Professor Ellen Langer, of Harvard, once told an anecdote that reveals something important.
One day she handed out a paper to a group of students and said, ‘Read this. You’re going to be tested on it.’ Later she handed out the same paper to a different group and said, ‘Read this. You’re going to be tested on it… Oh, and by the way, it’s a bit controversial’.
Which of the two groups do you think did better on the test? The second one. Why? Because uncertainty engages the mind.
I’m dying to extrapolate, but I’ll leave that to you. What say you?
ps, Langer’s concept of mindfulness is well worth reading about.
Ken Carroll
The overwhelming impression it leaves me with, confirming the impression that Freakonomics gave me, is that college professors are incessantly using their undergraduates as guinea pigs.
I remember reading a long time back that memory is stimuluted by adredalin - things are more easily moved from short-term memory to long-term memory under the influence of this hormone (this is why I can still remember my first confession, and other firsts…)
I guess the frisson that accompanies controversy might be another way to explain better test results - depending on whether the test was memory driven.
I’m not sure that uncertainty engages the mind at all (I’m in a very contrary mood for a Friday). I think most people crave certainty and security, and tend to glaze over into mental overload when faced with uncertainty.
Although as I think about it again, perhaps our need to turn uncertainty into certainty spurs us to engage, digest and compartmentalize things which we flag as new.
That is exactly why I prefer emotionally charged lessons with controversial and emotional debates over a dialogue of two rational, reasonable, and thoughtful experts who come to insightful agreements like “it all depends”, “you have to see both sides of the coin” and “there is no black and white, just dull grey”. (;
I have studied this phenomena in my Psychology Specialist Program in courses that dealt with memory and cognition.
I wouldn’t say that it is uncertainty per se that engages the mind, rather, it is the uniqueness of a situation or event in one’s life that results in that event being retained in memory. The theory says that “vivid” events are more likely to be burned into long-term memory and therefore recalled more readily.
And so applying this theory to language learning, the more “vivid” you make a podcast, the more meaningful that the podcast will be to the learner, and will result in better retention and learning. Perhaps that’s why I tend to get more mileage out of those “emotional-relationship” podcasts than I do from the “business-banking” ones.
I couldn’g get the meaning of her remark “it’s a bit controversial” due to my poor command of English. I wonder if she means that the content of the book is controversial, or she hasn’t yet decided whether or not to give a test. I’m not sure about that.
Therefore, I read today’s article and comments several times, and even searched “Ellen Langer” on Google in both English and Japanese. It really was a interesting job for me. Then I came to the conclusion that “uncertainty” certainly engages our minds.
Someone told me once.
–If you have the ability to retain all things you hear and feel you will go nuts. Your brain have the fortunate ability, not to listen to other than relevant information, or what it thinks is relevant. For your survival. Think about the movie Rain man. With Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman playing an autistic man, who have extraordinary memory abilities, but can not function social.-
Perhaps this is why the trechold is so big. To be able to retain irrelevant things.
Question I put myself.
Should I try to get the most interesting things to my in put. Yes I try.
Breandan..
Should we try to get a scary Cpod for our adrenalin kick, or maybe controversial topics that engage, and outrage us.
I think Cpods frontage is that it engage us. But it can always be improved. A little of Ellen Langers psychology can probably, in a smart way, be tucked into a pod cast, and more of story telling. Like a quest. To get this uncertainty
I think Changye’s anecdote illustrates beautifully the point. Brilliant. Consider, too, if we put it this way: Certainty does not engage the mind. If we know how the movie/book/conversation is going to end it’s simply less interesting. [If I know the dialog through listenign over and over it has to become less interesting because the brain will filter it out.]
I agree with the Leif - brain is designed to filter out. What would be the evolutionary value of a brain that focused on certainty and things we already know, rather than on the lack it?
Ken Carroll
I totally disagree with what Ken and Changye said. I mean, do they really mean it? At least Leif captured it all.
Comfort is the key that determines in which direction the uncertainty effect pushes.
Uncertainty engages the mind in a constructive way, IF-AND-ONLY-IF the uncertainty is introduced over a firm layer of comfort. Then, it surely does help. After a period of working towards resolving that uncertainty, if some answers have not been obtained the effect stops and rapidly turns to frustration, a frustration whose intensity equals the initial perked up interest level.
But if the present situation for a student is not comfortable, or is uncomfortable, then uncertainty will have the negative effect immediately.
We can do a lot of things to create comfort, and we do, and we succeed, but how can we really know what’s going on in front of that screen on the other side of the planet? That guy over there whose face is red and he’s about to punch the wall, when he doesn’t appreciate yet more uncertainty being dumped on him, is he going to come in here among those who enjoy it and say out loud that he can’t hack it? No, he’ll just sit there, ego bruised, or maybe go away, and we’ll have no way of knowing how badly it missed the mark.
Sure, I agree with the uncertainty thing being useful, but there’s always a danger of getting swept away with these types of ideas. This one has a big but known/controllable danger: it must never be delivered unless there is first comfort, and a good chance of seeing some quick rewards, otherwise it could do more harm than good.
This mode of delivery is fantastic for those who have high comfort levels already, which uncertainty-based techniques will rely on, but it doesn’t do much to help people to gain comfort, or pick up those whose downward spiral has just begun. Therefore you have to be really careful about using anything that feeds (on) positive and negative comfort levels.
Aunty,
I think your qualification is correct. Total or unremitting uncertainty would get us nowhere. Let me re-phrase: the element of uncertainty can help to engage the mind!
Ken Carroll
I agree with Aunty on this one. On reading the original post I had a yes…. but no. Not only would complete uncertainty lesson the effect I think it also depends on the personality of the person some people fear uncertainty to a greater degree than others. Where I thrive on uncertainty I have friends for who it would be a barrier as they would be focusing on the unknown rather than what is at hand.
Really i would disagree with her method. Telling me that it was controversial would just make me interested (everyone loves a good controversy if we didn’t there wouldn’t be tabloids or flamewars in forums) Telling me that there “might” be a test on it would make me uncertain.
This is great. I can’t think of a better way to illustrate how informal learning happens in a community of practice.
Of course complete uncertainty would be bad, but the professor didn’t offer complete uncertainty - she offered an element of it, just to spice it up. (After reading Charles’ comment, perhaps the term ‘element of the unknown’ might be better.)
I don’t think that saying ‘eveyone likes controversy’ helps our understanding. The question is why? Again, I would argue that it is because people want to fill in the gaps. This leads to interaction with the information. If we didn’t need to fill those in, then every controversy/scandal that ever existed would be as interesting as the latest ones. There has to be news and an information-gap in there somewhere!
Ken Carroll
Yeah, Ken, mutually understood.
This reminds me of that old operant conditioning stuff, Pavlov’s dogs and the like. You see it in nature a lot too. Uncertainty is important in fundamental animal learning, learning the kind of things that keep them alive. Here’s how it works.
If a person or an animal observes that their action A is always followed by reward B, then after a certain number of A B pairings they “get it”, they realise that when they want a B they can do A and it’ll happen. For example, rats discover that pushing against a particular part of the cage (A) causes delicious food to appear (B).
This takes a certain time to learn (actually, a certain number of A-B pairings). If you stop delivering B after A, eventually they realise it doesn’t work any more, and so they give up on A.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. What happens if you deliver B only some of the time that they do A? You’ve introduced uncertainty. Do they still “get it”?
So long as they see B following A a lot of the time, they will learn what’s going on, but they’ll learn it much quicker if there is less than 100% certainty. Strange, eh! And here’s the best bit. After learning it this way, you can stop providing B and they’ll keep on doing A for a long time, sometimes exhausting themselves with repeated attempts, believing in their little hearts that it will come back if they patiently keep on trying that A thing.
Sure, we’re not lab rats, but a lot of this is universal. Have you seen how children behave when they learn from experience that the word “no” means “perhaps”? Have you ever wondered why adults are more interested in strippers than flashers and streakers? Would you rather your teacher/spouse/boss flatter you several times every day, or only when there is something they especially apreciate? Do have an urge to solve a crossword puzzle that you see was abandoned when two thirds completed, but never buy them yourself? If you had already read a full transcript of the Saturday Show, would you enjoy listening to it as much?
Uncertainty, where there is comfortable expectation of resolution, is a very powerful way to get people - and rats and dogs for that matter - to do whatever you want them to want to do.
Aunty Sue.
Is there any difference in trying to find a way to introduce uncertainty in a lesson or the way I approach my study. By listen to things a lot of time, even if I only understand a little. I have a various degree of uncertainty.
B will certainly not appear all the time. But when it does I really enjoy it. I go back to A again for more. Even that it is the same lesson. It may still reveal a new reward. And it is not boring, because there is many levels of understanding.
Woff….
In response to Aunty Sue: Clarity in ideas for me come without jargon. Jargon decreases my ability to learn. E.B. White talked about the writing process and emphasized that using a clearer word is better than using a more complex word when clarity is the aim of the writer. In learning clarity is extremely important. That is why pace of a lesson in Chinese is so important. Pace can help or hinder a learner. If a lesson is too fast for the learner sounds are not distinct and one wonders whether he/she is pronouncing the words correctly. If the pace is too slow, then the blending of the of the words in the sentence becomes awkward.
Uncertainty with comfort seems to be an oxymoron. A need to resolve a problem is an important motivation. Need can create fear, which is a motivator, but present excessively can deliver compulsion, impulsivity and/or paralysis. On the other hand, beauty can be a powerful motivator. Like the memory of one’s first orgasm; one says “I am going to be doing this a lot.” Or something like that. That desire perpetuates the species. Yet, taken to an extreme can become a self-destructive drive or instinct.
I am not a big fan of stimulus/response approaches to education since they depend on “motivations other than learning.” a paraphrasing of Randall in his book “We Are More Than Rats.”
I don’t exactly how it may apply to educational resources but it obviously does. I have noticed the following however.
Make real connections with people you really care about, now communication becomes more uncertain and edgy but also infinitely more wonderful. You start to wander off the tried and tested paths of polite conversation, and take real risks in trying to empart important information and ask weighter questions. You may be misundertood or misunderstand but each time it clicks the payoff it huge. You get the biggest jolt of learning adrenaline you could imagine.
Probably relativly obvious but Mandarin is the first language I am learning so it came as quite a shock to realise exactly how powerful this uncertanty effect could be.
BTW I have also seen this in many other obsevations. Buy flowers or similar for your wife every week and it quickly becomes nothing, in fact you run the risk of not doing it. Surprise in random ways and at random times and everything changes.
My Chinese learning consists of things I have to do (becasue I have deliberatly painted myself in a corner), things I do spontaneously (becasue I feel like it), things that happen randomly (becasue of previous actions I have taken) and the odd pure spontaneous risk (ie they look Chinese, jump in and see what happens). Sometimes I earnestly plan to do something and never do (but don’t feel I failed becasue something different happend). That is going to be pretty hard to reproduce in a single educational resource.
I like Kens rephrasing much better
I’d like to see more of the unknown “wait for the thrilling conclusion next week” type of unknown… Thats a huge part of the psychology that makes lost so successful. I’ve actually written an exploration of episodic content and how it might work on ChinesePod. It’ll be going up on my blog next Sat after I’ve finished the current (and first) topic of how I learn (the first post of which went up today). I think that I might expound a bit on this idea in it now as I wasn’t really using any element of the unknown in my examples.
A note on “why everyone likes controversy” I remember reading an article about while people read “The Sun” in england (this is what is was recalling when i mentioned tabloids in my other post) apparently that was also a animal instinct controversy usually signals a change in the social standing of others. Like monkeys we try to increase our social standing as a way of increasing out likelihood of attaining high quality mates (it’s always about sex with us animals isn’t it!). So we see controversy as something we may be able to exploit. There was actually a good example of this recently on www.digg.com which has resulted in the removal of the top users list which was the gauge of social standing on the site (really on a site made up nearly completely of geeks counting the amount of mating partners wasn’t really going to work
)
Charles,
“controversy usually signals a change in the social standing of others”
More learning!!! Great insight. Excellent.
Ken Carroll
Of course, to point out the obvious, if you were to start each lesson with “…and this is a bit controversial”, we’d become certain it isn’t.
It might be fun also to do something like: listen to the following 4 sentences. See if you can identify the one that isn’t mandarin, but nonsense.