The Programmers’ Stone

Over 100 people have now entered an EFT results form with at least the “Before” value filled in. The raw data, just as I pulled it from the MySql table that cforms II made, is eft11dec2007.txt. Looking at the occupations, this is an entirely geek sample. The breakdown of scores is:


0000 - 0999 ... 0
1000 - 1999 ... 10
2000 - 2999 ... 48
3000 - 3999 ... 47
4000 - 4999 ... 8
5000 - 5999 ... 13
6000 - 6999 ... 4
7000 - 7999 ... 0
8000 - 8999 ... 1


From occasional trials on various people, there’s a big pool of people 5000+ missing from the geeky sample. What’s interesting is the low number of people 4000 - 4999. I’ve seen that gap in occasional trials, making me hope it would stay there with bigger numbers of samples.

Juxtapositional thinking seems to appear and disappear digitally, but the sudden, non-linear appearance could come from the repeated use of faculty that was improving linearly. If a problem required two jumps to solve, the chance of getting it might be the linear improvement squared. So the non-appearance of a performance gap wouldn’t mean much, but if a performance gap appeared, it would encouarge my hope that EFTs can be used to determine if someone can use juxtapositional thinking at the time they do the test.

Here are a couple of articles which describe ways to improve awareness. It’s all good for destressing, which according to social stress addiction is necessary to reduce dopamine and norepinephrine and allow cognitive flexibility to return.

I would make one qualification. There are a couple of suggestions involving thinking in pictures and making diagrams. Practical experience working with software engineers suggests this is a good idea for males, but less so for females. Females seem to prefer one dimensional representations packed with richness - words. Lots of punctuation and qualifications in the words doesn’t confuse them. Males seem to prefer two dimensional representations with much less richness - pictures. The information content is the same, but the representation is different.

This matches findings that suggest males tend to be better at spacial perception, females at language. I’ve even advised teams that where a male is explaining something to a female he should sit on his hands and make himself talk. A female explaining to a male should try to draw a picture first, then explain it. This loads the harder task onto the person who already knows what the idea is.

So if you are female, try replacing the stuff about diagrams, with explaining everything to an imaginary student. (This point was first brought home to me 20 years ago, after I’d spent about half an hour explaining an idea to a German woman who remains the best business analyst I’ve ever met. After much hand-waving and whiteboarding on my part, she said, “Zis is all very nice. But vy not just tell ze computer vot to do?” She has an ability to map from requirement directly to code, in a way that I just can’t do it.)

Get Smart: How to Boost your IQ by 10 points.

7 Little Known Ways To Drastically Improve Your Learning

10 Amazingly Simple Tricks To Turn Your Brain Into A Powerful Thinking Machine.

This article is very good on stress, but bear in mind that what it says about dopamine is the current conventional understanding of the function of high dopamine. This is really the core issue that this blog is all about. I reckon that while high dopamine is a “feel good” chemical, it is no more healthy to have it elevated for long periods as a response to stress, than it is as a response to snorting cocaine. It makes us feel good, but it is addictive, and it shuts down some of our cognition. It is nature’s tranquilizer, and like all tranquilizers it should be used sparingly, and only at times of crisis. We should not structure our lives in a stressful way in order to stimulate addictive dopamine hits:

The Guide to Stress Part I: Chemicals of Stress and Their Effects

Another good article on stress:

Stress: It’s Worse Than You Think

Way back in Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister were very critical of open plan offices, particularly the incessant noise of ringing telephones and other people’s conversations.

More recently at Joel on Software, Joel Spolsky has been saying the same thing over and over. So interesting to notice an abstract, Creativity and Breadth of Attention, which concludes that:

(a) trait breadth of attention was correlated modestly and positively (r =. 20) with creative performance; (b) creative performance was impaired by exposure to noise, especially noise that was unpredictable or intelligible; and (c) noise impaired creative performance more in participants whose trait breadth of attention was wide than in those whose trait breadth of attention was narrow.

So people with greater environmental sensitivity are more creative (here determined by writing poems, an acceptable alternative to writing Java), unpredictable phones and intelligible conversations are most impairing, and they impair the best people the most.

So open plan offices are shown to impair the performance of the highly priced workers put in them. This is bad accounting. Perhaps the motive for this bad accounting is an unconscious desire on the part of accountants to creative stressful, dopamine raising environments.

Hmm. The article Study: frequent cell phone use slows brain activity is at least suggestive. In American Mania, Whybrow emphasises mobile phone use in the people he calls manic, and I share his interest in this phenomenon. There are plenty of compulsive mobile phoners around - what can they be talking about? The amount of novel information per call must be very low. The calls are highly compressible. So compulsive mobile phoning is a very good candidate for a way of fixing rituals, and chronic fixers can be expected to be mentally sluggish. The “less open minded” bit fits rather well too. The improved “focus” is possibly more to do with the reduced sensitivity associated with stress, rather than a learning effect.

If so, it’s the stressfulness of the use cases rather than the broadcast radiation that is responsible for the effect.

It turns out there’s a direct link in the literature whereby dopamine turns off some coincidence detection functionality via DRD4.

A database at Stamford says,

this is one of the five types (d1 to d5) of receptors for dopamine. the activity of this receptor is mediated by g proteins which inhibit adenylyl cyclase.

Wikipedia says:

In neurons, adenylate cyclases are located next to calcium ion channels for faster reaction to Ca2+ influx; they are suspected of playing an important role in learning processes. This is supported by the fact that adenylate cyclases are coincidence detectors, meaning that they are only activated by several different signals occurring together.

A cartoon of adenylate cyclase, linked from a page at Davidson College, mainly because I love the rasmol colours

It isn’t high level processing though - DRD1 and DRD5 stimulate adenylate cyclase. More like an AND gate - a basic component that can be used in many ways. Even so, social ritual addiction values coincidence detection for itself, rather than as something possibly related to learning.