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The Alpina Publisher has published a book by the American professor Richard Nisbett "Brain Accelerators: How to Learn to Think Effectively Using Techniques from Different Sciences". Nisbett talks about how the brain works, how you can stimulate it, and how to learn more about it. Meduza publishes an excerpt from the book dedicated to scientific experiments on oneself.
A Harvard study in which female students was asked to rate the importance of factors affecting their moods found that correlating events in their own lives is just as difficult for us as in other areas. Fortunately, we can experiment with ourselves to better understand what makes us nervous.
What are the factors preventing you from falling asleep? Does morning coffee improve your performance throughout the day? Do you do a better job in the afternoon if you take an afternoon nap? Do you work better if you don't eat lunch? Does yoga make you feel better? Does the Buddhist practice of "kindness" bring you - visualizing how you smile at others, reflecting on the positive qualities of other people, their generous actions and repeating the words "love-good" - peace in your soul and does it free you from anger towards to other people?
The problem with experimenting with yourself is that you are dealing with a single case (N = 1). The benefit is that you automatically see the before-and-after effect from the inside, which can improve accuracy by reducing the level of error variance. You can also minimize variable distortion. If you want to understand the effect of a factor on you, try to keep all other variables constant throughout the study period in which you are comparing the presence and absence of one particular factor. This will give you a perfectly valid experiment. Don't try to research the effects of yoga while you are moving into a new home or experiencing a breakup. Start doing yoga when you can see the net effect before and after. Monitor your physical and emotional well-being, the quality of relationships with other people and performance for several weeks before the start of the class, and then for several weeks after the start, under the same conditions. Such things can be assessed on a simple three-point scale. At the end of each day, assess your health: 1) not very good; 2) normal; 3) very good. Find the average of each variable over the days you did not do yoga and the days you did. (I hope nothing happens in your life during this time that will confuse your experiment.)
Oftentimes, you can do better research than a before-and-after experiment. You can try a randomized experiment with a random distribution of conditions. If you want to find out if morning coffee improves your performance, do not drink coffee without any system. Then any extraneous variables can skew the result of your research. If you only drink coffee in the morning, when you just can't concentrate at all, or only when you need to be in your best working shape, your data will get confused, and whatever result you get, it will inevitably be wrong. You need to literally flip a coin as you walk into the kitchen. Eagle - drink coffee, tails - don't. And be sure to record observations of your performance throughout the day. Use a three-point scale: not very efficient, quite efficient, very efficient. Examine the results in a couple of weeks.
The same experimental processes can be applied to anything that you think affects your well-being and performance. And don't be fooled into thinking that you can calculate such things without resorting to a systematic randomized distribution of conditions, carefully recording your observations, and monitoring the result.
Such experiments are extremely useful because people do differ greatly in terms of how coffee affects the body, how well endurance and strength training is effective, and whether it's peak performance in the morning, afternoon or more. evening. What is useful to others may be completely useless to you.
Conclusions
Verbal reporting is subject to a tremendous amount of distortion and error. There is no special filing cabinet in our heads where we store our views. Attitude reports may change under the influence of the order of the questions asked, the preceding questions, the occasional situational stimulus during the response to the question. In other words, the attitude towards something is often built spontaneously and is the result of the influence of many extraneous factors.
Answering the question about the attitude to something, a person often unconsciously compares himself with a certain reference group. If you ask me how conscientious I am, I will tell you how conscientious I am compared to other (absent-minded) professors, my wife, or members of some other group that was nearby when I was asked this question.
Reporting the reasons for our behavior, as emphasized in Chapter 3, is subject to a huge number of errors and the influence of random factors. It is best to take them as purely theoretical data, free from any "facts" that introspection reveals.
Actions tell more than words. Behavior allows for a better understanding of people's attitudes and personal qualities than their verbal reports. Experiment with yourself. The same methods that psychologists use to study other people can be used to study ourselves. Irregular observation can give a misleading idea of what factors lead to a particular result. Careful planning, combined with random assignment of experimental conditions and systematic recording of observations, can tell you things that cannot be learned simply by living your life and haphazardly observing what is happening.
A Harvard study in which female students was asked to rate the importance of factors affecting their moods found that correlating events in their own lives is just as difficult for us as in other areas. Fortunately, we can experiment with ourselves to better understand what makes us nervous.
What are the factors preventing you from falling asleep? Does morning coffee improve your performance throughout the day? Do you do a better job in the afternoon if you take an afternoon nap? Do you work better if you don't eat lunch? Does yoga make you feel better? Does the Buddhist practice of "kindness" bring you - visualizing how you smile at others, reflecting on the positive qualities of other people, their generous actions and repeating the words "love-good" - peace in your soul and does it free you from anger towards to other people?
The problem with experimenting with yourself is that you are dealing with a single case (N = 1). The benefit is that you automatically see the before-and-after effect from the inside, which can improve accuracy by reducing the level of error variance. You can also minimize variable distortion. If you want to understand the effect of a factor on you, try to keep all other variables constant throughout the study period in which you are comparing the presence and absence of one particular factor. This will give you a perfectly valid experiment. Don't try to research the effects of yoga while you are moving into a new home or experiencing a breakup. Start doing yoga when you can see the net effect before and after. Monitor your physical and emotional well-being, the quality of relationships with other people and performance for several weeks before the start of the class, and then for several weeks after the start, under the same conditions. Such things can be assessed on a simple three-point scale. At the end of each day, assess your health: 1) not very good; 2) normal; 3) very good. Find the average of each variable over the days you did not do yoga and the days you did. (I hope nothing happens in your life during this time that will confuse your experiment.)
Oftentimes, you can do better research than a before-and-after experiment. You can try a randomized experiment with a random distribution of conditions. If you want to find out if morning coffee improves your performance, do not drink coffee without any system. Then any extraneous variables can skew the result of your research. If you only drink coffee in the morning, when you just can't concentrate at all, or only when you need to be in your best working shape, your data will get confused, and whatever result you get, it will inevitably be wrong. You need to literally flip a coin as you walk into the kitchen. Eagle - drink coffee, tails - don't. And be sure to record observations of your performance throughout the day. Use a three-point scale: not very efficient, quite efficient, very efficient. Examine the results in a couple of weeks.
The same experimental processes can be applied to anything that you think affects your well-being and performance. And don't be fooled into thinking that you can calculate such things without resorting to a systematic randomized distribution of conditions, carefully recording your observations, and monitoring the result.
Such experiments are extremely useful because people do differ greatly in terms of how coffee affects the body, how well endurance and strength training is effective, and whether it's peak performance in the morning, afternoon or more. evening. What is useful to others may be completely useless to you.
Conclusions
Verbal reporting is subject to a tremendous amount of distortion and error. There is no special filing cabinet in our heads where we store our views. Attitude reports may change under the influence of the order of the questions asked, the preceding questions, the occasional situational stimulus during the response to the question. In other words, the attitude towards something is often built spontaneously and is the result of the influence of many extraneous factors.
Answering the question about the attitude to something, a person often unconsciously compares himself with a certain reference group. If you ask me how conscientious I am, I will tell you how conscientious I am compared to other (absent-minded) professors, my wife, or members of some other group that was nearby when I was asked this question.
Reporting the reasons for our behavior, as emphasized in Chapter 3, is subject to a huge number of errors and the influence of random factors. It is best to take them as purely theoretical data, free from any "facts" that introspection reveals.
Actions tell more than words. Behavior allows for a better understanding of people's attitudes and personal qualities than their verbal reports. Experiment with yourself. The same methods that psychologists use to study other people can be used to study ourselves. Irregular observation can give a misleading idea of what factors lead to a particular result. Careful planning, combined with random assignment of experimental conditions and systematic recording of observations, can tell you things that cannot be learned simply by living your life and haphazardly observing what is happening.
