parvalbumin interneurons (PV), a type of neuron found throughout the brain that is known to be involved in processing sensory information, making it a prime candidate as a gamma-wave generator. Significantly, people with schizophrenia tend to have fewer PV neurons than average.
But here they hit a hurdle. How do you control individual types of neurons in the brain so specifically that you can analyse the resulting effect on information flow? For a long time it was impossible, says Deisseroth. Last year, however, his team applied a technique they had previously developed, called optogenetics, to genetically engineer the PV neurons in a group of mice to respond to pulses of visible light. This allowed them to control the neurons on demand. They found that inhibiting PV neurons suppressed gamma oscillations, while driving them generated gamma waves (Nature, vol 459, p 698).
Could these neurons be a suitable candidate for retuning? “That’s certainly what we consider a long-term goal,” says Deisseroth. “This will help us guide different therapies.”
Other groups have suggested that PV neurons in people with schizophrenia fail to synthesise and release enough of the neurotransmitter GABA, preventing brainwaves from being transmitted effectively (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol 6, p 312). Drugs that increase GABA release may improve the transmission of gamma waves and re-establish lost cognitive functions.
Helpfully, drugs that imitate GABA already exist, and they are used as muscle relaxants and treatments for anxiety. To find out whether they could have an effect on schizophrenia, for four weeks David Lewis, director of the translational neuroscience programme at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues gave 15 men with chronic schizophrenia a drug that selectively activated GABA receptors. Compared with a placebo, the drug counteracted some of their symptoms, improving their attention span and their ability to avoid automatic responses in certain situations (American Journal of Psychiatry, vol 165, p 1585). Further tests with a larger number of participants are needed before a full clinical trial can begin, however.
Drugs are not the only way we could retune gamma waves. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which exposes the brain to a short burst of a magnetic field, might stimulate the correct neural rhythms. It’s an appealing idea, since TMS has already been shown to reduce the urges of people with obsessive compulsive disorder (American Journal of Psychiatry, vol 154, p 867).
Brain training might be another option. Studies have shown that volunteers hooked up to a monitor that displays an instant replay of their brainwaves have been able to learn to suppress or activate specific brainwaves at will. Tomas Ros at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, recently observed that volunteers using this technique could change their neural activity in a way comparable to other methods of artificial brain stimulation. He found that the effects persisted for at least 20 minutes, indicative of long-lasting change in the way the neurons are wired (European Journal of Neuroscience, vol 31, p 770).
Although the long-term goal is to use the technique to treat people with mental illness, it might also be useful to retune the healthy brain occasionally. André Keizer at Leiden University in the Netherlands showed that healthy volunteers linked up to a neurofeedback machine could boost not only the power of their gamma waves, but also their performance on abstract reasoning tests that act as a marker of intelligence – probably because it improved the transfer of information across the brain (International Journal of Psychophysiology, vol 75, p 25).
Boosting gamma brainwaves improved subjects’ performance on abstract reasoning tests
For now, we should be content in the knowledge that, for most of us, our brainwaves are working in sync. They might not make you a genius, but they are behind every thought or feeling you have ever experienced.
Zack is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist working from The Lewis Clinic, 1 Harley Street, London. Using the latest advances in NLP, he can help you with any issues around confidence, stress, anxiety, stopping smoking, trauma and performance enhancement. Contact Details: 07738088632 or info@zackpolanski.com
Life at the clinic has been really varied and interesting, recently.
There’s been many clients that have surprised me with their resilence and inner strength to change; to wanting to get over the things that have been holding them back and allowing themselves to move forward.
It’s been, even more than usual, a real mix of seeing people who are feeling anxious, depressed, unconfident, phobic and/or addicted in equal measures – and it’s been wonderful, as always, to see people moving on with their lives.
I realise that I want to start a testimonial page soon, so people can read some of these stories. I’ve always been reluctant to have a Testimonial’s page – as for me, it can seem a little cliche. I also don’t like the emotional pressure on people to write their stories down afterwards- but in an increasingly digital age, i’m starting to see the benefit in sharing the wealth of stories that people already share with me.
To this end, if you’d like to write a testimonial- then please feel free to e-mail me at info@zackpolanski.com.
We’ll remove all actual identity statements,and make sure the published text is completely anon. – with just age and gender.
And here’s to the future; to the individuals i’ve not met yet whom I look forward to getting to know and see them make differences to their own lives.
Whether it be small little differences over a longer period of time, a huge difference in a very short amount of time or somewhere in between really isn’t the point; It’s just about doing whatever you want to do it, in the time that you’re allowing yourself to do it.
Remembering, if you do what you’ve always done; you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
Let’s do something different.
Zack is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist at the Lewis Clinic, 1 Harley Street. You can e-mail on info@zackpolanski.com or just give him a call on 07738088632.
Within a few years, a standard aspect of your health care could include the decoding of every aspect of your genetic make-up.
This would predict the diseases you are likely to develop in the future, which treatments will work best for your illnesses and what doses would best suit you.
The basic technology for doing this – sequencing the human genome – is evolving at an extraordinary pace. What has been, up until now, a revolutionary research tool is fast advancing towards the clinic.
It took 2,000 of the world’s scientists more than 10 years and $2.7bn to read the first human genome. Today the same job takes one lab three weeks and less than $10,000.
Continue reading the main story
I think it’s far more important than walking on the Moon; not much has happened since walking on the Moon
Dr Craig Venter JCVI
Before long, your doctor might soon be able to read your entire genetic code for $1,000 in even less time.
Ten years ago this week – on 26 June 2000 – President Bill Clinton invited scientists into the White House to announce that they had compiled their first draft of the human genome sequence.
The Human Genome Project analysed the entire DNA of what amounted to one individual person. It read out the order, or sequence, of most of the three billion letters of molecular code which it contains.
The genome is the term for this complete set of genetic instructions. It includes the code for some 20,000 genes. It is sometimes described as the “book of life”.
John Sulston was the director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, which sequenced one third of the human instruction manual during the Human Genome Project.
Genome race
As well as regarding the feat as an historic scientific achievement, he believes that the sequencing of our genome was a significant philosophical milestone.
“Here we have a species, ourselves, which in the course of four and half billion years of evolution, has arisen and has become smart enough to read out its own code of instructions,” he said.
During the later years of the publically-funded project, Professor Sulston and his colleagues found themselves in competition to sequence the genome with a commercial company, Celera Genomics, which was established by Craig Venter.
Dr Venter was in the news only last month, having created a bacterium with an entirely laboratory-made genome.
In conversation with the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on BBC Radio 4’s “The Age of the Genome”, Craig Venter is in no doubt about the place in history that sequencing the book of life deserves: “I think it’s far more important than walking on the Moon; not much has happened since walking on the Moon.”
Craig Venter points out that access to the complete genetic code transformed medical research.
“I actually call it a silent revolution because most people don’t realise that before we sequenced the human genome, discovering human genes was an extremely slow process.”
Before the genome was laid bare, the search for just one gene implicated in a particular illness could take a team of scientists longer than ten years. Today gene hunting is much easier and quicker.
In 2000, we knew of just a handful of genes which influence our risk of developing common diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancers.
According to Peter Donnelly, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, says: “Because of the experiments we are now able to do, that number has gone from ten or twenty to something like 700, across well over 100 diseases now.”
However, there are still many more genes to discover and characterise before doctors are in a position to offer us a broad and accurate “one-shot” genome reading.
One of the clinical expectations from the human genome project was that one day we would be going to our doctors for a personal genome reading.
These DNA check-ups would reveal with precision our individual risks for the whole gamut of common diseases. Our doctors would advise us on lifestyle and prescribe preventive medicines and measures accordingly, tailored to our genetic endowment.
Faster, cheaper
The technical means to do this cheaply is likely to be in place if and when geneticists have identified enough genetic information to make clinical genomic scans worthwhile.
The speed at which a genome can be sequenced doubles every year. The price is also plummeting. The cost of decoding a human has fallen by 320,000 times.
At the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Mark McCarthy is currently sequencing the genomes of 3,000 individuals in the search for genetic differences which predispose some people to type 2 diabetes.
He says that although DNA sequencing machines are currently only affordable and useful for research, it might not be many years before they are at work in the health service.
“There are certainly efforts to drive the costs down to a few hundred dollars in the not too distant future,” he says.
“And when you think about it that compares to the cost of an MRI scan or an endoscopy or many of the things we consider to be regular parts of clinical practice.
“And then the questions will be whether the information that we can gather from knowing your genome or my genome could be useful in terms of offering you or me better clinical care.”
- BBC News
From the Times today;
Antidepressants of the Prozac type are no better than a placebo, a leading psychologist has claimed. According to Irving Kirsch, the evidence is overwhelming that there is no link between depression and serotonin, the brain chemical that such drugs are supposed to affect.
Practising psychiatrists, however, say that it would be disastrous to use stricter criteria for the prescription of antidepressants on the basis of Professor Kirsch’s research findings. “Be very careful what you advise, because we in the surgeries will be left to pick up the pieces,” said Amjad Uppal, a consultant psychiatrist for the Gloucestershire NHS Trust.
Last year in England the NHS issued 39 million prescriptions to treat depression, more than half being for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor” (SSRI) drugs. Three million people took antidepressants daily. Antidepressants including Prozac and the newer generation of SSRIs, such as Seroxat, are taken to increase the level of serotonin in the brain.
Professor Kirsch argued that they worked through the placebo effect — patients expect to be made to feel better — and said that “talking treatments” such as cognitive behavioural therapy were more effective in the long term.
Related Links
* Genetic test metches patients with drugs
* Barking mad? No, just doggie depression
“Although the chemical-imbalance theory is often presented as if it were fact, it is actually a controversial hypothesis,” he said. “This is about as close as a theory gets in science to being disproven by the evidence.”
Others maintain that antidepressants do have an active biochemical influence. “We do not fully understand how these drugs work, but there is evidence that they influence the number of neurons and the connections between neurons. You can’t draw conclusions about this because of the nature of the study,” said Hamish McAllister- Williams, a consultant psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist at Newcastle University.
He said that depression was a dangerous illness, noting that sufferers were at as high a risk of a heart attack as those who smoked 20 cigarettes a day.
Dr McAllister-Williams believed that “at least a proportion” of the effect of the drugs was “due to active ingredients, but either way they work and we really need an effective treatment”. Dr Uppal said: “I have a very high threshold for prescribing antidepressants, but there’s no doubt in my mind they work. Research studies are artificial and do not capture the difference between effectiveness and efficacy.”
Professor Kirsch’s research, presented at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival, shows that a new drug, tianeptine, is just as effective as SSRIs in treating depression. Tianeptine, which is a serotonin reuptake enhancer, actually decreases the level of the chemical.
In comparisons of tianeptine with SSRIs and the earlier tricyclic antidepressants, the three produced virtually identical response rates: 63 per cent of patients responded to tianeptine, 62 per cent to SSRIs and 65 per cent to tricyclics. If drugs having three different effects on serotonin brought similar benefits, these could not be due to their specific chemical activity, Professor Kirsch said. “The idea that the neurotransmitter serotonin is a causal factor in depression is wrong.”
Came across this and I think it describes part of the therapy process well:
Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. ”
Lewis B. Smedes
_________________
If I had my life to live over,
I’d try to make more mistakes next time.
I would relax. I would limber up.
I would be sillier than I have on this trip.
I would be crazier. I would be less hygienic.
I would take more chances, I would take more trips.
I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets.
I would burn more gasoline. I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I am one of those people who lives prophylactically and sensibly and sanely, hour after hour, day after day.
Oh, I have had my moments
And if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them.
In fact, I’d try to have nothing else.
Just moments,one after another.
Instead of living so many years ahead each day.
I have been one of those people who never go anywhere without a thermometer, a hot
water bottle, a gargle, a raincoat, and a parachute.
If I had to do it over again, I would go places and do things.
I’d travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefooted earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.
I would play hooky more. I wouldn’t make such good grades except by accident.
I would ride on merry-go-rounds.
I’d pick more daisies!
Nadine Stair
It’s been a really interesting week.
Not just politically and not just because the weather has been going to and fro but a really common theme in everything that i’ve heard both with clients and the public around me is this idea of resolutions and compromise
Some of them have been the obvious stuff like ‘i want to lose weight,’ or ‘i don’t want to smoke anymore’ and some have been more unusual. I saw a father for his final (5th) session who’s final aim was to be more understanding with his children. And then interestingly, there was one lady who’d experienced a form of trauma and wanted to start this month by leaving it behind.
As always in my blogs, I checked that she didn’t mind me talking about it as long as I left her anonymous.
The abuse aside, looking forward to the future was a real moment for her. She’d never taken that time to really think about what she wanted. And the actual content of it, in the end, turned out not to matter- much more important and profound for her was the process of how she was going to get it and how she was going to divert around not getting what she’s not wanting.
We spoke on the phone, just an hour ago which prompted the blog entry- and she just said that she felt the hour together had really made an impact on her life.
The idea of “What makes us tick?”
Tony Robbins would suggest that there are several factors;
1) Certainty – Do you like surprises? Ha. Only the ones that you wanted. Everything else we label as a problem.
2) Uncertainty- What happens if you only had certainty in your life? You’d be bored, right?
3) Significance- We’re all striving for this in some way. Some do it through financial means, others by striving for intellectual precidence and others by meaning something to their partner. We often see it in youth through violence; if there’s no other way out, they can strive to cause damage to others.
4) Love/Connection- Everyone wants the first, but sometimes when we get scared; maybe we can just settle for the second. This is what Robbins suggests in his most recent book.
Whilst I think these are useful models, I think it’s important to take them for what they are- models. Ultimately, it has to be about what does the individual want?
So here’s the question?
What do you want in your life right now? Do you want to be free of that phobia? Not feel anxiety any more? Not to suffer from lack of confidence or insecurity?
And if any of those, what is it that you actually want?
Do you just need to feel ok? Or how about maybe, just maybe, you want to feel great?
Whatever it is, intentionally setting a conscious target can only point you in the right direction.
Zack Polanski is a Cognitive Hypnotherapist and NLP New Code Practitioner. For information prior to booking an appointment, call on 07738088632 or alternatively e-mail at info@zackpolanski.com
From the New Scientist…
YOUR plane crashes and you find yourself stranded in the middle of a vast jungle. How would you work out which fruits are safe to eat and where to find clean water? You could muddle along on your own for a while, but you would probably end up sick and very hungry. Far better to find some friendly locals and learn how they do things.
Learning from others is something we do all the time, not just in extremis. We are more reliant on so-called “social learning” than any other animal – it is thought to be at the core of culture and tradition and is credited with our successful colonisation of the planet. Yet no one knows exactly how social learning works. Obviously, copying others allows us to acquire useful knowledge without having to bear the costs of working everything out for ourselves. But there is a catch. If societies are to adapt to changing conditions, there must be innovation too – people cannot blindly copy everything because the information may be wrong, outdated or unavailable.
This problem has occupied Kevin Laland of the University of St Andrews, UK, for some time. “Individuals ought to be selective with respect to when they rely on social learning and from whom they learn,” he says. “Natural selection ought to have fashioned specific adaptive learning strategies.” But what are these strategies? If social learning is such a powerful force in our species’ success, surely we need to know when, where and why it happens. Yet previous attempts to answer these questions have only scratched the surface. Laland realised that if he was going to get anywhere he would have to come up with an original approach.
Until then, only a tiny fraction of the possible learning strategies had been investigated. The most thoroughly researched was the “conformist transmission model” – the idea that a person is more likely to copy traits that are common in the population than those that are rare. An alternative is “copy an expert”, which seems like a reasonable rule to follow when buying a new computer or shares on the stock market, for example. “Copy the most successful” also makes intuitive sense, although in our celebrity-oriented world there is a chance it might backfire – George Clooney may endorse a certain brand of coffee, but does he really know any more about beverages than the next person?
Let battle commence
Laland wanted to consider a much broader range of strategies and, crucially, to find out which ones work best. He realised he could not do that with a traditional experiment, so he hit on the idea of holding a tournament. His inspiration came from a series of open competitions held in the 1970s to examine why cooperation evolved. These tournaments, based around the prisoner’s dilemma, which involves deciding when to cooperate and when to defect, were a shot in the arm for research into cooperation. Laland hoped a tournament could be just as successful for social learning. “We thought if we were to advertise this idea widely we could attract all kinds of people into the field,” he says. So, teaming up with several other experts in social learning, Laland secured enough funding from the European Union to pay for the project, including a €10,000 prize for the tournament winner.
Their competition was going to be a game of survival, taking place in a computer-generated world. Virtual agents would have the potential to acquire 100 possible behaviours, each with a different associated pay-off that would change over the course of the game. The pay-off represents the benefit an individual gains by performing a particular behaviour, its changing value reflecting the fact that information can become outdated as the environment changes.
Entrants to the tournament would start with 100 agents each, which would accumulate a repertoire of behaviours over their lifetime through learning. At every round of the game, each agent would have three options: innovation, in which they randomly acquired a new behaviour by individual learning; observation, in which they acquired a new behaviour by social learning; or exploitation, in which they used a previously learned behaviour and so gained its pay-off. The entrants had to devise a strategy that their agents would use to decide between these options. The challenge was to create the strategy that generated the most successful or “fittest” agents – a criterion measured by dividing an agent’s accumulated pay-off value by the number of rounds it had survived. Furthermore, in each round, every agent would have a 1 in 50 chance of dying. The deceased would then be replaced by an “offspring” of another agent. Agents were chosen to “reproduce” with a probability proportional to their mean lifetime pay-off. So the better a strategy’s performance, the bigger the share of the population its agents were likely to have. By this simulated version of natural selection, the entrant with the most successful strategy would have the most agents at the end of the game.
There were two phases to the tournament. The first was a round robin where all strategies played each other for 10,000 rounds in pairwise contests. The strategy with the most agents at the end was the winner. Then, in the second phase, the 10 highest scoring strategies were thrown in together to see who would win overall. They battled it out in a variety of simulated environments, differing in such parameters as the number of agents a potential learner was able to observe, the likelihood that an agent using social learning would pick up the wrong information, and the way in which pay-offs associated with behaviours changed over time. The aim here was to test how robust the strategies were in different learning environments because in the real world the costs and benefits of social learning versus individual learning may vary.
And the winner is…
The competition, held last year, turned out to be an irresistible challenge to many, with over 100 entries submitted from a variety of academic disciplines, ranging from philosophy to computer science, and even some school pupils. In fact, two teenagers from Westminster School in London beat most of the academics to come tenth overall.
Last month, Laland and colleagues published their findings in Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1184719. So what did they discover? It seems a successful strategy rests primarily on the amount of social learning involved, with the most successful agents spending almost all their learning time observing rather than innovating. However, avoiding spending too much time learning either socially or individually was just as important. “Between a tenth and a fifth of their life seemed to be the optimal range,” says fellow organiser Luke Rendell, also from St Andrews University. “If they did more learning than that it seemed that life was just passing them by.”
The most successful agents spent almost all their learning time observing rather than innovating
Successful strategies were also good at spacing out learning throughout the agents’ lives. The winning strategy, Discount Machine, submitted by PhD students Daniel Cownden and Timothy Lillicrap from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, stood out because it did just this. It seems packing all your learning into the early part of your life is not a great idea – we need to keep updating our knowledge as we go along.
Lillicrap points out that the questions their strategy addressed resemble those posed in real life. “We face similar trade-offs all the time – for example, how much education should I get before I join the workforce?” To answer such a question we need to consider various factors such as how much more do I expect to earn with this training? How long is it going to take? What’s the likelihood that my training will become irrelevant? How long will I be in the workforce? “Our strategy takes those things into account,” he says.
Another attribute of the most successful strategies is that they are parasitic. This is the essence of social learning – somebody has to do the hard graft to find out how to do things before other people can copy them, so it only pays to learn socially when there are some innovators around. Indeed, in contests where Discount Machine agents were able to invade the entire population, they actually ended up with a lower average pay-off than they did in contests where the conditions allowed some agents with more innovative strategies to survive, so providing new behaviours to copy.
This also has real-world implications. Could it be that we don’t all use the same optimal social learning strategy? “It’s quite clear that you would expect social learning to evolve and be favoured,” says Laland. But if everyone relied heavily on it then there would be a decrease in the population’s fitness and subsequent advantages for individuals who are more inclined to learn for themselves.
General observation certainly suggests that people vary considerably in their propensity to copy others or find stuff out for themselves. Personality traits such as creativity and curiosity are clearly linked to the ability and willingness to carry out successful individual learning, and these traits vary widely.
There also seems to be a gender difference. Kimmo Eriksson of Malardalen University in Sweden, one of the tournament’s designers, and Pontus Strimling of Stockholm University discovered this when they carried out a game called explore and collect, in which paired players tried to get the highest possible score among a number of undisclosed options by either uncovering the relative ranks of options for themselves or choosing options already favoured by the other player (Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, vol 7, p 309). “We found that women tend to invest more in individual learning than men, in the sense that they spend more effort on trying out a greater number of unknown options,” says Eriksson.
As well as highlighting the variability in our individual approaches to social learning, the tournament has also shed light on an apparent paradox. Laland and others have found that social learning is widespread in nature, even being used by invertebrates. So what’s so special about copying in humans?
Social learning is widespread in nature. So what’s so special about copying in humans?
Firstly, says Laland, the competition reveals that social learning does not require much brainpower. “You don’t need any clever copying rules. You can just copy anyone at random,” he says. “Other individuals are doing the filtering for you. They will have tried out a number of behaviours and they will tend to perform the ones which are reaping the highest rewards.” That explains why even insects can benefit from social learning. “But,” he adds, “to become the winner of the tournament you really have to do something a bit more sophisticated than that.” You have to weigh up the relative costs and benefits of sticking with the behaviour that you have, versus inventing a new behaviour, versus copying others. That requires assessing how quickly the environment is changing, as this gives you an idea of how quickly information will become outdated. Discount Machine was very good at doing just that – in variable environments it placed a higher value on more recently acquired information and discounted older information more readily.
It is in this ability that humans seem to have the edge over other animals. That’s not to say we are alone in making these sorts of calculations, though. For example, Laland and his colleagues have found that sticklebacks can do it. First they taught individual fish to expect more food at site A than site B. Then they switched the food around, but the only clue to the deception was that there were now more fish feeding at B than A. It turns out that the longer it has been since the fish checked the sites out for itself, the more it will rely on social information to tell it which site has the most food (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 271, p 957).
While this is impressive, humans have a unique talent that allows us to take account of passing time and changing circumstances far more effectively: language. “You can simply talk about what might happen,” says Rendell. Or you can use language to imagine yourself in a different place or time. Rendell suspects this may be what has enabled us to take full advantage of social learning, leading to the huge gap between human culture and the behaviour of other animals.
The tournament has undoubtedly provided several insights into social learning. According to Rob Boyd of the University of California, Los Angeles, a pioneer of social learning research and another of the tournament’s designers, its big advantage over previous approaches is the level of realism. It entails “much more environmental complexity and more cognitive complexity in the organisms”, he says. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement. Rendell points out that the simulations cannot track particular individuals through time, and that it doesn’t include formal teaching, a vital part of learning in the real world. “We want to explore additional complexities with some more tournaments in the future,” he says.
Before they do that, however, the team has another intriguing idea to pursue. “We want to go out and try to explore this in the real world,” says Rendell. “We plan to set up an experimental version of this tournament where we get people to play it themselves and see what they actually do.”
Mairi Macleod is a science writer based in Edinburgh, UK
Zack Polanski M.N.C.H (Lic) Dip CHyp HPD PNLP
Cognitive Hypnotherapist and NLP New Code Practitioner
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