Ted Talks | The Paradox of Choice
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Psychology, Research, Videos Leave a comment »Thanks to Sara for sharing!
How a tired brain can slow your physical performance
Posted: September 7, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology Leave a comment »
By Alex Hutchinson
“It sounds crazy,” Samuele Marcora admitted during his talk at a conference on fatigue at Charles Sturt University in Australia last month, “but it’s actually not.”
Dr. Marcora, a professor at the University of Kent’s Centre for Sports Studies in Britain, has spent the past few years unravelling the surprising links between tired brains and physical performance. His initial results suggest that what we perceive as physical limits are actually highly dependent on our levels of motivation and mental fatigue – and that we may be able to use this fact to our advantage.Back in 2009, Dr. Marcora and his colleagues published a study in which 16 volunteers cycled to exhaustion after spending 90 minutes either watching “emotionally neutral” documentary movies or performing a demanding cognitive test called the AX-CPT, which requires “sustained attention, working memory, response inhibition and error monitoring.”
Although the cognitive test didn’t produce any physical fatigue, the volunteers gave up on the cycling test 15 per cent sooner when they were mentally fatigued compared to when they had simply watched the documentaries.
Dr. Marcora explains these results using a new “psychobiological” model of fatigue that views exercise limits as a balance between motivation and perceived effort: We stop not because our muscles are starved of oxygen or depleted of fuel, but because the effort it would take to keep going is greater than the rewards for continuing. In this picture, a tired brain and tired muscles are equally capable of increasing your perceived effort, and ultimately making you quit.
This principle doesn’t apply only to endurance sports. At the fatigue conference last month, researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney, presented data on the effects of mental fatigue on intermittent sports such as soccer, which mix short bursts of intense sprinting with longer stretches of low and medium intensity.
Using the AX-CPT test to induce mental fatigue prior to a simulated 45-minute game, the researchers found that the short, high-intensity sprints – when motivation was maximal – were unaffected by mental fatigue.
I think you’re fat
Posted: August 9, 2011 Filed under: Happiness, Inspiring, Psychology, Research Leave a comment »
By A.J. Jacobs
This story is about something called Radical Honesty. It may change your life. (But honestly, we don’t really care.)
Here’s the truth about why I’m writing this article:
I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague regret over their decision not to have sex with me, and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them someday at a reunion. I want Hollywood to buy my article and turn it into a movie, even though they kind of already made the movie ten years ago with Jim Carrey. I want to get congratulatory e-mails and job offers that I can politely decline. Or accept if they’re really good. Then get a generous counteroffer from my boss.
To be totally honest, I was sorry I mentioned this idea to my boss about three seconds after I opened my mouth. Because I knew the article would be a pain in the ass to pull off. Dammit. I should have let my colleague Tom Chiarella write it. But I didn’t want to seem lazy.
What I mentioned to my boss was this: a movement called Radical Honesty.
The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.
Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.
And yet…maybe there’s something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren’t big lies. They aren’t lies like “I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator.” Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. “Yes, let’s definitely get together soon.” “I’d love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu.” “No, we can’t buy a toy today — the toy store is closed.” It’s bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.
I e-mail Blanton to ask if I can come down to Virginia and get some pointers before embarking on my Radical Honesty experiment. He writes back: “I appreciate you for apparently having a real interest and hope you’re not just doing a cutesy little superficial dipshit job like most journalists.”
I’m already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I lied to him in my first e-mail — that I haven’t ordered all his books on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious about his work. He writes back: “Thanks for your honesty in attempting to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have been.”
Blanton lives in a house he built himself, perched on a hill in the town of Stanley, Virginia, population 1,331. We’re sitting on white chairs in a room with enormous windows and a crackling fireplace. He’s swirling a glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon and water and telling me why it’s important to live with no lies.
“You’ll have really bad times, you’ll have really great times, but you’ll contribute to other people because you haven’t been dancing on eggshells your whole fucking life. It’s a better life.”
“Do you think it’s ever okay to lie?” I ask.
“I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie….I lie to any government official.” (Blanton’s politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky’s.) “I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in golf. And in poker.”
Blanton adjusts his crotch. I expected him to be a bully. Or maybe a new-age huckster with a bead necklace who sits cross-legged on the floor. He’s neither. He’s a former Texan with a big belly and a big laugh and a big voice. He’s got a bushy head of gray hair and a twang that makes his bye sound like bah. He calls himself “white trash with a Ph.D.” If you mixed DNA from Lyndon Johnson, Ken Kesey, and threw in the nonannoying parts of Dr. Phil, you might get Blanton.
He ran for Congress twice, with the novel promise that he’d be an honest politician. In 2004, he got a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his Virginia district as an independent. In 2006, the Democrats considered endorsing him but got skittish about his weeklong workshops, which involve a day of total nudity. They also weren’t crazy that he’s been married five times (currently to a Swedish flight attendant twenty-six years his junior). He ran again but withdrew when it became clear he was going to be crushed.
My interview with Blanton is unlike any other I’ve had in fifteen years as a journalist. Usually, there’s a fair amount of ass kissing and diplomacy. You approach the controversial stuff on tippy toes (the way Barbara Walters once asked Richard Gere about that terrible, terrible rumor). With Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In fact, it would be rude not to say it. I’d be insulting his life’s work. It’s my first taste of Radical Honesty, and it’s liberating, exhilarating.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707-2
Dopamine squirts, intermittent reinforcement, and mobile apps
Posted: July 28, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology, Research, Technology Leave a comment »
Is this you? Your phone vibrates and you pull it out of your pocket to check and see if anything interesting caused the vibration. You have a moment of boredom in a store, in a checkout line, while waiting for your spouse to get dressed – so you pull out the phone and run through a checklist of information to peruse – looking to see if anything exciting has occurred in your digital universe be it Twitter, Facebook, or any of a thousand different things people can check on these days. Finally, after prolonged lack of exposure to your smart phone, your overall sense of boredom is heightened. You get fidgety, you get bored quickly, and you feel disconnected and out of touch. Often times you simply don’t know what to do with yourself w/out a laptop or your mobile phone.
If this is you, don’t be ashamed. You’re just like millions of other people who are being conditioned by their “smart” mobile devices. Every time your phone vibrates to alert you of the possibility of something interesting, exciting, or even mundane (but new) – your brain is getting what psychologists call a “Dopamine squirt”. Over time, your brain links the phone vibration, ring, or the “new SMS” tone to a brief release of dopamine. You feel this tiny little rush of excitement that feels like adrenaline every time your phone vibrates, jingles, rings, or otherwise begs for your attention. Since this is dopamine we’re talking about, you actually suffer mild withdrawal symptoms when you are away from your phone or your phone is idle/quiet for a long period of time. You get fidgety, anxious, bored, etc.
Intermittent Reinforcement is another psychological term that is used to refer to the behavior of people tethered to their smart phones. Even if their phone has been programmed to alert them to the arrival of something new and noteworthy, millions of people will pull out their phones and do a quick scan for “new or interesting stuff”. The next time you’re in an airport, or a Starbucks, or any other crowded place (especially one with business people on their lunch break), sit back and do some people watching. Watch how often people pull out their phone, do a scan, then put their phone back. The scary part comes when you see the same person do this 4, 5, 10 times in a row while waiting in line for their coffee, sandwich, or standing on a street corner waiting for the “walk” signal to light up.
Creative kryptonite and the death of productivity
Posted: July 9, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology, Research, Technology Leave a comment »
By Jonathan Fields
Great work, brilliant ideas, extraordinary art requires space.
Time away. Room to process, synthesize, allow connections between seemingly disparate parts to effervesce out of the ether of the mind.
Genius is the offspring of the in-between.
But, increasingly, technology is removing the in-between.
We don’t just walk in contemplation, we walk, talk and type.
We don’t just drive, we drive, talk and every time we stop the car, we check, tap and reply. Red lights, the bain of a life-long quest to get “there,” have now become a sought after opportunity to catch up on any communication that may’ve arrived since the last red-light…5 blocks ago.
But when we fill in all the organic in-betweens with texting, e-mailing, DMing and updating, we unintentionally kill the a critical step in the ideation process—percolation and contemplation—and along with it go creativity, innovation and despite your opposite intention, productivity.
So, why do we do it?
Filling in the in-between, we say, lets us get so much more done. Wrong.
Hyperconnectivity gives us the perception of getting more done, it makes us feel like we’re doing more, because we’re using every free moment of every waking hour.
There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.
Hyperconnectivity requires a massive volume of switchtasking, which destroys true-productivity and efficiency because every time you page through your various modes of connectivity and respond to different prompts, you lose focus. To regain that focus requires a certain amount of time and cognitive effort.
Put another way, there is a ramping cost every time you switch gears, then return.
So when you spiral through every known mode of communication hundreds of times a day, you may be busy as hell, but you damn sure aren’t productive. At least nowhere near the level you could be. You’ve just created the illusion of productivity.
By the way, if you’re wondering if that’s you, here’s an easy test:
Next time someone asks what you did at the end of a day, if you know you were crazy busy but you can’t immediately pin-point a small number of substantially-meaningful accomplishments, critical insights or measurable forward movement…let alone recall any tasks beyond “oh I answered a lot of emails, put out fires and had a bunch of meetings…you’ve very likely fallen into hyperconnected lost-sock land.
All of which begs an even bigger question…
If hyperconnectivity really isn’t about efficiency and productivity, like we claim it is, what is it about?
>It’s Not Your Fault – Blame Biology!
Posted: September 8, 2010 Filed under: Psychology, Science Leave a comment »>
I turn on the TV and find a commercial informing me that I should Blame Biology rather than french fries for an outbreak of acne. It is true that biologic factors involved in acne include excess sebum production caused by increased hormones, outlet obstruction of sebaceous follicles and inflammation. Further, research has shown that greasy foods and chocolates won’t worsen acne. However, excessive manipulation and rubbing, hair gels, medications, stress and certain foods such as refined sugars and starches will increase oil production and probably the pimple population. In other words, you do have some control over your complexion.
This Blame Biology message is not new, nor is it limited to dermatology. We are always looking for something or someone to blame; allowing us to shift responsibility. An article from CNN described circadian rhythms and additional sleep requirements as the biological reasons for teenagers arriving late to school, nodding off during class and getting into more car accidents. Recently a National Public Radio show explained how unruly and disrespectful teen behavior should be blamed on biologic changes not just in their hormone levels, but in their rapidly developing brains. Similarly, the Boston Globe printed an article which discussed how anorexia is not primarily a psychological, but a biological disorder and how we should blame the appetite regulation mechanism in the brain, rather than parenting or altered self-perceptions. An article in Newsweek attempts to clarify how antisocial behavior should be blamed on brain development rather than on poor choices or deviant personalities. Unfriendly and detached? There’s no reason to invoke personal responsibility; look no further than gray matter density in the brain.
Of course, we do have some obvious biological blames such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and glaucoma to name a few. Does that mean that we don’t have any control? Heck No! Acknowledging that I may have a genetic predisposition to incur some disease is different than Blaming Biology and removing myself from any personal responsibility. The truth is that you and I do have control. Having a genetic predisposition does not mean that a disease or aberrancy will be phenotypically displayed (i.e. you have the gene but it is not expressed or seen). Genetically predisposed simply means that you have an increased chance of exhibiting some specific characteristic or disease. Whether you actually get that disease or demonstrate that trait depends on several other factors for which you are responsible, including your choices, behaviors, and actions.
Are you too short, obese, lethargic, stubborn, anxious? Do you have poor eyesight, thin hair, bad knees, sweaty palms, insomnia, depression, or fits of anger? We can Blame Biology for each of these physical or emotional traits, but in the end, we lose not only our responsibility, but our control and the ability to make positive changes.
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That is certainly something interesting to ponder and discuss with people!
>Video: The Rise of the Numerati
Posted: April 23, 2010 Filed under: Psychology, Technology, Videos Leave a comment »By Stephen Baker
With the explosion of data from the Internet, cell phones, and credit cards, the people who can make sense of it all are changing our world
An excerpt from the introduction of the book The Numerati.
Imagine you’re in a café, perhaps the noisy one I’m sitting in at this moment. A young woman at a table to your right is typing on her laptop. You turn your head and look at her screen. She surfs the Internet. You watch.
Hours pass. She reads an online newspaper. You notice that she reads three articles about China. She scouts movies for Friday night and watches the trailer for Kung Fu Panda. She clicks on an ad that promises to connect her to old high school classmates. You sit there taking notes. With each passing minute, you’re learning more about her. Now imagine that you could watch 150 million people surfing at the same time. That’s more or less what Dave Morgan does.
“What is it about romantic-movie lovers?” Morgan asks, as we sit in his New York office on a darkening summer afternoon. The advertising entrepreneur is flush with details about our ramblings online. He can trace the patterns of our migrations, as if we were swallows or humpback whales, while we move from site to site. Recently he’s become intrigued by the people who click most often on an ad for car rentals. Among them, the largest group had paid a visit to online obituary listings. That makes sense, he says, over the patter of rain against the windows. “Someone dies, so you fly to the funeral and rent a car.” But it’s the second-largest group that has Morgan scratching his head. Romantic-movie lovers. For some reason Morgan can’t fathom, loads of them seem drawn to a banner ad for Alamo Rent A Car.
>Article: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature (Part 5 of 5)
Posted: April 20, 2010 Filed under: Psychology Leave a comment »>
Excerpts from Psychology Today, July 2007
9. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
An unfortunate consequence of the ever-growing number of women joining the labor force and working side by side with men is the increasing number of sexual harassment cases. Why must sexual harassment be a necessary consequence of the sexual integration of the workplace?
Psychologist Kingsley R. Browne identifies two types of sexual harassment cases: the quid pro quo (“You must sleep with me if you want to keep your job or be promoted”) and the “hostile environment” (the workplace is deemed too sexualized for workers to feel safe and comfortable). While feminists and social scientists tend to explain sexual harassment in terms of “patriarchy” and other ideologies, Browne locates the ultimate cause of both types of sexual harassment in sex differences in mating strategies.
Studies demonstrate unequivocally that men are far more interested in short-term casual sex than women. In one now-classic study, 75 percent of undergraduate men approached by an attractive female stranger agreed to have sex with her; none of the women approached by an attractive male stranger did. Many men who would not date the stranger nonetheless agreed to have sex with her.
The quid pro quo types of harassment are manifestations of men’s greater desire for short-term casual sex and their willingness to use any available means to achieve that goal. Feminists often claim that sexual harassment is “not about sex but about power;” Browne contends it is both—men using power to get sex. “To say that it is only about power makes no more sense than saying that bank robbery is only about guns, not about money.”
Sexual harassment cases of the hostile-environment variety result from sex differences in what men and women perceive as “overly sexual” or “hostile” behavior. Many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment.
Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men’s repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not treating women differently from men—the definition of discrimination, under which sexual harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women.
10. It’s natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they’re male)
On the morning of January 21, 1998, as Americans woke up to the stunning allegation that President Bill Clinton had had an affair with a 24-year-old White House intern, Darwinian historian Laura L. Betzig thought, “I told you so.” Betzig points out that while powerful men throughout Western history have married monogamously (only one legal wife at a time), they have always mated polygynously (they had lovers, concubines, and female slaves). With their wives, they produced legitimate heirs; with the others, they produced bastards. Genes make no distinction between the two categories of children.
As a result, powerful men of high status throughout human history attained very high reproductive success, leaving a large number of offspring (legitimate and otherwise), while countless poor men died mateless and childless. Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, stands out quantitatively, having left more offspring—1,042—than anyone else on record, but he was by no means qualitatively different from other powerful men, like Bill Clinton.
The question many asked in 1998—”Why on earth would the most powerful man in the world jeopardize his job for an affair with a young woman?”—is, from a Darwinian perspective, a silly one. Betzig’s answer would be: “Why not?” Men strive to attain political power, consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. Reproductive access to women is the goal, political office but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it.
What distinguishes Bill Clinton is not that he had extramarital affairs while in office—others have, more will; it would be a Darwinian puzzle if they did not—what distinguishes him is the fact that he got caught.
By Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa of Psychology Today magazine.
>Article: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature (Part 4 of 5)
Posted: April 9, 2010 Filed under: Psychology Leave a comment »>
Excerpts from Psychology Today, July 2007
6. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
For nearly a quarter of a century, criminologists have known about the “age-crime curve.” In every society at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off in middle age.
This curve is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes every quantifiable human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors). The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists—which might be called the “age-genius curve”—is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then equally quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.
Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years, and now spends much of his time painting. Bill Gates is now a respectable businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer a computer whiz kid. J.D. Salinger now lives as a total recluse and has not published anything in more than three decades. Orson Welles was a mere 26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane.
A single theory can explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course: Both crime and genius are expressions of young men’s competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.
In the physical competition for mates, those who are competitive may act violently toward their male rivals. Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities.
The cost of competition, however, rises dramatically when a man has children, when his energies and resources are put to better use protecting and investing in them. The birth of the first child usually occurs several years after puberty because men need some time to accumulate sufficient resources and attain sufficient status to attract their first mate. There is therefore a gap of several years between the rapid rise in the benefits of competition and similarly rapid rise in its costs. Productivity rapidly declines in late adulthood as the costs of competition rise and cancel its benefits.
These calculations have been performed by natural and sexual selection, so to speak, which then equips male brains with a psychological mechanism to incline them to be increasingly competitive immediately after puberty and make them less competitive right after the birth of their first child. Men simply do not feel like acting violently, stealing, or conducting additional scientific experiments, or they just want to settle down after the birth of their child but they do not know exactly why.
The similarity between Bill Gates, Paul McCartney, and criminals—in fact, among all men throughout evolutionary history—points to an important concept in evolutionary biology: female choice.
Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.
7. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
Sociologists and demographers have discovered that couples who have at least one son face significantly less risk of divorce than couples who have only daughters. Why is this?
Since a man’s mate value is largely determined by his wealth, status, and power—whereas a woman’s is largely determined by her youth and physical attractiveness—the father has to make sure that his son will inherit his wealth, status, and power, regardless of how much or how little of these resources he has. In contrast, there is relatively little that a father (or mother) can do to keep a daughter youthful or make her more physically attractive.
The continued presence of (and investment by) the father is therefore important for the son, but not as crucial for the daughter. The presence of sons thus deters divorce and departure of the father from the family more than the presence of daughters, and this effect tends to be stronger among wealthy families.
8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
Many believe that men go through a midlife crisis when they are in middle age. Not quite. Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it’s not because they are middle-aged. It’s because their wives are. From the evolutionary psychological perspective, a man’s midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife’s imminent menopause and end of her reproductive career, and thus his renewed need to attract younger women. Accordingly, a 50-year-old man married to a 25-year-old woman would not go through a midlife crisis, while a 25-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman would, just like a more typical 50-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman. It’s not his midlife that matters; it’s hers. When he buys a shiny-red sports car, he’s not trying to regain his youth; he’s trying to attract young women to replace his menopausal wife by trumpeting his flash and cash.
By Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa of Psychology Today magazine.
>Video: Selective Attention Test
Posted: April 9, 2010 Filed under: Psychology, Research, Videos Leave a comment »>
First watch the video and then read below to learn about this experiment…
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much. To our surprise, it has become one of the best-known experiments in psychology. It is described in most introductory textbooks and is featured in more than a dozen science museums. It has been used by everyone from preachers and teachers to corporate trainers and terrorist hunters, not to mention characters on the TV show C.S.I., to help explain what we see and what we don’t see. And it got us thinking that many other intuitive beliefs that we have about our own minds might be just as wrong. We wrote The Invisible Gorilla to explore the limits of human intuition and what they mean for ourselves and our world. We hope you read it, and if you do, we would love to hear what you think.
By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Thanks to Melanie for sharing!
