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Okay. So this has nothing really to do with the subject for the week, but I really wanted to post this so people could be exposed to it because it totally changed the way I think about cognition/made me do better in school so listen up. I write more in my book review if you want to hear more. There is something called priming. Basically if your exposed to a set of words, or even told to think a certain way, it can affect your performance. For example in one study the primary investigator has one group of people think about what it means to be a professor and asks a second group think about what it would be like to be a soccer hooligan before playing Trivial Pursuit. The group that was primed with professor-like thoughts got over ten percent more questions correct than the soccer hooligan group. These were groups of people same as the soccer hooligan group, but after being ‘primed’ by thinking about being a professor they were in a ‘smart’ frame of mind. Basically if you thinking ‘smart’ you will be smart. It works the other way too, in another study, when African-American students were asked to identify their race on a pre-test questioner, the simple act of checking the box next to African American was enough to prime them with negative cultural stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. The number of items they got right was cut in HALF. HALF! So what’s going on here? In these studies it was all unconscious. There is some sort of unconscious regulation of ability. I use the word regulation because obviously there is a range of knowledge inside our heads somewhere, but how much of it we have conscious access to varies. There must be some part of our brain that inhibits our performance, but with certain behavior the subjects in this study were able to vary this inhibition (whatever it is). So with practice, we are effectively able to prime ourselves to be in a smart frame of mind, or a not so smart one. What are the implications of this for US (by us I mean students)? Personally, when I’m going into a test, if I think I will do great, I really will, but if I’m feeling really shitty about it, it will be reflected in my performance (this is all respective, no grades are implied). Its not so much how much I know, but how I feel. So basically all I want to say is think smart, and you will be.