I am reading a book called
Stumbling on Happiness
by Daniel Gilbert. It certainly builds on the book that inspired Diddly by Cordelia Fine.
Below is a link to good review
http://jseliger.com/2009/04/23/stumbling-on-happiness-%E2%80%94-daniel-gilbert/
I heard a great quote from someone today:
” I am like a pack rat with my memories and feelings. I hold onto them until I can’t even move anymore and then I go nuts.”
Great insight. I have observed this phenomenon, but never heard it expressed so well.
I don’t see it encouragement to express everything you feel, but rather a warning about the wasted energy and time required to keep feelings and memories going. You have to keep focusing on yourself to hold on like that .
Take a break from yourself.
Go to the window.
Look out.
Open it.
Fresh air.
Go.
Go out there and experience dealing with one feeling at a time.
Leave your pack rat ways behind.
We’d never get through the world if we knew it as it is: enormous and chaotic. We’d need a brain so large that we couldn’t keep our heads off the ground. The brain’s simplification of reality means that anything that gets into the mind is immediately overemphasized, whether it is an emotional slight, a change in the weather, or a matter of statecraft. So we give the most recent news that greatest weight in decision making. This leads to frequent and dramatic fluctuations in our thoughts and moods, and our fragile minds almost leave us little choice but to delude ourselves most of the time.
NO ONE FACES REALITY.
We all react to a simplified, filtered model of the world, a personal story we tell ourselves with respect to the world and our place in it.
From Healthy Pleasures by Robert Ornstein and David Sobel.
In a previous post on the pig-headed brain, I wrote about how we tend to accept things as true as a matter of course when we first hear them. Our brains want to save the energy of questioning everything when they it is tough enough to piece all the info given together. The hope is that reflecting on what has a been said later on will help us sift through what is true or not. Can we rely on this?
Apparently not if we are multitasking.
If your brain is too busy with other things to put the necessary legwork in to reject a doozy, then you’re stuck with a belief that you would normally find dubious. In one study, volunteers read from a computer screen series of statements about a criminal defendant (ex. the robber had a gun). Some of the statements were false. The volunteers knew exactly which ones they were, because they appeared in a different color of text. For some of the volunteers, the untrue statements they were shown were designed to make the crime more heinous. For others, the false testimony made the crime seems more forgivable. At the same time the volunteers were reading the statements, a string of digits marched across the computer screen. Some of the volunteers had to push a button whenever they saw the digit “5″. Banal though this may seem, doing this uses up quite a lot of mental resources. This meant that these volunteers had less brainpower available to mentally switch the labeling of the false statements from the default “true” or “false”.
Misremembering affected how long they thought the criminal should serve in prison. THe distracted volunteers tended to sentence him to prison for twice as long as indistracted ones. (FINE)
Evidence that fits with our beliefs is quickly waved through at the mental border control. Counter evidence, on the other hand, must submit to close interrogation and even then will probably not be allowed in. As a result, people can wind up holding their beliefs even more strongly after seeing counterevidence. It’s as if we think, “Well, if that’s the best that the other side can come up with then I must really be right.” This phenomenon is called belief polarization.
In 1956, a physician named Alice Stewart published a preliminary report of a vast survey of children who had dies of cancer. The results from her work were clear. Just one x-ray of an unborn baby doubled the risk of childhood cancer. A mere 24 years later (1980), the major U.S. medical associations officially recommended that zapping pregnant women with ionizing radiation no longer be a routine part of prenatal care. Britain took a little longer still.
Why did it take so long? Unfortunately, a later study run by a different researcher failed to find a link between prenatal x-rays and childhood cancer. Even though the design of this study has substantial defects- as the researcher himself later admitted- the medical community gleefully acclaimed it as proof that they were right and Alice Stewart was wrong. The similarity of this story to the experimental demonstrations of biased evaluation of evidence is, well, dramatic.
By 1977, there was a huge amount of research showing the link between prenatal x-rays and childhood cancer. Yet the US NAtional Council on Radiation Protection remained stubbornly concvivned that x-rays were harmless. They suggested an alternative explanation: It wasn’t the radiation that caused cancer. No, the relationship between x-rays and cancer was due to the supernatural prophetic diagnostic powers of the obstetricians. The obstetricians were x-raying babies they somehow knew would get cancer.” (Fine)
From Fine: “Research has shown that we believe things as a matter of course. It is easier for us to take this position. It is only with some mental effort that we can decide something is untrue. This may be because, in general, people speak the truth more often than not. It’s therefore more efficient to assume things are true unless we have reason to thing otherwise. But there is a problem with this system. If your brain is too busy with other things to put in the necessary legwork to reject a doozy, then you’re stuck with that belief. ” The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has done a lot of work in this area, and you could do a search with his name in addition to looking on page 119-121 of Fine’s book.
And if you find yourself just believing what I am saying without checking out the research, that kind of makes the point.
It does require work for you to look up the research. It would also require work for me to describe all the experiments in the blog.
That would require our mental energy, and that would make us more susceptible to this gullibility. So there is something to be said for not pursuing investigation of this gullibility proposition further.
How do we choose what to do – where to focus?
I think we need help from more mature minds – certainly I am not claiming to have one of them. But one thing to look out for is anyone who tells you what to think. And perhaps a ‘closed’ mind will often be a better bet than an ‘open’ one.
Let your kids suffer
February 20, 2009Here is the scenario:
Your kids is suffering or you anticipate them suffering.
Seeing them suffer makes you suffer, and you can’t take it, so you do something to prevent their suffering.
You feel relieved. Your kid has no idea that they should feel relieved because you won’t ever allow them to suffer.
Your kid becomes even worse than you in that they are less able than you to handle the pain that goes along with being alive.
Your kid is still living with you when they are 30 years old.
You don’t understand how it could have turned out this way because you did everything a parent could do.
Grow up! And I am not talking to your kid.
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