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…people are selectively worse at incorporating information about a worse-than-expected future

There are aspects of my life where I’m optimistic but probably less so than most people. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a self-decribed pragmatist: I see wonder and beauty all around but I also see problems coming a mile away.

In my work as a software architect I consistently encounter a propensity for optimism from folks who dream things—as opposed to those who build things. The dreamers are “The Business” and they are “bully”. To varying degrees, anything short of “can do” is nay-saying.

Strangely, it’s the dreamers who tend to label the do-ers (as pessimistic) but not the other way ’round. In professional life it’s taboo for someone to tell an optimist that they just don’t know enough to understand the real risks involved in X, Y or Z.

Those conversations do happen rarely and don’t often result in much change. Why?

One answer could come from applying evolutionary psychology to the SDLC. It’s a topic I’m interested in considering further.

As a start, I’ve looked at The brains rose-colored glasses : Nature Neuroscience.

The best way to think about the problem from The Business’s expectation is:

optimists’ brains fail to generate a learning signal when confronted with the evidence that negative events are more likely to occur than predicted

The foundation of Agile Methods—XP—took this into consideration. XP focused on measuring “velocity” and included rules that used past velocity to govern / temper the optimism of a future iteration.

More details can be found here: optimism

From Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. …

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Frontline’s “The Wounded Platoon” is documentary that follows members of Third Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st battalion, 506th infantry…the regiment known as the “Band of Brothers”. It exposes some of the repercussions of modern warfare on the psychological health of our troops.

One of the biggest impacts is PTSD.

PTSD was a term that emerged from the wars in Viet Nam. Some have said that it’s a new term that’s the same as the old adage that “War is hell”.

However, something else is going on:

Since 2002, the number of Fort Carson soldiers diagnosed each year with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, has risen from 26 to 1,120, a rise of over 4,000 percent.

In recent decades, medical science has greatly increased our knowledge of PTSD. One might naively think that a deeper understanding would result in more humane treatment of soldiers who can’t cope. That is true in some circumstances. However, our deeper understanding has also led our military to adapt policies and approaches for dealing with combat troops exposed to inhuman situations:

Before the Iraq War, American soldiers in combat zones were not allowed to take psychiatric medications…

But by the time of “The Surge”, more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. These drugs enable the Army to keep soldiers with post-traumatic stress on the battlefield.

One soldier, Kenny Eastridge, came home with PTSD and got into some really bad trouble. He was convicted for participating in a crime spree that included drive-by shootings, aggravated robbery, running over and stabbing a nursing student and finally the execution-style murder of two fellow soldiers.

From his jail cell, soldier Kenny Eastridge recalls his own experiences from that his time in The Surge:

I was having, like, a total mental breakdown. Every day, we were getting in battles and never having a break, it seemed like. It was just crazy. I just got to where I couldn’t take it. I tried to go to mental health, and they put me on all kinds of meds, too, and I was still going out on missions.

Like, they had me on Ambien, Remeron, Lexapro, Celexa, all kind of different stuff. They tried different medications at different doses and nothing would work.

How is this different from human medical experimentation?

My DVR records the servies Frontline whose episodes accumulate because Frontline tackles serious and often depressing topics which are usually hard to watch.

True to form, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 they aired Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. The show was very thought provoking and I captured a couple memorable quotes—one from author Ian McEwan and another from opera singer Rene Fleming. Both these quotes relate to questions of faith and faithlessness surrounding those tragic events.

As I watched and listened I also came across a very interesting definition of art given by Kirk Varnedoe, curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art:

Its true that art transports you, that it gives you the sense that you can find other worlds than the ones that you know are inside of you.

There are so many imagined worlds. Each artist creates a world with its own logic and its own set of rules in which you can move in and inhabit. They find form that lets you imaginatively take part in experiences with which you may not have had any contact, and for a moment, conceive of a world as pearlescent and as beautifully, rectilinearly ordered as a Piero.

To feel these things through art expands the reach of who you are. But art doesnt only transport you to new, imagined places. It also, in the best sense, narrows your vision, focuses with a new immediacy on the things that may be the most familiar to you. It gives a new spiritual dimension to the objects that you touch, to the room that you inhabit. And this is not just a tidy or comfortable experience but can be suffused with a kind Dionysian pleasure, in the sense of the small world controlled and the poetry of the world possessed, this crossing over of the line between what is the love of the material thing, of the dust mote in the sunlight or the sheen of the porcelain, of the look of the ivy winding around the bowl of fish, you know, this sort of pleasure in the daily small things.

In art, through art, I think, transmutes itself into a form of spirituality…

via Transcripts | Faith And Doubt At Ground Zero | FRONTLINE | PBS.

I think that I now have my answer to the question “What is art?”.

How to apply the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

1. Recognize the power of situations
2. Recognize the power of roles
3. Recognize the power of hierarchy
4. Understand the obedience to authority
5. Realize how quickly these changes can occur
6. Be careful which newspaper ads you respond to

Of all these “lessons” I’m most fascinated by the speed at which the changes occurred and how quickly things built up until they were utterly out-of-control:

What followed was a devastating manifestation of the human capacity for cruelty and evil, so powerful and dehumanizing that the researchers had to end the two-week experiment after the sixth day.

What’s most striking about the study is that all the participants were “normal” young men, yet they came to identify with their assigned roles so deeply that their behavior and entire personalities morphed to unrecognizable extremes, molded after the expectations of the respective role.

via The Stanford Prison Experiment Turns 40 | Brain Pickings.

The experiment was conceived and conducted by Philip Zimbardo who later pointed out that:

The study makes a very profound point about the power of situations — that situations affect us much more than we think, that human behavior is much more under the control of subtle situational forces, in some cases very trivial ones, like rules and roles and symbols…

It’s this “lesson” that to me is the most actionable in my daily life. I’ve started to consider how situations—particularly work situations—might have a modifying effect on my otherwise established sense of self.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has caused me to think more about my actions in specific situations. I’m more aware of the expectations of others given my role(s)—and their roles. I’m actively challenging concepts and catechisms.

The Nature article Recalling the Future reviews the book Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future wherein Harvard’s Moshe Bar reviews cognitive science research about memory.

From the article I learned that there is growing experimental evidence for significant overlap between memory recall and future simulation. This relationship indicates that prediction is one potential reason why memory evolved: prediction is a unifying principle of the brain’s function and predictions are created from memories.

It seems that our minds spend a significant amount of time making predictions. These predictions are often mundane but sometimes they provide useful insight or even a survival advantage in a harsh and dangerous world. As our brains generate detailed pictures of future events, memory plasticity allows us to augment our recalled memories with up-to-date information. This also allows us to make new associations with a basis in past experience.

In a happy juxtaposition, I also watched Nova’s What Are Dreams? on the same weekend that I read the Nature article. That’s where I learned of an interesting twist on the conventional notion that dreaming helps to reinforce memories. I’ve heard before that dreaming may be involved in moving memories from short-term storage to long-term storage. Now it seems that dreams may also be involved in using memories to help us predict.

This idea is expressed here by Harvard’s Robert Stickgold:

…this is all about the function of sleep and the role of dreaming in processing memories, that it refines the memory, it improves the memory, it makes the memory more useful for the future, and so when they come back, they’re going to be better.

My sense is that when we’re asleep and when we’re dreaming, we are actually conscious and figuring out what’s important about what happened to us and how that relates to everything else that’s happened to us in the past and figuring out what that means about our future.

I’ve often thought (as I’ve searched the house for my car keys) that my memory connects my past to my present. But I’m also aware of how often my memories of past experiences help me in new situations—sometimes when circumstances are similar and sometimes when they’re not.

MIT’s Matt Wilson puts prediction in perspective when he highlights the biggest challenge that we face as humans:

…it is the unknown of the future. And in REM, we may have the opportunity to step into that future world with no risk, because the consequences are simply things don’t work out as you might have expected, and then you wake up.

A safe and secure dry run of sorts…

Memory is information about the past but one useful outcome of remembering the past is the more effective predictions of the future. It seems that our brains are constantly involved with making predictions—both while asleep and awake—and that the key component to these predictions is a result of our mind’s ability to remember.

Chronobiology…examines periodic (cyclic) phenomena in living organisms and their adaptation to solar—and lunar—related rhythms.

These cycles are known as biological rhythms.

I developed a general interest in chronobiology when I first learned about Michel Siffre. By isolating himself in caves—without external cues to the passage of time—Siffre conducted several experiments on human life’s biological cycles. He tried to understand the fundamental and natural state of biological rhythms by observing his own sleep/waking cycles (amongst other things). I’m not sure how impactful Michel’s research was vs. other researchers but one thing is certain: his commitment was impressive.

My general interest in chronobiology has been amplified by recent international trips and by all-night software-design sessions. I’m unable to recover quickly from jet lag and I’m extremely irritable for several days if I don’t get a decent amount of sleep. I’ve also had co-workers levy small apologies for similar behavior due to working ’round the clock.

My own experiences plus recent news stories about air traffic controllers and pilots falling asleep on the job have me wondering: How fundamentally important are our biological rhythms? New information published in the January 27th, 2011, issue of Nature have shown that these rhythms operate on a cellular level and have done so for billions of years.

Two studies (cited below) have focused on sampling the production of peroxiredoxins to understand the clock cycles present in all living cells. One study looked at peroxiredoxin in human red blood cells while the other used marine algae.

the 24-hour circadian clock found in human cells is the same as that found in algae and dates back millions of years to early life on Earth

These body clocks have been passed down through eons of evolution. They work at the cellular level as well as the super-cellular level. They affect us consciously and sub-consciously.

So there’s the answer: your biological rhythms affect you more than you know.

Other resources:

• Ancient body clock discovered that helps to keep all living things on time
• Circadian clocks in human red blood cells
• Circadian rhythms persist without transcription in a eukaryote
• The circadian rhythms of human subjects without timepieces or indication of the alternation of day and night

I commute to work on my bike. Seattle is fairly “bike friendly” but I’m still faced with daily challenges while I’m in traffic:

• car doors opening
• cutting through lanes of traffic to go from a bike lane to a left-hand turn lane
• broken glass in the road
• taking your hand off the brakes to indicate a turn
• drivers who think that turn indicators help you complete—not announce—a turn…

Of course, I drive a car, too. The vast majority of cyclists ride and drive. The vast majority of drivers don’t ride bikes. These are simple facts that speak to the lack of awareness of drivers when it comes to the challenges of riding a bike.

I was interested in an article in Outside Magazine that goes beyond the simple facts. It delves into the psychological details of road rage against cyclists:

In one study in which drivers were asked how they feel about cyclists, one of the recurring labels was "unpredictable."

When asked to elaborate, drivers often blamed the "attitudes and limited competence" of the cyclists themselves, rather than the "difficulty of the situations that cyclists are often forced to face on the road."

When asked to describe their own actions or those of other drivers, however, they blamed only the situation. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error.

via Bike Commuting Conflicts | OutsideOnline.com.

Bike safety would increase if this attribution error were to decrease. There are campaigns to raise awareness—and empathy—for all sorts of causes. I think bike safety is a cause that clearly needs be elevated to new heights of awareness. I hoped that Dave Zabriskie’s “Yield to Life” efforts would kick start a new era of public awareness but that hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t talk on my cell phone very much. No one in my family does, either. And, according to the New York Times it seems that most people aren’t making cell phone calls, either:

Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.

via Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls – NYTimes.com.

The trend being reported on isn’t news, really. But it got me thinking about how much money I spend on mobile data and how much money I waste on unused call minutes. I currently have an iPhone with a $30 unlimited data plan, an 3G-enabled iPad with no monthly data plan and an additional line for work that costs $25 per month for 2 GB. $55 per month for 2 devices PLUS the cost of the calling plan!

AT&T is going to allow personal Wi-Fi hotspot functionality but this will come at an additional charge. The feature will get you 4 GB of data for $45 per month.

It’d be interesting to consider dropping my cell number completely and take all calls on Skype!