The secret

Premack gave a group of rats free access to drinking water and a running wheel (Premack, 1959). He recorded their behavior across several minutes. Initially (at baseline), each rat spent some time drinking and some time running, but on average rats spent more time running than drinking: about 250 seconds running and only about 50 seconds drinking. Then, Premack restricted the rats’ access to the wheel: they were allowed to run only after they had drunk a certain amount of water. The rats soon learned the contingency and started drinking water in order to gain access to the running wheel. Unsurprisingly, the total amount of running decreased, because the rats now had to work to obtain access to the wheel. But the total amount of drinking increased to more than 100 seconds, as the rats now performed this behavior more often in order to gain access to the wheel. In effect, the activity of running was acting as a reinforce, and it was increasing the probability of an otherwise infrequent behavior, drinking:

S (running restricted) → R (drinking) → C (access to wheel)

Premack went on to show a similar pattern in human children (Premack, 1959). He put the children in a room that contained a pinball machine and a bowl of candy, and he recorded how much time each child spent playing pinball and eating candy. Some of the children spent more time playing pinball. Premack then restricted access to the pinball machine, allowing these children to play only after they had eaten some candy. Candy eating increased, showing that access to the preferred activity (pinball) could reinforce the less-preferred activity (candy eating). Conversely, children who preferred eating candy in the first place could be trained to play more pinball, by making access to the candy contingent on playing pinball.

Thus, in both rats and children, the opportunity to perform a highly frequent behavior can reinforce a less-frequent behavior. This idea came to be known as the Premack principle. Examples of the Premack principle abound in human life. For example, left to their own devices, most children will spend more time watching television than doing their homework. Thus, watching television is a preferred activity, and it can be used to reinforce the less-preferred activity of homework. The parent restricts television time, making it contingent on homework. As a consequence, the child spends more time doing homework than he would have done if television had not been restricted. A later extension of the Premack principle, the response deprivation hypothesis, suggests that the critical variable is not which response is normally more frequent but merely which response has been restricted: by restricting the ability to execute almost any response, you can make the opportunity to perform that response reinforcing (Allison, 1993; Timberlake & Allison, 1974). For example, perhaps you have a chore, like cleaning your room or doing laundry, that you normally detest. But if access to this activity is restricted, it can become reinforcing. If you have been studying for several hours straight, the idea of “taking a break” to clean your room or do the laundry could begin to look downright attractive. If so, you’ve experienced the Premack principle at work.

Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior New York: Worth Publishers, 2007
Mark Gluck
Eduardo Mercado
Catherine Myers
p316-317

Raymond Chandler on writing & school

from Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney:

Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. "Me, I wait for inspiration," he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believe that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: "He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks."

Thie Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simpe tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task....Just follow Chandler's regimen:

"Write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself.

Write or don't write, but if it's don't write, don't do anything else, either.

Never thought of that. 

B.F. Skinner and the magic writing room

habit, part 1

Shortly after writing habit, part 1, I realized I have no business writing posts about habit. I'm supposed to be writing something else about habit, not blog posts.

So, for the time being, I'm going to re-recommend Piers Steel's The Procrastination Equation, which is revelatory, and post a passage I tracked down on the subject of B.F. Skinner's magic writing room:

Meanwhile I had set up a pigeon laboratory in which Charles Ferster and I worked very happily together for more than five years. It was the high point in my research history. Scarcely a week went by without some exciting discovery. Perhaps the behavior we dealt with most effectively was our own. Near the end of our collaboration we found ourselves with a vast quantity of unanalyzed and unpublished data, and we proceeded to design an environment in which we could scarcely help writing a book. In it we both worked as we had never worked before. In one spring term and one long hot summer we wrote a text and a glossary and prepared over a thousand figures, more than 900 of which were published.
B.F. Skinner: An Autobiography (in Festschrift)
p. 15

We worked slowly at first, but the need to finish before my scheduled departure in June 1955 led us to organize our environment and to develop several ways of self-management. All our work was done in a room dedicated to writing and not used at other times. Interruptions were the first problem, which we handled by a decision not to take phone calls. When visitors appeared at the door, we routinely stepped in the corridor to speak with them briefly. The frequency of interruptions became very low and the writing room came to control our behavior. Usually we began before nine and stopped by lunch time. There was frequently a temptation to continue in the afternoon when we were working especially well or when the data was especially interesting, but our recently acquired data on fixed-ratio performances convinced us to seek a work schedule that kept our performance at maximum frequency for the period we were actually writing. The procedure worked very well. There were no warm-up or inactive periods in the writing room. Naturally we did not write elsewhere nor did we converse about outside matters nor do anything but work on schedules of reinforcement so long as we were in the writing room. At times the pace of the writing was so intense, and rewarding, that we began to control our outside activities in the fear that they might compete with or decrease the frequency of writing and graph-making. Bridge, chess and late social evenings were out.
Festschrift for B.F. Skinner by P.B. Dews
p. 45
Ardent Media 1970
“Schedules of Reinforcement with Skinner” by C.B. Ferster American University

The way I heard this story, back in college, was different.

The way I heard it, Skinner was alone in his magic writing room, and he systematically left the room any time so much as a stray thought crossed his mind. Eventually, by dint of heroic self-discipline and his rigidly adhered to exit strategy, he worked his way up to -- and maxed out at -- 45 minutes of sustained concentration without extraneous thoughts.

Forty five minutes was the outer limit, we psych students were told, the pinnacle of human attentional capacity: 45 minutes was to concentration what 120 years was to lifespan.^* I have believed this to be true for my entire adult life.

Come to find out it wasn't 45 minutes, and making a magic writing room wasn't hard. It was 3 hours, or possibly 4, and when the 3 or 4 hours were up, Skinner and Ferster had to force themselves to stop.

So .... number one.... damn. Sure wish I'd gotten the straight story the first time around.

And, number two, I'm putting myself under stimulus control.

Actually, I think I already did.

more anon

^*Possible but not bloody likely. 

habit, part 1

I keep mentioning my Eternal Basal Ganglia project...the one that never, ever gets done. (It's close! I swear!)

One of the issues I've been struggling with is the question of how people develop good habits as opposed to bad habits. More to the point, how would one go about developing a good habit on purpose?

Which, of course, raises the question of what, exactly, a habit is.

Answering that question has turned out to be more difficult than I expected. We all know a habit when we see one, and we all have numerous habits of our own, some of which we're trying to "break." But when you try to reverse-engineer the concept, it gets slippery.

I think Piers Steel's terrific book, The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Things Done, has helped me finally make the jump from "What is a habit?" to "What would I need to do if I wanted to create a habit on purpose?"

More later.

The Procrastination Equation

the equation:

Motivation = E x V/I x D

E = Expectancy: your level of confidence (but not over-confidence) you'll actually get whatever you're trying to do done
V = Value: how much you value getting whatever you're trying to do done
I = Impulsiveness: (no explanation required)
D = Delay: length of time before you realize the reward/goal/etc. - people "irrationally find present costs more salient than future costs"

The book is fantastic. Briliant. Amazing.

More anon.

The Procrastination Equation.

The Procrastination Equation at Science Daily.

Chinese moms, part 5

Today I finally got through the basal ganglia article I was trying to read.

Then realized the reason I'm so captivated by Chinese moms is that I desperately need one myself.

Speaking of desperation, Piers Steel's book is out!




and see... structured procrastination

learned industriousness

Given the fundamental nature of procrastination, it is curious how such a mechanism could have become prevalent. One would expect that such a disadvantageous characteristic would have long been culled from our gene pool. To address this, George Ainslie argues that people in a hunter/gatherer environment should find that their motivational compulsions fit motivational demands almost perfectly: "As long as they sleep and hoard and mate when the relevant urge arises, they will behave more or less adaptively in the environment in which those urges evolved" (1992, p. 88). Unfortunately, in our civilized circumstances, contingencies are quite different, and it often becomes important to act not as nature intended.

There are some who have likely inherited characteristics that let them deal better with procrastination without any type of self-regulatory assistance. Like the naturally athletic, they don't need a lot of help to stay motivationally fit. Fortunately, there is help for the rest of us. There are many, many ways to reduce procrastination if not effectively eliminate it. Here we review three: Learned Industriousness, Energy Regulation, and Goal Setting. Of note, most procrastinators have a wide streak of impulsiveness in them and likely are looking for the "quick fix." Unfortunately, the more powerful the remedy for procrastination, the longer it takes to work.

Piers Steel at Procrastination Central

I am taking his advice re: learned industriousness to heart.

speaking of big ol' honkin' wallets

When we moved to Irvington from Studio City, some of my office boxes wound up in the garage without my knowing it.

Five years later I spotted the stack sitting beside the door into the family room.

The box on the bottom was labeled "Important."


wallets

"A Wide Open Future"

Al Gore's American Life
TIME

So how much time do we think Al Gore spends searching for stuff on the Internet?

anonymous cube dweller

"This is circa about 1997. . "




"Same area about 2004. He has expanded into the three surrounding cubes which are almost as bad."

source:
flickr Messy Desk contest

Mad Scientist

here

There's more here.

She's got the Befores, but no Afters.

hark

I've just found a church bulletin on my desk dated Sunday, December 23, 2007.

SERMON: The second Annunciation

Also a "report from Andrew's bus monitor about his recent conduct on the van." March 17, 2008

I'm sorry. There is nothing about this situation that contributes to my creativity.

Such as it is.

My Messy Desk

the slide-show

There's an interview, too.

Check out Esther Dyson.

Anatomy of a Black Hole

C. told me about stumbleupon this morning, which is exactly what I needed seeing as how I spend so little time stumbling upon internet thingies as it is.

On my first go, I have stumbled upon Anatomy of a Black Hole.

I am severely losing interest in desk-clearing. Only 10 items cleared thus far, and it's 2 o'clock.

stupid pet tricks

Will we see a back-to-basics movement thanks to the 21st century global world meltdown?

Possibly.

Today’s shaky economy is likely to produce many more such tricks. “In postwar Japan, the economy wasn’t doing so great, so you couldn’t get everyday-use items like household cleaners,” says Lisa Katayama, author of “Urawaza,” a book named after the Japanese term for clever lifestyle tips and tricks. “So people looked for ways to do with what they had.”

[snip]

Today, Americans are finding their own tips and tricks for fixing misbehaving gadgets with supplies as simple as paper and adhesive tape.... [M]any tech home remedies can be explained by a little science.

e.g.:

Remote Car Key

Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.

Mr. Pozar explains, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.” Using your head can extend the key’s wireless range by a few car lengths.

Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems
by Paul Boutin
NYTIMES 2.18.2009

fault slippage

I've been cleaning my desk since last Tuesday, February 10.

As of this morning, I have dealt with 326 individual items.

I'm still going.

Doug Sundseth was the person who came up with fault slippage.

up the down staircase

I may just abandon all hope & spend the coming 21st century global world meltdown years watching YouTubes.

my progress bar

Here's today's progress bar from my Scrivener program.

This little doohickey is incredibly motivating and reinforcing, although when you go into word deficit by cutting sections things can get hairy, motivation-wise.

Say you start a writing session by cutting a thousand words. The Session target bar doesn't count anything you write until you've made up the lost thousand. Scrivener needs to create a Session target for revising & cutting.

The first chapter of Temple's & my new book was huge....was it 60 pages? 80? I've forgotten. It was so out of control that our editor told me not to revise it until I'd revised all the other chapters. That way I'd know what needed to stay and what could go.

So that's what I did, and when I finally re-read the first chapter, a year after I'd written it or thereabouts, I was aghast. What a mess --- what a long-winded, barely comprehensible, almost psychotically verbose mess!

I went at that thing with a buzz saw.

After our editor read it, she called and said, "You cut that thing to pieces."

She sounded surprised. Surprised and happy.

Scrivener needs a doohickey that rewards and reinforces reductions in Word Count.

help for the afflicted, part 2

I've launched my anti-procrastination project this summer, and have just this afternoon made a major discovery: Scrivener has a progress bar! (source: Wine on the Keyboard)

This isn't a great photo of it, meaning you may not be able to see, from this image, how reinforcing this thing is.

I'm trying to get a revision of my book proposal started, which means I'm in Writer Hell, so I set 500 words as my "Session target" (a reasonable goal) which meant that I could see progress at once.

The reason I haven't posted a Screen Grab of my own highly reinforcing "Project Target" icon is that it disappears the minute I open Screen Grab.

Also in the category of riveting computer problems: I can't log onto flickr anymore, although I can still upload photos from my Desktop for some unknown reason.

These are the kinds of distractions the "Project Targets" progress bar was designed to defeat.

I love Scrivener. Love it, love it, love it. I wrote all of Temple's (2nd) book on it, and I have everything in ONE Scrivener Project: all the drafts, all the research, all the interviews --- plus all my ktm stuff, which is a whole lot of stuff.

I love Scrivener so much I'm going to try to see if I can get C. to use it. Thus far, he's been resistant.

Oh, well. He may have to wait until school life gets a whole lot more painful to see the beauty of this thing.


bonus points

I just noticed this comment under the "writer's paradise" post:

For longer blog articles scrivener is a god send. It tends to be a little overkill for shorter ones.

(off topic, you write about apple and just now found out about scrivener? What next, iPhoto?)

Scrivener
Scrivener - A Writer's Paradise
help for the afflicted, part 1
procrastinating chickens (the perils of long-duration behavior)
Piers Steel's meta-theory of procrastination
"Structured Procrastination" by John Perry

why you shouldn't throw paperclips

glumbert - Why You Shouldn't Throw Paperclips...

I am still revising 24/7, still off email, and still off kitchen table math.^**

I have not put together a National Geographic jigsaw puzzle in weeks.

I really can't say how I ended up at Glumbert just now.^** (Be sure to read the comments. I'm glad I did.)

Question: do I need a 30-dollar book on Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adult ADHD?

Don't answer that.


^* I've cut back.

^** Susan S, email purveyor of things Glumbert, has a lot to answer for. A whole lot.