Although evidence suggests that each of us tends to rely on a particular cognitive mode, no one is frozen into one mode of thinking at all times. People sometimes shift their modes of thought, and that is why we deliberately use words such as “typical” and “habitual” throughout this book. According to the Theory of Cognitive Modes, your dominant mode (i.e., the one you usually operate in) is determined by how much you utilize the top-brain and bottom-brain systems (where “utilize” refers to the optional uses of the systems, as discussed previously)—and you can alter this, albeit with considerable effort.
Consider one of the great diplomats of our time: the late Richard Holbrooke, who served several presidents (and also succeeded on Wall Street) and is perhaps best remembered for brokering the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which ended the bloody war in Bosnia. At the time of his death in December 2010, Holbrooke was a special adviser to President Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke understood not only history and contemporary geopolitics but also the complicated personalities of the leaders who drive them. Clearly, he often operated in Perceiver Mode. But a successful negotiator on the world stage must also, of course, sometimes operate in Mover Mode—and Holbrooke certainly did, as Dayton and other achievements demonstrated. And yet, in his well-known angry rants, he sometimes appeared to be in Stimulator Mode. These outbursts sometimes worked to his advantage (and hence may have been strategic, reflecting Mover Mode thinking), but they also, in certain circumstances, alienated others and apparently were not part of a plan to accomplish a specific goal.
Or consider Stephen Colbert, the popular comedian who plays a right-wing talk-show host on television: He himself must often be in Mover Mode in order to project a character who is usually supposed to be in Stimulator Mode when he interviews a guest, throwing out bombshells and being intentionally provocative in order to “see what happens.” But in order effectively to see what happens he must sometimes shift into Perceiver Mode. If he notices that the guest is getting upset in a way that isn’t very entertaining, he might shift into Adaptor Mode and let the guest take control of the interaction for a while.
Stephen Colbert himself is obviously very comfortable in Mover Mode, but he can let himself—at least temporarily—function in the other modes. So it is with many of us as we move through our less public lives.
Nonetheless, if the modes of thinking are like other psychological characteristics that have been studied in detail, people fall into a single mode by default for specific reasons—and some of these factors are difficult to overcome. In particular, a person’s temperament—which is one aspect of personality—probably affects why that person habitually operates in a given mode; some aspects of temperament affect how easily the person can stay focused on executing a complex, detailed plan or reflecting on the interpretation of an event. Such aspects of temperament include how emotional a person is, his or her overall activity level, his or her attention span and ability to be persistent, and how reactive and patient she or he is. Consider Perceiver and Stimulator modes, for instance: Being patient would help one to operate in Perceiver Mode but would not help one to operate in Stimulator Mode—but the opposite would be true for being highly active, which would help one to operate in Stimulator Mode but not in Perceiver Mode.
Why do we have the particular temperament we do? Most aspects of personality are determined at least in part by genes. Thus, it is plausible that genes influence which mode we prefer. And you cannot easily change the aspects of your temperament that were programmed by your genes.1 The genetic effects of temperament are evident even in infants. If you are a parent, you will have noticed that even as babies, children are different: One might be alert and lively, another a calm and relaxed mini-Buddha, and a third seemingly high-strung and jittery.
Studies of twins have produced good evidence that temperament is given to us—at least in part—courtesy of our genes. Because identical twins have almost the identical set of genes and fraternal twins share only half of their genes, researchers can infer the role of genes by comparing the two groups. Studies have consistently shown that many aspects of temperament are more similar in identical twins than in fraternal twins. Such studies have implicated genes in many aspects of temperament, including activity level, level of attention and persistence, emotionality, and shyness. The estimates of “heritability,” which corresponds to the percentage of the variability in a characteristic that is due to genes, range from about .20 to .60 (on a scale from 0 to 1.0). Without question, temperament is determined in part by genes.
Consistent with such empirical findings, researchers report that many aspects of temperament are relatively stable as children grow up. This fact has been well illustrated in the work of a pioneer in this field, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan.2 He has focused in large part on a facet of temperament he calls “reactivity,” which is evident even in four-month-old infants. Kagan and his colleagues showed infants unfamiliar objects, such as a strange-looking metal robot, and had them take part in novel procedures, such as being fitted with a blood pressure cuff. About 20 percent of the babies he and his colleagues tested were highly reactive—they became agitated and aroused when they encountered unfamiliar objects or events. And roughly another 40 percent were not highly reactive, but instead were relaxed and didn’t react strongly to unfamiliar events.
Years later, these same children were tested again to assess their brain functioning. And in fact ten- to twelve-year-old children who were high-reactive infants were found to have different brains from most other people.3 Specifically, these children had more active amygdalae than the children who were low-reactive as infants. The amygdala is a deep-brain structure that contributes to our having strong emotions, such as fear. At least in part, its future functioning is decided at conception, when a person’s DNA is assembled.
In short, temperament probably affects our dominant mode, and genes clearly influence our temperament. Our genes are not only part of the reason why we look as we look—they also are part of the reason why we behave as we behave.
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You are also stuck with baggage that is not a result of your genes. Learning is a big factor that affects behavior—and we have good reason to think that learning affects which cognitive mode you find most comfortable.
In most cases, we cannot help learning and remembering information about events that we pay attention to—that’s simply how the brain works. That is, we don’t have to make a deliberate effort to remember most things; merely paying attention to objects or events as we encounter them, and thinking about them at the time, typically will lead us later to remember them. This characteristic of the brain causes many sorts of important experiences to affect us for years to come. For instance, just being at the wedding of a close friend, and paying attention to every detail, will likely lead you to remember many happy aspects of the event many years later. By the same token, being at the funeral of a loved one, and hanging on every word of the eulogies, will likely lead you to remember the unhappy event—whether you want to or not.
Moreover, it’s not just genes and learning acting separately—it’s the way they interact that uniquely defines who you are and what you can do. If your genes incline you toward a very active temperament, you will probably engage in sports and take trips that involve an element of adventure—perhaps going rock climbing on very challenging mountain faces or rafting down rapids. But if your genes incline you to have a more passive temperament, you will likely gravitate toward more laid-back pursuits—reading or gardening, for example. And, once you’ve had those experiences, what you learned will in turn shape you, giving you new ways of organizing the world and classifying future experiences (relying on the bottom brain). Moreover, they will expand your repertoire of viable plans, of ways to go about doing things (relying on the top brain).
In short, your genes may incline you toward different experiences, and the learning that occurs during those experiences in turn affects how much you utilize the top- and bottom-brain systems.
A telling finding comes from the study of IQ: The genetic contribution toward IQ actually goes up as people advance into old age, as University of Minnesota researcher Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., reported in 2004.4 Why would this be? One reason is that as you age, you have more control over your environment: You get to decide whether to spend time hunting deer or cuddling up with a good book, playing touch football or interacting with other chess players, and so on. Because the effects of your genes (such as those aspects of temperament that are genetically programmed) weigh in on your choice of environments, and environment contributes to IQ, your genetics can affect your IQ indirectly. The indirect effects may increase with age because you are able to choose your environment, and thus the total contribution of the genes to your intelligence increases with age.
We can credibly conclude that our genes almost certainly influence the degree to which we each tend to use our top- and bottom-brain systems in optional ways, not forced by the current situation. And we can conclude that learning, which affects virtually all aspects of cognition and behavior, also influences how much we utilize the two systems.
It follows that over time each of us tends to settle into using the top- and bottom-brain systems to greater or lesser degrees—which in turn produces a dominant cognitive mode. We may not be stuck in this dominant mode every minute of every day, but we will be most consistently comfortable using that one particular mode.
So, what to do when your habitual mode of thinking turns out not to be as helpful as it could be for the job at hand? Can you change which cognitive mode you use? According to our theory, the answer is: In most cases, yes—but only to a degree, and only with significant effort.
In what follows we’ll examine the possibility of changing your dominant cognitive mode, examining ways to alter the functioning of both the top- and the bottom-brain systems. We’ll start with the bottom brain, which classifies and interprets input from the senses.
If experience has made you an expert in a certain area—you’ve learned a huge amount about it, in other words—you can become comfortable using Perceiver Mode in that area, regardless of your dominant mode of thinking. The problem is that the scientific literature indicates that, in general, people become experts only after about ten thousand hours of practice. Unlike cognitive modes that are determined in part by temperament—which may affect all your interactions with the world—cognitive modes that emerge from knowledge in an area are typically restricted to that one domain. If you become an expert in football plays, you may become very good at classifying and understanding them—but this skill will not help you much, if at all, with classifying and understanding baseball or soccer plays. In fact, in many cases becoming good at one particular task does not even lead one to become good at similar tasks.
Consider chicken sexing, an important practice in animal husbandry. Determining whether day-old chicks are male or female is crucial to egg producers: Not only are males incapable of producing eggs, but their presence actually disrupts egg laying. Poultry farmers place a premium on sorting males from females.
Classifying the sex of baby chicks is easier said than done. To the untrained eye, it is not at all clear what distinguishes males from females—they don’t have easily identifiable external genitalia. This explains why becoming a professional chicken sexer is a valued, high-paying profession; these experts were in demand even during the Great Depression. Expert chicken sexers can determine the gender of about a thousand chicks per hour with 98 percent accuracy. In about half a second, looking under a magnifying glass, they make the call. Imagine a baseball hitter with even half this rate of success—he would surpass even Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, the greatest hitters who ever lived, who got a base hit only about a third of the time at bat.5
Researchers Irving Biederman and Margaret M. Shiffrar studied how chicken sexers perform their job.6 They began by asking them to look at photographs of baby chicks’ bottoms and circle the area that they focused on when determining sex. The area that was identified was flat or concave for females and convex for males. The researchers then used photos to train people with no experience in this domain. After training, the nonprofessionals could distinguish males from females accurately 84 percent of the time. (Actual training typically does not involve photos but rather hinges on experience with real chicks.)
This study illustrates two important points:
First, the task could be learned—after instruction, participants did far better than the 50 percent accuracy expected by chance alone. Even without much practice, the nonprofessionals were able to function in Perceiver Mode when classifying chicks.
Yet the training did not allow participants to generalize completely, even within this one domain: Those trained in the study were not even close to being perfectly accurate; they missed many calls. In fact, it turns out that to be an expert chicken sexer requires mastering various exceptions to the simple rule. Learning the rule doesn’t allow a nonprofessional to generalize, any more than learning that a strike in baseball is a fruitless swing of the bat helps you also understand that a strike occurs when the ball passes over the plate in a certain way, swing or no swing.
Ultimately, learning to distinguish between baby chick genitalia or between strikes and balls in baseball will not help you to distinguish between different types of rocks, apples, courthouse facades, or anything else. The time spent learning how to sex chickens would not help you become a gemologist, skilled in grading jewels after a single look.
In short, we expect that becoming an expert at a particular task can allow you to operate in Perceiver Mode in that context, but only after you do an enormous amount of work. If the task is really important to you, it may make sense to invest effort in learning—but keep in mind that this is not likely to affect the mode you operate in when you are in other situations.
In the previous section, we considered how experience can alter the bottom-brain system. A comparable story applies to the top-brain system, but in this case you can learn new strategies that allow you to use your top brain in specific new circumstances. This learning does not imply that you will utilize the top-brain system more in general—it just allows you to use it more in the particular task you practice.
Take the case of S.F., a student at Carnegie Mellon University who volunteered to participate in an experiment that is well known in cognitive science circles (he is identified only by his initials in order to preserve his anonymity).7 S.F. reported to a laboratory three to five days a week over the course of more than a year and a half. At each visit, researchers K. Anders Ericsson and William Chase gave S.F. a series of random digits (for example, 4, 9, 3, 1, . . .), one every second. S.F.’s job was to repeat back each series immediately after hearing it.
In the first session, he was given a single digit and was asked to repeat it back. He was then given two random digits and asked to repeat them back; then three and so on until he could not repeat the entire sequence. On that first day, he could recall about seven digits in a row (six or seven is the usual number of random digits that people can store in short-term memory and repeat back). He returned the next day to repeat the process, and continued to return. The lists grew longer. By the end of the study, he could repeat back seventy-nine random digits!
How did S.F. accomplish this? He used top-brain processes to organize the digits into groups.
Humans can store about four groups of information in short-term memory. Within each of those groups can be up to another four groups, and so on. S.F. happened to be a long-distance runner. He was able to translate groups of digits into times for specific segments of particular races he remembered and then associate the segments. For instance, “3, 4, 9, 2” was coded as 3 minutes, 49.2 seconds. When the numbers did not fit times of familiar races, his memory plummeted; when all the digits fit, his memory was superb. With increasing practice, he supplemented this strategy with one that coded digits into dates or people’s ages. He got better and better at using these strategies to organize random digits.
Here’s the kicker: After S.F learned to remember digits with such dramatic success, when he was given letters of the alphabet instead of digits, he could not recall anywhere near seventy-nine. In fact, he couldn’t recall even ten—he was back to recalling about six items (which is within the normal range). The strategies that worked well for digits simply did not apply to letters, so he could not organize letters into groups effectively. Given time and practice, he probably could have learned new strategies—but these strategies then would apply only to letters.
In a limited number of cases, however, some transfer from a trained task to a new one is possible. Such transfer can occur if one performs tasks that share at least one underlying aspect of information processing. For example, in a study reported by Stephen and his team, participants were asked to practice “mentally rotating” objects every day for twenty-one consecutive days. As we discussed in chapter 4, mental rotation occurs when you visualize something spinning around a pivot point (either in 2-D or in 3-D), such as when you rotate a mental image of the uppercase version of the letter p 180 degrees to discover whether it would then be another letter. (Is it? If so, which one? Answer: Yes, a lowercase d.)
As expected, the participants got faster and faster at such mental rotation with practice. After three weeks, they were given another task. The researchers found that, after the participants practiced mentally rotating one set of forms, their performance in other tasks improved to a greater or lesser degree depending upon how similar the required information processing was to that required in the original task—the more similar, the better. The greatest improvement was observed when the participants mentally rotated another, similar set of forms. Participants improved somewhat when they mentally folded squares into boxes, but not as much. Participants also solved verbal analogies. The researchers found that previous practice in mental rotation did not lead to improved performance of the verbal task.
Why did participants get better at mentally folding squares into boxes after they practiced mental rotation? Because both tasks involved mentally shifting the locations of parts of objects, and this process apparently improves after practicing mental rotation—and hence it is then more effective when subsequently used in mental paper folding. Other processes required to perform mental rotation (such as keeping a figure properly aligned as it is rotated) were also practiced. Such processes apply strictly to mental rotation; that is why there was greater transfer to another rotation task than to mental paper folding. And there was no transfer to solving verbal analogies because this task shared virtually no underlying processes with mental rotation.
If we can generalize from the sorts of experimental findings we have just discussed (of which there are many) to the cognitive modes, we can infer the following: You can change the degree to which you rely on top-brain and bottom-brain functioning in a particular task or closely related tasks. Such changes could allow you to operate in Perceiver Mode (if the bottom-brain system becomes utilized more), Stimulator Mode (if the top-brain system becomes utilized more), or Mover Mode (if both the top- and the bottom-brain systems are utilized more). However, the existing scientific literature strongly suggests that the effects of such training will be limited primarily to the domain in which you practice. And you have to practice a lot to reach expert-level performance, which requires an enormous commitment. Most of us are unwilling or unable to make such a commitment for such a relatively limited reward.
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In our view, no one cognitive mode is in general “superior to” or “better than” others, and there is no good reason to be dissatisfied with your dominant mode, which you’ll have the opportunity to identify in chapter 13. The challenge is to find the best way to use your dominant cognitive mode to good ends, which may entail partnering with others or finding the right environment to engage your strengths. We will have a lot more to say about this, but let’s first explore the four modes in greater detail, considering more thoroughly the hallmarks of each and providing illustrations.