Speaker 1:	Good afternoon and welcome to Research+Pizza which is a lunchtime lecture series featuring research presentations by faculty from across the university. If you haven't had a chance, please do, help yourself to drinks and pizza. I think they're going fast so you might want to get over there and get some. The refreshments, the pizza are courtesy of our generous program supporter Austin's Pizza. So enjoy the pizza and we do have recycling and trash cans around here for when you're done. 
	Because today's program is being recorded for a podcast, we would appreciate it when you have questions if you would raise your hands so that I can come to you and bring the microphones so that we can get that on to the podcast. We also ask that you hold your questions till the end of Dr. Markman's presentation please. So after he's done, then hold on to those questions. If you're sitting on one of the chairs, then you probably have a feedback form. If you're out at the tables and you don't have a feedback form, they're up here on the little round table that's by the drink cooler, so you can come and get a pencil and a feedback form and let us know what you think of the program and your ideas for future programs, we'd appreciate that.
	So onward to today's program. Art Markman has a bachelors in Cognitive Science from Brown University and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Illinois. He is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor in the Department of Psychology. He's taught an undergraduate seminar on reasoning and decision-making and a graduate seminar on motivation and learning. His research interests are the way people see things to be similar and how they process similarity and analogy comparisons, category learning and decision making and the way that motivational factors affect learning, decision-making and cognition. 
	Dr. Markman is the director of UT's new human dimensions of organizations program and of the similarity and cognition lab. He's currently executive editor of the journal Cognitive Science and a member of the editorial board of cognitive psychology. He's also the research director of the ICı Institute. His Psychology Today blog, Ulterior Motives is about the interface between motivation and thinking. Our goals have a huge influence on our behavior and the active goals we have also influence our emotions, which in turn affect our preferences in thinking. Dr. Markman's most recent book is, Smart Thinking: Three Essential Keys to Solve Problems, Innovate, and Get Things Done. He's a very busy man and he is also not the chair of the Psychology Department Limerick Committee. Please welcome Dr. Art Markman.
Dr. Art Markman:	Thanks a lot. I appreciate this and it's thanks for coming out. I'm going to hope that it was a split between coming out to hear this and coming out for the pizza. So what I want to do today is talk to you a little bit about how to think more effectively, and this will encompass some of the research I've done and some of the other research in the field. That's the book Smart Thinking that came out in January of this year and I like the cover, so I like to show it off. Smart Thinking, yeah. 
	In order to put smart thinking into perspective, I'll always like to start by talking about what I refer to as merely adequate thinking. I'll give you an example of that. That merely adequate thinking came from me back when I was in high school. My high school job was cleaning an office building and this was back in the era when everyone could smoke indoors. I worked in a, and it was an accounting office building. The accountants would sit there apparently in smoke stuff all day and they would fill up these ashtrays full of stuff. My job was to come in, empty the ashtrays and then vacuum up all of the ash from the floor. Floor was covered with some combination of ash and paper clips.
	I would vacuum and periodically when you vacuumed a lot, the bag of the vacuum starts to fill up, and when it starts to fill up, the vacuum works less effectively. On a routine basis, I would solve what I like to refer to as the bag problem. With a big heavy industrial vacuum, the bag problem is solved by taking the vacuum to the back, taking a big metal clamp off of it and dumping the contents of the bag, which was generally a fine stream of miss punctuated by paper clips. I would dump that into a big bin and then I would put the clamp back on and successfully solved the bag problem and go about vacuuming. And for this I was paid the princely sum of a $125 a month and I was pretty excited about that as a high school student.
	Now, at about the same time that I was routinely solving the bag problem, there was another guy by the name of James Dyson and he noticed the same problem I did. What Dyson noticed was that when a vacuum cleaner bag starts to fill up, the vacuum doesn't work so well anymore. And the reason it doesn't work is because the dust and dirt that gets pulled into the vacuum cleaner bag clogs the pores in the bag that allowed the air to escape, and the vacuum doesn't suck so well anymore, and so that's why you have to empty the bag. Now, rather than solving the bag problem the way I did, Dyson did something very different. He asked himself, what is the fundamental, the essential problem that a vacuum is trying to solve?
	Well, what a vacuum is really trying to do is it takes in this combination of dirt and air and then it needs to separate the dirt from the air. And traditionally the way that's done is the vacuum cleaner bag acts as a filter. So the air passes through and the dust is too large to fit through the pores and so it stays behind. Now, Dyson's fundamental insight was there are lots of ways of separating dirt from air. And Dyson was a guy who knew a lot about a lot of different things. One of the things he knew about was the sawmill.
	I don't know about you. I didn't know much about sawmills until I started looking into this. In fact, most of my experience with sawmills came from cartoons. In a cartoon, you've got a big log, big saw blade, usually a body on top of the log and it starts to move the saw blade and then it gets milled down into wood. In a real sawmill, it's pretty much the same structure, big log, big blade, usually no body on the log. The thing that's missing from the cartoons is a tremendous amount of sawdust that gets kicked up when the blade hits the log, and so it has to solve a problem of getting rid of the sawdust and it does that essentially by having a gigantic vacuum that sucks the sawdust out of the sawmill.
	But unlike a vacuum cleaner that you might have at home, it doesn't have a bag in it. There's no gigantic vacuum cleaner bag in a sawmill, instead there's a device called an industrial cyclone. The industrial cyclone is a big cone shaped object and the air comes in, it creates a cyclone, the sawdust is thrown to the side of the cone and it slides down into a hopper where it can be trucked away. And Dyson realized you could take that industrial cyclone, make a little tiny version of it, stick it inside of a home vacuum cleaner and could get rid of the bag altogether. So Dyson then spent a couple of years building a prototype for this and ultimately ended up with a company that nets him hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And I would argue that's pretty smart thinking, certainly relative to the, you know, By the measure of the $125 a month I was taking home for solving the bag problem pretty smart.
	Now, you could ask yourself, how was it that Dyson was able to come up with this brilliant design for a vacuum whereas I and basically everybody else who played with vacuums just continually solved the bag problem in more and more refined ways. You might imagine that the answer to that question is that Dyson is simply a smarter guy than I am and smarter than anybody else. But maybe that's not it. Because when we think about the concept of being smart, a lot of times what we do is we assume it has something to do with intelligence. And boy do we love tests. We love to give IQ tests and if you come to UT, then you had to take the SATs and if you want to go to graduate school, you got to take the GRE. All of these tests purport to say something about how smart you are.
	But the fact is if you look at the research, maybe 10% of the differences between people and how they perform in a bunch of situations are really reflected by the scores that you get on these tests. Which means that the other 90% is really due to other factors and many of those are under your control. To give you an example of what I mean, I want to tell you a story about a guy who's a very good friend of mine. We met in college and he's a good friend for a number of reasons, not the least of which is he has no idea how often I've told this story. 
	We met freshman year in college and one of the things that college freshman did at least back then is start comparing SAT scores and I don't know why. He would love to engage in this conversation because he had in fact gotten a perfect score on his SAT. Back in the day, that was a 1600. We were friends throughout college. He sort of drifted through his classes, never really found something that he loved to do. When we got to our senior year, he had this dawning realization he was going to have to find a job. So he thought, maybe I'll be a lawyer. And on a whim, he went out and took the LSAT, the Law School Admission Test, he got a perfect score on that as well.
	One very smart thing he did was to realize that if he was going to consider a career in the law, maybe he ought to find something more about that profession so he worked as a paralegal for a year. Turns out he is a smart guy, he realized he hates the law. So he didn't go to law school in the end. He's fashioned himself a very solid career. He works for Stanley Kaplan, the test prep people. As it turns out the thing he's really good at is taking these tests. Now, it's not so clear to me that the people who design the LSAT and the GRE and IQ tests are really trying to predict primarily how well you're going to score on tests. What we really want to know is how smart are you going to be in the world. That is, how effectively are you going to go out in the world and do something interesting that requires thinking.
	Now, the fascinating thing to me is that the way our minds work is not really about some raw CPU power that we have in our brain. It actually has a lot more to do with other factors. The fact is that each of you is ultimately going to be asked to go out and think for a living. That's why you're hanging out in a university environment, and yet we don't really spend a lot of time teaching you how your mind works unless you happen to wander into a bunch of psychology classes. I've decided to spend some amount of my time trying to tell people a little bit more about how minds work, in the hope that I can make you a little bit smarter by telling you enough that you can tweak the way that you do things in order to think more effectively.
	What I'm going to say is that there are three things that you need to start doing. Three factors that are going to make you smarter. The first is that you have to develop smarter habits. The second is that you have to use those habits to acquire what I'm going to call high quality knowledge. And then the third thing is you're going to have to learn to use that knowledge when you need it. That's what I'm going to do for the rest of this, I'm going to elaborate on that. I'm going to start with the idea of habits. Now, it might seem a little bit strange, if I'm going to talk about being smart, to start by talking about habits. But it turns out that most of your life is spent not thinking.
	When I teach my big undergraduate cognitive psychology class, I spent a lot of time making sure that it's clear to everybody that the human mind is designed as much as possible not to think. What we'd really like to do is to do what we did last time. We want to sit in the same seat in a lecture hall when we can. We want to take the same route to and from work. You walk into a restaurant and you order the same thing that you ordered the last time. This is the power of the kinds of habits that we have, and the reason that we have these habits is because the more that you can do things habitually, the more that you can save the precious thinking resources you've got for thinking about something that's actually interesting. So it's very valuable to have habits. And so I encourage you to develop as many good habits as you can.
	The problem from the standpoint of thinking though is that we have a lot of habits that end up getting in our way when it comes to effective thinking. I'll show you one device that has created lots of habits that aren't necessarily good ones. You may recognize this, they're referred to as the smartphone. The phone itself may be very smart but it tends to create dumb people. It does that because this device connects us to the world constantly and it promotes multitasking. Now multitasking to my mind is the bane of modern human existence. 
	The human mind is not really designed to multitask. What it really does is what I call time sharing. If you've ever seen a timeshare apartment, people get these to go on vacation. The optimal way for a timeshare apartment to work is a family comes one week, they hang out, they leave. Another family comes in for another week, they leave, another family comes in. And that's really the way you want to think. You want to do one thing, then another thing and then another thing. Imagine the disaster in a timeshare apartment if two families show up the same week. You guys get the bedroom from 10:00 to 12:00 and we'll take the bathroom. It's not going to happen. And that's really what's happening when you try to multitask. 
	So imagine this situation, I know none of you would ever do this, but imagine somebody is sitting in a class and they pull out that smart phone because they just know that they got a text message. That little vibrating buzzer comes off and now there's that little piece of your mind that's telling you to check the text. While you check the text in class, you are physically present in the classroom but mentally you're not there. Which means you've shifted your attention from the class to the text and then when you come back to the class, you've got to catch up on what happened while you were gone. That means you missed a couple of things while you were gone and you've got to figure out, you've got to sort of put all of that knowledge back into your head that you missed ... That you were thinking about before you went to the text message. So you got to get rid of the habit of multitasking.
	It is not the case that just because we have a generation of people who grew up getting smartphones when they were in middle school that somehow makes us better at it, it doesn't. We're just not good at it. So don't do it. This also means you have to protect yourself from yourself, because once you have a message, you can't prevent yourself from looking at it. That little badge on your Gmail account that tells you that five new messages have come in, that is a beacon that begs you to check the messages you've got. If you're instant messaging window is open and suddenly somebody sends you a message, it just feels rude not to respond to that person. But you got to prevent yourself from doing that. 
	Which means shut off your email program, don't put the IM window up there. Because learning, actually acquiring new information is hard, it's difficult. And when you're in the middle of struggling through some new piece of material, almost anything feels like it's going to be more fun than learning. You've ever seen the statue or dance statue of the thinker? That statue is miss-named because thinking itself isn't really that hard. When you're firing on all cylinders thinking, it feels good, one idea after another. The thing that's hard is learning. That statue ought to be called the learner. 
	Because that torture, being there, sitting there, feeling every muscle taught, that's what it feels like when you're struggling through some new piece of material that you don't quite get yet. And in those moments, you'd rather answer an email. Because then you feel like you've gotten something done, whereas struggling through material doesn't really feel like you're accomplishing anything even though that's the valuable work that you need to do in order to really be able to learn new things. The thing to bear in mind with things like email and instant messaging and things like that is just because a collection of bits can wind its way across the earth in a matter of seconds.
	Had an experience this summer, I went to a conference in Japan and I was standing next to somebody who needed me to email him something that I had promised to email him. So we're standing right next to each other and I took my phone out and emailed him a document. We sat there trying to figure out the path that this email had to take in order to travel three feet. But it did it almost instantly. But the fact that it gets there almost instantly does not mean you have to respond to it instantly. When I was in college, my mom ... I went off to college, my freshman year my mom sent me a letter every single day for the first six weeks of college and it was a letter. I went to my mailbox, I pulled out a letter that she'd written a few days before. I would collect four or five of them and at the end of the week, I'd write her a letter and she'd get that a week later. She was perfectly happy hearing from me a week later, it didn't have to be immediate. So you can let your email go a little bit.
	Now, the habit you need to develop is to acquire what I'll call quality knowledge. And in particular the kind of knowledge I'm referring to is high quality. The stuff that's really going to allow you to solve new problems in an effective way is what we'll call causal knowledge. That is knowledge about the way the world works. Causal knowledge is the stuff that you use to answer the question why. Human beings love the question why. Have you ever hung out with a five-year-old? Anybody? Five-year-olds favorite question, why. And you answer the question and then they say, why? And so you answer it again and then they say, why? And then you send them off to play.
	Now, the reason that we like the answer to the question why is because that question allows you to address a problem in a new way. For example, when I sit down in my car, I have no earthly idea how my car works. I sit down and used to be turn the key, now you press a button to get the car to go on. If I press the button and the car goes on, all is well. But if I press the button and nothing happens, I'm lost. I don't know what to do. I have to bring it to somebody else who actually understands the way the car works in order to be able to solve whatever problem has gone on with that. So we need to know how things work in order to be able to solve new problems. 
	The problem that we have though is that the quality of our causal knowledge is actually less good than we think it is. This is called the illusion of explanatory depth. That is, we believe we understand the way things work better than we actually do. This actually came out of research. The first time I encountered this, it was from some studies that were done by a colleague of mine at Yale University. He took a bunch of Yale University undergrads and he brought them into a lab and he said to them look, here's a bunch of common household objects. I want you to describe to me how these work. Do you think how they work?
	So people would rate things, how much they thought they understood things. He would find things where people said, I know how this works. And then he would say, good, explain it to me. What he found consistently was that almost every object that people thought they understood backward and forward, in fact, they didn't really understand it that well at all. They weren't able to explain it when the time came. I will tell you, when I saw this research, I looked at it and I thought, sure, of course they got that result. He was using Yale University undergraduates. They don't know anything. I could do this.
	So I looked through the list of objects that he had and one of them was the flush toilet. I've been popping the back off a flush toilet since I was five. You flush it, you watch, you flush it again till your mom comes and tells you to stop. So I was convinced I could explain how a flush toilet works. So here goes, you ready? There's a handle on the toilet. The handle is connected inside to a little lever. That lever has a chain on it that reaches down to a valve. When you press the handle, the lever comes up, it pulls the valve up and the water starts to go down. As the water goes down, there's a little bulb that goes down that was floating on top of it. When it gets down to a certain point, it opens up a switch and the water comes in and starts to refill the tank.
	When the water in the tank gets all the way to the bottom, the valve closes, for some reason and then and then the water starts to fill the tank back up until the bulb floats back up and shuts off the flow of water. Now, the water that leaves the tank goes somewhere, but it ends up in the bowl of the toilet for some reason and then it swirls around and most of it goes away and some of it sticks around. I don't actually know how a toilet works. That was the discovery that I made. I was suffering from this same illusion of explanatory depth.
	I want to point out that this illusion, this inability to know how much we know about the way things work seems to be somewhat specific to the causal knowledge we have. There's lots of other knowledge we have where we're perfectly good at knowing whether we know it or not. Here's a question. I don't want you to tell me the answer, I just want to tell me whether the answer. So how many of the address of the White House? Anybody? How many people have no idea what the address of the White House is? How many people think they might sort of know? All right. What I will tell you is if you know the address of the White House, you know it. And if you don't know it, you don't know it. And if you think you sort of might know it, then about half of you who think you sort of like know it, probably know it and the other half don't.
	This isn't just true for simple things like facts about the world, it's also true for more complex things that have a kind of linear order to them. How many of the plot of the movie Finding Nemo? Anybody? You can admit, it's okay. I know the plot of Finding Nemo. How many people no clue the plot of Finding Nemo? How many people sort of, I sort of got it? Well, again, it's the same thing. If you know the plot of Finding Nemo, you can get all the way from the eel eating the eggs at the beginning all the way through the East Australian current, into the dentist's office. If you don't know the plot, don't worry. I haven't ruined anything.
	So you're pretty well calibrated for complex things like plots but still causal knowledge somehow eludes us and it does this for two reasons. The first is because of this idea that we can keep asking the question why. The reason that five-year-olds can keep playing this game is because causal knowledge is kind of nested. I can give you the first explanation of something but as soon as I give that first explanation, there's another one underneath that and I can ask why again. And then I can ask why yet again after that. And the problem is that when you ask yourself, do I understand how this works, you often just check the first level of that knowledge. And it's only when you really dig into it that you realize that there are other things missing. That's one problem.
	The second problem is that there are gaps in our knowledge that are papered over by words whose meanings we don't actually understand. In business they would call those buzzwords, but in the rest of our lives, we have lot of terms that we use that we don't understand. I'll give you an example of what I mean. When I discovered that I actually was clueless about the way a toilet worked, I started to look into it a little bit more using the magic of Wikipedia. It turns out that after the drain of the toilet, there's a loop, there's a pipe that loops. One of the functions of that loop is that it creates a siphon that sucks out all the stuff that's in the toilet. And the reason that the water level rises back up to some level is because it rises up approximately to the level of that loop in the pipe.
	So for a couple of weeks, I was pretty darn proud of myself because now I knew how a toilet works. It's a siphon. Then, after a couple of weeks, I began to think, I don't really know. I know sort of what a siphon does but I don't really know how it works. I had this word that papered over a gap in my knowledge. So I had to go out and look up how a siphon works and it turns out, just for fun, it turns out that even physicists are a little bit split on exactly how a siphon works. I didn't feel so bad. But we have these words that stand in for concepts whose meanings were not entirely clear.
	What can we do from a habit standpoint to become better at developing causal knowledge? And the answer to that question is actually pretty simple. We should take a lesson from education. It turns out that the best way to learn anything is to teach it. I teach a number of graduate students and some number of them go off to become faculty at other universities. One of the things that I tell the students is sort of parting shot of wisdom is that, it's going to take about seven hours to prepare each hour of lecture that you're going to do in a college class. My students never believe me. 
	They think, why would it take me seven hours to prepare a lecture, an hour worth of lecture, because that I've got a PhD, I know everything now. What I usually tell them is look, it takes seven hours because what's going to happen is when you start to prepare a lecture you're going to discover all the things you don't actually understand that well. So when you teach something, you have to learn all of those details that might be missing in your head. And here's the beauty of it. You don't have to wait for the opportunity to teach someone else, you can actually teach yourself. The habit you want to develop is to explain things to yourself as you go along when you're learning something. 
	What this means is you got to become more active when you're learning causal knowledge. The thing that amazes me is when we're studying for exams and things like that, we often just kind of reread the chapter before the test. But think about it like this. Anybody play a musical instrument or a sport? Would you practice that musical instrument or sport by just sort of reading about it or watching somebody else? No. You feel like you got to get in there and do it. And yet when it comes time to studying for exams and learning the way things work, we sort of think it's fine to just read what somebody else wrote about it without really asking ourselves any fundamental questions or doing much work by ourselves.
	I wrote a cognitive psychology textbook several years ago with two colleagues and we included all these questions at the end of each chapter. It turns out that most of the students in the class were treating those two pages of questions at the end of each chapters, two pages they didn't really have to read. If you actually go through and answer all those questions, you actually go through and teach things to yourself, you eliminate the gaps in your causal knowledge and that will make you smarter.
	Now, the third thing you need to do to get smarter is to be able to use all of that knowledge when you need it. Here's the issue with using knowledge when you need it. Sometimes it's easy to do it. When you sit down in an exam and the professor asks you a specific question that relates to the class, you can go, I know which knowledge I'm supposed to use to answer this question. But imagine the situation that Dyson was in. If Dyson had access to Google, he would not have been able to type in "how do I make a vacuum without a bag in it" because nothing would have come back. 
	He actually had to know, not only know a lot about things like industrial cyclones, he had to realize that the problem that the vacuum was solving was actually the same problem that a sawmill was solving. He had to be able to draw an analogy between one area of knowledge and another. He had to realize that in some way this vacuum was analogous to a sawmill and then adapt a solution from one place to another. These kinds of analogies are incredibly valuable because what they do is they allow you to take knowledge you have from one area and bring it down and put it in another.
	The problem with using analogies though, because I'm hardly the first person to say analogies are important, but psychologically we're not wired for analogies. We're not wired to be thinking about sawmills when we start out thinking about vacuum cleaners. Because really most of the time, if I start talking about vacuum cleaners and you start thinking about sawmills, you are probably delusional. I mean, this is mental illness, if your mind is immediately wandering off to all kinds of far-flung areas. It's a matter of when all else fails. When you don't know how to solve a problem, you have to start looking around for areas of knowledge that are going to help you to solve the problem. 
	And the way that you do that, the way you do that is to recognize that the way your memory works is that your memory desperately wants to please you. It wants to give you the information it thinks you need when it thinks you need it. So if you don't get the solution to a problem, if you get stuck, what you have to do is to ask your memory a different question. You have to re-describe the problem that you're solving. And every time you re-describe it, new knowledge is going to come up that's going to help you to find other things that about that are going to help you to deal with this new situation. And in particular what you need to do is to find the essence of the problem.
	So the essence of vacuum was this idea of separating the dirt from the air. And generally speaking, you need to develop the habit of finding the essence of problems, which means going beyond the surface of the problem, what it looks like and really getting to what's happening. The way to practice that is to take a lesson from proverbs. Proverbs, not the biblical book, the idea of a proverb. Proverbs are these beautiful little nuggets of cultural wisdom that are usually embedded in a specific situation. I'll give you an example. Here's a proverb, the noise of the wheels doesn't measure the load in the wagon.
	When I ask people, if I say to you, do any other proverbs like that? The noise of the wheels doesn't measure the load in the wagon. Usually the first thing that pops into people's heads is the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Because they got wheels in them. The thing is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease doesn't mean the same thing as the noise of the wheels doesn't measure the load in the wagon. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, the person who complains the loudest gets the most attention. The noise of the wheels doesn't measure the load in the wagon, that's the surface properties of something, are not a good reflection of its inner essence. That's the essence of that proverb.
	If you start thinking about the essence of the proverb, you suddenly realize you do no other proverbs that actually mean the same thing. All that glitters isn't gold, can't judge a book by its cover, all of those have the same meaning even though they don't involve wheels. That's what you need to learn to do. You need to learn to find the essence of things, and the way to do it is actually to practice to develop a habit with proverbs. So go to Google, type in list of proverbs and for reasons I don't completely understand, people have put lists of proverbs on the internet and so type in list of proverbs and you'll find a website. Bookmark that site. 
	When you get bored one day, when you're sitting at your computer doing what I call fake work, where you're sitting at the computer but you're like googling stuff or checking up on what people are doing on Facebook, go to that page of proverbs and pick five of them and define them. Look at the proverb and say, what does this really mean? What you'll find is that after you start to do that, after you practice that for a week or two weeks, you'll find that you start doing the same thing whenever you encounter a new problem. Suddenly, you'll begin to find these connections between what you know and other things that you know that are really related by their essence. That is going to help you to get smarter.
	So when we think about it, there are these three things we need to do. We need to develop more effective habits, we need to get rid of multitasking, we need to acquire high-quality causal knowledge by explaining things to ourselves, teaching things to ourselves to find and eliminate the gaps in our knowledge. Then, we need to learn to find the essence of problems that we're solving in order to be able to use the knowledge that we have when we need it. Now, the last thing I want to do before we go, because I always feel like I'm going to teach something like this, everybody's got to walk away with at least one practical skill in case you don't feel like you've gotten one already. 
	So I'm going to leave you with this, which is, how many of you have trouble remembering people's names when you meet them? Anybody? Just a couple. The reason why you have trouble remembering people's names is because names are these facts about someone that are completely disconnected from everything else that you know about them and the human mind wants to latch on to pieces of information that are connected. The reason that we love causal knowledge is because it binds together all of these things that we know and names aren't connected to anything. You get your name often before you even pop out, they've picked out your name or at least soon after, and that name has nothing to do with who you are. We ought to name people when they're like five. But that would be awkward for the first five years. Don't ...
	So here's what you need to do if you want to be more effective at remembering people's names. The first thing you need to do is to pay attention. I believe we have a psychological mechanism that I like to call the peanuts effect. You know the old peanuts cartoons, every time an adult speaks, goes ... Whenever somebody says to you, hi my name is ... I believe the next three seconds or so of speech are heard as ... So you have to pay attention, that's the first thing. The second thing you need to do is to find a way to attach the person's name to something else you've learned about them. Because often you're in these conversations and you found out where this person works or where they live or what hobby they have or what they like to do or their favorite sports team. You found this other stuff and not only have you discovered these things, but that's the stuff you remember about them later. So attach their name to some of that information. Find a way of connecting things together, that's the second thing.
	Third thing you need to do is to use their name as quickly as possible in the conversation. Now, it turns out that information you generate for yourself is better remembered than things you just hear. That's one of the reasons that teaching things to yourself is so effective. This is a little awkward to do because when you're first introduced to somebody, you don't really need their name, they're standing right there. So you have to manufacture a reason to use their name. The very last thing you need to do is ... Again, by show of hands, how many of you have some trouble remembering names? Put your hands up. Look around the room. Keep your hands up for a second. Look around the room. It's most everybody. What this means is that if you have forgotten someone's name when you've just been introduced to them, chances are they've also forgotten your name.
	So that means it's actually socially acceptable to say, you know what, I totally blew it, I don't remember your name. Can you please repeat it and by the way my name is ... And they're usually relieved because they've also forgotten your name. But I do warn you, if you ask somebody to repeat their name, then by all means pay attention. Thanks for coming out, I'd be happy to take a few questions.
Audience:	Hello?
Dr. Art Markman:	There we go.
Audience:	Thank you. You seem to say that multitasking is a negative but many times in the current environment employers, and that's in the job description, can you multitask? That's what we're looking for. So how do you reconcile that?
Dr. Art Markman:	So the first thing you have to do when they say, can you multitask is say no. I can get a lot done but I'm not going to do them all at the same time. I will say that there's a bunch of us in the psychology community who are trying to spread the word about the evils of multitasking and it is getting out there slowly. So five years ago when I would go somewhere and say this, people would stare at me in shock. And now I think the message is starting to get out there. I think that there's a difference between being agile in the sense of being willing to take on lots of things and to do lots of things and trying to do them all at the same time.
	So what you need to do is to structure your work environment so that you can get things done. If that means I'm going to work for 20 minutes on this and then I'm going to take care of something else for 10 minutes and then I'm going to take care of something else for 15 minutes, that's better than taking an hour and trying to do all of them at the same time. You'll be much more effective by taking things one at a time. I think that employers are getting more sensitive to that. 
	In fact, I was at a talk, I gave a talk to a bunch of the chief information officers to large companies, and a number of them are now forcing people to check their technology at the door. In fact, one company has a basket they put in the middle of the table and everyone's got to stick their smartphone in it during the meeting and then they can pick it up afterwards. So I think they're beginning to recognize that there's a difference between agility and multitask.
Audience:	Hello? I have a quick question. You say in the beginning like our mind like to be comfortable of what we ... The things we've done before like we like to sit on the same seat every single time. So how can we train our brain or our thought to be more like ... To like not to procrastination. For example, like some sometimes you tell yourself I'm not going to do this again but two or three days later, same situation come out and then you end up doing it again.
Dr. Art Markman:	Some of our habits are great habits and some of our habits are not so good. When you're in the situation where you've got a habit that isn't so good, it can be very hard to change because it's deeply rooted in what you do. So there's a few things you can do. The first is you have to figure out what the source of the habit is. What is it in your environment that's triggering that habit. It could be in the case of things like procrastination, often procrastination involves some other thing that you're doing instead. You sit down at your computer with the best intention of getting this work done, but suddenly Call of Duty is there or whatever it is. 
	You have to you have to actually observe your behavior a little bit to figure out what it is that's drawing you away from getting work done. And then, the first thing you need to do is to protect yourself from yourself. Which means, if what you're doing is calling up a video game instead of getting work done, remove the game from the computer. If what's calling you is something else, you want to sit down and get work done but there are friends hanging out and you and you end up wandering over to them, start working in the library. I mean, put yourself in a situation where you can't engage in the thing that you don't want to do.
	The other thing that's really hard to do is we often when we're trying to break a habit, we often have the most difficulty when we're trying to replace a behavior with no behavior. I'm going to stop doing this thing. Let's take it out of the realm of work for a second and think about something like biting your nails. Some of you bite. I used to do that when I was a kid. I bit my nails and it was very hard habit to break because you're trying to replace the habit of biting your nails with nothing, not biting your nails. What you have to do instead, because habits are actually part of your memory, so things are calling it to mind. You have to reprogram the habit to do something else. So you have to create some other activity that you're going to engage in. 
	Anybody who comes to my office will see I have desk toys all over my office and I started collecting desk toys at the point where I was trying to stop biting my nails. Because I found what I would do is every time I had the urge to bite my nails, I just start playing with something on my desk. My students make fun of me now for that but that's preferable to having nails that are bitten down. So replace something with something else. You guys ask the question, I'll repeat it.
Audience:	Okay. Here we go. You mentioned that analogies, making analogies are hard. I was wondering if you could elaborate that a little bit and then explain some strategies.
Dr. Art Markman:	Sure. Analogy is a fascinating thing. We're really good at understanding an analogy when it's right there in front of us. The sort of ancient example everybody use, not ancient, but the example everyone in the analogy community of researchers uses is, if I say to you the atom is like the solar system. You immediately understand that that means something about there's something revolving around something else, and you don't assume that this means that the nucleus of the atom is hot and gaseous or the third electron out supports life. You sort of get what the analogy is about. But the hard part of analogies isn't being able to deal with them when they're in front of you, it's finding one. It's finding something that's analogous.
	So that's where you need to have these strategies for read ascribing problems. One thing you can do is to learn to practice with proverbs. But there's lots of other things you can do. Another thing you could do is to say look, this problem I'm solving right now, imagine it was a story, what would I call? And if you give it a title, often that title captures that essence of what it's about and that serves as a re-description that will help you to remember something. I'll give you one other example. Often I use punch lines of jokes to describe situations that come up over and over again.
	For example, some of my graduate students will come into my office and start complaining about something and I'll say to them, he had a hat. And they'll say, what are you talking about? So now I'll tell them the joke. And the joke is really simple. There's a mom who's at the beach with her kid. The kid's digging in the sand, which is what kids do at the beach, and this big wave comes, washes the kid into the ocean. The mom is distraught. She looks up to the sky and she says, please bring my child back. I'll do anything. Just bring my child back. After doing this for a minute, another wave comes, deposits the child on the beach completely unharmed. And the mom looks down at the kid and then looks back up at the sky and says, he had a hat.
	Now, anytime that a student of mine comes in and starts complaining about something for which they really ought to be grateful, I say that he had a hat. And after a while, you can see the wheels turning there. They'll start to complain and then, no. Yeah, he had a hat. So you begin to recognize situations that may be very different on the surface but have this same quality to them just by finding these other ways of describing things. So really that key is trying to find a variety of different ways to re-describe the situation you're in that will help you to find these analogies.
Audience:	Dr. Markman, thank you. Is it working? What about when you're tired?
Dr. Art Markman:	What? Sleep. It turns out sleep is really good for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the frontal lobes of your brain which help you to do a lot of really smart stuff work more effectively when you slept than when you haven't. Memory, sleep ... If you think about it like this. We spend about a third of our lives asleep. Which to put this into context, it means that when you get to the age of 45, you've been sleeping for 15 years. That means that we must be doing something in that period. 
	One of the things that sleep does is it actually influences memory and different stages of sleep seem to influence different types of memories. So there are some stages of sleep that help you with skills that you've practiced. I'll practice my saxophone then go to sleep and when I wake up, I actually play better than before I slept because there's something about the sleep that actually consolidates that. Same thing with learning. If you cram for an exam, don't pull a complete all-nighter. Because if you do that, if you don't sleep, you actually learn the material less effectively. 
	So sleep matters a lot and coffee, coffee is a wonderful substance. Caffeine is a great drug but doesn't actually make memory more effective. It makes you more alert but it doesn't really have a great impact on the areas of the brain that help to lay down new memories. Hard as it is to say, sleep. I mean, make sure you add some time into your schedule for sleep and naps are good. A good 45-minute nap, not in the middle of class, but at other time like a scheduled nap is a great thing. Even that helps. It helps memory, it helps all that. It helps reset the brain.
Speaker 1:	And with that, we have to draw to a close. So thanks for coming out to Research+Pizza. Hope you enjoyed yourself. There's still a little bit of fruit and a bag of carrots, so run, run and it can be yours. Thank you, Art Markman.
Dr. Art Markman:	Thank you.