Improving Your Memory (Essential Managers) by David Thomas

I know the book author and have heard him speak on this topic several times.  The book contains the key elements of his presentations but you really should hear him in person if you get the chance.

Memory-training techniques will certainly improve your IQ – by broadening your vocabulary, for example. Another way to increase your score is to practise doing the test: each time you do an IQ test, you learn from the questions asked, so your memory builds up a bank of experience that it can call upon in the future.Read more at location 99

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Also fundamental to memory training is the brain’s natural propensity to organize information in patterns. Look for patterns and, if order is not paramount, reorganize the information. For example, when you have a list, look for words beginning with the same letter. See if things fit into categories: perhaps five things are items of stationery and four are household objects. Are any of the things the same colour? By breaking a large group of things into several smaller ones, you make it easier to assimilate.Read more at location 355

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A second system to help memorize names is known by the acronym SLUG. The letters stand for Slow down the introduction, Listen to the name, Use the name, Go over the name.Read more at location 540

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“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.” ConfuciusRead more at location 1025

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Most new information is lost within one day if you do not go over it an hour after learning it. Only by reviewing at regular intervals will you maintain long-term recall. As you become proficient at memorizing and recalling, you will feel confident enough to set new targets.Read more at location 1047

Mistakes were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Similar to some of the material in the Psychopath Test I read in November in a strange way, this book looks at our in-built tendency to judge others by different standards than those we use on ourselves.
How our memory is not what it seems at all, how it reconstructs the past so it fits with our view of the world and of ourselves.
How the well meaning social services teams construct abuse that never happened.  How judges and prosecutors cannot accept that innocent men were imprisoned (or given the death penalty)

Perhaps my favourite quote is the last in this blog from a Chinese philosopher more than 2500 years ago - we really haven't come that far since then!

“There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.” It seems unlikely that Newt Gingrich said to himself, “My, what a hypocrite I am. There I was, all riled up about Bill Clinton’s sexual affair, while I was having an extramarital affair of my own right here in town.” Similarly, the prominent evangelist Ted Haggard seemed oblivious to the hypocrisy of publicly fulminating against homosexuality while enjoying his own sexual relationship with a male prostitute.Read more at location 174

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What they do show is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.Read more at location 374

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So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief. This mental contortion is called the “confirmation bias.”Read more at location 384

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see.” Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high self-esteem; it’s also about protecting low self-esteem if that is how a person sees himself.Read more at location 612

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people will bend over backward to reduce dissonance in a way that is favorable to them and their team. The specific ways vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.Read more at location 726

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Just as we can identify hypocrisy in everyone but ourselves, just as it’s obvious that others can be influenced by money but not ourselves, so we can see prejudices in everyone else but ourselves. Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group. Because we are not irrational or mean spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded. It’s theirs we need to suppress.Read more at location 998

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Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or course of action.Read more at location 1073

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reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group.Read more at location 1101

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Fortunately, we can also better understand the conditions under which prejudices diminish: when the economic competition subsides, when the truce is signed, when the profession is integrated, when they become more familiar and comfortable, when we are in a position to realize that they aren’t so different from us.Read more at location 1142

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We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.Read more at location 1152

memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “ ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.”Read more at location 1230

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Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation—confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you, or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened at all.Read more at location 1260

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Conway and Ross called this self-serving memory distortion “getting what you want by revising what you had.”Read more at location 1387

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If we are to be careful about what we wish for because it might come true, we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because then we will have to live by them.Read more at location 1588

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Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: The memories keep intruding.Read more at location 1879

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McNally. “The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible.”Read more at location 1884

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Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did.Read more at location 2439

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Many judges, jurors, and police officers prefer certainties to science. Law professor D. Michael Risinger and attorney Jeffrey L. Loop have lamented “the general failure of the law to reflect virtually any of the insights of modern research on the characteristics of human perception, cognition, memory, inference or decision under uncertainty, either in the structure of the rules of evidence themselves, or the ways in which judges are trained or instructed to administer them.”Read more at location 2559

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Successful partners extend to each other the same self-forgiving ways of thinking we extend to ourselves: They forgive each other’s missteps as being due to the situation, but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do.Read more at location 2821

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Social psychologist June Tangney has found that being criticized for who you are rather than for what you did evokes a deep sense of shame and helplessness; it makes a person want to hide, disappear.Read more at location 2848

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In his groundbreaking study of more than 700 couples, whom he followed over a period of years, psychologist John Gottman found that contempt—criticism laced with sarcasm, name calling, and mockery—is one of the strongest signs that a relationship is in free fall.Read more at location 2856

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in the way each side tells the same story. Perpetrators, whether individuals or nations, write versions of history in which their behavior was justified and provoked by the other side; their behavior was sensible and meaningful; if they made mistakes or went too far, at least everything turned out for the best in the long run; and it’s all in the past now anyway. Victims tend to write accounts of the same history in which they describe the perpetrator’s actions as arbitrary and meaningless, or else intentionally malicious and brutal; in which their own retaliation was impeccably appropriate and morally justified; and in which nothing turned out for the best. In fact, everything turned out for the worst, and we are still irritated about it.Read more at location 3248

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The implications of these studies are ominous: Combine perpetrators who have high self-esteem and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals,Read more at location 3314

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The moral of our story is easy to say, and difficult to execute. When you screw up, try saying this: “I made a mistake. I need to understand what went wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.” Dweck’s research is heartening because it suggests that at all ages, people can learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.Read more at location 3855

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As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (“Old Master”) observed more than twenty-five-hundred years ago: A great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.Read more at location 3882

The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens by David Brooks

A very interesting approach to writing a book that looks at what are the secrets for a happy and successful life - it follows teh story of two individuals from birth through to death and how they come from very different backgrounds, eventually marry and spend a life together.  The story itself is not a completely happy one (I won't spoil the ending) but it really makes you think about how much we can really mould future generations, given where individuals start from.

It reviews teh evidence about what can (and what cannot) make a difference to peoples lives.


And over the past generations we have seen big policies yield disappointing results. Since 1983 we’ve reformed the education system again and again, yet more than a quarter of high-school students drop out, even though all rational incentives tell them not to. We’ve tried to close the gap between white and black achievement, but have failed. We’ve spent a generation enrolling more young people in college without understanding why so many don’t graduate.Read more at location 127 •
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov of Princeton have found that people can make snap judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right. In other research, Todorov gave his subjects microsecond glimpses of the faces of competing politicians. His research subjects could predict, with 70 percent accuracy, who would win the election between the two candidates.Read more at location 284 •
As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary. People with an 80 IQ will know words such as “fabric,” “enormous,” and “conceal” but not words such as “sentence,” “consume,” and “commerce.” People with 90 IQs will know the latter three words, but probably not “designate,” “ponder,” or “reluctant.” So people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person’s level.Read more at location 327 •
It is an elemental fact of life that we get to choose what we will order, but we do not get to choose what we like.Read more at location 332 •
The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice. But it is all information, and it all flows from the dead through us and to the unborn.Read more at location 647 •
This activity of blending neural patterns is called imagination. It seems easy but it is phenomenally complex. It consists of taking two or more things that do not exist together, blending them together in the mind, and then creating an emergent third thing that never existed at all.Read more at location 933 •
If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.Read more at location 1097 •
“All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”Read more at location 1111 •
The people in the executive suites believed that the school existed to fulfill some socially productive process of information transmission—usually involving science projects on poster boards. But in reality, of course, high school is a machine for social sorting. The purpose of high school is to give young people a sense of where they fit into the social structure.Read more at location 1301 •

Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests. But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.Read more at location 1438 •
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50 percent more time to complete it and makes 50 percent more errors. The brain doesn’t multitask well. It needs to get into a coherent flow, with one network of firings leading coherently to the next.Read more at location 1601 •
“Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”Read more at location 2171 •
top performers devote five times more hours to become great than the average performers devote to become competent.Read more at location 2277 •
There is no one personality style that leads to corporate or any other kind of success. But they found that the traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytical thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours. That is to say, the ability to organize and execute.Read more at location 2302 •
That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experience did not correlate well with CEO success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and conscientiousness—being dependable, making plans, and following through.Read more at location 2308 •

Incognito, the secret lives of the brain by David Eagleman

A very readable book outlining the advances in understanding mind and brains.  The essence is that the conscious part (the part we call me) is actually a very thin layer on top of our existence.  Almost all of what we do is unconscious, our conscious sense of self just rationalises what we have just done to make sense of it for future occasions.  The only time we really use our conscious self is when setting goal sor long-term plans, but even then we are driven by our unconscious experience and desires.

The fact that what we think we preceive, is actually a construction of our brains and is quite often not so strongly connected with pyhsical external reality.  The book does have some philosophical implications for freewill, mentions them but doesn't really answer the problems it raises.

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.Read more at location 84 •
Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.Read more at location 87 •
Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.Read more at location 113 •  You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary.Read more at location 117 •
You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck.Read more at location 132 •
One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.Read more at location 169 •
try this demonstration: have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you’re able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won’t be able to accurately determine their order.Read more at location 391 •
The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.Read more at location 457 •
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Read more at location 522 •
From the natural laboratory of evolution comes a related phenomenon in humans. At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor—and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.36 Two color swatches that look identical to the majority of people would be clearly distinguishable to these ladies. (No one has yet determined what percentage of fashion arguments is caused by this mutation.)Read more at location 692 •
The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.” Here’s a way to prove to yourself that something strange is going on with time: look at your own eyes in a mirror and move your point of focus back and forth so that you’re looking at your right eye, then at your left eye, and back again. Your eyes take tens of milliseconds to move from one position to the other, but—here’s the mystery—you never see them move. What happens to the gaps in time while your eyes are moving? Why doesn’t your brain care about the small absences of visual input?Read more at location 829 •
consciousness tends to interfere with most tasks (remember the unhappy centipede in the ditch)—but it can be helpful when setting goals and training the robot. Evolutionary selection has presumably tuned the exact amount of access the conscious mind has: too little, and the company has no direction; too much, and the system gets bogged down solving problems in a slow, clunky, energy-inefficient manner.Read more at location 1175 •
Our conscious assessment of an activity as easy or natural can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.Read more at location 1420 •
We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of its water.Read more at location 1433 •
The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.Read more at location 2166 •
Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.42 Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.Read more at location 2248 •
Human programmers approach a problem by assuming there’s a best way to solve it, or that there’s a way it should be solved by the robot. But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners.Read more at location 2394 •
“Evolution is smarter than you are.” If I had a law of biology, it would be: “Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”Read more at location 2401 •
Libet’s experiments caused a commotion.15 Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information? Did his experiment drive the nail into the coffin of free will?Read more at location 2702 •
The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?” The question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing. There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseparable.Read more at location 2842 •
main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.Read more at location 2958 •
you choose neither your nature nor your nurture, much less their entangled interaction. You inherit a genetic blueprint and are born into a world over which you have no choice throughout your most formative years. This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not choices; these are the dealt hands of cards.Read more at location 3478 •
As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.Read more at location 3620 •