Just a public service announcement to readers in the UK with access to the BBC iPlayer and who missed the programme Imagine last week: Alan Yentob following in the footsteps of Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (US edition). There is just one day left to download it; you can then keep it for 30 days. Do it: it’s worth it. The streaming landing page is here.

I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with music over the past few years, not least trying to understand why I like what I like, how my tastes evolve, and what relationship there might be to my own cognitive function at different times. For example, for the past two months I’ve been listening almost exclusively to classical music radio, barely a CD and almost no pop.

The key points for us here in Imagine were the results of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan of Alan Yentob’s brain while he listened to three different pieces of music: one that made him happy (Is This the Way to Amarillo), one that annoyed him (some angry heavy metal), and a piece with deep emotional significance for him (one of Strauss’s Four Last Songs sung by Jessye Norman (US version).

There were two unexpected results. One was that the first song didn’t annoy Yentob (OK, that was my conclusion). The second was that the fMRI scan showed Yentob’s brain literally “bathed in blood” during the most poignant musical choice; the first two songs activated regions of the brain more usually associated with music.

Then there was the autistic and blind pianist, Derek Paravicini, who’d come to music at an early age, and as an adult demonstrated extraordinary virtuosity — able to reproduce a piece of complex jazz immediately after hearing it for the first time.

But here you need to pay attention, because it was made plain — then sort of glossed over later by some Yentobian editorialising — that turning the early latent musical genius into what we saw on screen took years of patient mentoring by the music teacher; that his ability to express his musicality through the keyboard was painstakingly earned, and perhaps more so than for an unencumbered musician. The boy’s ability to coordinate and apply appropriate fingering had been deeply limited by his disabilities (blindness/autism). There is probably a whole separate programme here on the process of releasing latent talent, particularly among those with learning impairments.

Finally, a group of Tourette’s syndrome sufferers, who displayed uncoordinated tics when gathered in a room, became immediately transformed and synchronised as musicians when they started a drumming exercise. This apparently supernatural effect suggests a deep-rooted social component to our experience of music, and one that I’ve sought out myself over the past few years as part of my own evolutionary fitness experiments. But I suspect my choirmaster would dispute how readily I become synchronised with my co-singers.

For those who can’t get the BBC, here are couple of YouTube’s. The first with Sacks talking about rhythm, and the second from Derek Paravicini’s website, which is ostensibly a UK TV documentary made specifically about him, featuring among others Jools Holland and Simon (not Sacha) Baron- Cohen.

Welcome to the Knackered Hack. If you're visiting in search of my paleo lunch with Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, you'll find it in three parts here. If you enjoy what you see don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, so you don't miss an important update and can more easily forward those salient posts to your friends and business contacts, sign up for my regular email service. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here. Thanks for visiting!

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The Economist this week has two stories back-to-back in its Science and Technology section on cognitive enhancement. Not surprisingly the first one, which is about the widespread use of cognition-enhancing drugs (such as Ritalin and Provigil) to help you pass exams or improve performance, and the expectation of more to come, has been given the greater attention by the wider press. It’s a scare story about competition and cheating and raises the possibility of the need to test students as potential drug cheats. But The Economist takes a controversial tack in its editorial, likening this to “harmless” coffee and arguing it is a good thing.

It falls on deaf ears here because this is a week when I did not drink or eat any coffee, milk, wheat product, potato, rice or any refined carbohydrate excepting that contained in one bar of 85% cocoa chocolate. I drank no alcohol either. I’ve been doing this as a stricter enforcement of a paleo-style diet to help regulate my weight, but above all else to enhance cognition, and for longer-term preventative health. As far as I’m aware, it is working. With one or two qualifications. Those qualifications being a coincident virus that caused a migraine which lasted longer than I’d normally expect, prompting a little hypochondria and Googling for ideas about nutritional deficiency — to no avail.

The paleo-style diet (or lifestyle) is hard to sustain and I can tell you that it has been a lot harder in the short run than popping a few pills. But my argument with The Economist’s view is that the brain is a complex system: don’t mess with it if you don’t need to. My own experience seems to suggest that I’m a little insulin-resistant, with diabetes in the family, so a lower-carb diet is likely to be beneficial.

But the second story in The Economist pairing owes more to my approach than the pill-popping. This other story describing research that social position can be detrimental to cognition has received no mainstream attention elsewhere, as far as Google can tell us. It has been, thus far, editorially cold-shouldered, and subordinated, and yet by far and away it is the more interesting story for self-experimenters, self-improvers, collaborationists, diversity specialists, managers, teachers, coaches and parents.

Pamela Smith and colleagues from Radboud University Nijmegen suspected that a lack of social power might reduce someone’s ability to keep track of information and make plans to achieve goals in difficult and distracting circumstances. This seems like common sense, not least because I’ve seen a number of situations, for example, where even senior executives have lost confidence and status and then suffered a quite immediate impairment. I’ve even experienced it myself at significant moments. I once had to pitch for $30 million for a management buy-out having been booked into a shoddy lower-Manhattan hotel where the breakfast was served on paper plates. Not a good start to the day. The next day, for the next pitch, I moved to a different hotel and a waterside suite — ironically for much the same price.

The Economist says:-

To explore this theory, she (Dr Smith) carried out three tests. In the first, participants were divided at random into groups of superiors and subordinates. They were told that the superiors would direct and evaluate the subordinates and that this evaluation would determine the subordinates’ payment for the experiment. Superiors were paid a fixed amount. The subordinates were then divided into two further groups: powerless and empowered. A sense of powerlessness was instilled, the researchers hoped, by having participants write for several minutes about a time when they were powerless or by asking them to unscramble sets of words including “obey”, “subordinate” and so on to form sentences. The empowered, by contrast, were asked to write about when they had been on top, or to form sentences including “authority”, “dominate” and similar words.

Not much, you might say, to induce a sense of inferiority or superiority when compared with the real-life stress of a domineering boss or other confidence-draining circumstance, but nevertheless enough to make an impact on several cognitive tasks:-

In all three tests Dr Smith found that low-power participants made 2-5% more errors than their high-power counterparts. She argues that these results were not caused by the low-power volunteers being less motivated, as they had the same financial incentive as the high-power volunteers to do well. Instead, she suspects that those lacking in power suffered adverse cognitive effects from that very lack, and thus had difficulty maintaining their focus on the tasks.

A common problem in evaluating how well someone is doing relative to their ability is the often-mentioned fundamental attribution error: a pretty universal cognitive bias where we will tend to ascribe another’s failure in a task to their personality rather than their circumstances — largely because we will probably have more data about their personality than the circumstances. Conversely, we judge our own failures more kindly because we know what extenuates them.

What Pamela Smith’s findings suggest is that when we are judging an individual for promotion, for example, it is quite possible that their performance will be transformed once they emerge from a subordinate position, and even more so if we have failed to motivate them properly. They may have been swimming hard against a tidal flow that we cannot see.

Of course, this applies from hiring manager to teacher, coach, and parent, and should require CEOs and other leaders to show a little more humility given the cognitive momentum their high status affords them.

While I love what the cognitive sciences are doing these days, I can’t help but be reminded of the existing literature on these matters. This one evokes the first record I ever owned: Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of The Ugly Duckling. And this YouTube rendering is not so different from the way I used to enjoy it nearly 40 years ago.

Take a look. And believe that you are a swan.

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Flatland: A Journey of Many Dimensions (US edition) is a short book, but I read it very slowly. It’s less than 100 pages, and it took me six weeks, I think.

Perhaps if I had studied more than school-house geometry I would not have felt the need to spend so long pondering the perceptual consequences of living in two dimensions, as the characters in Flatland do.

Then again, there is the more frightening thought that I am in fact living a single dimensional existence without realising it. To understand how stupidly comic the book makes that idea seem you’ll have to get hold of a copy. It is a book that encourages humility in our understanding and yet aspiration to higher knowledge at one and the same time.

Written by Victorian London schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland was a mathematically-inspired parody of the restrictions (social, intellectual and philosophical) of the era. Abbott created an alternative two-dimensional world, expounded by geometrical observation and hand-drawn sketches to attack in allegory the conventional wisdoms of that hierarchical 19th century society.

But it barely takes any imagination to transpose the ideas into our own era. For it must ever be the case that a battle is going on within society between those who want to push our understanding upward, to challenge orthodoxy, and those whose economic benefit resides in the status quo. Quite literally these days our quantum friends ask us to consider many more dimensions than most of us have the faculty to conceive of.

The main protagonist and narrator of the story is A. Square, who is…a square; this makes him a professional man, or gentleman in Flatland. The middle classes are equilateral triangles, the lower classes isosceles. And in this world the women (ladies, you’ll not like this) are straight lines.

Remember, Abbott is describing a highly structured society. Social mobility in this world is generationally dependent. Deviations, if not correctable at birth, are extinguished. Squares beget pentagons, pentagons beget hexagons,etc etc. Regularity matters above all else.

The angularity of one’s body dictates not only your station in life but is also mirrored in your IQ; the pointier your angles the thicker you are. But Abbott’s protagonist from a middling station nevertheless demonstrates, through a combination of curiosity (his own and that of his hexagonal grandson) and through the revelation of a visitor from the higher plane, that there is a third dimension (and possibly more). He ends up challenging the established order held in place by his intellectual and geometrical superiors — the top-most of which are the priestly circles.

But this is more than just a reprint of Abbott’s text because the book is republished to accompany an animated movie(US DVD version). The narrative has been updated to account for a more contemporary sensibility and bring this geometrical allegory to life for a new generation, and one very easily turned off mathematics. So purists for the old story should get over themselves and help celebrate — if they were otherwise so inclined.

The movie was an instant hit with the two knackered chips off the old hack: one 13, the other eight. So if you are a secondary or junior school teacher tasked with enthusing children with the idea of maths and geometry in particular, there could be no better investment. And don’t worry about the women being lines; that liberal poster-child Martin Sheen plays Arthur Square in the film, and the precocious grandson, Hex, becomes a girl and is given voice by Kristen Bell.

The DVD extras also provide some great computer-generated animation that shows how three-dimensional shapes would be perceived in just two dimensions, and then, by the same logic, how higher dimensional objects might present themselves in our three-dimensional world.

And pay attention for the line in the trailer here: “Oh dude, you’re freakin’ me out!”, for that is the Line King talking.

What is particularly cute to my mind about the animated characters is that, while their outward form is two-dimensional, their insides are all revealed to be Mandelbrotian fractals. Now, there’s a truth we should all ponder.

Thanks to the movie’s animator Dano Johnson for providing the above on YouTube.

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I’ve been interested in the concept of athletic injury — why it happens and how to avoid it — since my early attempts at distance running went wrong. My failure to properly manage the progression from half- to full-marathon training scuppered my enjoyment at the full distance and cost me no small amount of time, money and pain at the physio clinic.

Last year I asked the London Marathon folks how many places they allocate each year, and how many drop out before the day, but answer came there none. Many runners, I’m sure, tough it out on inadequate training and recovery, just as I did in 2005, with a virus or other illness that seems marginal in the context of the joy of getting a place in this massive mobile folk festival, or the sense of obligation to one’s sponsors. The latter, of course, is very powerful.

But during all my middle-aged attempts at higher fitness, I think the most interesting concept I’ve come across appeared just the other day in the sports science newsletter Peak Performance:-

There is a price to be paid for developing specific robustness, and it goes some way to explaining how highly trained athletes can still be susceptible to injury. As training and strength progress we become increasingly adapted to the stimulus our body expects. However, high levels of adaptation to a familiar stress may conversely leave you potentially fragile to an unexpected stress. And as the highly adaptable and complex being that you are, it is often tiny unexpected stresses that may prove catastrophic. This is referred to as the robustness-fragility trade-off.

The concept is new to me, but presumably it will not be to those familiar with complex systems, be they biological or technological. I’m guessing here that it should also resonate in the workplace, school, the home and even the family. The more we become good at the specific skill, task, business or market orientation, the more vulnerable perhaps we are to some not entirely distant butterfly-wing flap - the tooth that cracks while biting on nothing more than a lettuce leaf.

Well, I’ve heard in business the suggestion that the big non-linearities are kind of unavoidable, and that their impact will be evenly distributed, so there is not much competitive advantage in laying down tools and tinkering in some other less defined direction, which is what the Peak Performance article advocates for physiological purposes.

I think they are telling us to do a bit more than just cross-training, the benefits of which are well-documented, but try and incorporate a range of movements into your life and workouts. For example, the article recommends introducing a “bandwidth of variability” in the way we run or exercise, and do things that challenge our coordination.

For runners (which is mostly where my interests lie) exercises like skipping and even hopscotch are recommended. It seems a far cry from what we conceive of as the serious business of piling on the miles.

Perhaps a bit more corporate hopscotch, and some of our currently endangered institutions might now be looking a little less vulnerable? But I doubt the stock analysts would be able to reduce it to a metric for discussion, so it is only through the wisdom of failure that most managers are likely to allocate any time or resources to such a pursuit.

The difficulty is that we prefer to focus on the task in hand and see ourselves progress directly at the sport or discipline in which we will be measured. The greater discipline required to step back and spend a little bit of time filling in the gaps seems to come at the cost of specific progress on that road to greater robustness in our chosen sport or business endeavour. That less-travelled training road is also likely to leave us feeling that we are falling behind our colleagues or competitors.

For example, if the choice exists between dropping some miles on the training path and some core stability training, the closer to an event the more likely that non sport-specific activity is going to be foregone if there is some other pressing work or family responsibility.

Very early readers of the Knackered Hack will recall my focus on rugby player Jonny Wilkinson’s return to competitive sport, and his own comments on the mismanagement of his early training regime.

Up to now I have perhaps not had the strength to make these tough decisions because I always believed the toughest decision was to stay on the field and “tough it out” for an extra hour or so. The tough decisions for me now are about getting the most out of my training while still being able to rest and recuperate for the weekend’s game. I still train numerous times every day but I try now to train better and smarter, which does not necessarily always mean longer.

It is for this reason that, rather than focus on a specific event goal like the marathon, my training approach is now holistic, trying to put together some of the things I’ve learned over the past several years. This may mean a slower, more varied route to robustness. All that said, my opinion of my current regime is that it is still too monotonous. So, inspired by Peak Performance, I will be ringing the changes in the coming weeks with weights, tennis, badminton, skipping, basketball, and maybe even some hopscotch (corporate and otherwise).

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Great Britain again dominated the World Track Cycling Championship at the Manchester Velodrome this weekend. I watched only briefly, taking a break from the Twitter stream to see an interview with team psychologist Steve Peters.

Peters is something of a phenomenon, if not a genius; Undergraduate Dean of Sheffield University, much in demand in a variety of UK sports, he’s a sometime visitor to the England rugby training camp here at the Sports Training Village in Bath — which, by the way, seemed to be a secret he did not want told on national TV.

But most interestingly, perhaps, he is a former forensic psychologist, who spent many years working in Rampton Secure Hospital, exemplifying our own belief here at Knackered Towers that the study of that which is broken yields useful lessons if you want to succeed.

If that were not enough, the unassuming Dr Peters is a highly competitive Masters M50 sprint champion (that’s running fast for old folks). His training regimen, discussed here, would likely pass muster with that most eminent of critical thinkers on all things sporty, Professor Art de Vany. It’s very unorthodox.

Now, recently I’ve been tempted to comment on Reuters’ CEO Tom Glocer’s blog, but held back. Tom was talking about national character, negativity and optimism. If I understood his point correctly, he was saying that if only you think positively, good things will follow (that was the post title in any event). He referred to the need for an optimistic outlook, drawing on the athletic coach and the self-talking salesman as examples.

You can’t really argue with that. Except that, as Ed Smith painted in his book, the truth is a lot less certain and requires a more subjunctive qualification: think positively and good things might happen. The corollary being, think negatively and it ain’t gonna happen, not now, not never. And that’s more my own experience; as Woody Allen would have it, 80 pct of life is about turning up.

But, in my own corporate experience, positivity and negativity tend to be understood in very binary terms. And because of that, useful information about how products could be improved (or an organization better configured) does not flow freely up the ranks. With tools like wikis, of course, it now flows much more freely across reporting lines, if managers take the step to encourage their use. And it flows pretty freely among the folks who stand outside the office smoking, but let’s not go there.

Returning to individual and team confidence, what Peters had to say was quite brief but highly nuanced. What was clear was that positive thinking, and the psychological tools needed to create it, were not straightforward: they were specific to the individual, but also situational depending on the person, whether a team was involved, the type of event, the coach, championship and location. What mattered was educating athletes into how their minds worked, what trigger points led to negative emotions, and how those could be turned around.

Vicky Pendleton, the diminutive and self-confessed “girly girl” who won two gold medals and a silver over the weekend, had lacked confidence, according to Peters, when he started working with her. But he described how she had been able to train herself to turn her mood around within 10 minutes of a setback.

Peters explained how large events, such as the Olympics, create a huge range of distractions (from transport to security) each of which will affect each athlete differently, and for which all need to be prepared if they are to secure their own best chance of success.

What makes sport an interesting crucible through which to understand performance these days is that there is just so much of it, it is so professional, and there is so much research (physiological, neurological, psychological) . And it produces characters like Peters, Martin O’Neil and Ed Smith.

Sportsmen and women are dealing with the most intense of situations in which their vulnerabilities are very public, even on a day-to-day basis in training. They have a lot of complex information to understand, and failure to self-manage can quickly lead to injury, loss of form, loss of a place on the team, loss of funding, denial of access to quality coaching, etc. And that ignores the consequence of a random fall or illness at a critical moment in a training schedule. This cascade gathers its own momentum because at each stage the athlete finds him or herself increasingly isolated, so the reversal becomes commensurately difficult to effect.

It should not be forgotten, and if you have ever trained really hard you will know, that resulting sharp mood swings can affect motivations and relationships outside of the sport as the body and mind adapt and recover from the process of extreme exertion. Indeed, a protracted bad mood is a sign of over-training syndrome which is very hard to pinpoint in oneself until it’s too late, and takes a surprisingly long time to recover from.

There don’t seem to be enough Steve Peters to go round sport, let alone international business. I wonder how we should go about making more?

Photo: British Cycling

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