Daniel Mezick

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

Wow

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.

His name was Lev Vygotsky.

He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.

He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.

Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.

The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.

Vygotsky said the exact opposite.

He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.

He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.

The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.

For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.

The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.

The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.

Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.

The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.

They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."

The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.

Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.

What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.

People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.

And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.

The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.

Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@r0ck3t23 Stop right there. Golden retrievers have no chance in the wild. That's because they're domesticated: that dog don't hunt. All it knows how to do is eat from the dish. To obtain nutrients, maybe it knows to do a cute trick ( a trick that's beneath it's dog-dignity) when prompted

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@spaceandtime66 @PokerGO Televised poker events that require the eyes, face and neck to be exposed have at least the potential (if not the guarantee) of much more drama and much more entertainment value. All of the above can help grow the game.

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

With all respect due Phil Ivey, #poker with hoodies and/or sunglasses has become a joke. Players covering their neck- it’s pathetic. All of the above plays very poorly on TV and should be banned. Players prohibited from head, face, neck and eye coverings would do more to grow the game than any one rule change I can think of. Look at how Alan Keating shows up: neck, face, eyes all unobscured. Great for the game. I’ve had enough of the neck covering, sunglasses, the hoodies. Weak sauce!

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@a16z @brian_armstrong More food for thought here:

https://t.co/7yoVrh6u8n

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

The technical term for this is empiricism.

Most people are allergic to it, because to use it, we have to go in explicitly admitting we are not sure/are learning/don't know/are guessing/are experimenting/have no clue, etc.

Most people are allergic to uncertainty. It's a huge problem. It explains why incorrect beliefs, untrue but comforting narratives (etc) gain traction, persist etc.

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@r0ck3t23 These teaching & learning ideas are not new and they work.

Keller (PSI) Plan:
https://t.co/ptzql42pso

Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
https://t.co/SmcHyg5kyg

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@joekent16jan19 https://t.co/Qa1Ts2SQMd
POSIWID: coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do".

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

Concerning

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

https://t.co/Kh6VekN6dH

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@lifeofthebob In the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@TheDuderineau @pokerheadrush Ah now I see it "...and we both had $145 back."

OK, insta-jam

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@pokerheadrush In a $1-3 game I'm folding that.

You went $4 into $13, ess than 1/3 pot. Normally in $1/3 I'm going at least 3/4 pot there when I have a weak ace against a board with my A and 2 suited cards)

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@pokerheadrush Assume A6-A9 suited in a late seat. What's wrong with limping there once in a while (not every time) with a rule that you fold to any bet over 2BB

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@flowidealism Gatto encouraged students to actively engage in service to their community, even during school hours. He would mark them "present" instead of "absent" to make this possible

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@pokerheadrush I'm in BB with KJo, I raise 3BB, 3 callers, flop comes 3-K-T, I bet 2.5X pot, 1 caller, turn is a blank, I bet 1.25 pot, he folds

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@gregory_kramer @chamath Ya well ya know

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@NYCMayor Surely there are more than your 2 options

Tax All Property Owners or

Tax the “Ultra Wealthy”

[Daniel Mezick @DanielMezick]

@Tim19662078 @BourbonInsider @grok People say "no" (sell) for many reasons, but people say "yes" (buy) for one reason, and that one reason is: they like what's being offered