People on the road or on the street understand the value of names, and more precisely, the value of remembered names. Whether by instinct, social education, or through research like myself, there is a knowledge base both Wide and Deep focused on being remembered, for those on the edge of the curb.
A friend of mine, for example, her name is pronounced Tracy — but being wise to the minds of man, she spells her name Trace, and tells you when introduced, that she is Trace with an ‘E’ instead of a ‘Y’. The frequent result of course is a round of verbally spelling the name back and forth between the newcomer and her a couple of times… followed by her being remembered by name, rather than mere description.
Ever play the Google Name Game? It’s a simple amusement, not quite as fun as the Barrel Roll, but still amusing. For me to play, as an example, I would search Google for “Glenn is”, and then read the next words or few from the listings…
Glenn is …
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Glenn is a person that jokes a lot, easy to talk to and a person -- Urban Dictionary
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Glenn is a reliable…
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…
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Glenn is dead -- Walking Dead Series
Most names are a bit more upbeat. If you’re feeling a little off center, search for askew and see if that helps. Still not as fun as the barrel roll, but again, amusing.
Names
Names are things other people give us. However, they are important. We respond to our names, but rarely respond to other people’s names, unless they are repeated to us several times. The more the better. Otherwise we have trouble remembering other people’s names, even people we really wish we could remember names for. Even people we wish to have sex with -- so it’s not really a matter of having a bad memory or feeling that their name is not important to us. The issue is how our brains work with memory.
Memory is a connective event[1]. The mind actively maps new information to related information already in memory[2]. This add-on effect is effective[3], and the more existing information, which can be mapped to the new information, the stronger the new information can take hold in our long-term memory[4]. This works best when the new information has a few unique features to map with[5] -- and therein lies the rub -- names aren’t unique. I only have one, but I’m not the only Glenn - even though some Glenn’s are dead.
Each John is unique, but most aren’t unique enough to matter much[6] [7]. Faces are unique, and also with a little eye squinting, everyone has someone famous they resemble, giving us a long term memory foothold, and a mapping.
Lacking any uniqueness at all, however, repetition can keep a name in our conscious minds long enough to make the associations needed to anchor the new data into our long term memory. These ties and stringers don’t need to be good feeling associations, in fact bad feeling associations work much better, twice as good according to some studies, because we remember bad events with stronger recall than we do good events[8] -- which is why relationship arguments begin to spin out of control after a while. It’s biology -- evolved biology.
*Maybe forgetting some of those bad memories might be useful? [9] [10]
Memory Techniques and Mnemonics
There are tons of these. For numbers I use the Major mnemonic system.[11] [12] For events and my writing I use the Method of Loci or Memory Palace as it is also known [13] [14]. Both of these are fairly new to me — last two years in fact. I didn’t require much help before my stroke, and brain surgery, however, they serve me well now, and using them has become almost second nature.
The Pythagorean Memory Method[15]
This method is first found from Pythagoras, the same guy that gave us the a2+b2=c2 equation for triangles. I got a D in math so, I won’t expound on that, but his memory technique helps me immensely, so I forgive his mathematical needs. Like his math methods, however, it sounds simple, until you breach the wrapping and attempt to use it. Simply, at night, before bed or sleep, list in your mind the details of the day, in order, with as much detail as you can recall. [16] It is important to recall every event in the order they occurred, no skipping around. This has proved to be invaluable to my stroke recovery, and amazing for all sorts of long term recovers as well. For example, I can remember 2014 with vivid detail. Of course, I have my bias’ working for me in this as well.
Memories from the Year 2014
First I was busy. We had Common Core running. My work led me into some gray and darker areas of Marketing/Persuasion/Manipulation areas, where I got caught up in a wave of influence propaganda techniques which seemed to come from no where with no obvious agenda except for chaos and Trump. Twitter, Facebook, News Media, wind-tunnels, and blogs were being infected ad-nauseum by mis-information and some outrageous memory injection techniques — but I couldn’t put a finger on the source. It felt like it was from everywhere with unlimited resources.
I too, have resources -- as I am resourceful -- so to help understand what was going on and where it was going to, I wrote several Python scripts using CoreNLP[17] to quickly condense and focus the front pages and the political pages of twenty-five news media sites and three social media sites. Eventually I accessed and utilized the IBM Watson AI[18] for this effort. Even with Watson, however, I caught up too late. Too late to be at the front lines. When the Russian Firehose of Falsehood[19] [20] was brought to the attention of the public, all I could do is read along with everyone else in the nation, nod my head, and look for new work. This did not come as a surprise nor a disappointment. I’m not a professional Propagandist, just a writer with strong skills in marketing, and again, my main focus at that time was Common Core, and battling the gallons of mis-information fueling the flames attempting to burn that down.
One factoid was clear, however, from the IBM Watson data I was getting all year from those websites, and out of social media, and that was — Trump was going to win the Presidential election. Not because of the firehose, but because of the news media and bias leveraging.
Cognitive Bias
While the number of traits characterizing the human condition, which we call ‘Cognitive Bias[21]’ seems to increase each year, there are some core ‘hard-wired’ traits[22] we are slaves to most of our days[23].
A prime one, for example, which is timely right now, is called the Normalcy Bias: The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before. I’m sure you are running into this daily, or often enough to understand the bias.
Another is Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
One I’m constantly embattled with is the Denomination Effect: The tendency to spend more money when it is denominated in small amounts (e.g., coins) rather than large amounts (e.g., bills).
Attentional Bias[24] [25] is a particularly troublesome wire-harness in our minds. There is a ton of research done on this so it is easy to understand and recognize — even though that won’t help you at all, but more about that in a moment. The Stroop effect, for example, is a demonstration of cognitive interference where a delay in the reaction time of a task occurs due to a mismatch in stimuli. To check this yourself try reading the colored words in the image to the right, out loud, and as quickly as you can.
What the Attentional Bias means, in short is: The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
In other words, if you hear it enough times, it affects both your perception of the world, as well as the decisions you make. Now, this isn’t a surprise. Like we have already seen in several areas, our minds and memories are affected by repetition of data. If you want to remember your phone number without a mnemonic system, you repeat it over and over again, until it is in your long term memory. You might have to do this a couple of times to get it firmly in place, but it works — every time.
Hard Wired
What we mean by hard wired in reference to all of this is, you don’t have much control over what or when or where a bias is going to affect your life. Even though you know about the bias, and you are on the watch for its influence on your decisions, you are still going to suffer from the effects of that bias. That’s just the way it is — Jesus saves, the rest of you take damage.
I have spent years of focused time on learning and researching these little monsters inside our minds to use in my fiction writing. They are rather effective for romance and thriller storytelling. Over ten years, in fact, I have dedicated to the nuances of these human conditions — and like I said, I am frequently embattled by them, and just as frequently on the defensive, rather than the offensive.
What is significant, about being on the defensive is that the bias has already affected your decision making — before you recognized its influence. Once that’s occurred — recognized or not -- you’re a bit stuck[26]. Understand that our minds are not like spreadsheets. We can’t find bad data in a cell, and replace it with good data. That’s not how memory works. If the data is in long-term memory, then we can mark it as “misinformation”, but we can only add a cell with the good information, and hope we will recall it is there — which many studies have shown, isn’t likely.
The Myth of the Model
The idea that you can simply educate people, and real information (i.e. the Truth) will free the mind from the lies shackling the masses, is a myth. In communication we call this the “Information Deficit Model”, which summed up mean “throw info at it, and it will work.”
No, no it doesn’t.
Let’s say you remember what your wife was wearing on your first date, because your mother wore a dress just like it, in the same color, for your birthday the week before. Then, ten years later, you are going through family pictures and discover that your mother’s dress was not blue, but green. Very green in fact. No biggie, you think, so I was wrong. Except now, instead of the two datums supporting one another, you recall your wife’s dress was blue, like your mother’s, only your mother’s was green.
Gets complicated fast, from there.
Frequently what happens is you will begin to swear that your wife’s dress was green. This is the danger of Fake news. Still today, some 5 years later, I’m shown a math lesson that is beyond weird — even if mathematically accurate — and told that it is a Common Core math lesson. Which it’s not. I don’t even have to look at it to know that this is a lingering example of misinformation. How? simple. Common Core doesn’t have lessons. Not one. Common Core is a framework which lays out what a student should learn in each grade of their primary education. That is all it has. It doesn’t even have graphics. Common Core allows the instructor full reign and control over how to accomplish those goals and standards. So, if it is weird, talk to the teacher.
Reliving the Past
While this has been a long walk it hasn’t been down a garden path or out into the clover. I bring all of this up, because we’re doing it again. Even here, on this website, over 70% of the articles name the POTUS in the headline or first paragraph. Just go to the front page and count how many trumpets you see.
Repetition breeds change in decision making.
Oh, right, the barrel roll, search Google for “do a barrel roll”
References
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[3] "The Science of Memory: Top 10 Proven Techniques to ...." 6 Jun. 2019, https://zapier.com/blog/better-memory/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
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[10] "Remembering the good, forgetting the bad: intentional ...." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16351371. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
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[13] "Method of loci - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
[14] "Method of Loci - Memory Techniques Wiki - Art of Memory." https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Method_of_Loci. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
[15] "Hack Your Memory with the Pythagoras Memory Technique." 22 Jul. 2014, https://www.mantelligence.com/pythagoras-memory-technique/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
[16] "A Bedtime & Morning Exercise for Life Memorization ...." 21 Nov. 2018, https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/a-bedtime-morning-exercise-for-life-memorization-pythagoras/34141. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
[17] "Natural language processing - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
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[19] "Firehose of falsehood - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
[20] "The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" - RAND Corporation." https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
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[23] "How Cognitive Biases Influence How You Think and Act." 1 Nov. 2019, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cognitive-bias-2794963. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
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[26] "Spider-Man? Sure! The neuroscience of suspending disbelief ...." 18 Jul. 2013, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/174327908X392870. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.