Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

by Michael Easter

Astronauts loop Earth so fast that they see the sun rise and set sixteen times daily.

Look in to

“The whole idea behind science is doing and learning new things.

Exploration is about new experiences and seeking answers to bigger questions.”

Other research shows that infants and toddlers who are allowed to explore the world develop better and faster than those who are helicoptered and kept mostly in the same place.

“exploration should be listed as an independent primary drive.”

walking while paying open attention to the world can enhance creativity, concentration, and understanding.

Scientists now believe that our drive to explore is ultimately a search for information.

as humans evolved, our scarcity brain developed a craving for information. Especially information that improved our life and increased our odds of survival.

Scientists have even discovered a gene, called DRD4-7R, that is linked to exploration and a willingness to take risks. Scientists have nicknamed it the “wanderlust gene.”

the gene seems to “make people more likely to take risks; explore new places, ideas, foods, relationships, drugs, or sexual opportunities; and generally embrace movement, change, and adventure.”

just as our ancestors searched for information on the savannas, today we search for information online.

Day realized that to gather eyes and make more money off ads, it’s best to run stories that leverage the unpredictability feature of the scarcity loop.

Much of our modern information is produced or processed not by humans but by computers.

When we know nothing, adding information helps us make better decisions. But if we continue piling on information, we hit “information overload.”

more information usually leads to worse decisions.

The more complex information we deal with, the sooner we hit...

Make everyday decisions within sixty seconds.

today’s world contains thousands upon thousands of experts in niche academic fields and work specialties (like art hanging).

“experts” have thrust so much information into the world that it’s impossible to understand the deeper nuances of most topics.

I should exercise my human informavore muscle. It’s a rule of thumb we should all consider anytime we want to understand something deeply—constantly

constantly questioning where our information is coming from and, whenever possible, going to the source.

knowledge and understanding. Knowledge is possessing facts. Understanding is different.

“when we understand something, we not only possess a lot of independent facts, but we see how those facts connect….Second, when we understand something, we possess some internal model or account of it which we can use to make predictions, conduct further investigations, and categorize new phenomena.”

Understanding is most likely to land when we work a bit harder to get our knowledge ...

Want to know what something looks or feels like? See it or experience it. Curious about what someone believes? Ask them. More is revealed in person in the present moment.

We crave information, but we’d prefer it to be easy to get. Picking up the phone or meeting someone in person is more uncertain, unpredictable, and uncontrollable than being behind a screen and reading what someone else already interpreted.

online brain. They say that the internet has altered our minds in three ways.

First, it hurt our ability to focus.

The second effect of online brain is that we’ve off-loaded some of our memory to the cloud.

The study suggests that if we want to better remember information, searching for it more labor intensively, like finding the right book, then finding the right section in the book, can be advantageous.

slow information is often better than fast information.

Whats considered slow information

Third, the scientists say, the internet is changing s...

Our brain seems to respond to social interactions online and ...

When we have a question, we tend to go looking online for information that only reinforces the ideas we already have. You can easily find that reinforcing information. And you can get more entrenched in any idea.”

discovering what we think is the right information feels good.

“intellectual orgasm.” That’s a line that only someone who thinks for a living could utter, but she was getting to something important. The “...

Confusion, on the other hand, is an uncomfortable cue signaling us to think more and se...

Lacking information is like having an empty stomach. Finding information is like the full and happy state of finishing a hamburger.

manner….[T]o know that we fully understood something, we would need to conduct an exhaustive and thorough investigation.”

So we evolved to trust our “aha!” feeling, the feeling of clarity.

the fast and loose “aha!” feeling of clarity to make rough estimates that we’ve done enough thinking and have made good decisions. But this “aha!” feeling calls off the search before we discover flaws in the information.

If we can search and scout something beforehand, we’re more comfortable taking the leap.

our middleman doesn’t always have our best interests in mind.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania called online reviews a dual-edged sword.

“there is a systematic problem with many online reviews—they tend to over-represent the most extreme views….This makes it hard to learn about true quality from online reviews.”

For example,

Each time we do something truly new and unknown, we can be the hero in our own small, everyday hero’s journey.

Hanke knows games that leverage the loop draw us in. “These loops mimic real-life reward behaviors,” he told me. “So you do something; then you get a reward and you get a rush for getting the reward.

It’s ultimately up to us to be aware of when and why we’re falling into the scarcity loop, and look for ways to shift it to an abundance loop.

a journey is more important than the mere arrival at a destination.