Shopping With Kids: Make It Fun!

Very often when at the grocery store, I have noticed that moms (its usually moms doing the shopping with the kids) seem to be in a state of mild agitation. This is especially true when they are toting more than one kid around in their giant car shaped cart.  They  just want to get done. The kids are anxious, and bored, and just want to get done.  

I don’t think I’ve ever, or very often, had this feeling while shopping with my kids.  It is something we all enjoy, and look forward to.

The great thing about children is that they have the
most fun when they are learning...

While I am new to meditation and to making a practice of mindfulness, I think that I have always been aware of the concept of mindfulness and have attempted to make it part of my every-day life.  

My time with my boys is precious, even if I am with them all day, nearly every day. I want to enjoy it as much as possible while it lasts. I also want my boys to enjoy their time with me, and with each other as much as possible.  

Yes, I have my two year old and my four year old do my
shopping for me

The great thing about children is that they have the most fun when they are learning, and when they are doing so by being involved in and engaged in the activity that is taking place. Of course I understand that the strolling pace at which I shop with my kids is a luxury of time that I am gifted with, but I have found that it doesn’t take that much longer to let my kids do the shopping for me.

Yes, I have my two year old and my four year old shop for me. Or with me. Or I simply narrate what it is that I am doing at any given moment in the store, and I have done this since they were old enough to sit up in the cart on their own. I noticed very quickly with Caveboy, who talked very late due to a speech delay, that he could identify different products we were looking for when he was well under a year old. That doesn’t make him a prodigy of any kind. That is simply what kids are made to do at that time: learn what things are called and try to identify them: over, and over, and over again.  

Before my boys were big enough to be trusted to walk around the store themselves, or even before they could walk, we would look for different landmarks in the store; not just food, but also the store decorations.  Sprouts has pictures of old trucks and tractors above the vegetable section which are fun to try to spot from different parts of the store.

King Soopers has really assisted us by putting tiny

shopping carts in the store

At around two and a half years old, Caveboy got kicked out of the cart as Cavebaby got old enough to sit up in the cart himself.  Since then he has directly assisted in the shopping by identifying the various products. Once he was old enough to read numbers, I’ve asked him to help identify the best deals.  Of course this takes practice: he could read numbers sometime at around three, and now that he’s four and a half he is finally starting to be able to look at the various choices and consider which might be the best.  It isn’t about him getting it right, because of course he hasn’t had the ability.  It’s about being engaged in the process. It’s about doing what Dad is doing, with Dad.  However, as his ability grows, so too does his engagement in the process.

At two and a half Cavebaby is now mostly out of the cart as well, depending on the store.  He is old enough to help find what we are looking for in the store, and even push his own cart. Our local Kroger Market (King Soopers in Colorado) has really assisted us by putting tiny shopping carts in the store for just this purpose.  

Shopping with Cavebaby

When there aren't kid-sized carts I try to find different tasks for them to do, whether it is finding the next item, pushing the big cart, or just remembering that they will get a treat if they keep their hands off the shelves.

Sure it makes shopping trips last longer, but not by as much as 10 minutes. I'll trade fun for time any day!

The Scarcity Trap, Bandwidth, and My ADD

Oh yeah, writing! I forgot all about it this week.  I need to get back to it for sure.  I have several possible blog posts circulating in my head, and I need to rewrite my speech and practice it. I think that speech, about climbing the Needle with my dad, will be a fun post to write as well.  It has been a fairly busy week so far with Susan having to do homework every night, and with me starting on the R class.  I still have a bit of cleaning to do in our house as well, and I don’t have mom’s house rented yet.  I don’t understand why so many people are dragging their feet.   

It's been too nice outside to sit in and write.  It was T-shirt weather at 13,000 feet at Arapaho Basin for skiing on Saturday.  

What have I been thinking about? I suppose the concept of “bandwidth” and how we distribute it was bouncing around in my head yesterday.  I listened to a “Hidden Brain” podcast about the concept of The Scarcity Trap.  Of course if the scarce resource is food we would obviously focus our bandwidth on trying to find more of it. This eventually led me to consider how the concept of bandwidth can help me understand, or at least describe, myself.   

It is interesting that we will do this no matter what the scarce resource is. Money is one that people have always known about, but the reaction to being poor has long been misunderstood.  It, of course, makes a lot of sense when you think of the reaction to being poor as the exact same psychological response as the response to being hungry: one will focus their available bandwidth on obtaining the scarce resource.  Right now Susan’s scarce resource is time.  

It has long been noted that poor people tend to focus on short term economic goals such as putting food on the table today. They do seem to be better at coming up with short term necessities than people who are not under the same temporal pressures.  This has always come at the cost of long term financial planning.  The traditional response of philanthropists has been to attempt to educate the poor on long term financial planning, often with very little results.  

The problem is not that poor people who are under immediate financial stress necessarily don’t understand the value of long term planning. The problem is that all their bandwidth is taken up to focus on the more immediate issue, and therefore are physically, or psychologically, unable to consider the long term.

I was considering the concept of bandwidth while meditating yesterday. I am currently doing the focus lessons on Headspace, and one of the exercises is to move the mind’s attention incrementally across different parts of the body. Two interesting things occur as one does this. The first is that there seems to be an additional sensation to whatever you might be feeling.  I can only characterize it as sometimes tingling, sometimes heat, sometimes flushness, and sometimes totally nondescript.  The second is more obvious, but perhaps more enlightening as well.  In focusing on the various parts of the body you become aware of the various sensations that are present in those parts of the body.  You become aware of tensions, or pressures, or itches, or pain, or simply the contact of your skin with the fabric of the clothes you are wearing.  

All these sensations are always there, but you are never aware of them unless you are actively focusing on them, or when they are so annoying that they demand your attention.  This is because we don’t have the conscious bandwidth to process all that is going on at once.  While our brains as whole entities can be thought of as super computers more powerful than anything created artificially by humans, the portion concerned with consciousness has a RAM and processor speed that is stuck in the 1970s.  This computer analogy can get a bit messy as computers and the brain do not function in the same manner, but there are some useful similarities.  

Pretending that consciousness functions similarly to a computer, it has been posited that we can process 16 bits of information at a time.  I suppose that actually brings us up to the late 1980s.  If we also assume that everyone has about the same processing power, what differentiates us cognitively is how we are able to apply that focus to the underlying processes, which appear to be of unlimited calculational capacity.  

16 Bits!

This piqued my curiosity because of the unique functionality of my own brain, and the similar peculiarities of others with classic ADD. This can be parsed out by examining the standard diagnostics for ADD derived from IQ and GAI (General Ability Index) tests.

You might have heard that ADD will cause a 15 point drop (a whole standard deviation) in the score on an IQ test.  In a lot of literature online the author will presume that IQ scores for ADD people are necessarily lower than those of their peers. This is not in fact true. People with ADD often score higher than average on IQ tests, on often score very high.  The 15 point drop comes from inattention in one very important part of the composite score: working memory. However this deficit can often be more than made up for in other areas of the composite score.

What does this have to do with bandwidth? Remember that we only have a limited amount of bandwidth, but there is a way to simulate augmenting it: rapid task switching.  This is not the same thing as multi-tasking, which fundamentally doesn’t exist anyway and is also achieved by task switching.  The ADD brain will focus less on a particular task or part of a task and rapidly switch between related tasks that are being processed in the background. In this way total bandwidth is augmented, which is one reason why many ADD people seem to find creativity to be easier. If there were a computer analog to this, perhaps it would be processor speed. There is not more memory available, but there is the ability to process multiple parts of the same task at once.   

This can negatively affect working memory as there is a temporal component to working memory.  To temporarily store objects in the memory, one needs to focus on them and keep them forward for some seconds. This task can prove impossible to achieve when the brain is constantly switching tasks.

Some people believe that the General Ability Index is a better composite than IQ as it weights working memory to a much lesser degree than does IQ.  I tend to disagree with this notion as I personally value working memory very highly as a measure of cognitive ability.  Perhaps this exposes my bias in that as I have the working memory of a goldfish, my scores from my last psych evaluation in both IQ and GAI appear to me to be much higher than I have ever been able to represent in any real world application.  

Shifting back to meditation and the focus exercise, I am now wondering if I can train myself to chose how I am utilizing my bandwidth through mindfulness and meditation exercises.  Is it possible for me to narrow my focus so that I can increase my working memory? Can I then still keep the ability to augment my bandwidth through higher frequency processing if I so choose?

A Meditation on Cognitive Dissonance

I haven't posted in awhile, but I am working on improving my writing by making sure to sit down and write something every day whether it is post worthy, or not. These have been mostly stream of consciousness meditations simply to get some thoughts out and to explore future topics of writing. I try to give a speech every two weeks at my Toastmasters club, and that has definitely taken time away from writing for this blog, and I am trying to do some research for a book or paper I want to write about the evolutionary significance of cognitive dissonance.

Today's meditation seemed to come out as a ready-made blog post, so here it is.

I was going to start out today’s writing by asking “what is it about people that they can’t consider alternate explanations when the evidence is overwhelming.” Of course I know the answer: cognitive dissonance. Again I engaged in discussion on a controversial topic on a friend’s Facebook page. The topic: flu shots.  

He assumed that it was stupid that a doctor had said: “Despite getting the flu shot, my family still got the flu. This only reminds me why I get the vaccine. Because the flu stinks." I left a rather long comment describing why this actually demonstrates how the vaccine works over the population.  

My friend has his beliefs, and while there may be some cognitive dissonance involved in the persistence of these beliefs, education is really the issue here: he doesn’t know how vaccines work, and it is a difficult and complicated thing to understand.  

What isn’t hard to understand is that correlation does not infer causation.  You will often hear people tell you that they know someone who got the flu directly from the flu shot.  I can understand why you might think this: a virus is a very simple organism, made up of RNA, and maybe it can mutate so that it will become virulent.  However the virus in the shot is not only inert, it is not even complete.  

I’m sure that it could be possible for this section of RNA to attach to something else and begin to replicate itself, but the likelihood that this resultant organism would also become a flu virus is on the order of zero.  

I bring this up because one person on my friend’s thread said exactly that: “I know several people who have gotten the flu from the flu shot.” Ok. How do you know that they got the flu from the shot? Instead of answering that question she stated that she finds it “exhaustingly repetitive that people with no direct knowledge of a specific situation tell you you don't know what you are talking about when you do have direct knowledge of a specific situation”.

I am sorry about that.  However I don’t see how I need to know the situation to call into question how one can be certain of their conclusion.  If you know, and accept, the the virus is inert; if you know, and accept, that it would take an astronomically unlikely event to change this fact; and you also believe that this has happened more than once… to people that you know, you should be able to come to the conclusion that, perhaps, they just got the flu.  The only thing that would keep one from making the deduction that they, in fact, just got the flu is a little irritation in your anterior cingulate cortex which initiates a fight-or-flight response.  This allows you to effectively battle the new belief, and make decisions based on your original belief.  

There are at least two evolutionary advantages to this response. One is that you won’t waste time and energy worrying about decisions that don’t matter: for the overwhelming majority of decisions made throughout our evolutionary history our original belief was at least good enough to get us through. Any difference in quality between two possible choices were overshadowed by the value of just making a decision and moving on.

The second has to do with the value of winning, or at least not losing, an argument.  For most of our evolutionary history we have not dealt at all with objective facts simply because we did not have the precision to measure them, and so they were not useful.  What is useful, in a tribal-social environment, is the maintenance of status.  You don’t maintain status by easily giving into another’s point of view, even if it may be slightly better worded or reasoned.  You maintain status by winning, and your body keeps you from losing by reacting to the possibility of losing in the same way it reacts to a real and mortal threat. Of course the cost of losing status could very well be death when resources are slim. We aren’t made to be totally cooperative creatures.  We are not built for objective reasoning.  The fact that we are even capable of it on any level is what is strange.  Perhaps it is a byproduct of our necessary capacities for logic, which we have needed to become good hunters and gatherers, and tool makers.

Cognitive dissonance only seems like an impedance in our postmodern society where we trade more in ideas and knowledge than we do in real social status.  And, based on our recent experiences in our political system, it has become a very large impedance indeed.