SYSK TRENDING - Curious Quirks of the Human Brain

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1:01Why does your brain sometimes confidently remember things that never actually happen? Why can a song get stuck in your head for hours and why is it almost impossible to get rid of? The human brain is remarkably powerful, but it's also filled with some very odd quirks, shortcuts and glitches that influence how you think, remember and behave. That's why today's SYSK trending topic is curious quirks of the human brain. Art Markman is a cognitive scientist and an expert on how the mind works, and he's here to explain some of the strangest things your brain does, and what those quirks reveal about you. And we'll get to that conversation right after this. Some days I eat pretty well. Other days I get to the late afternoon and realize that nutritionally speaking today has not exactly been my finest work, which is one reason I've been using Kachava.

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3:06That's kachava.kacva.com. Code sysk. How can you not be fascinated by the human brain and how it works? Particularly when you step back and see that it sometimes works in very strange and mysterious ways. And I think the more we understand how the brain works, or at least shine a spotlight on it and observe how it works, the better insight we gain into ourselves. And someone who I think would agree with that premise is psychologist Art Markman. Art is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the co-host of a podcast called Two Guys on Your Head, and he is the author of several books, including Brain Briefs. The answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. Hi Art. It's great to be here. Thanks so much.

4:06So one of the questions you tackle, which I think a lot of people would be curious about, is why we find kitten videos so irresistible. The thing about kitten videos is that they are this perfect storm. In the sense that one of the things that evolution has done is to recognize that infants are annoying in every species. And so what they do to make sure that parents still want to take care of them, is they do things to make them look really cute to the people who are going to take care of them. And so infants of every species have big eyes, and they have little small features. And so we love those. And so what happens is kittens have that aspect ratio. They have big eyes, very small face, very symmetric. And so what we are doing is getting this evolutionary dose of cuteness. And then rather than having to live life in all of its moments,

5:08to wait for the one moment that is great, what a kitten video does is it is kind of like the highlight reel for football fans. You don't have to sit through the whole game. You just get the highlight, really the great part of it. And so what a kitten video does is it takes this extraordinarily cute thing and then just gives you the highlights. And they are absolutely fascinating. So talk about liars because that interested me that how we can tell when people are lying if we can at all. If you go on the internet and you start searching around, you will find all of these tips for catching liars. And a lot of these tips have to do with these unconscious tells that people are supposed to give off. They are supposed to give off when they are lying. So they will tell you if you look up or down or to the right or to the left. That means you are lying or if you make eye contact or if you don't make eye contact or if you hesitate. And it turns out that almost all of those cues, actually pretty much every one of those cues, is not a very effective means for telling you who is lying to you.

6:13So really what the absolutely the best way to figure out if somebody is lying is to follow up with them and ask them lots of questions whose answers they should know if they were telling you the truth. So if someone said to you, yeah, well I took the bus to get to this meeting, well what bus? You know, where did it go? What are some of the things that you passed? Where if you actually had that experience, you would actually know the answer to that. And what happens is people when they lie to you, they haven't necessarily prepared the entire world around that. And so it's fairly easy to get people to trip people up. And there are actually really good studies showing that for example the agents who are trying to catch people who might be lying at customs and border control at various countries. If they use that technique, they're much more effective at catching people who are lying. But wouldn't you have to know the answers to what the bus went by in order to catch them in a lie?

7:19You might have to know the answers and certainly if it were important enough, you could go back and check some of the things that they say. But the fact is that what ends up happening is when you catch people suddenly where you start asking them a bunch of questions to follow up. Most people have a really hard time actually coming up with answers to things that ought to be at the tip of their tongue if they'd actually experience the thing. Here's one that's always interested me and I was just talking about it the other day with someone that as I get older, it truly does seem that time goes by faster. And I think it's a fairly common experience. What is that? So there's several reasons actually that come together for why time feels like it goes faster as you get older. One of them is that a lot of what makes time feel slow is that your brain, when your brain is doing a lot of work to understand a situation,

8:19then in the moment your brain has to, is going to create lots of memories that will, when you look back on it, become these landmarks that feel like a lot of time has passed. Now, when you're young, everything is new and so your brain is constantly doing lots of work in order to understand the situation and that influences your sense of the passage of time. As you get older, more and more of your life becomes routine, more and more of your life becomes predictable. And as a result, your brain is laying down fewer and fewer landmarks that make the time feel like it's gone slowly. And that's one of the reasons why a great way to slow time down is to take up new skills to learn how to play an instrument or a new sport or something like that or to expose yourself to new classes. Because what that's doing is forcing your brain to set up a bunch of new landmarks.

9:21Now, even if you do all of that, you're not going to slow the feeling of the passage of time completely because there's another piece of it as well, which is that your brain is also taking into account how much other stuff you have learned about your life so far. So if you think about it, when you're six years old and then you go through another year, that year occupies a tremendous amount of space in your brain because you haven't been exposed to that much yet. You haven't learned that many things, but by the time you're 50, the amount of new stuff that you add to your brain in the next year is just a small fraction of everything. So all of that gives rise to the sense that time is just rocketing by as you get older. You have a section in the book that's really interesting to me about slackers and how we perceive other people to be flakes and slackers and not very conscientious. And we would never do that. And how can they do that? And I think it speaks to like how we see our place in the world and so talk about that.

10:29Well, there are two parts to it. So one of them is that we tend to judge people based on a particular set of values that we have. And so some people, particularly folks who are pretty conscientious, would like people to just either do it or not do it but let me know in advance. And so there's a case where we're going to judge people on the basis of whether we would have done the same kind of thing. And that's a piece of what's going on. But then there's another piece that's also kind of fun, which is we have a lot of what's called an egocentric bias, which means basically we over-represent our own influence on the world relative to everybody else's, which is why if you have a group do a project. And you ask everyone the percentage of the project that they were responsible for and then you add up that number. The number is going to add up to way more than 100 because everyone is going to overestimate their own contribution to what happened.

11:32And so when you look at what people have done, one of the things that happens is you assume that you had a much bigger impact on results than other people did. And that ends up making you feel like you really carried the weight and everybody else was just riding on your co-tales. We're talking about things that go on in your head and I'm talking about that with psychologist Art Markman. He's a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. And he is author of the book Brain Briefs. The answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. Sometimes the thing that makes your house look better isn't a new sofa or a remodeled kitchen. Sometimes it's a grill cover. Seriously, we have a nice patio pool area and a nice grill but the cover on the grill has been outside for years. It was so faded and worn and cracked and frankly made the whole area look shabby.

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13:47Wayfair every style, every home. Here's an interesting test. Look in your closet and ask yourself, how much of this stuff do I actually wear? Because I have plenty of clothes. But there are maybe a dozen things I wear over and over again. And more and more of them are from Quince. They're cashmere sweaters and polos. They're pants. They're jeans. I wear their stuff all the time. That's what I really want from clothes. I don't need something that's going to impress me hanging on a rack. I want something I'm still going to want to wear six months from now. That's what Quince does really well. They make timeless everyday staples using premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, marino wool. And their cashmere sweaters start at just $60. The other part I like is the price. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middleman. You're paying for the quality, not the name sewn into it.

14:51I wear Quince. My family wears Quince. We buy a lot of it and it has absolutely earned its place in our closets. I use it and I recommend it. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash sysk. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash sysk. So, Art, I remember hearing someone say and it's always stuck with me. I heard them say, we judge ourselves by our intentions and we judge other people by their actions. That's right. And not just their actions, but the outcomes that come from those actions. So, we don't even always see all of the effort that somebody put in. We just see the results. Whereas when we see our own actions, not only do we judge our intentions, we judge the amount of effort we put in, even if we don't completely succeed at the thing that we set out to do.

15:57Whereas with somebody else, most of what we see is the outcome. And so, we discount that amount of effort. By the way, that works also with how we credit other people for things that they've done. So, for example, if you go to a great concert and you see this amazing musician play, you often at the end of it say, man, that musician is incredibly talented. And you call them talented because up on stage, you don't really see all the work that they put in, all of the practice hours and everything that they had to do to achieve that amazing level of performance. And so, you assume that a lot of what allowed them to play the way they did was talent rather than effort. One of the interesting questions you look at is, why do we buy what we buy? And I think most people would think, well, you know, I'm a smart guy and I sit down and I make a decision of, or I'm going to buy this and not that because I'm a logical thoughtful guy.

17:00And you're going to probably tell me that's not how we do it. You probably are a logical thoughtful guy, but most people are actually driven quite a bit by just mere familiarity to things. I mean, one of the scariest things is the influence that advertising has on the kinds of decisions that we make and the kinds of things that we buy. There's a beautiful effect that was first categorized by a guy named Bob Zients back in the 1960s called the mere exposure effect. And what he showed was simply showing something to someone makes them like it better later. And you see this, for example, with music where when you first hear a song, yeah, you're not 100% sure how much you like it. But after you've heard it several times, suddenly you like it quite a bit more. And the same thing happens with advertising. It really doesn't matter what the advertiser tells you about the product.

18:00Most of the effect of advertising is just taking something and making it feel familiar. And so in the moment when you go to a store, for example, and you're trying to figure out which of the products on the shelf you're going to buy, you will feel more warmly towards something that's been advertised because it feels familiar. And then, and here's the beauty of it, then you're going to backfill a story about why that's actually a better product. And you see people do this, for example, with certain kinds of products that are legally mandated to be identical. So for example, if you go to the store and you buy an over-the-counter cold remedy, that cold remedy has to have a formulation that fits the quality of the product. That fits within a particular set of FDA guidelines, which means that chances are every single brand of product that is that type of cold remedy actually has an identical formulation. And yet people still consistently buy the brand name products in part because those products feel familiar relative to a generic product.

19:06So then they'll tell themselves, well, it must be higher quality, it must be a better formulation. But in fact, it's actually identical to everything else on the shelf. Something I think people universally experience is choking under pressure. And it might seem somewhat self-evident, we choke under pressure because there's pressure, but there's got to be more to it than that. So the thing about pressure is it does a couple of things. One of the things that it does is it decreases the amount of what's called working memory. So working memory is the amount of information that you can hold in mind at the same time. And the less information you can hold in mind, the less complicated a decision you can make. And so the more pressure that you're experiencing, experiencing it at any given moment, the less information you get to take into account when you are working. And so that's one source of choking under pressure. And then there's another, which is particularly important for motor skills, for actions that you're performing.

20:10So if you ever think about it, if you've ever played golf or tennis or something like that and you find in a pressure situation that suddenly you're hitting the ball terribly, one of the reasons for that is because another thing that you tend to do under pressure is to monitor your own performance. So you start paying attention to what you're doing in a way that you don't do when you're performing without pressure. Now the thing about motor skills, about movements, is that actually paying attention to those movements tends to discoordinate those things rather than make them more coordinated. And so the more that you pay attention to your own movements, the more that you lose that coordination that's important for skilled performance, which means that when you are practicing a skill that you're going to perform under pressure, a motor skill, one of the things that you want to do is to learn to pay attention to the situation you're in rather than to the motor movement itself.

21:12So this way, if you're playing tennis or golf or something like that, when you get under pressure, you start monitoring the situation rather than the performance of the skill itself. What about punishment? Does it work the way we think it works that punishment deters future problems or how does the brain deal with punishment? Yeah, so the fascinating thing about punishment is it works depending on the time horizon you care about. So punishments are negative things that you do to somebody that engage what's called the avoidance motivational system and rewards positive things that you give to people, engage what's called the approach motivational system. And so here's the paradox. If you want to get somebody to do something right now, it is absolutely critical that they do it right at this moment. Absolutely the best way to get somebody to do something right now is to threaten them and to threaten them with a punishment or some harm.

22:20Because in the moment, people would rather do something and avoid that punishment. The problem is that the avoidance motivational system, one of the ways that you know it's active is through the emotions you experience and the emotions that are associated with avoidance are fear and stress and anxiety. And nobody really enjoys experiencing fear and stress and anxiety. And so as a result over the long term, people actually go out of their way to try to avoid situations in which they might experience fear, stress and anxiety. And so in the long term, if you keep punishing people and you keep threatening people, they just find ways to avoid you altogether. So a workplace that's full of threats of punishment will in the moment get people to hop to it and get stuff done. But in the long term, you'll see lots of turnover and absenteeism and things like that because people don't really want to be around a lot of those punishments.

23:20So talk about life's little nuicences and aggravation in the best way to deal with that. I've got to know this. So man, there's a lot going on, right? I mean, each of us has a set of pet peeves that are just things that people do that just annoy the heck out of us. And you know, one of the things that we have to remember is that we have a tremendous amount of choice about what it is that we want to pay attention to and what kinds of information are going to influence us in the future. And it turns out that when you create a mindset where you start looking for the things that bother you, you start seeing the things that bother you. Your world actually becomes more and more surrounded with the negative things that are out there in the environment because you get this state dependent memory. So when you're in a negative mood and looking for negative stuff, you remember negative things, you see negative things, you start feeling badly. So that that feeds on itself.

24:20And the fascinating thing is if you flip that switch and you start looking for the good things that people are doing. So you ignore those pet peeves and you actually start trying to look for better things. You begin to notice more good things in the environment and it actually creates a situation in which people start interacting with each other in a way that starts to bring about those good things. So if you spend your time rather than trying to be critical of everybody, if you spend your time finding really good things somebody is done, then you find they're smiling at you and then you smile back and suddenly you're having a pleasant conversation. And so these things can really become a self-fulfilling prophecy in either direction. So absolutely the best thing to do is for those things that are not going to threaten anyone's life, giving those things an opportunity to just pass by without comment and focusing on the more positive things actually just makes life infinitely better almost immediately.

25:23Good advice and interesting insight into how the brain works in real life in real life situations. Art Markman has been my guest. He is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. And his book is called Brain Briefs, the answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. Thanks for joining me Art. Oh my pleasure. It's great talking with you again. That's it for this S-Y-S-K trending episode. I'm Mike Herothers. Thanks for listening to something you should know.