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Meditating could make you less error prone

Meditation has been shown to have a slew of benefits, and researchers from Michigan University have added another to the list: fixing mistakes. The team took more than 200 participants, who had never meditated before, through a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise while their brain activity was being measured. “Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring meditation is different, '' said Jeff Lin, the study’s co-author. “It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery.” Then, the participants completed a distraction test, and were found to have an enhanced ability to notice mistakes in comparison to the group who didn’t meditate. “The EEG (electroencephalography) can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of neural activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses,” Lin said. “A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. “We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls.” Though meditating didn’t immediately improve actual task performance, these findings suggest that sustained meditation could have beneficial effects on performance. “People’s interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits,” Lin said. “But it’s amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of a guided meditation can produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators.” Lin said it was encouraging to see public enthusiasm for mindfulness and meditation, but there was still a lot more to do to understand its benefits and how it works. “It’s time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens.” The study was published in <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/9/9/226" target="_blank">Brain Science</a>. Image: Getty Images

Mind

100-year-old man charged with 3,518 murders in WWII

<div class="post_body_wrapper"> <div class="post_body"> <div class="body_text redactor-styles redactor-in"> German prosecutors have charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder after allegations the man served during the second world war as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp. He is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945. The man's name has not been released in line with Germany privacy laws, but Cyrill Klement, the lead investigator, believes that the man was an enlisted member of the Nazi party's paramilitary wing. Despite being 100, the man is considered fit enough to stand trial, but accommodations may have to be made to limit how many hours a day the court is in session, according to <a rel="noopener" href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/09/man-100-charged-in-germany-over-3518-nazi-concentration-camp-murders" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>. “The advanced age of the defendants is no excuse to ignore them and allow them to live in the peace and tranquillity they denied their victims,” Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said. The case was handed to the Neuruppin office in 2019 by the special federal prosecutors' office in Ludwigsburg, which is tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes. The case against the 100-year-old man relies on a recently set legal precedent in Germany that establishes anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders that were committed there. The court has not yet set a date for the trial. </div> </div> </div>

Legal

Why you turn down the radio when you're trying to park your car

You’re driving down an unfamiliar street on a clear spring evening. You’ve been invited to a friend of a friend’s party, at a house you’ve never been to before. Tracking the street numbers, you see you’re getting close, so you (almost automatically) turn the radio down. Finally, with all that music out of the way, you might actually be able to see the house. Why is it that Cardi B must be silenced so you can better see the address of your party? For that matter, why do we have a convention to read silently when in a library? One response might be: “When we need to concentrate a little more, like when we’re looking for a house in the dark, we often try to get rid of distractions so we can focus.” This answer is intuitively appealing. It’s also exactly the kind of answer cognitive psychologists try to avoid. The words concentrate, distractions, and focus all point towards something (attention) that is left undefined. Rather than detailing its properties and how it works, we just assume people intuitively know what it means. This is a little circular, like a dictionary using a word in its own definition. Hashtag nofilter When you have a problem that seems inseparable from intuition, one way to get a handle on it is to a use a metaphor. One of the most important metaphors for attention was provided by psychologist Donald Broadbent in 1958: <a href="http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/d_e._broadbent_-_perception_and_communication_1958.pdf">attention acts like a filter</a>. In his metaphor, all sensory information – everything we see, hear, feel on our skin, and so on – is retained in the mind for a very short period simply as physical sensation (a colour in a location, a tone in the left ear). But when it comes to bringing meaning to that sensory information, Broadbent argued, we have limited capacity. So attention is the filter that determines which parts of the torrent of incoming sensation are processed. It might seem like this broad description of a filter doesn’t buy us much in terms of explanation. Yet, sadly for Broadbent, he gave just enough detail to be proven incorrect. A year after the publication of Broadbent’s book, the psychologist <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/17470215908416289">Neville Moray found</a> that when people are listening to two simultaneous streams of speech and asked to concentrate on just one of them, many can still detect their own name if it pops up in the other stream. This suggests that even when you’re not paying attention, some sensory information is still processed and given meaning (that a mass of sounds is our name). What does that tell us about how this central bottleneck of attention might act? Radar love One answer comes from <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225765926_Divided_attention_between_simultaneous_auditory_and_visual_signals">a remarkable 1998 study</a> by Anne-Marie Bonnel and Ervin Hafter. It builds upon one of the most successful theories in all psychology, <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/signal-detection-theory">signal detection theory</a>, which describes how people make decisions based on ambiguous sensory information, rather like how a radar might detect a plane. One of the basic problems of radar detection is to work out whether it is more likely that what is being detected is a signal (an enemy plane) or just random noise. This problem is the same for human perception. Although apparently a metaphor like Broadbent’s filter, signal detection theory can be evaluated mathematically. The mathematics of human identification, it turns out, largely match those of radar operation. A perfect circle Bonnel and Hafter recognised that if people have a finite amount of attention to divide between vision and hearing, you could expect to see a particular pattern in certain experiments. Imagine attention as an arrow of a fixed length that can swing back and forth between sight and hearing. When it’s pointing entirely towards sight, there’s no room for any focus on hearing (and vice versa). But if a little attention is taken up by hearing, that means there is less directed towards sight. If you graph this relationship, the tip of the arrow will draw a neat circle as it swings from one to the other. Sure enough, the data from their experiments did indeed form a circle, but only in a certain case. When people were asked simply to detect whether a stimulus was present, there was no trade-off (paying more attention to vision did not change hearing performance and vice versa). It was only when people were asked to identify the specific stimulus that this circle appeared. This suggests that while do we indeed have a limited capacity to process information, this is only the case when we’re processing the information for meaning, rather than being aware of its presence. Our <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25222469">own research</a> suggests this pattern indicates some deeper constraint at the heart of the way we perceive the world. The circle represents a fundamental limit on processing. We can never leave that circle, all we can do is move forwards or backwards along it by choosing to focus our attention. When our visual task becomes difficult – like finding a house number in the dark rather than simply scanning the road – we move along that circle to optimise the signal from our visual system. In many cases, we can only do that by turning down the input to our auditory system, by literally turning down the radio. Sorry, Cardi B.<img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126263/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /> <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/simon-lilburn-871974">Simon Lilburn</a>, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-melbourne-722">University of Melbourne</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/philip-smith-879796">Philip Smith</a>, Professor of Psychology, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-melbourne-722">University of Melbourne</a> This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/turn-down-for-what-why-you-turn-down-the-radio-when-youre-trying-to-park-your-car-126263">original article</a>.

Music

In praise of the printed book: The value of concentration in the digital age

There is an old saying that anxiety is the enemy of concentration. One of the best pieces of sports journalism I ever read was by <a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2007/02/22/the-man-who-wasnt-there">Gene Tunney</a>, world heavyweight champion of the 1920s, writing about how reading books helped him stay calm and focused in the lead-up to his most famous fight against former champion Jack Dempsey. While members of Dempsey’s camp ridiculed Tunney for his bookishness, Tunney kept calm, and went on to win. Most of us would feel stressed at the prospect of stepping into the boxing ring, but stress-related illnesses, especially depression and forms of anxiety and attention disorder, are becoming increasingly prevalent, especially in wealthy societies. According to a major <a href="http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plosmedicine.org%2Farticle%2FfetchSingleRepresentation.action%3Furi%3Dinfo%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030442.sd004&ei=_3mgULrKOoWRigeI6IDoCw&usg=AFQjCNFMmbioHNEqLYDf0H8jduBX-qV_hw">2006 projection of global mortality by Mathers and Loncar</a>, by 2030, unipolar depression will be almost 40% more likely to cause death or disability than heart disease in wealthy societies. Stress can of course have many causes, but in the most general sense, it spreads from factors that impact negatively on focus and concentration. We fear interruption or a surplus of tasks, responsibilities or options to choose, leading to heightened stress levels. The digital age is an age of distraction; and distraction causes stress and weakens concentration. Concentration, as the philosopher <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/">William James</a> argued in his classic 1890 work <a href="http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/">Principles of Psychology</a>, is the most fundamental element of intellectual development. He wrote: <blockquote> The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character, and will … An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. </blockquote> Concentration is equally important emotionally, as is being increasingly revealed by new research into <a href="http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/collections/monash-authors/2008/9781741667042.html">“mindfulness” and meditation</a>. The inability to focus is associated with depression and anxiety and, amongst other things, an underdeveloped sociability and human empathy. Tests have revealed that people report greater happiness from being effectively focused on what they are doing than from daydreaming on even pleasant topics. How many memoirs include stories of the author surreptitiously reading books by torchlight underneath the blankets, with parents fearful of the child reading too much? (In my case I was reading The Hardy Boys so my mother’s objections were probably justified.) As <a href="http://www.jamescarroll.net/JAMESCARROLL.NET/Welcome.html">James Carroll</a> has argued, at its core, reading is <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0130-02.htm">“the occasion of the encounter with the self”</a>. In other words, the ultimate object of reading is not to take on information but to absorb and reflect upon it and, in the process, hopefully, form a more developed version of one’s own identity or being. It seems likely that the concentration required and encouraged by books is extremely valuable. Reading books is good for you. And this seems especially so in the case of print books, where a reader is most completely free from distraction. Ebooks, and more pertinently perhaps, the digital reading environment, are unquestionably transformative in the opportunities and experiences they offer to readers. Great oceans of knowledge otherwise only obtainable through tracking down print books or physical archives and records, have become available and, much more easily searchable. <a href="http://websearch.about.com/od/h/g/hyperlink.htm">Hyperlinks</a> mean readers no longer have to read in a straight line, as it were, but can follow innumerable paths of interest. <a href="http://www.unimelb.edu.au/copyright/information/guides/wikisblogsweb2blue.pdf">Web2 technologies</a> enable “talking back” to publishers and media, the formation of groups of readers with common interests, easy (sometimes too easy) sharing of files and other information. Stories can be enriched by animated graphics and interactivity. And so on. No-one in their right mind would imagine that the e-reading environment can or should somehow be wound back. Nonetheless, by their nature e-reading devices facilitate and encourage the constant, inevitably distracting consideration of other reading options, more or less instantly attainable. This is probably their main selling point. <a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/epcd/faculty/wolf.asp">Maryanne Wolf</a> has even asked: <blockquote> “if the assumption that ‘more’ and ‘faster’ are necessarily better (will) have consequences that radically affect the quality of attention that can transform a word into a thought and a thought into a world of unimagined possibility?” </blockquote> It is interesting to consider, in light of this possibility that the greatest benefit of reading may come from its capacity to assist in the development of focus and concentration, that the print book may not actually have been superseded or, indeed, be supersede-able. This, I think, is what the novelist, critic, philosopher and communications historian <a href="http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/">Umberto Eco</a> means when he argues: “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”<img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/9855/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /> Written by Nathan Hollier, Director, Monash University Publishing, Monash University. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-praise-of-the-printed-book-the-value-of-concentration-in-the-digital-age-9855">The Conversation</a>.

Books

Does music really help you concentrate?

Nick Perham is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Many of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0182210" target="_blank">beneficial effects on creativity</a>. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated. The assumption that listening to music when working is beneficial to output likely has its roots in the so-called “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8413624" target="_blank">Mozart effect</a>”, which gained wide media attention in the early 1990s. Put simply, this is the finding that spatial rotation performance (mentally rotating a 3D dimensional shape to determine whether it matches another or not) is increased immediately after listening to the music of Mozart, compared to relaxation instructions or no sound at all. Such was the attention that this finding garnered that the then US governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/15/us/georgia-s-governor-seeks-musical-start-for-babies.html" target="_blank">proposed giving free cassettes or CDs</a> of Mozart’s music to prospective parents. Subsequent studies have cast doubt on the necessity of the music of Mozart to produce this effect – a “<a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00170" target="_blank">Schubert effect</a>”, a “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16597767" target="_blank">Blur effect</a>”, and even a “<a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00170" target="_blank">Stephen King effect</a>” (his audiobook rather than his singing) have all been observed. In addition, musicians could show the effect <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-014-9232-7" target="_blank">purely from imagining the music</a> rather than actually listening to it. So researchers then suggested that the “Mozart effect” was not due to his music as such, but rather to people’s optimum levels of mood and arousal. And so it became the “<a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00170" target="_blank">mood and arousal effect</a>”. Unfortunately, the situations in which most mood and arousal effects are observed are slightly unrealistic. Do we really sit and listen to music, switch it off, and then engage in our work in silence? More likely is that we work with our favourite tunes playing in the background. How sound affects performance has been the topic of laboratory research for over 40 years, and is observed through a phenomenon called the irrelevant sound effect. Basically, this effect means that <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pchj.44/abstract" target="_blank">performance is poorer</a> when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet. To study irrelevant sound effect, participants are asked to complete a simple task which requires them to recall a series of numbers or letters in the exact order in which they saw them – similar to trying to memorise a telephone number when you have no means to write it down. In general, people achieve this by rehearsing the items either aloud or under their breath. The tricky thing is being able to do this while ignoring any background noise. Two key characteristics of the irrelevant sound effect are required for its observation. First, the task must require the person to use their rehearsal abilities, and second, the sound must contain acoustical variation – for example, sounds such as “n, r, p” as opposed to “c, c, c”. Where the sound does not vary much acoustically, then performance of the task is much closer to that observed in quiet conditions. Interestingly, it does not matter whether the person likes the sound or not. <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.1731/abstract" target="_blank">Performance is equally as poor</a> whether the background sound is music the person likes or dislikes. The irrelevant sound effect itself comes from attempting to process two sources of ordered information at the same time – one from the task and one from the sound. Unfortunately, only the former is required to successfully perform the serial recall task, and the effort expended in ensuring that irrelevant order information from the sound is not processed actually impedes this ability. A similar conflict is also seen when reading while in the presence of lyrical music. In this situation, the two sources of words – from the task and the sound – are in conflict. The subsequent cost is poorer performance of the task in the presence of <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.2994/abstract" target="_blank">music with lyrics</a>. What this all means is that whether having music playing in the background helps or hinders performance depends on the task and on the type of music, and only understanding this relationship will help people maximise their productivity levels. If the task requires creativity or some element of mental rotation then listening to music one likes can increase performance. In contrast, if the task requires one to rehearse information in order then quiet is best, or, in the case of reading comprehension, quiet or instrumental music. One promising area of the impact of music on cognitive abilities stems from actually learning to play a musical instrument. Studies show that children who are being musically trained show an <a href="http://www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3psygs/SchellenbergCDPS2005.pdf" target="_blank">improvement in intellectual abilities</a>. However, the reasons behind this are, at present, unknown and likely to be complex. It may not be the music per se that produces this effect but more the activities associated with studying music, such as concentration, repeated practice, lessons and homework. Written by Nick Perham. Republished with permission of <a href="http://theconversation.com/" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>.<img width="1" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86952/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation"/>

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