Thinking Fast Equals Risky Business

Connections between the speed of thought and feelings of euphoria have been reported in cases of clinical mania. New research now links racing thoughts with risk-taking among the general population.

The speed of modern life has increased dramatically in recent decades, and faster is almost always better. But, is that true when it comes to your own thoughts? In two experiments, reported in Psychological Science, scientists manipulated participants’ thought speeds and assessed their appetites for risk. In the first experiment, three dozen students read aloud at different speeds — twice their normal speed or half their normal speed. Then, each student played a computer-simulated game that required them to blow air into a balloon without popping it. Students were rewarded with five cents each time he or she pumped air into the balloon, but lost money each time the balloon popped. The students who had read quickly were more willing to take risks with the balloon (and the money), attempting and achieving more pumps, but also popping more balloons than the students who had read slowly.

In a second experiment, 52 students watched fast-, medium-, or slow-paced movie clips that contained similar content. The students who watched the fast-paced clips reported a greater intention to engage in real-world risky behaviors, including unprotected sex and illegal drug use. Those students were also more likely to minimize the danger associated with each risky behavior.

Previous studies have shown a link between life in the fast-thinking lane and mood. Experimentally accelerated thought is achieved through instructions to brainstorm freely, exposure to multiple ideas, encouragement to plagiarize others’ ideas, performance of easy cognitive tasks, narration of a silent video in fast-forward, and controlled reading speed. Regardless of the types of thoughts that were induced (money-making schemes, word choice, or feelings of depression or elation), individuals demonstrated an increased positive affect after thinking quickly. Increased speed of thought also amplified feelings of power, creativity, and energy, and inflated self-esteem.

Researchers attribute these findings to the subjective experience of thought speed and the joy-enhancing effects of fast thinking. Likewise, thinking slowly is, apparently, a killjoy.

The need for speed is undeniable today’s fast and furious world. But, at what cost? Are we riskier because we are always thinking faster? Or are we happier? Will letting the brain stop and smell the roses decrease our desire to take risks, or will we just become depressed? Human thought is the product of an integrated, sophisticated network that involves neurons, sensory input, and the brain. Speed is fundamental to the thought process, but it is not the only determinant of effectiveness. Efficiency, timing, and appropriateness must be balanced with speed to keep us safe and running smoothly in whatever lane of life’s highway we choose.

References

Chandler JJ, & Pronin E (2012). Fast thought speed induces risk taking. Psychological science, 23 (4), 370-4 PMID: 22395129

Pronin E, Jacobs E, & Wegner DM (2008). Psychological effects of thought acceleration. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 8 (5), 597-612 PMID: 18837610

Pronin E, & Wegner DM (2006). Manic thinking: independent effects of thought speed and thought content on mood. Psychological science, 17 (9), 807-13 PMID: 16984299

Contribution from BrainBlogger

7 Ways to Enhance Focus, Creativity, Productivity and Performance

One, it does not require rigid focusing of the mind on one thing for an extended period of time, a practice that most people find extremely difficult.

Two, it appears the benefits can be experienced extremely quickly, in as little as 5-days, and

Three, the practice can be done fairly quickly, allowing almost anyone to fit it into their day.

Wanna jump right in today?

Here’s a simple technique and to get you started with a very basic, accessible 10-minute daily seated practice.

Find a quiet place

Sit in a comfortable upright position with your hands on your knees

Close your eyes and take 10 breaths, letting your exhale get longer and longe with each one

Starting at a very gentle pace, begin to count backwards from 100 by threes, saying each number softly or just sub-lingualizing them with every inhale and exhale. So, for example, inhale and think and say 100, exhale, think and say 97, inhale, think and say 94 and so on. If you get a number wrong, just let it go, say the right one and move one.
When this becomes easy or a few days or week in, pick up the pace a little bit until it becomes easy again. Then, bump the top number by 25 and keep practicing and bumping pace until it gets easy again. Keep at this until the whole practice takes about 20-minutes and give it a few weeks.
Let go of any expectations and see what unfolds...we're all meant to suck at it in the beginning!
There are so many ways to explore AT and access the states that it creates. And, it is important to note that, while the focus of this article is on the "professional" impact of these practice, there is also a very clear and profound impact that reaches deeply into all aspects of your life. That discussion is for a future article.

Does Yawning Cools the Brain??

The medical literature is rife with explanations for yawning, but one has gained substantial ground in recent years: This mysterious habit may help regulate brain temperature.

The brain operates best within a narrow range of temperatures, and like a car engine, it sometimes needs a way to cool down. To lower the brain’s thermostat, researchers say, the body takes in cooler air from its surroundings — prompting deep inhalation.

Yawning is contagious. Simply watching someone do it is enough to induce the behavior. But when scientists had people watch yawning videos in a 2007 study, they found that applying cold packs to the subjects’ heads practically eliminated contagious yawning. Nasal breathing, which also promotes brain cooling, had a similar effect.

In a study of 160 people published last month in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, yawning was found to vary by season. People were shown to be more likely to yawn in winter than summer, perhaps because an overheated brain gets little relief from taking in air that is warmer than body temperature.

The researchers, who controlled for factors like humidity and the amount of sleep subjects got the night before, also found that the more time a person spent outside in warm temperatures, the less likely they were to yawn. The findings may explain why people yawn when tired: Sleep deprivation raises brain temperature. As for why yawning is contagious, it may have evolved as a way to signal to others in a group to stay alert and ready in case of outside attacks, scientists say.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Growing evidence suggests yawning may be a way for the brain to cool off, though it is still just a theory.
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology

Contribution by Samuel McNerney

In 1996, Lyle Brenner, Derek Koehler and Amos Tversky conducted a study involving students from San Jose State University and Stanford University. The researchers were interested in how people jump to conclusions based on limited information. Previous work by Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and other psychologists found that people are “radically insensitive to both the quantity and quality of information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions,” so the researchers knew, of course, that we humans don’t do a particularly good job of weighing the pros and cons. But to what degree? Just how bad are we at assessing all the facts?

To find out, Brenner and his team exposed the students to legal scenarios. In one, a plaintiff named Mr. Thompson visits a drug store for a routine union visit. The store manager informs him that according to the union contract with the drug store, plaintiffs cannot speak with the union employees on the floor. After a brief deliberation, the manager calls the police and Mr. Thompson is handcuffed for trespassing. Later the charges were dropped, but Mr. Thompson is suing the store for false arrest.

All participants got this background information. Then, they heard from one of the two sides’ lawyers; the lawyer for the union organizer framed the arrest as an attempt to intimidate, while the lawyer for the store argued that the conversation that took place in the store was disruptive. Another group of participants – essentially a mock jury – heard both sides.

The key part of the experiment was that the participants were fully aware of the setup; they knew that they were only hearing one side or the entire story. But this didn’t stop the subjects who heard one-sided evidence from being more confident and biased with their judgments than those who saw both sides. That is, even when people had all the underlying facts, they jumped to conclusions after hearing only one side of the story.

The good news is that Brenner, Koehler and Tversky found that simply prompting participants to consider the other side’s story reduced their bias – instructions to consider the missing information was a manipulation in a later study – but it certainly did not eliminate it. Their study shows us that people are not only willing to jump to conclusions after hearing only one side’s story, but that even when they have additional information at their disposal that would suggest a different conclusion, they are still surprisingly likely to do so. The scientists conclude on a somewhat pessimistic note: “People do not compensate sufficiently for missing information even when it is painfully obvious that the information available to them is incomplete.”

In Brenner’s study, participants were dealing with a limited universe of information – the facts of the case and of the two sides’ arguments. But in reality – especially in the Internet era – people have access to a limitless amount of information that they could consider. As a result, we rely on rules of thumb, or heuristics, to take in information and make decisions. These mental shortcuts are necessary because they lessen the cognitive load and help us organize the world – we would be overwhelmed if we were truly rational.

This is one of the reasons we humans love narratives; they summarize the important information in a form that’s familiar and easy to digest. It’s much easier to understand events in the world as instances of good versus evil, or any one of the seven story types. As Daniel Kahneman explains, “[we] build the best possible story form the information available… and if it is a good story, [we] believe it.” The implication here is that it’s how good the story is, not necessarily its accuracy, that’s important.

But narratives are also irrational because they sacrifice the whole story for one side of a story that conforms to one’s worldview. Relying on them often leads to inaccuracies and stereotypes. This is what the participants in Brenner’s study highlight; people who take in narratives are often blinded to the whole story – rarely do we ask: “What more would I need to know before I can have a more informed and complete opinion?”

The last several years have seen many popular psychology books that touch on this line of research. There’s Ori and Rom Brafman’s Sway, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and, naturally, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. If you could sum up the popular literature on cognitive biases and our so-called irrationalities it would go something like this: we only require a small amount of information, often times a single factoid, to confidently form conclusions and generate new narratives to take on new, seemingly objective, but almost entirely subjective and inaccurate, worldviews.

The shortcomings of our rationality have been thoroughly exposed to the lay audience. But there’s a peculiar inconsistency about this trend. People seem to absorb these books uncritically, ironically falling prey to some of the very biases they should be on the lookout for: incomplete information and seductive stories. That is, when people learn about how we irrationally jump to conclusions they form new opinions about how the brain works from the little information they recently acquired. They jump to conclusions about how the brain jumps to conclusions and fit their newfound knowledge into a larger story that romantically and naively describes personal enlightenment.

Tyler Cowen made a similar point in a TED lecture a few months ago. He explained it this way:

There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book… [they are] all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don’t these books tell us that? It’s because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you’re learning about some of your biases, but you’re making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias.

The crux of the problem, as Cowen points out, is that it’s nearly impossible to understand irrationalities without taking advantage of them. And, paradoxically, we rely on stories to understand why they can be harmful.

To be sure, there’s an important difference between the bias that comes from hearing one side of an argument and (most) narratives. A corrective like “consider the other side” is unlikely to work for narratives because it’s not always clear what the opposite would even be. So it’s useful to avoid jumping to conclusions not only by questioning narratives (after all, just about everything is plausibly a narrative, so avoiding them can be pretty overwhelming), but by exposing yourself to multiple narratives and trying to integrate them as well as you can.

In the beginning of the recently released book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains how some books (his included) make a case for how one certain thing (in Haidt’s case, morality) is the key to understanding everything. Haidt’s point is that you shouldn’t read his book and jump to overarching conclusions about human nature. Instead, he encourages readers to always think about integrating other points of view (e.g., morality is the most important thing to consider) with other perspectives. I think this is a good strategy for overcoming a narrow-minded view of human cognition.

It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas. As the trader turned epistemologist Nassim Taleb says: “We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.” But readers of popular psychology books on rationality must recognize that there’s a lot they don’t know, and they must be beware of how seductive stories are. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.

Moving forward, my suggestion is to remember the lesson from Brenner, Koehler and Tversky: they reduced conclusion jumping by getting people to consider the other information at their disposal. So let’s remember that the next book on rationality isn’t a tell-all – it’s merely another piece to the puzzle. This same approach could also help correct the problem of being too swayed by narratives – there are anyways multiple sides of a story.

Ultimately, we need to remember what philosophers get right. Listen and read carefully; logically analyze arguments; try to avoid jumping to conclusions; don’t rely on stories too much. The Greek playwright Euripides was right: Question everything, learn something, answer nothing.

====

The author personally thanks Dave Nussbaum for his helpful editorial comments and criticisms. Dave is a social psychologist who teaches at the University of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter and check out his homepage.

Image: by Wyglif on Wikimedia Commons.

About the Author: Sam McNerney graduated from the greatest school on Earth, Hamilton College, where he earned a bachelors in Philosophy. After reading too much Descartes and Nietzsche, he realized that his true passion is reading and writing about cognitive science. Now, he is working as a science journalist writing about philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. He has a column at CreativityPost.com and a blog at BigThink.com called "Moments of Genius". He spends his free time listening to Lady Gaga, dreaming about writing bestsellers, and tweeting @WhyWeReason. Follow on Twitter @whywereason.

The Six Best Ways to Decrease Your Anxiety

We all know the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety. Our hearts race, our fingers sweat, and our breathing gets shallow and labored. We experience racing thoughts about a perceived threat that we think is too much to handle. That's because our "fight or flight" response has kicked in, resulting in sympathetic arousal and a narrowing of attention and focus on avoiding the threat. We seem to be locked in that state, unable to focus on our daily chores or longer-term goals. As a Cognitive-Behavior Therapist with more than 15 years of experience, I have found a variety of techniques that I can teach my patients with anxiety disorders such as phobias, panic attacks, or chronic worry. Some are based on changing thoughts, others on changing behavior, and still others involve physiological responses. The more aspects of anxiety I can decrease, the lower the chance of relapse post-therapy. Below are six strategies that you can use to help your anxiety.:

(1) Reevaluating the probability of the threatening event actually happening

Anxiety makes us feel threat is imminent yet most of the time what we worry about never happens. By recording our worries and how many came true, we can notice how much we overestimate the prospect of negative events.

(2) Decatastrophizing

Even if a bad event happened, we may still be able to handle it by using our coping skills and problem-solving abilities or by enlisting others to help. Although not pleasant, we could still survive encountering a spider, having a panic attack, or losing money. It's important to realize that very few things are the end of the world.

(3) Using deep breathing and relaxation to calm down

By deliberately relaxing our muscles we begin to calm down so we can think clearly. If you practice this without a threat present at first, it can start to become automic and will be easier to use in the moment when you face a threat. Deep breathing engages the parasympathetic nervous system to put the brakes on sympathetic arousal.

(4) Becoming mindful of our own physical and mental reactions

The skill of mindfulness involves calmly observing our own reactions, including fear, without panic or feeling compelled to act. It is something that can be taught in therapy and improves with practice.

(5) Accepting the Fear and Committing to Living a Life Based on Core Values

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an approach that encourages people to accept the inevitability of negative thoughts and feelings and not try to repress or control them. By directing attention away from the fear and back onto life tasks and valued goals, we can live a full life despite the fear.

(6) Exposure

Exposure is the most powerful technique for anxiety and it involves facing what we fear and staying in the situation long enough for the fear to habituate or go down, as it naturally does. Fear makes us avoid or run away, so our minds and bodies never learn that much of what we fear is not truly dangerous.

The New Brain Science - Optimizing Neuroplasticity

Remarkable discoveries about neuroplasticity over the last few decades are creating (amazing) opportunities.

You may have heard of self-directed neuroplasticity, the brain revolution, or even the brain rewiring itself and wondered what is going on and what it has to do with the function of your brain.

Well, here’s the long and short of it.

Neuroplasticity describes the ability of the brain to change – literally to rewire itself in response to experience.

Where before the brain was thought of as a machine, preset at age five and deteriorating from there, we now know that we have the capacity to re-wire brain circuits and grow new neural pathways.

Ever since neuroscientists discovered neuroplasticity and also neurogenesis (the brain’s ability to grow new neural networks), practitioners have sought to bring these new findings to their patients.

These findings open clinical possibilities when treating everything from stroke to OCD to anxiety and depression.

Any yet, the possibilities that can result from neuroplasticity aren’t limited to work done by health and mental health professionals.

Teachers, coaches, managers, even parents can benefit from learning ways to rewire the brain.

So what brain lessons have we learned so far? I’ll give you a few examples:

Too much stress can be harmful, not just to the cardiovascular system, but also to your brain. Recent studies are showing that when corticosteroids (the stress hormone) were increased, neurogenesis (brain growth) decreased. In fact, chronic stress can shrink the brain making it hard to learn new information or even retain the information you already have.

You need to find the “sweet spot” for neuroplasticity. New learning is most likely to take place when the brain has an optimal amount of arousal. Too much arousal and the brain shuts down; not enough, and it gets distracted and lazy. For you teachers, parents, and managers, this is especially useful information about the function of the brain.

Aerobic exercise is one of the best things you can do for your brain – at any age! Aerobic exercise increases BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which when released into the system, enhances brain growth and neural connections, and overall function of the brain. John Ratey, MD, calls it “miracle grow” for the brain.
There is a brain-belly connection. That’s right: to improve brain health, you need to take a metabolic approach, including controlling inflammation and insulin levels. And don’t forget to eat brain happy foods like nuts, omega 3s, and avocados.

How to Form & Change Habits

The Power of Habit | Psychology Today

I’m not alone in my opinion about how this responsibility lies with the individual in question. Recently, I listened to the audio edition of Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit. Although I didn’t agree with how widely he cast the conceptual net of “habit,” I did agree with most of what he said as he summarized recent research about habits, habit formation and how we change habits.

Interestingly, he saved a key statement to the very end of his book (the last nine minutes of the audio book). I’ve transcribed key ideas of these statements below. I added the emphasis with bold font.

"Once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it . . . others have done so . . . That, in some ways, is the point of this book. Perhaps a sleep-walking murderer can plausibly argue that he wasn’t aware of his habit, and so he doesn’t bear responsibility for his crime, but almost all of the other patterns that exist in most people’s lives — how we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend our time, attention and money — those are habits that we know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work."

Duhigg then goes on to quote William James, and while it is tempting to add this, it isn’t necessary. The key points were well said above.


“Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them . . . Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.”
The procrastination habit can change, and it is through learning about why we procrastinate and how that relates to your particular habit that you can find that keystone habit that will be central to change. Perhaps your procrastination hinges on internalized unrealistic expectations of others and an irrational dialogue that this has set up in your own mind. Perhaps it’s your unwillingness to tolerate frustration or delay of gratification, you always want to feel good now. Perhaps it’s chronic disorganization. Whatever it is, it is something, and it can change. Find that keystone habit, and you will leverage change to more life-giving as opposed to self-defeating habits like procrastination.

I write about procrastination research here in my blog and interview colleagues for my iProcrastinate podcasts as a resource for this self-exploration, but the final step is always our own, as we take seriously our own freedom and responsibility for change. What a wonderful promise our agency holds for us, as we autonomously shape our own lives and enhance our well being.

The power of habit can be a life-giving, even life-saving, force in our lives.

As Duhigg concludes,

"Once we choose who we want to be, people grow to the way in which they have been exercised . . . If you believe you can change, if you make it a habit, the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit. The insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs, and becomes automatic, habitual, it's not only real, it starts to seem inevitable."

So, let's just get started. That's a keystone habit.



Tags: bold font, different ways, drug abuse, drugs, duhigg, habit formation, habits, learning, murderer, nancy reagan, procrastination, self help books, sleep, slogan, the power of habit