David McRaney's Blog, page 21
August 4, 2018
YANSS 132 – Practice (rebroadcast)
You live in the past.
You don’t know this because your brain lies to you and then covers up the lies, which is a good thing. If your brain didn’t fudge reality, you wouldn’t be able to hit a baseball, drive a car, or even carry on a conversation.
According to research by David Eagleman, it takes about 80 milliseconds for the brain to generate consciousness, to take the information flowing in and construct a model of reality from moment to moment. Everything you think is happening now already happened 80 milliseconds ago, and you are just now becoming aware of it — over and over again.
Since you live in the past, it should be impossible to do things like hit a baseball or duck a punch, yet athletes do these sorts of things all the time. As our guest, author of The Sports Gene
, David Epstein explains, professional baseball players and boxers don’t have faster reaction times than the average human being. No human being can make the circuit from eyes to brain to muscles fast enough to hit a ball in midflight or avoid an oncoming fist. You can’t change those natural limits with any amount of practice. So how do they do it?
[image error]Epstein explain that practice strengthens intuition, not reaction times. Even among chess players, practice builds up a cognitive database that nonconsciously informs our decisions and reactions. Experience and mastery are demonstrations of a robust, well-trained unconscious mind that senses tiny cues in the environment and then prepares an action that will occur later, syncing up reality the way you stitch together sounds and sights. All sports are a display of brains predicting the future based on intuition built up by practice – brains compensating for lag by seeing what is happening now, before the ball is thrown, before the punch is launched, and making a best guess on what will happen later.
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The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
July 2, 2018
YANSS 131 – The psychological forces that make waiting for marshmallows easier also make life itself easier
In 1990, psychologist Walter Michel’s and his team released a landmark study into delayed gratification.
They offered kids a single marshmallow now, or two marshmallows later if they could resist temptation for 20 minutes. They found that the children who could wait were more likely to be successful later in life. They had higher test scores on the SAT, lower divorce rates, higher incomes, lower body mass indexes, and fewer behavioral problems as adults.
Today, if you go to YouTube and search for “The Marshmallow Test” you will find thousands of videos in which parents test their children to see if they can wait for the marshmallow. It’s understandable, because throughout the early 2000s, a slew of TED talks, popular books, and viral articles suggested that you could use the test to portend your child’s chances at reaching their life goals — and its fun and easy and you can eat all the extra marshmallows.
The marshmallow test is now one of the most well-known studies in all of psychology, right up there with the Milgram shock experiments and the Stanford prison experiment, but a new replication suggests we’ve been learning the wrong lesson from its findings for decades.
[image error]In this episode, we sit down with Tyler Watts, who researches early childhood development. According to his team’s research, the marshmallow test is still important and insightful, but an expanded replication shows the ability to delay gratification at 4-years old isn’t nearly as strong a predictor of later success as socio-economic status. In fact, it was socio-economic status all along that affected children’s ability to wait for the marshmallow.
These findings have huge implications for education, because many schools teach delayed gratification strategies to young children in the hopes of affecting their later success. According to Watts, those efforts aren’t likely to produce large effects, and what effects they do produce will be overwhelmed by the psychological impact of poverty and the environments it produces.
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[image error] This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development
May 21, 2018
A conversation about how minds change with Misha Glouberman
On April 22, Misha Glouberman of How to Talk to People About Things sat down with David McRaney of You Are Not So Smart in Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel to talk in front of a sold-out crowd abiut David’s upcoming book on how minds change.
This is the full video of this event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFFvD1ajjhk
Misha’s Glouberman’s Website
How to Talk to People About Things Website
YANSS 128 – The neuroscience of joy, comfort, happiness, and bliss
What makes you happy? As in, what generates happiness inside the squishy bits that reside inside your skull?
That’s what author and neuroscientist Dean Burnett set out to answer in his new book, Happy Brain, which explores both the environmental and situational factors that lead to and away from happiness, and the neurological underpinnings of joy, bliss, comfort, love, and connection.
In the episode you’ll hear all that and more as we talk about what we know so far about the biological nature of happiness itself.
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YANSS 127 – How we became self obsessed
In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast we sit down with my friend and one of my favorite journalists, author Will Storr, whose new book just hit the shelves here in the United States. It’s called Selfie: How We Became so Self-Obsessed, and What it is Doing to Us.
The book explores what he calls “the age of perfectionism” — our modern struggle with our many modern pressures to meet newly emerging ideals and standards that tell us if we are falling short of the person we ought to be – and how that struggle to be that person is an impossible task. As he says in the book, “perfectionism is the idea that kills,” and you’ll hear him explain what he means by that in the interview.
[image error]In the book, Will embarks on two investigative journeys. The first is an examination of the self as a psychological mechanism. He digs deep into what science has to say about where our concept of self originated and how it operates so that he can understand how perfectionism causes that mechanism to malfunction.
The second is how the cultural concept of self originated and then evolved over millennia. The very concept of a self has changed many times, as have the pressures that concept has endured, and depending on where you live today, the lineage of your culture’s idea of the ideal self will strongly differ from people who live elsewhere, surrounded by different cultural norms and expectations that change what it means to be fully realized and unique individual.
As he writes, “it is the self that wants to become perfect, and it’s our culture that tells us what perfect actually is.” It’s a great book, and I hope you check it out.
For this episode, Will and I just had a conversation about it, and there’s some great prescriptive advice near the end involving a lizard on an iceberg.
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[image error] This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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YANSS 126 – Separate Spheres and Normalization
Common sense used to dictate that men and women should only come together for breakfast and dinner.
According to Victorian historian Kathyrn Hughes, people in the early 19th Century thought the outside world was dangerous and unclean and morally dubious and thus no place for a virtuous, fragile woman. The home was a paradise, a place for civility, where perfect angelic ladies could, in her words, “counterbalance the moral taint of the public sphere.”
By the mid 1800s, women were leaving home to work in factories, and they were fighting for their right to vote and to get formal educations and much more – and if you believed in preserving the separate spheres, the concept that men and women should only cross paths at breakfast and dinner, then as we approached the 20th century, this created a lot of anxiety for you.
Despite their relative invisibility, a norm, even a dying one, can sometimes be harnessed and wielded like a weapon by conjuring up old fears from a bygone era. It’s a great way to slow down social change if you fear that change. When a social change threatens your ideology, fear is the simplest, easiest way to keep more minds from changing.
In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, we explore how the separate spheres ideology is still affecting us today, and how some people are using it to scare people into voting down anti-discrimination legislation.
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Terry Kogan clerked for the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and practiced law in Boston before joining the University of Utah where he teaches law concerning contracts, copyright, trusts, art, and sexuality. According to his official bio, “He has spent the past decade considering the rights of transgender people, in particular issues surrounding the legal and cultural norms that mandate the segregation of public restrooms by sex.”
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[image error]This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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purchase.
[image error]Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud
Sex-Separation in Public Restrooms: Law, Architecture, and Gender
The Weird History of Gender Segregated Bathrooms
Gender roles in the 19th Century
This Anti-HERO Ad Is the Definition of Transphobia
South Park Takes on Trans Issues … and It’s Great
Feds issue guidance on transgender access to school bathrooms
Houston Voters Reject Broad Anti-Discrimination Ordinance
April 11, 2018
YANSS 125 – How we rationalize unwanted changes to the status quo that we once resisted
When faced with an inescapable and unwanted situation, we often rationalize our predicament so as to make it seem less awful and more bearable, but what if that situation is a new law or a new administration?
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New research from psychologist Kristin Laurin suggests that groups, nations, and cultures sometimes rationalize the new normal in much the same way, altering public opinion on a large scale.
As a coping mechanism, the brain is very good at turning lemons into lemonade. Divorce, losing a job, a terrible illness — to keep us sane and moving forward, we often rationalize terrible situations that drastically alter our lives once we accept those situations are 100 percent happening and inescapable. We often do so in a way that makes those events seem like the best thing that ever happened to us. It’s a clever trick, a gift really, one that allows us to rebuild our lives and develop new identities instead of the alternative, spiraling down into depression and stasis. By telling ourselves a good story, the brain keeps us from taking up extended residence in our bedrooms with the covers over our heads.
While studying this kind of rationalization, Laurin wondered if it scaled up to groups, cultures, and nations. She noticed that when people greatly resist a change to the status quo — the election of president many people did not want, the passing of new legislation that many people resisted, the creation of new policies that people are sure will cause harm — once the change actually happens, the panic and resistance often seems to drastically diminish within a few weeks.
Laurin wondered if this too was a form of rationalization, one that people perform without realizing it, one that can have a big impact on how we see ourselves as a people, so she set out to create a series of experiments to answer those questions. In the episode, you will hear all about those experiments, what she discovered, and what advice she has for people resisting and dealing with changes to the status quo.
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[image error]Let’s hang out in Toronto on April 22 at the extra super gnarly How to Talk to People A bout Things conversation series with Misha Glouberman — I’ll be talking about my next book on how and why people do and do not change their minds, and what does and doesn’t work according to the latest research. Tickets here.
[image error] This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
[image error]
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Scientific American Frontiers – Episode 3 – Pieces of Mind
Photo Credit: K.C. Green’s Gunshow comic #648: “The Pills Are Working”
March 26, 2018
YANSS 124 – How our brains hide the evidence of belief change
When was the last time you changed your mind? Are you sure?
In this episode we explore new research that suggests for the majority of the mind change we experience, after we update our priors, we delete what we used to believe and then simply forget that we ever thought otherwise.
In the show, psychologists Michael Wolfe and Todd Williams, take us though their new research which suggests that because brains so value consistency, and are so determined to avoid the threat of decoherence, we hide the evidence of our belief change. That way, the story we tell ourselves about who we are can remain more or less heroic, with a stable, steadfast protagonist whose convictions rarely waver — or, at least, they don’t waver as much as those of shifty, flip-flopping politicians.
This can lead to a skewed perception of the world, one that leads to the assumption that mind change is rare and difficult-to-come-by. And that can lead to our avoiding information that might expand our understanding of the world, because we assume it will have no impact.
The truth, say Wolfe and Williams, is that mind change is so prevalent and constant, that the more you expose yourself to counterevidence, the more your worldview will erode, replaced by a better, more accurate one — it’s just that you probably won’t realize it until you look back at old posts on social media and cringe.
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[image error] This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
[image error]
There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first
purchase.
[image error]Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
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Poor Metacognitive Awareness of Belief Change
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