Dispositional mindfulness is associated with reduced implicit learning | Hacker News Reader

Dispositional mindfulness is associated with reduced implicit learning

sciencedirect.com

57 pointsunicornporn46 comments

Original paper:

http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:1749328:5/comp...

In fact, it's not. The paper you've linked is titled "Mindfulness reduces habitual responding based on implicit knowledge: Evidence from artificial grammar learning", from September 2012. It may be related, but not the same.

A summary for us laypeople [1].

'The authors suggest that people who deliberate less are better at implicit learning because they have a wider span of attention and focus on a wider variety of stimuli. In turn, this makes them more likely to capture relevant associations in complex tasks.'

'But they also found several positive correlations between mindfulness and previously investigated cognitive and psychological health outcomes, “supporting the idea of a tradeoff in benefit,” Stillman says.'

1: http://www.georgetown.edu/research/news/mindfulness-cognitiv...

Better: quote the actual authors.

> We therefore tested whether the mindfulness trait predicted a reduction of grammatically congruent preferences ... Mindfulness was shown to correlate negatively with grammatically congruent responses

> Mindfulness was measured using the Dutch version (de Bruin, Topper, Muskens, Bogels, & Kamphuis, 2012) of the 39 item Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ, Baer et al. (2006)).

> Working memory (WM) performance over sessions was analyzed with repeated-measures ANOVA. WM performance (LEVENSHTEIN) was indexed by mean Levenshtein distance between target sequence and remembered sequence ... Low Levenshtein distances therefore represent good WM performance, and high Levenshtein distance poor WM performance.

The WM variable represents mean distance between target sequences subjects were exposed to before they were told there was a pattern, and the sequences they generated attempting to recall them after being told there was a pattern.

The phrase, "grammatically congruent responses" appears only in the abstract, but it probably refers to the same thing as WM.

Sometimes, it's best to let your pattern matcher do its thing. Label your axes, kids.

i spend almost of my time in thought. i've been this way ever since i was a kid, and i think this is why i was so bad at social skills.

most people learn social skills through implicit-pattern matching. 'when i do this, that happens' - with no real structural understanding of _why_. they implicitly learn patterns like posture, eye contact, facial microexpressions.

that implicit learning is not possible if you are always engaged in conceptual thought.

that implicit learning is not possible if you are always engaged in conceptual thought.

While I agree with you, the paper is saying that mindfulness (being "in the moment" or aware of your surroundings) results in reduced implicit learning. That seems to be the opposite of your observation.

Although I have no idea whether "dispositional mindfulness" is different from "mindfulness," so maybe my comment isn't quite accurate. But if it's any way related to the colloquial definition of "mindfulness," then the paper is saying it's negatively correlated with implicit learning.

Is the paper's "implicit learning" the same as the type of learning you're talking about? I don't know.

thanks for the clarification. you're right on that.

i've found that my social skills have dramatically improved from trying to learn them _conceptually_, rather than implicitly. I watched a lot of tv shows - walking dead, house of cards, game of thrones, breaking bad - and kept pausing the tv to discuss with my wife _why_ people were acting the ways they did.

doing this really helped me come to understand a lot of things, like the importance of staying calm if you want to be respected. apparently 'dispositional mindfulness' is mindfulness as a default state, as opposed to something practiced intentionally.

going about my day thinking about abstract things constantly seems like the opposite of dispositional mindfulness. i'll haveh to look further.

Based on your description, it sounds like you may be on the autistic spectrum. Perhaps reading up on that can give you more insights.

You may also find this book interesting, by a man who was diagnosed with Asperger's (which is now just said to be on the autistic spectrum) as an adult, after his wife started picking up on it: http://www.amazon.com/The-Journal-Best-Practices-Marriage/dp...

Almost everyone spends most of their time in thought. This mode of the brain is called the "default mode network".

Mindfulness disengages the "default mode network" and instead engages the "experiential focus network" which is more attuned to the 5 senses, and less absorbed in thought.

my 'default mode' is the task positive network. the task positive network and default mode network are counter-driven - so having a task positive network active means the default mode network is off. evaluating other people's emotional states and daydreaming are the primary functioning of the default mode network - things which it takes me a lot of effort to do. drifting off to thought about 'the nature of consciousness' comes naturally; it takes effort to look at the people around me and evaluate their emotional content.

this is the point i was trying to make above, but failed to understand the article.

This sounds vaguely like attention deficit disorder.

I think that statement is most accurate with the word "vaguely". This sort of mental state/behavioral disposition and A.D.D. are mutually exclusive. In fact, usually people who are this way are introverted and rather calm natured.

Nope. Hyperactivity is not a necessary symptom for A.D.D. But this is a very common misconception. Without hyperactivity, patients have a tendency to never get a diagnosis until sometimes even in their fifties, they start wondering why they are still chaotic, unorganized, can't seem to get their social skills in order or other seemingly unrelated stuff.

Turns out, when somebody has diagnoseable ADHD, then the corresponding treatment options apply. And there's not a thing they can do to solve their problems which is more effective than treating ADHD according to well-proven guidelines.

I can recommend "Pay Attention! ADHD through the lifetime" from Coursera. That MOOC goes into quite some detail about how ADHD affects people.

Thanks I will look it up

Reduced implicit learning is not in fact a "bad" thing, although we may quickly assume so at first glance. I suppose if you read the title of this post and thought "wait what? They're saying mindfulness is bad?" then that would be an example of where your implicitly acquired knowledge failed to some extent.

In fact, a common cause of disturbance within people is that they are too affected by implicit "I did this and that happened" learnings and not of the true intent/meaning behind actions and reactions.

It seems like only a trained expert can understand what they're saying.

Or, put another way: This paper desperately needs a translator for us laymen. We could puzzle over what the paper is saying, but hopefully someone in the field will write a translative comment.

Until then, everyone seems to be making comments based off of what they hope the paper is saying rather than its true findings. For example, it seems like the paper claims they administered a grammatical task, and performance on verbal tasks is a distinct type of learning. Someone can fail their English exams but still be an amazing artist, for example.

Well, stuff that you implicitly learn are things that you cannot 'explain'. In the paper, they say they use sequence learning as their implicit learning task. In sequence learning, you show some visual stimuli, and the subject reacts. Depending on the test, the sequence may have underlying structure. I don't have access to the paper, so I'm speculating here, but its probable that they used a test with underlying structure, and measured the reaction times of the subjects. This test essentially tests the subjects 'subconscious' pattern recognition. And one of the hallmarks of implicit learning is that your skill is only weakly transferable to other skills. So it might be that only sequence learning is impaired by mindfullness. Who knows.

As for if implicit learning is 'bad'? Well, it certainly depends on context. There are definitely large areas where it is preferable to have explicit knowledge. That said, there are also lots of situation where it simply isn't feasible to get that explicit knowledge - we must fall back to implicit learning. For example, language learning is a pretty weird case. As children, language learning is pretty much mostly implicit - it is entirely possible to develop into a passable English speaker without being to articulate any of the grammer rules. Even as adults, we are often told to stop worrying about the rules, and just get exposure to the language - this too relates to implicit learning.

The full paper is linked here in a toplevel comment. It seems like speculation is unproductive, because the paper is highly technical and has particular definitions for all of its terms. Without reading the paper it'd be hard to know what they're talking about.

The way you describe it, implicit learning is the formation of associations, pattern matching, and what some call intuition. I've seen great things done with fact-based x-causes-y deduction as well as intuitive understanding that is hard to explain. I've also seen cases of each where a person who thinks the other way would never have found a solution to a problem. I would not discount implicit learning, nor promote it as "better".

Are we getting at the old right-brain left-brain thing here?

Implicit or procedural learning refers to learning how to do things like tying your shoes: It requires considerable cognitive effort and attentive control of muscles to get right, but eventually, after you've done it many times, you don't think about it anymore.

Driving is another example: After sufficient experience, you drive without conscious effort, becoming consciously aware of things only when they exceed your implicit bounds ("That car is too close, what's that unexpected shape at the side of the road").

The basic gist of the article is that mindfulness (which essentially makes you both more aware of and detached from your conscious cognitive efforts) mixes poorly with learning tasks or activities that are intended to eventually be performed automagically.

I suppose, I speculate, that the reason for this is that implicit learning requires you be "all in" attending to the task, but mindfulness would have you at least partially attending to your attention, so your mind is in fact distracting itself.

I further speculate that this likely "weakens" the "signal" your brain is trying to send from the explicitly conscious regions of your brain that are attending to the new task to the implicit, subconscious regions that will eventually perform the task, once it has been well learned.

(Just for fun, try to describe to someone in step-by-step detail how you tie your shoes. Then try tying them while describing what you are doing. Report back on how many attempts it takes before you succeed.)

I tried very hard for a long time to explain to my daughter how to make herself go on a swing with no luck. "Lean back, legs out, when going forward..." Then I sat on the swing next to her and did it myself. She watched and was doing it herself in about 5 seconds. No idea if anything I had said helped prepare for that. I think she had seen me swing myself before and didn't get it, so IDK what clicked.

The paper investigated "implicit sequence learning tasks in which optimal learning may in fact be impeded by the engagement of effortful control processes." (from the abstract)

"Optimal learning" in the context of implicit learning is evidently desirable, and by extension, mindfulness-induced impairment of implicit learning is undesirable. I am not an expert in this topic, but if I had to distill my understanding of the paper into a sentence of plain English I would say:

There is a type of learning which is not achieved through deliberate effort but rather occurs naturally with repeated experience, and this learning can actually be impaired by focusing too hard on the information presented.

The task they tested seems to be a pattern recognition task, as described in this paper: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/38/10073.full.

As someone who practices mindfulness and spends a lot of time learning and reading new material, the result of this study doesn't surprise me. A lot of learning happens when you're letting your mind wander 'over' recently learned material, at least for me. I've had to learn to turn mind wandering on and off so I can effectively absorb new material.

"Or, to render it into an alternative phrasal representation: this research deliverable could benefit from a linguistic coordinator acting as an intermediary between those endowed with the innate ability for circumlocution, and those who exhibit more cognitive agility in the face of realistic, less verbally obtuse configuration of presented material ..."

Mm. So, implicit learning is a scientific term, that should be contrasted with semantic or declarative learning rather than "explicit" or "~~intentional~~" learning. Implicit learning trains implicit or procedural memory, whereas semantic learning trains semantic memory.

Semantic memory is your memory of places, things, facts, etc.. Procedural, or implicit, memory is of things like "how to ride a bike" or "how to identify a chess tactic". Your implicit memory, and your ability to implicitly learn, is related to all sorts of things, like creativity, fluid intelligence, intuition, all of your background processes.

I'm not sure how you can operationally define something as nebulous as "mindfulness" (I've seen a reference to the metric they use in another comment, so apparently operationalizations do exist), but if it does reduce implicit learning, it is indeed bad.

Virtually all learning should eventually end up being implicit. Implicit learning is venerable hacker feeling out a bug in some code and massaging in a solution. Implicit learning is what makes it possible for chess grandmasters to instantly identify board configurations and memorize arbitrary board layouts instantly -- as long as the layout is legal. Experts can do these things because they have automatized their disciplines, because over time their repeated, implicit practice has caused their pattern-matching brains to encode vast amounts of information over years of lessons.

I still don't grasp how a distinction between implicit and explicit learning can be made. At a first glance, the two words seem to imply that these are two very different processes. But when I asked myself "Does learning a Karate move require rather implicit or explicit learning?" the answer is not clear to me.

On the one hand, you have to be fully focused [explicit learning] on the actual move (What's the angle of my feet?, How high should my fist rise? etc.) On the other hand, karate instructors always advice "do not think about what you do", they hence perhaps advice an implicit learning approach. [so, according to the paper, they don't want you to be mindful - and that sounds like an oxymoron since karate is about being mindful]

My uneducated guess would be that it requires both kinds of learning at the same time to the same amount (That's what I would actually consider/define as mindful learning...)

I would like to understand these concepts better as I guess a lot of ineffective learning can be ascribed to the "wrong kind of learning".

Yes! I've always suspected that this is true.

I believe my first conscious experience of this was when I tried to write a towers-of-hanoi program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi

My 'hands' figured out the algorithm in a minute or two, and could fly through the stacks without a problem. But when I tried to be mindful enough of what I was doing to write an algorithm for it, I basically forgot what i was doing, and had to painstakingly reteach myself.

Given that "implicit learning" means, roughly, learning without being aware of what's being learned, this is expected. The question would be: is this lack of awareness a good or bad thing?

so the harder you think about it, the less you are able to learn?

there is a difference between implicit and explicit learning.

implicit learning is knowing how to react to a given situation. explicit learning is knowing why that is.

implict learning is what google translate does. 'this goes with this, that goes with that.' why? 'because, this goes with this, that goes with that.'

That's what came to mind first for me as well, but I think it's important to note that 'mindfulness' as defined in the paper is a specific type of "thinking harder".

I wonder if there would be similar results if the experiments were performed with new motor skill acquisition. I know that in my own experience it seems that a combination of "mindful" practice (especially at the beginning of the learning process) with "drill" type practice seems to seal the deal most efficiently. Basically the "engram" theory.

No, it means that you learn more explicitly, with more awareness of what you are learning.

(See my other comments) Basically, no: implicit learning requires you to think as hard as possible about nothing else, at least at first. Mindfulness takes some of your thinking away from the task you are learning and directs it at meta-thinking, if you will, observing what you are thinking about.

This reduced attention to the task at hand appears to cause you to take longer to learn that task.

EDIT: Fixed prepositions, missing word.

So they're saying that if you don't pay attention you don't learn?

Kind of the opposite, really (see my other comment above for more): Learning a to-be-implicit-eventually task requires near-total attention while you learn it (tying a shoe, riding a bike), but eventually requires none.

Mindfulness, or paying attention to the fact you are paying attention, would appear to sufficiently reduce that required near-total attention so as to slow down the learning process.

When learning to swing the bat at the ball, focus solely on the bat and ball. Once you can hit the ball without thinking about it, then attempt mindful inspection of your actions - but not before.

EDIT: s/too/to/above.

"We tested two adult samples using two different sequence learning tasks."

Two? Nothing to see here.

Two samples, not two subjects. Still not definitive, but definitely "something to see" if their methodology holds up (I don't have access).

This attitude is not helpful and actively damaging. Small sample sizes in science do serve a purpose: to get larger studies funded.

It's as if the top comment to every ShowHN post was: "Not at $200mm in funding. Nothing to see here."

Actively damaging? A little dramatic perhaps? I didn't say it doesn't serve a purpose, I said there is nothing to see here. Quite literally. Until they do a larger study why is it news?

It is actively damaging to the community for you to take snipes at studies when the reason you are criticizing the study is not only unnecessary criticism that any layman could provide, it is actually a misinterpretation of the study. You didn't add anything to the discussion.

As for why it is news, a lot of hackers are interested in mental health and mindfulness+meditation specifically and would be interested in more cutting edge news about it, rather than what ends up in the NYTimes 8 months later.

I think they mean two different studies, not two subjects.

I just got a copy of the paper from the researcher. They used 16 study participants. Still not a huge sample size, but big enough for consideration.

Ask HN: can anyone come up with some old English language adage (or in any other language) which says the same thing as this paper?

For instance:

"Abstract: the timeliness of mindful preemptive action is positively correlated with mitigated needs for subsequent compensating or reparative measures."

--> "A stitch in time saves nine."

--> "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Not being able to "see the forest for the trees" is in the right ball park. Cliche Zen ideas come into play here also: opening your mind to the broader experience, rather than straining at focusing.

"Turn on, tune in, drop out, man! ... and, like, learn more!" :)

not an adage, but here's an analogy (correct me if i'm wrong):

if you worry too much about the mechanics of shooting free throws, you're not likely to learn to shoot them as well/quickly as someone who just shoots over and over (and thereby letting their subconscious make the adjustments for them).

basketball analogies are my favorite =)

"Sh*t, or get off the pot"

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