December | 2008 |

I’ve been reading The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. No, no, don’t click away yet. The ideas in this book are important. For anyone who has ever tried to change herself, or to teach something to somebody else, the most important is on page 9. Its called “regression toward the mean.”

Here’s the short version.

When we do something well its usually a combination of skill and luck. Ditto the reverse. When we perform badly its lack-of-skill and/or lack-of-luck. Examples–SATs, golf shots, investments, job interviews, sales calls, first dates (do people still date?), Yorkshire pudding. Whenever luck is involved there will be variations in performance–we will do better sometimes than others. These variations will tend to cluster around their true value, or average value. If you have a really good day on the golf course, chances are your next day will be worse. Conversely, if you have a really bad day, then the next game you play will most likely be an improvement. In both cases, the scores are tending to move in the direction of your true or average score. This means you can’t really tell very much from one or two observations. Its only by watching and recording outcomes consistently, time after time that you can discern whether your golf game, investments, or cooking is getting worse, getting better or staying about the same.

The problem is that our brains have difficulty holding on to this concept. We are hard-wired to make associations (to find patterns). We naturally tend to discount the role of chance and to see patterns where they don’t actually exist.

: Daniel Kahneman Image via Wikipedia

Mlodinow tells this story to illustrate. In the 1960′s Daniel Kahneman was teaching behavioral psychology to Israeli flight instructors to help them improve their teaching. A basic principle is that rewards(praise) work better than punishment (scolding). A flight instructor disagreed with this, saying when he yells at a student,they do better next time but when he praises a student that student does worse the next time. Therefore, the flight instructor concluded, scolding was more effective than praise.

What was going on? Chances are that a performance worthy of a good verbal thrashing is way below average and, because of regression toward the mean, it is highly likely that a better performance will follow. The student does better next time but its because of random variation, not because of the the instructor’s tirade. Conversely, that excellent performance that the instructor praised was also partly a matter of luck and, statistically speaking, the most likely outcome next time will be a worse performance but that too had nothing at all to do with the instructor’s praise. (By the way, Kahneman devoted much of his career to studying how humans consistently misinterpret random events. In 2002 he received the Nobel prize in economics along with Tversky for his work.)

Still seem a little “out there?” I’m going to follow up with a few examples in my next post.

: Image by shelms via Flickr

People sometimes ask me why some teens need residential treatment. It seems extreme to separate a teenager from friends, family and community for one or two years (the average length of most therapeutic boarding school programs). There are lots of reasons and I will write more about them later. But in this blog I want to talk about triggers.

About a year ago, I placed a golden retriever puppy, Coda, in the home of another employee at the school, Audra. His first family was unprepared for all the normal things a retriever puppy brings to the relationship and Coda is an above average Golden Retriever. He has what it takes to be a great working dog — way too much energy for most pet owners.

Coda only spent a few days in my menagerie before Audra adopted him. But it was enough. The contrast with his former existence must have been huge because I became a a very strong positive stimulus.

In the weeks that followed, every time Coda saw me he became a wired-up frenzy of energy. It didn’t matter what Audra tried–planned ignoring, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, teaching a competing behavior, nothing worked. No learning was possible because we couldn’t communicate with him. The second he saw me, Coda’s fore brain shut down. He writhed and wriggled, bounced, came up off his front legs whenever he saw me. His overwhelming urge seemed to be to lick my face in the classic puppy gesture of submission and joy.

In a young puppy, that behavior is beyond cute. But this puppy would grow to be a 70 pound monster knocking over toddlers and the elderly with impunity. Audra understood that. She put Coda and me on “black-out.” That is a term we use at The Family Foundation School. Its a consequence applied when two students bring out the worst in each other. We put them on “black-out.” They avoid any and all interaction with each other.

Coda and I stayed on black-out while Audra worked with him on basic puppy obedience, gave him lots of exercise and while his puppy brain developed. Gradually, she reintroduced me to Coda. I still have to be careful not to trigger his exuberance. We keep contact brief and I don’t play with him becase the old associations are still there. They may never go away.

Image by Pirate Scott via Flickr

A good residential program is designed to separate an at-risk teen from her triggers just like Audra separated Coda from me. Friends, music, patterns of family interaction; sights, sounds and smells of the neighborhood, styles of clothing, drug paraphernalia–all these can be overwhelming stimuli that fire-up the old neuronal pathways. They can instantly bring back feelings, thoughts, and patterns of behavior that were violent, or addictive, or depressive, or abusive. They are all there just waiting for resurrection.

The school creates a safe haven where we can make new associations and learn new patterns of behavior. The hard part is knowing how much practice we need with the new patterns before we can safely handle even a limited exposure to our old environment. It’s not easy.

Coda and I still have to be careful around each other. Over the holidays Coda will stay with me while Audra and her family take a vacation. I will need to be mindful of Coda’s limits if we aren’t going to undo all the work Audra has done. Most of our students will go home for the holidays. Let’s hope their parents are mindful of their limits too.

(Note: Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not claiming that dogs and teens are identical. Human beings have a much more complex brain (mind) than dogs do. Nevertheless there is some correspondence. We are both mammals, our neurons fire the same way. )

At-risk teens and dog training, learning and the brain

Monthly Archives: December 2008

Why common sense is nonsense

Triggers