The Cognitive Cost of Expertise (Mental vs. Spiritual Knowledge)

note: this article is interesting. It reinforces Lao Tzu’s dictum about letting go of Knowledge, in order to gain wisdom. Wisdom requires flexibility, as the Life Force/Qi Field is always in flux, always creating….whereas intellectual knowledge is more fixed, memorized. I feel that qigong and inner alchemy keep your heart-mind flexibile, changing, dissolving, re-forming with the in-the-moment flow. The Present Moment is never fixed, and thus cannot be “learned”. – Michael

THE COGNITIVE COST OF EXPERTISE
By Jonah Lehrer
Wired
November 19, 2010

http://nhne-pulse.org/the-cognitive-cost-of-expertise/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/the-cognitive-cost-of-expertise/

In the 1940s, the Dutch psychologist Adrian de Groot performed a landmark
study of chess experts. Although de Groot was an avid chess amateur — he
belonged to several clubs — he grew increasingly frustrated by his
inability to compete with more talented players. De Groot wanted to
understand his defeats, to identify the mental skills that he was missing.
His initial hypothesis was that the chess expert were blessed with a
photographic memory, allowing them to remember obscure moves and exploit the
minor mistakes of their opponents. De Groot’s first experiment seemed to
confirm this theory: He placed twenty different pieces on a chess board,
imitating the layout of a possible game. Then, de Groot asked a variety of
chess players, from inexperienced amateurs to chess grandmasters, to quickly
glance at the board and try to memorize the location of each piece. As the
scientists expected, the amateurs drew mostly blanks. The grandmasters,
however, easily reproduced the exact layout of the game. The equation seemed
simple: memory equals talent.

But then de Groot performed a second experiment that changed everything.
Instead of setting the pieces in patterns taken from an actual chess game,
he randomly scattered the pawns and bishops and knights on the board. If the
best chess players had enhanced memories, then the location shouldn’t
matter: a pawn was still a pawn. To de Groot’s surprise, however, the
grandmaster edge now disappeared. They could no longer remember where the
pieces had been placed.

For de Groot, this failure was a revelation, since it suggested that talent
wasn’t about memory — it was about perception. The grandmasters didn’t
remember the board better than amateurs. Rather, they saw the board better,
instantly translating the thirty-two chess pieces into a set of meaningful
patterns. They didn’t focus on the white bishop or the black pawn, but
instead grouped the board into larger strategies and structures, such as the
French Defense or the Reti Opening.

This mental process is known as “chunking” and it’s a crucial element of
human cognition. As de Groot demonstrated, chess grandmasters automatically
chunk the board into a set of known patterns, which allow them to instantly
sort through the messy details of the game. And chunking isn’t just for
chess experts: While reading this sentence, your brain is effortlessly
chunking the letters, grouping the symbols into lumps of meaning. As a
result, you don’t have to sound out each syllable, or analyze the phonetics;
your literate brain is able to skip that stage of perception. This is what
expertise is: the ability to rely on learned patterns to compensate for the
inherent limitations of information processing in the brain. As George
Miller famously observed, we can only consciously make sense of about seven
bits of information (plus or minus two) at any given moment. Chunking allows
us to escape this cognitive trap.

Now for the bad news: Expertise might also come with a dark side, as all
those learned patterns make it harder for us to integrate wholly new
knowledge. Consider a recent paper that investigated the mnemonic
performance of London taxi drivers. In the world of neuroscience, London
cabbies are best known for their demonstration of structural plasticity in
the hippocampus, a brain area devoted (in part) to spatial memory. Because
the cabbies are required to memorize the entire urban map of London — it’s
the most rigorous driving test in the world — their posterior hippocampi
swell and expand, leading to permanent changes in the brain. Knowledge
shapes matter.

However, the same researchers that documented the expansion of the
hippocampus are now documenting the tradeoffs of all that extra spatial
information. The problem with our cognitive chunks is that they’re fully
formed — an inflexible pattern we impose on the world — which means they
tend to be resistant to sudden changes, such as a street detour in central
London. They also are a practiced habit, and so we tend to rely on them even
when they might not be applicable. (A chess grandmaster has to be careful
about applying his chess chunks to checkers.) Here’s Christian Jarrett at
the BPS Research Digest, summarizing this new experiment:

“A second investigation tested their ability to learn unfamiliar routes that
were integrated into familiar areas of London. At this task, the taxi
drivers struggled compared with their performance when learning entirely new
routes. Woollett and Maguire speculated that in this case the drivers’
expertise was getting in the way of learning the new routes: ‘When presented
with new information to learn that is similar to their existing knowledge,
their poorer performance may reflect expert inflexibility and an inability
to inhibit access to existing (and now competing) memory representations.’

“This finding tallies with the real-life experiences of taxi drivers. For
example, several of them reported struggling a few years ago to incorporate
new layouts around the Canary Wharf district into their existing knowledge.”

The larger lesson is that the brain is a deeply constrained thinking
machine, full of cognitive tradeoffs and zero-sum constraints. Those chess
professionals and London cabbies can perform seemingly superhuman mental
feats, as they chunk their world into memorable patterns. However, those
same talents make them bad at seeing beyond their chunks, at making sense of
games and places they can’t easily understand.

One of my favorite examples of such tradeoffs comes from the work of
neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, who has helped illuminate the anatomy of
reading in the brain. Not surprisingly, the ability to make sense of words
takes up a significant chunk of the visual cortex, as brain cells previously
devoted to object recognition get usurped by the alphabet. (Dehaene refers
to this process as “neuronal recycling.”) Deheane also speculates that,
while “learning to read induces massive cognitive gains,” it also comes with
a hidden mental cost: because so much of our visual cortex is now devoted to
literacy, we’re less able to “read” the details of the natural world. (Just
imagine all the things you could notice if you couldn’t read this sentence.)
So if you’re an expert, be proud: You’ve learned to perceive the world in a
useful way. Your training has changed the structure of your brain. But don’t
forget to think about your blind spots, about all those new patterns that
you must struggle to see.