roll for initiative

More on that auto-mindfuck #1.

Some co-workers and I did (and are) try(ing) to quit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware of the health and social stigma of smoking. It’s just that it’s just so damn primal and sensual and social …

Primal. Typically not usually associated with smoking. Back in the day, smoking was probably viewed as being civilized and cultured, but I’m diggin on the primality of it. If you stretch a lilttle, you can get 3 4 of the 4 old-school elements: earth, wind, fire, and water.

Fire is pretty obvious. Wind is synonimous with breath … and inhaling.

Earth and water would seem to be missing from the experience, but that’s where the tabacco plant comes in. Like all plants, tabacco can only grow from the interaction between earth and water. Earth provides the plant with sustinance and water allows it to thrive.

I’ve never been to a tabacco farm (or are they plantations … and what’s the difference?), but I imagine gently rolling hills or dark red soil, cut with lush green pinstripes. Well, I just did a Google image search and this is what it looks like, so I wasn’t too far off.

I do believe that the primality (is that even a word?) of the smoking ritual is part of what makes it so difficult to quit (aside from that whole pesky nicotine addiction thing). Sure, you use a patch or chew some gum, but you’re not getting that primal experience … that core experience taking a piece of earth and a drop of water and lighting it on fire … and then taking it into your lungs.

Next we’ll take a quick look at the social and work-related issues. I bet you can’t wait.

About 6 years ago I decided to run a little experiment on myself: I decided to see what it would be like to become a smoker. And then, in an impressive display of self-control and willpower, I would quit.

It would be an experiment of self-discovery and a test of willpower. Thinking about it now, I think I thought it was going to be some sort of feat of mental strength, an ordeal that would lead to a greater appreciation for my mind-over-matter abilities.

Well … what actually happened is that I mindfucked myself into a wee bit of a smoking addiction. I really do think it’s only a wee addiction; I can go days without having a smoke … but often times I choose not to - not to go days without smoking I mean. But I’m guessing that’s what addiction is all about - you think you can do without but you often choose not to. Hmmm … maybe there’s a lil’ bit of self discovery in this experiment after all.

Reading (and writing) about the Curse of Knowledge yesterday got me thinking about source amnesia.

In another life, a long long time ago, I was working on a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, studying memory and the fallibility thereof. One concept I researched was source amnesia.

Source amnesia describes the phenomenon of when you forget when or where you learned something while still retaining the factual knowledge. In essence, you forget the source of your knowledge but you retain the actual fact.

Source amnesia is different from retrograde amnesia where you forget your biographical knowledge - the classic TV type of amnesia. It’s also different from anterograde amnesia, where you retain everything you know up to a point but are unable to learn or retain anything new - like HM, the classic anterograde amnesiac.

To understand source amnesia, I think it’s helpful to break memory down into various sub-components. One way to slice it is to differentiate between declarative memory and procedural memory. Declarative memory is knowledge of facts and events, while procedural memory is knowledge of how to do stuff.

Declarative memory can be further divided into two sub-categories - “what” memory (i.e., “semantic memory” or knowledge of facts) and “when” memory (i.e., “episodic memory” or knowledge of specific events or moments in time that you have experienced).

Back to source amnesia … when you learn something new it becomes part of your declarative memory. Specifically, it becomes part of your semantic memory. For some reason, information about the specific episode that resulted in you learning something new is rarely encoded in episodic memory. As a result, you retain the new fact you just learned in semantic memory, but you don’t store the associated event-related information in episodic memory … and voilà - source amnesia.

For example, you know that Ottawa is the capital of Canada (you did know that right?). That’s part of your semantic memory. But I’m guessing that you can’t remember when you learned that (unless you JUST learned that in the last … say … 2 dozen or so words). Remembering the when requires that you encode the specifics of the moment you learned that Ottawa is the capital of Canada - but because you didn’t, you have source amnesia.

I do have to take some exception to the wikipedia article on source amnesia. In that article, they refer to source amnesia as an “explicit memory disorder”. Granted, I haven’t been in grad school for many moons so I’m not (and probably never was) up on the latest on source amnesia, but I’d be hesitant to describe source amnesia as a “disorder”. It’s way too common to be a disorder - it’s almost a natural byproduct of the differences between semantic memory and episodic memory.

And now to bring it full circle with the Curse of Knowledge …

The reason I started thinking about this source amnesia thing in the first place was because it strikes me that the curse of knowledge is somehow related to source amnesia…. Maybe source amnesia falls into a curse of knowledge subset … or maybe it’s the other way around … maybe the curse of knowledge is a symptom or a byproduct of source amnesia.

If you don’t encode the episodic information related to new knowledge it would seem as if you always possessed said knowledge … which would make it hard for you to think back to a time when you didn’t know what you now know (uh oh … I’m getting Rumsfeldian again) and that might make it difficult to sympathize with those who don’t know what you now know.

Hmmm that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. I’ll have to modern jackass that one some more.

A friend “lent” me a copy of the December 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which there was an interesting article about “the curse of knowledge” by Chip and Dan Heath (brothers maybe?). (Unfortunately, I don’t think they have online versions of the HBR without subscription, but you get a copy of the article for $6 at the HBR web site.)

Chip and Dan were arguing that when upper management puts forth vague business strategies and mission statements like “Provide best-of-breed services and products”, they’re not just drinking the kool-aid. They argue that to someone who’s been immersed in the “logic and conventions” of business, those platitudes actually represent a sort of “business shorthand”. To the biz folk, those statements represent vasts amounts of business related knowledge, accumulated over years of b-school and industry experience.

[I supposed that every discipline uses similar shorthand ... with designers talking about "envisioning transparent interactivity", PMs saying stuff like "push back non-critical cycles to open up the critical path", engineers talking about "shutting down the retention fields to prevent the overloading the Jefferies Tubes", etc. etc. etc..]

Unfortunately, those business strategies and missions statements have a tendency to come across vague and ambiguous to the rest of us, the ones without all that internalized business acumen.

The problem is further compounded by what’s called “the Curse of Knowledge”. Once you know something, you behave as if you’ve always known it and it’s difficult for you to think like someone who doesn’t know what you know (sounds positively Rumsfeldian).

To illustrate their point, they referred to a 1990 psych study by Elizabeth Newton, then a psych grad student at Stamford. (Unfortunately, the study was included in her non-published dissertation, so it was unable to read the original study. Thanks anyway, Google Scholar.) In her study, Newton divided her participants into two groups, tappers and listeners. Tappers had to tap out a common tune on a table (I imagined them doing this with their fingers or a pencil), listeners had to listen and say which song it was.

Funny thing is I tried this with some friends back when we were kids and it’s incredibly difficult for the listener to pick out a song. Try it with a friend: ask them to identify a tune you’ll tap out, and pick something easy, like Happy Birthday or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

When Newton asked the tappers to predict how often the listeners would guess the song correctly they said that the listeners would get it right about 50% of the time. Since they knew the song they were tapping out, the task seemed incredibly easy for them and they assumed it would be the same for the listeners.

The ACTUAL success ratio was much much smaller. Out of 120 songs, listeners only got 3 right, for a success ratio of 2.5%.

So, back to the biz guy and his grand-yet-incomprehensible-ideas. Chip and Dan argue that there are ways for you to beat the curse of knowledge trap. It’s all rather basic, really. If you’re aware of this curse of knowledge, you’re in a good position to be able to avoid it’s pitfall by translating your ideas back into lay-speak. (Though I guess the challenge would be to do so without coming across as patronizing.)

Chip and Dan suggest using “concrete language” and “stories” to avoid the curse of knowledge and get your point across to other people. Which seems extremely similar to “speak the users language” and “use scenarios and personas” … all things we user research folks try to do with users and designers.

Maybe there’s a market out there for user testing business models and strategies. Damn, maybe I should patent that!