Zombies Learn Too, But Not Well

I recently had a scholarly paper on free-will research published in a cognitive psychology journal. This experience has caused me to think about the role of free-will in learning and memory. Though it might seem like a stretch, how one approaches learning affects how well it is done. If you learn subconsciously, as in  being conditioned like Pavlov's dogs or trained seals, the learning is primitive and limited because it is hidden from consciousness. I call this zombie learning (anybody who has lectured to students has seen this happening throughout the room). On the other hand, when one consciously and freely wills to learn, he becomes engaged as an active learner. Such learning, being mediated in the consciousness, is available for refinement, expansion, application, and integration into other learning, past and future.
       Let me explain the point of reference. Ever drive a route so familiar you don’t remember getting there? It is as if your brain was on autopilot. Many scientists think this zombie-like behavior is the norm. They say that even when we are aware of having done something, it was willed subconsciously, and we only became consciously aware after the fact. This has led to a common notion among scholars that free will is an illusion. At least that is the argument promoted long ago by scholars like Darwin, Huxley, and Einstein. Many modern scientists also hold that position and have even performed experiments they say prove it.
        These experiments supposedly show that the brain makes a subconscious decision before it is realized consciously.  Well, I am not intimidated by science’s giants, past or present. In a paper in the current issue of Advances in Cognitive Psychology (Vol. 6, page 47-65), I challenge a whole series of experiments performed since the 1980s purported to show that intentions, choices, and decisions are made subconsciously, with conscious mind being informed after the fact.
       But these experiments do not test what they are intended to test and are misinterpreted to support the view of illusory free will. In the typical experiment, a subject is asked to voluntarily press a button at any time and notice the position of a clock marker when they think they first willed the movement. At the same time, brain activity is monitored over the part of the brain that controls the mechanics of the movement. The startling observation typically is that subjects show brain activity changes before they say they intended to make the movement. In other words the brain issued the command before the conscious mind had a chance to decide to move. All this happens in less than a second, but various scientists have interpreted this to mean that the subconscious mind made the decision to move and the conscious mind only realized the decision later.

My criticisms focus on three main points: 1) timing of when a free-will event occurred requires introspection, and other research shows that introspective estimates of event timing are not accurate, 2) simple finger movements may be performed without much conscious thought and certainly not representative of the conscious decisions and choices required in high-speed conversation or situations where the subconscious mind cannot know ahead of time what to do, and 3) the brain activity  measures have been primitive and incomplete.

I identify 12 categories of what I regard as flawed thinking about free will. Some of the more obvious issues that many scientists have glossed over include:

• Decisions are not often instantaneous (certainly not on a scale of a fraction of a second).
• Conscious realization that a decision has been made is delayed from the actual decision, and these may be two distinct processes.
• Decision making is not the only mental process going on in such tasks.
• Some willed action, as when first learning to play a musical instrument or touch type must be freely willed because the subconscious mind cannot know ahead of time what to do.
• Free-will experiments have relied too much on awareness of actions and time estimation of accuracy.
• Extrapolating from such simple experiments to all mental life is not justified.
• Conflicting data and interpretations have been ignored. 

In the real world, subconscious and conscious minds interact and share duties. Subconscious mind governs simple or well-learned tasks, like habits or ingrained prejudices, while conscious mind deals with tasks that are complex or novel, like first learning to ride a bike or play sheet music.

We do act like zombies driven by our subconscious when we act out of habit, prejudice, or prior conditioning. But we should and can  be responsible for what we make of our brains and for the choices in life we make. In a free-will world, people can choose to extricate themselves from many kinds of misfortune — not to mention make the right choices that can prevent misfortune.

An earlier book of mine on personal responsibility, Blame Game, How To Win It (http://blamegame.us) provided the inspiration to explore why people are not more responsible. It is not that we lack the capacity for free will. Rather, we fail to exercise it.

Relating these ideas to learning, we should strive to become active learners, consciously thinking about what we are learning, not trying to memorize it by rote. Rote memory doesn't work very well anyway, and it puts us in a zombie mode that prevents us from full understanding and capability to use the learned material.

Traumatic Memories, Part 1

Most of the time, most of us wish we could remember things better. But some of the time all of us have things we wish we could forget. Traumas, emotional upset, grief — all can be more than we can wish to bear.
     When anxiety becomes too intense and persistent, the level of stress becomes de-bilitating. There are many negative effects on the adrenal gland and its production of hormones that are designed to cope with stress. Beyond that, the brain is also affected. These effects are the hallmark of what is commonly called “Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome” (PTSD), which seems to be a common and growing problem with American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. While older people are in the wrong age bracket to have this problem, they are very likely to know about PTSD in soldiers and may even have children or grandchildren who have PTSD.
     You don't have to be a combat soldier to develop anxiety disorders such as PTSD. Everyone has probably had some kind of traumatic experience that caused a serious emotional trauma. Such experiences are always associated with a host of cues, many subconscious, that are part of the original learned traumatic experience. The learned association may be remembered at some unconscious level long after the conscious memory is lost.
      Sensory cues, even if not recognized consciously, can trigger recall of disturbing memories or even just the negative emotions that went with the original bad event. Sometimes this is the basis for so-called “anxiety attacks,” which seem to come out of nowhere.
      Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health problems and are often treated with so-called extinction therapies. That is, therapy is geared toward unlearning (extinguishing) our fears by deliberately re-living the disturbing event under safe conditions and thereby learning we can cope.      
Modern psychotherapy for phobias, anxiety, and PTSD often involves recalling the original bad event under reassuring conditions. But this has to be done with conscious re-assessment and realization that the original negative emotions and fear are no longer applicable because the re-living is a simulation in a safe environment. One creates a new learning substitute for the original emotional trauma.
      The re-living must include dealing with the negative emotions in the light of reason and new emotional experience. Therapy requires critical thinking about thoughts and feelings, especially those that are unhelpful and unrealistic. The patient is gently led to face memories anew and to learn new ways of thinking and behaving. This re-creation of the bad event allows us to extinguish memory of the original bad situation and its negative emotions.
      I recently got an up-date in this area of research at a seminar by Gregory Quick from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Puerto Rico. As Pavlov showed, memory extinction is a basic phenomenon even in simple animals. If you repeatedly ring a bell and then stress a rat, it soon learns to become distressed the next time it hears that bell, even after you stop the stress. In the lab, this is manifested by the rat showing freeze behavior. But, if you repeat the bell enough times without the stress, the conditioned response (CR) (freeze behavior) eventually becomes extinguished.
     At first, scientists thought that extinction erases the memory of the CR. But extinction really creates a new memory that competes with memory of the original CR. Both memories co-exist. Over time the extinction memory may be lost, and the CR can return. The implication is that, just as ordinary learning needs rehearsal, so does extinction learning.
     Therapy for emotional trauma and PTSD might be more effective if therapy were approached like a conventional learning experience whose memory is affected in all the usual ways. Recall what was said about extinction being a case of new learning. Re-learning of an extinguished response occurs much more readily than it does for an initial extinction learning. This is an example of priming. It’s like re-learning a foreign language. It goes easier the second time and the memory might be even more dependable.
      Since memory of an emotional CR learning experience and its extinction can co-exist, these two memories compete for which one is strong enough to survive long-term. Sadly, the CR memory is often stronger. Cues are extremely important to both forming and retrieving all kinds of memory. It seems likely there are many more explicit cues for CR memories than for extinction memories. Therapy should be aimed at enriching the number and variety of cues associated with extinction learning. Rehearsal is likewise important. So far, nobody seems to have given that much thought.
     There is another aspect to emotional learning: learning to learn. If you have multiple anxieties, they may generalize and "spread" to facilitate learning new anxieties. The corollary would be that learning how to promote extinction could also generalize and thus increasing the general ability to cope with emotional trauma. Obviously, for one's brain to learn how to do that, one would need to begin with a single relatively easy extinction learning task.
    
     Dr. Bill Klemm is a Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University. Visit his book site and blog at ThankYouBrain.com for more help on improving learning and memory. Copyright 2010, W. R. Klemm

Music Training Helps Learning & Memory

Music training is good for the brain. Nina Kraus, a prominent brain researcher at Northwestern University, says that "music training leads to changes throughout the auditory system that prime musicians for listening challenges beyond music processing." The research in her laboratory and that from other labs suggests music training does for brain what exercise does for body fitness. She says "music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness."

Musicians are commonly studied models for neural plasticity, which refers to the ability of learning experiences to change the brain chemically and physically. Musicians have more brain grey matter volume in areas that are important for playing an instrument and in the auditory cortex, which processes all kinds of sound. Of course, the effects of music training are most robust for processing of music. But benefit transfers to speech, language, emotion, and general auditory processing.

In general, auditory learning requires formation of efficient sound-to-meaning relation-ships, which in turn require attending to sensory details (fine-grained properties of sound such as pitch, timing and timbre), but also thinking skills related to integrating sensory input and operating on it in working memory.

Music training confers ability to assess the relevance and predictability of information-bearing elements in an auditory signal. So, even in non-musical contexts, such as listen-ing to a speech, lecture, or sound track in a movie for example, musicians should learn and remember more of the content than non-musicians. Musicians also have an advan-tage when it comes to learning the sounds of a new language.

Music training imposes a high working-memory load. That can be a good thing, in that it helps you expand your working memory capacity, and thus reduces the impairing effects on memory of working memory overload. Increasing working memory capacity also improves the ability to think, as manifest in IQ scores. Since musicians usually have greater working memory capacity, it doesn’t mean they are smarter than anybody else. But it probably does mean they are smarter than they would be if they were not musicians.

Music training also helps improve certain memory capabilities outside of music. For example, musicians show improvements in auditory verbal memory and auditory attention, but not in visual memory or visual attention. This brings up the matter of learning styles: auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learning. Most people are visual learners, but to the best possible learners they need to develop all three styles. Music training should help their auditory learning style, especially under conditions where the sounds to be learned are embedded in conflicting sound stimuli, such as noisy rooms or learning a new language.

All fine and good, but how does this apply to the masses who are not musicians? Would listening to a lot of music help the brain? I doubt it, for listening does not make rigorous task demands on the brain. Would music training for non-musicians help the brain? Maybe, especially if the training occurred at a young age when the brain is ma-turing.

One study of children showed that fifteen months of intense music training induced structural changes in the primary auditory and primary motor areas. These structural changes were associated with improved auditory and motor skills, respectively. Other studies show children who are musically trained, compared with non-trained children, have a better vocabulary in their native language and a greater reading ability.  Pre-sumably, they would be better at learning other languages.

When and how much music training should be provided to children? Formal studies suggest that greatest benefit occurs if training begins before age 7. The benefits also cor-relate with the amount of music practice. However, much remains to be learned about effects of age and duration and nature of the music training.

Nina argues for more and better music education in the early grades of schools. She be-lieves music training may benefit academic achievement by improving learning skills and listening ability, especially in challenging listening environments, which are all too common in classrooms which are usually very noisy, despite research proving that classroom noise impairs learning. Noise not only creates problems of discerning salient sounds embedded in the over-all noise, but also creates a major distraction that impairs focused attention, information registration and memory consolidation.

I have summarized earlier research showing IQ in children improves when they are taught to have larger working memory capacity. Since working memory is apparently increased by music training, and music training also apparently enhances auditory learning, it seems like a no-brainer to suggest that more music training needs to occur in elementary school.

Source:
Kraus, N. and Chandrasekaran, B. 2010. Music training for the development of auditory skills. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. 11: 500-505.