Neuroscience
Interesting article in this week's The New Yorker about how doctors think / make decisions. What's the Trouble, a medical dispatch by Jerome Groopman is subtitled "How Doctors Think." I'd say it's also about how they make decisions, and specifically three kinds of thinking that lead to bad decisions on their part. Malcolm Gladwell covered this a bit in Blink : the power of thinking without thinking, but this is a personal essay on topic.
Groopman describes three kinds of thinking that adversely affect doctors' decision making, with three different anecdotes.
1. Representativeness errors -- you believe what you see and "fail to consider possibilities" that contradict your mental template. The opposite of Occam's razor?
2. Availability errors -- when you see six patients in a row with the flu, and the seventh presents with similar symptoms, you're more apt to diagnose the seventh with the flu too (kind of like word priming, I'd guess); first described by Tversky & Kahneman, in Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology in 1973. (wikipedia on availability)
3. Personal feelings for a patient -- The good Dr. Groopman admits to missing a diagnosis because he was reluctant to subject his "favorite patient on the ward" to an extensive (and buttocks) exam.
This is interesting for the medical profession, but it has (less dire) implications for librarians too -- I know I make assumptions at the reference desk which color the questions I ask. Sometimes I guess right, but not always, and then I have to backtrack, and occasionally start over.
Finally, Groopman refers to Achieving quality in clinical decision making: cognitive strategies and detection of bias, by Pat Croskerry, published in the 2002 Academic Emergency Medicine for more info.
- How Thinking In A Foreign Language Makes You More Rational In Some Ways But Not Others
Back in 2012, US researchers showed that when people used their second, non-native language, they were less prone to a mental bias known as loss aversion. This bias means we're averse to the same outcome when it's framed in a way that highlights...
- Trying To Predict Who Will Be A Happy Doctor
Being a doctor can be incredibly stressful and more than a fifth of junior physicians wish they'd never taken medicine in the first place. Moreover, there's evidence showing that stressed doctors are bad doctors, so it would make sense if applicants...
- Neuroimaging And Vegetative States In The New Yorker
Silent Minds What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients. by Jerome Groopman 15 October 2007 The New Yorker [ ... Read the piece ... ]...
- "momemtary Autism"
Writer Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) gave a presentation today at The New Yorker Festival about his forthcoming release, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, published by Little, Brown with a January 2005 release date. The...
- Counterintuitive, But True
Heard a podcast of Malcolm Gladwell (mp3 file) speaking at Hamline University School of Law last November. I suspect he was recounting many stories from Blink, and he is quite a storyteller. His thesis is that quick decisions based on few bits of data...
Neuroscience
How Doctors Make Decisions
Interesting article in this week's The New Yorker about how doctors think / make decisions. What's the Trouble, a medical dispatch by Jerome Groopman is subtitled "How Doctors Think." I'd say it's also about how they make decisions, and specifically three kinds of thinking that lead to bad decisions on their part. Malcolm Gladwell covered this a bit in Blink : the power of thinking without thinking, but this is a personal essay on topic.
Groopman describes three kinds of thinking that adversely affect doctors' decision making, with three different anecdotes.
1. Representativeness errors -- you believe what you see and "fail to consider possibilities" that contradict your mental template. The opposite of Occam's razor?
2. Availability errors -- when you see six patients in a row with the flu, and the seventh presents with similar symptoms, you're more apt to diagnose the seventh with the flu too (kind of like word priming, I'd guess); first described by Tversky & Kahneman, in Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology in 1973. (wikipedia on availability)
3. Personal feelings for a patient -- The good Dr. Groopman admits to missing a diagnosis because he was reluctant to subject his "favorite patient on the ward" to an extensive (and buttocks) exam.
This is interesting for the medical profession, but it has (less dire) implications for librarians too -- I know I make assumptions at the reference desk which color the questions I ask. Sometimes I guess right, but not always, and then I have to backtrack, and occasionally start over.
Finally, Groopman refers to Achieving quality in clinical decision making: cognitive strategies and detection of bias, by Pat Croskerry, published in the 2002 Academic Emergency Medicine for more info.
- How Thinking In A Foreign Language Makes You More Rational In Some Ways But Not Others
Back in 2012, US researchers showed that when people used their second, non-native language, they were less prone to a mental bias known as loss aversion. This bias means we're averse to the same outcome when it's framed in a way that highlights...
- Trying To Predict Who Will Be A Happy Doctor
Being a doctor can be incredibly stressful and more than a fifth of junior physicians wish they'd never taken medicine in the first place. Moreover, there's evidence showing that stressed doctors are bad doctors, so it would make sense if applicants...
- Neuroimaging And Vegetative States In The New Yorker
Silent Minds What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients. by Jerome Groopman 15 October 2007 The New Yorker [ ... Read the piece ... ]...
- "momemtary Autism"
Writer Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) gave a presentation today at The New Yorker Festival about his forthcoming release, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, published by Little, Brown with a January 2005 release date. The...
- Counterintuitive, But True
Heard a podcast of Malcolm Gladwell (mp3 file) speaking at Hamline University School of Law last November. I suspect he was recounting many stories from Blink, and he is quite a storyteller. His thesis is that quick decisions based on few bits of data...