CM 265: Tali Sharot on How to Rekindle Happiness
49:45 Share

Habitation is absolutely something that you see in every human. Yes, there is individual differences to the extent that we have bitrate to different things. But this is a very, very fundamental aspect of our physiology, without any doubt.

Welcome to curious minds at work. I'm your host, gale Allen. We all want to be happy, in fact, as our desire for happiness that drives most of our decisions, like our friendships, our activities, even our purchases.

Yet over time, we find that the things that made us so happy at the start, like that new car, that delicious meal, up, losing their luster. I was curious about why this happens and what, if anything, we can do about IT, why I wanted to talk to toi share IT, cognitive neuroscientist, professor, university college london and M. I T.

And director of the effective brain lab in her latest book. Look again, the power of noticing what was always there. SHE explains why the things that once made is happy no longer do.

SHE also shares what we can do about IT. Before we start one quick ask if you like the podcast, i'd be grateful if you take a moment to leave a rating on itunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback accents a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with toy share IT ti share IT. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having you.

A key concept in your book is habituation and the impact that IT has an enjoyment and happiness to start, what is habituation and what does that look like?

So habituation is our tendency to respond less and less to things that are constant or that don't change or very frequent. Um so for example, you enter um a room and it's full of smoke, let's say cigarette smoke. At the beginning the smoke is quite silent, but within twenty minutes that you show that you can't even detect the smell any longer.

The of factory norms in your brain have habituated meaning they don't respond anymore um or you jump into a pool is really called at first of humanistic doesn't feel that cold, you have bitumens. So just as we have bitumen, a smell or the temperature, we also habituated to more complex things in our life and in society. So we get used to them, and so we don't respond to them, not physiologically and not emotionally.

And these can be things that are, are great. So we might have some great things in our life, such as a nice home or an interesting job or a loving relationship. But we if there, they here and they've been there for a long time, we may not feel the joy out of them on a daily basis because we habituated, our motion response goes down and to the country, there might be not so great things around us, 嗯， maybe, you know, in society, racism and more in our own personal life, cracks in our personal relationships and efficiencies at the workplace. If they those things have been there for a while, we don't notice them anymore, we can detect them. And so we don't even try to change.

If evidence takes the joy out of living, why have we involved to do IT so automatically?

So there are good reasons why we have bitumen. Know any time you see that, there is a phenomenon that you can see in every single person, and not only every human, you can see IT in every animal. And in fact, to concede in every call in our brain, then probably there is a good evolutionary reason why we have that.

So in the case of the habituation is a few things. One is very simple. It's just about keeping our resources, saving resources. So when we respond to something something that's new um let's say it's a new smell right after a while, if you know I didn't really kill us, then we really want to save our resources, right?

The norms want to save the resources to have the resources to respond to the new thing that's coming our way, right? So it's just about balancing out our resources um but also there are a kind of more complex things like, for example, let's think about motivation, think about your first entry level job that you've ever had. When you got that job, you are probably pretty excited and happy about that job.

But what would happen if you were as excited about your entry level job ten years in, you want to be motivated to get that promotion to progress? So um IT seems that habituation is actually something that drives us forward, both as individuals but also as a species. And then there is this other aspect, which is we habitually to negative parts of our life.

And you know I talked before about, well, maybe that's not so great because um we don't see the bad things around us and we don't try to change. But you know there are also things in our life that's kind of bad but we can't change. Um IT could be you know a loss of a loved one and the good thing about habituation is that, yes, we have a very negative feeling at first when these things happen and we lose a job, we lose a person or could be smaller things.

But over time, we don't have as much of this emotional reaction. We kind of bounce back, and that's great, right? We want to be able to bounce back from negative events that happened to us and move forward.

Does a situation explain things like, you know, a midlife crisis? And if so, do experiences like this, do they cut across cultures, countries?

So I mean, habituation is absolutely something that you see in every human, yes, as individual differences to the extent that we have treated different things. But this is a very, very fundamental aspect um of our physiology without any doubt.

Now you're asking about middle age, and so there's interesting phenomena that we talk about in the book, which is um the U U shape um of happiness, which is that over many individuals in many countries where we're talking about many studies, over tens, maybe even hundreds, thousands of individuals there been found this interesting phenomenon where happiness is relatively high on average and kids and teenagers. And then he goes down, down, down, down and IT reaches rock bottom around your midlife on average, of course. And then there's another interesting thing that happens.

IT starts going back up again. And in fact, contrary to our image of maybe the ground p old person, IT actually stays relatively high until the last couple years of life. And there's a huge kind of mystery, why is that? Why is that? That we have this low level of happiness in midlife? And we don't really know the answer to there's probably mean many elements, but here's one speculation and one thing that can be going on, which is midlife is really the time of least amount of change.

You are probably living in the same place for quite a while, maybe even in the same home. You have a lot of people have been in the same relationship for quite a while. Um we usually we might even be at the top of our profession at that point in time, but we probably been there for a while.

And what a lot of people are trying to do is kind of maintain maintain where you are professional rather than moving forward and progressing. So IT is the time that we perhaps less have the least amount of variety in our life and the least amount of learning relative to other um parts of our life. If you think about IT kids, you know they learn every day, right they change everyday just biologically.

Um and even when you're a teenager, you continue to learn in your twenties, maybe you're going to university, maybe you're trying different types of job, you're trying different types of relationship. And every time that you put yourself in a new environment, in a new relationship, you have to learn um and funny enough, after middle, when you get to kind of around the retirement age, IT can be daunting about what are we going to do now. But there is a lot of changes which require a lot of learning.

So now you're retired to what are you're gone to do when people start expLoring different things and maybe the kids are leaving the house. And again, you need to kind of learn how can how to live in this new world that you have? And while they could be daunting, learning is actually key to happiness.

So I think midlife is about we everything is consent. So we've habituated quite a lot and we don't notice things and we learn the least while kind of towards the edges, there's a lot of learning um and study show that learning can actually bring us more joy than, for example, material goods. There's a great study by two neuroscientists, basin blane rob rutledge, and what they have done, they done this experiments where they have people play different games and complete different tasks and they um can get money if they do well, and people are happy when they do well and get money. But they found that people are happier when they learn something new about the game or learn something new about the task.

We can know that something is probable or should be enjoyable, but not feel that sense of enjoy the over time. Why is that?

We talked about how um we habituate to even great things, right? And we I mean, we talked about these big things like relationships and jobs and so on. But you also have attracted the small things like, you know think about like addition meal that you really like. If you have the same meal um again and again again day day and day out after a while, you're not going to do IT as much. And in fact, there's been steady is showing this that kind of seems intuitive.

But there's a study that we mention is, uh, one where people were given a dish that they like that was making cheese and they had one group who had mac cheese every single day in another group that had IT only once a week and everyone enjoyed IT to the same extent of the in the beginning. But the people who have the same dish every day I can choose everyday within we didier want to have IT anymore which you know is understandable those who had the only once a week they continued um enjoying IT and so IT is our emotional reaction that habituates. However, sometimes you know you could still know like if I ask you about if if there's something good in your life and let's say you think your job is is great and I ask you about like your job and is a good and you can say, yeah, you know it's really good and really lucky and that view may also you may also like diminish over time, but not as fast as your emotional reaction.

Like how happy are you to go to job? You are to go to work every day. How happy you are to do what you do, right? So that the emotional reaction, which is really a more evolutionary old reaction, that realize an evolutionary old parts of our brain, that is something that IT habitue fast.

The more kind of rational thinking about things and evaluating them, sure, there's some kind of diminishing of how good I think things are, but that doesn't really um follow the same type of the situation. The situation isn't more about. Our reactions are physiological reactions, are emotional reactions, so you could still believe that you have something great, but not feel IT as much totally.

What's the connection between our tendency to habituate in relation to how much we engage in expLoring .

verses exploited one way to diminish the situation in in our life in general is to try new things right? When you change your environment, you will this habituate what is this habituated IT means that you will start noticing these things again so you might have um habit itur to um something, let's say all IT takes the mac and chasing something right you've habituated to because you had IT every day for a but then you stop having IT you come back a months later and now you have IT and now it's great again you disappoint iterate IT or we have um a great example in the cover of a book, the inside cover.

It's a it's a visual illusion where there is these colors, the blobs of colors paying ello blue and there's a little fixation in the middle and if you fix that, your eyes for about even thirty seconds should do. What happens is that these blocks of colors suddenly become great. And if you're really good and not moving your eyes, you will suddenly seem like they have been come White.

You don't see the colors anymore. So the reason you don't see the colors anymore is habituation right? The same exact news in your brain are getting the same exact input from the different blogs of colors, and so they stop responding.

But the moment you move your eyes, you can see the colors again. Because the moment you you move your eyes, you then different neurons are getting different inputs and now you notice again, and that's called this habituation right? So in our life um any time that we create a change, then we dishabituated where we are trying something news and obviously it's new. So we start you know feeling IT again.

But also then when we go back to the old thing, then we feel IT again against just habituating uh part of IT um and so people who explore different things, they get a more of this variety, right and they get more of this kind of less habituation people who exploit, which means they do the same thing over and over, like you like to to go to the same restaurant, you go to the same restaurant over and over and over, they may um habituate to to those things that they do again and again again. However, there is individual differences, so some people can habituate slower, and if they habitat slower, they might not feel as much need to explore. Other people can habituate really, really fast.

And so they get really tired of things, right? They don't, they don't bring the joy, and they might need that they want they feel they want to explore more things. But really, you know in life we need to do A A bit of both.

We need to exploit e the good things right um but also have some amount of exploration to try different things because how do you know what is the optimal thing if you don't explore different options? I mean, it's well known that some people are more of an explorer and some people are more explorer res and some exploitive res don't feel comfortable expLoring. And one thing that we talk about is that just from like observations, there is no science behind this.

But when we kind of look around in our own lives and the lives of the people, in our friends and someone um we often see these couples where one of the exploitation and the other is the explore and it's interesting and when we talk about like my own cover casting, he says he's a more an explosion and his wife is an explore. And on one hand, you know, IT could be a little bit annoying. He doesn't want to go to a new place for vacation every time.

He doesn't want to trial these restaurants and and SHE does want to stay go to the same place over and over. But but in fact this kind of union can actually be a way to um have this optimal um solution, right? Because the the person who is really exploiting is like the explore is pushing them to explore and and exploit is pushing explore to explore its overall IT seems maybe not random that a lot of the couples that you see around us is a combination of these two things.

It's interesting where i've seen that play out as well as people who are starting companies like tech startups. And you have these incredible ideas. They're constantly expLoring new ideas, new ways of doing things, new ways of thinking about things. And often, they'll find that person or those people who will help them exploit those things, otherwise, we'll just keep ideating. So it's really interesting to think about how to look for other people who can give you the thing that sometimes you just don't have in that situation.

right? I mean, first response is always like uncomfortable, yes, like I don't want you to do that. But in fact um it's once you do that and in the long run it's actually good for you.

There's a quote from your book the joy of giving habituates much more slowly than the joy of getting tell us about that.

yes. So there's studies. People may be familiar about these studies um but say we get more happiness from giving people things rather than getting things ourselves. There is a question of why that may be. And there is this interesting study that was done at the way that they experiment work is that they had one group of people and they gave them five dollars every day and then they said, you can buy anything with this five dollars that you want so you know maybe people when and like a coffee and a question, maybe you've got like some stationary whatever they wanted um and they had the five dollars every day for I think he was like a week or so and the everyday they ask them here how happy are you with the least five dollars and um they saw hy situation so people were quite happy at first you know he became less exciting.

Mean it's only five dollars but still IT became less exciting over the week in the other group of people, they gave them five dollars every every day for a week and they asked them to take those five dollars and buy something for someone else um and so you may have again you bought the coffee with the code but you gave IT to your colleague or you bought some station area, gave IT to your child um and they found that um the joy of giving also habituated over the week but not as fast um so that's interesting and I think that relates and i'll tell you why this is. But for I tell you why this is, I want to relate this to the other phenomena, which is that is also known that we gain more joy on average from x experiences like a vacation, going to a concert, going to a lecture, going to dinner, bend from things like a new outfit or um a new like kind of take technology kind of machinery or something or whatever IT is that you buy. So there is a lot of study showing who experiences per buck gets you more joy than than from things and this okay, so why why do they find all of these things?

Um I think that anything that's material that's in front of you you bought IT whether IT was five dollars or hundred dollars in front of the whole time, your reaction, that your joy, that you can get out of IT diminishes, right? Because IT there all the time. Now if you think about experiences, experiences are fleeting, right?

You go to a concert at only last a few hours. You go to vacation at last a few days, you go to a dinner at last a few hours, it's fleeting. As well as giving something, you buy something, you give IT to someone else, they're really happy.

And IT makes you happy, and it's fleeting. And IT is this dimension, this feature of things being fleeting that actually means we can't habituate to them so much IT. IT is counter intuit because it's like o is a short time, so you will only give us joy for a short time.

But know what we do is we once in a while, we recall the event in our mind. So I could be like a concert. IT was only a few hours, but you number for years.

And because it's not actually there physically in front of you, you habituate to IT slower. Um and every time you remember, IT might be a little bit different. And the same thing with giving, yes, IT only took you a couple of minutes to give a person, you know, whatever you are giving them.

But that is a memory that you could retrieve again and again every time you do. You trieve IT a little bit differently. And it's not always in your mind. So the habituation is lower.

You mentioned in your book that habituation can play a really important role when we have to adapt to maybe a new city, a new job, a new relationship. Know at the start, we might not be very happy, but if we give ourselves of some time, we can habit. That's a really interesting way to think about this.

As you've been saying throughout the interview, you is a tool we can really use IT to think about. When should we maybe be pushing ourselves to habituate? When should we maybe pushing ourselves to dispatch? But I wonder if you could say more about that, that need to give ourselves .

of some time change is is difficult to right? Um because because of this kind of the first response where you let's say you talk about moving jobs. So even if you think you know it's a promotion and its sounds great, you get to this new office and you need to adjust.

I mean, you need to do things like figure out whose who, what is the higher key? Where am I going to have eat lunch? What are the options right? How is these like my computer doesn't work so obvious ly getting adjusted to things um at the beginning is a little bit hard um and some things could actually be good in principle and some things can not can be like really not good.

Perhaps it's like, oh you really don't like your um you office meat, but most things negative um we we simply habituate to IT over time. So we get used to you know over time you will figure everything out. You will figure like know where to have lunch and how things were and so on.

And so that would not be so much of a source of negativity. And a lot of the negative things as long as know you would also like capitulate to them. So they won't a be something that will annoy you on a day and day basis.

Now on one hand, again, this is a good thing, right? And you should take time and see you know how you feeling a few weeks in, a few months in. There is also a negative sight to IT, which is because we now habituated to perhaps these imperfections. Um will be less driven to change. Um and so we need to kind of look at the at the two sides of the coin and also think a little bit about what happens where you've been the same situation for so long that these kind of things that are not great around you is things that you don't notice and you should really notice.

And change in one fake way to do is, is kind of like, well, let's get out of the environment, move somewhere else and come back, for example, in in work environment, uh, employees sometimes rotate in different divisions um and that's a good thing, right? Because then they could experience a totally different at sphere with different people and then they can come back. And when they come back to their own division, now they have dishabituated. So now they can see, again, both the great things that they haven't kind of like a felt so much before, but also the negative things that now they can see more clearly and maybe be more inclined to try and change .

in this interview toy. Share a shares insight above the brain that can help us see our lives and the world around us in new ways. If you enjoy learning about the connection between brain science and perception, check out episode two o seven with David robson, author of the book the expectation effect, how your mindset can change your world. For example, he discusses how our view of aging can affect our well being.

Our beliefs about aging can shape the aging process, so people can oversee aging as this inevitable decline. You know, that filled with illness and disability and lack of excitement and kind of mental confusion, always expecting things to get worse, other people could see aging as this kind of opportunity. You know, in retirement, they could be the potential to take up new hobbies to travel.

But also, just the accumulated wisdom that you've got is actually like incredibly important for being able to make Better decisions. And what the researchers found was that those who interpreted IT as a good thing were much less likely to suffer from m cardigan cute disease, that much less likely to suffer from alzheimer's season. They live, on average, seven point five years long than those who have the negative beliefs. So really like shaping our langevin, our health. You know, it's really performed.

Now let's get back to my interview with tally share IT. What are the strategies you give us as well as thinking about some of the things you've just said is something that you say, shop the good, but swallow the bad hall. What does that mean? What does that look like? okay. So let's start .

with chop the good. This really comes from from a few pieces of data that we have. Let me tell you a few of them. And then the kind of conclusion, first of all, um there's um some data that we talk about where um I was actually helping working with uh large tourism company and they wanted to know what makes people happier on vacation and when are they happy is so we went on resorts and we ask people questions.

And the first thing we found is that people were happy est on vacation on average forty three hours in forty three hours gave them the time to you know on pack and and get to kind of know where they are and then from that point on, happiness and joy started diminishing. And don't get me wrong, they were still happy and eight days in seven days and six days and but two days and was the happiest. The other thing that we found in this um study was that when we ask people, hey, what was that happiest part of the vacation, there was one word that they use more than any other word.

And IT was first, the first view of the ocean, the first cases castle that I build, the first cocktail first were new and exciting. The second view of the ocean, the second cocktail they were good to the d four into the fifth cock was given not as good as the first. So what this suggest is that you perhaps it's not a bad idea to have you know more frequent vacations but shorter ones, right? So you get more of those peaks, more of those forty three hour peaks, more of those first.

Uh, of course, this is not always possible if you're travelling a long way, you are depending on on the vacation days that you have up, but it's something to consider. And then related to that um is this other study where people were asked um what would you rather listen to a song that you like from beginning to end, no interruption? Or would you rather listen to the song with little interruption? So every thirty seconds or so we'll have a twenty second interruption. So what would you answer to that gale? Of course.

in general, i'm gonna want to listen to IT from end to end. I've read your book though, and I have a feeling that's not the way to go.

So um that's what, you know, ninety nine percent of the people who have not read a book IT say I would rather listen to the to the song from beginning to end. It's the most intuitive answer. But when they did the experiment, they had one group linate to beginning to end in the other group with interactions.

They actually find IT surprisingly, people enjoy the song more with breaks, with interruptions um and they were willing to pay double to hear the song and concerts um as well and they did the same with massage as they could have they said, hey, would you rather have a massage beginning to end no break or would you have massages with breaks in between and of course people said I don't want to a break in my massari I want no interruptions but again, when they did the experiment they found that people were happier and more um you know had more joy from their massage when they were breaks. Why is that? Well if you listen to the song or have the massage from beginning to end, no interaction, the um enjoyment is quite high at the beginning but then habituation kicks in and IT starts diminishing.

You're still, you know, enjoying the song of the end. You're still enjoy at the end, but not quite as you were in the beginning. However, if I now have a breaks, every so often the breaks triggering this habituation.

So you're taking a break away from the sun, away from them, the song that you coming back and now the joy is again really high, right? And yes, IT starts going down a little bit, but there a break and then you come back this habituation so the joy jumps back in and that's why the joy was was greater um if you had breaks. And um so the idea is that we can we can breaks the good things into bits. You know whether IT is a tiny show that we like. Let's not um watch write the whole netflix show in one go, all episodes in one day once you have watch one episode a little break. In fact, there's a study that's not in the book that I wasn't even aware of that um Daniel girl bert told me about after the book was out and he said that there's study in which IT shows that people actually enjoy TV with with a divertisements which of course they don't think they do but in fact IT turns out that they enjoy IT more so that is super so I mean, the whole thing is so counter intuit if I think .

you're helping me understand why there are certain things in my life where I have to just i'm sort of a forcing function of the nature of the day and how the daily breaks up and having time where if I break a favorite podcast up into parts, or if I am listening to a book on table, I exercise. The reality is I never get to get through at all in one shot. And I come back to IT.

And if i'm loving the book, I just keep thinking about IT. And I enjoy IT so much more. And I would see the same thing for sports. I love professional basketball, so I don't have time to watch a game when it's on because if it's not a great game, i'm not going to I hate to say i'm not going to waste the time, but i'll curate games and then watch them in pieces and I just enjoy IT so much more and you really help me understand why it's so enjoyable to do that.

So you're actually raising at another reason, which I didn't mention. So beyond the like this bit and habituation you're talking about like how doing the breaks you're thinking about IT, right? And you're kind of anticipating and that is really important because when you break things up, not only are you illicit this evaluation, but also you have more of this anticipation time.

And if let's take the vacation example, what I told you was when when your on vacation, on average, forty three hours, and this is the happiest time. But what I didn't tell you is that, in fact, the absolute happiest time is before you even went on the vacation. There is a study showing, as the study was conducted at target, and they were asked people who are about to go on vacation every day for the week before vacation, how happy they were, every day for the week of vacation, how happy they were, and every day for the week after vacation, how happy they were.

And he turns out that the happiest day with the day before they were on vacation, right the day before they're still in the office working on the computers, but in their mind, they're ready on vacation and in their mind, it's quite wonderful when they went on vacation was good. But I wasn't quite as good as IT wasn't their mind the day before. So um by breaking things up, you are getting more of these anticipation periods and also more of the afterglow.

Ws that makes so much sense and you're helping me understand to why when you go somewhere, if you spend a lot of time in advance planning, the things you will be doing there every single day, now that the schedule has to be packed, but you look forward to things. And then every day while you're there, you have something to look .

forward to yeah and this is why I say like that you need anticipatory events, events in your a calendar that you could look forward to right um so you come back from a vacation, look the next one um or things for the weekend. These things are gonna happen in the future, but they make you happy at the present.

Um and there's there's another um really cool um finding where it's about people's favorite day of the week um and IT turns out that by far people prefer friday to sunday. The favor day of the week for most people is either saturday or friday. It's definitely not sunday and and again, it's kind of odd because friday, a day of work and study day is a day of pleasure. Why do people prefer friday will. Friday is when they are anticipating or be um great stuff that they have plan for the weekend, while on sunday they are doing the good stuff but they are feeling anxious about the work week.

You explain the habituation plays an important role in our mental heal well being that is tied to resilience, how so almost every.

uh, psychiatric condition is related to some form of problems in a situation, different ones. So different conditions are related to different problems in habituation. But almost every single one of them includes a problem in habitation.

So let me give you just one example, which I think, uh a lot of people can relate to and it's at depression. So IT turns out that people with depression, they habituate to the negative things in life slower. So if something happens, that's not great. Um IT has an effect on them for a longer time because they don't have this like fast emotional habituation to negative events.

Let me give you an example of a study um it's a study that was conducted by dr 点 eron heller at the university of miami where um he had a group of students who just got the grades of a really important exam and he asked them how they were feeling immediately and then he asked them how they were feeling every forty five minutes until the end of the day。 And what did he found was that when people got bad grades, they were feeling bad. And IT didn't matter if they had depression symptoms or didn't had a history of depression.

Or did IT everyone felt back to the same degree? Here's what was different once, like the time started passing, people that did not have depression and no history of depression, they, within a few hours, they bounce back, right? They habituated quite fast.

The emotional negative feeling of sad dss or anger, whatever IT was about the great, just diminished. While people with depression, or history of depression, they tend to bounce back much slower, IT had a negative effect of them slower. And part of the reason is rumination. People with depression tend to ruminate on these negative event. So they kept thinking about the bad grain and what that means and what that means for their future um and so that really had much more than negative effect on them over time.

Are there ways to overwrite that, that you found in your research?

So I think the Normal kind that the treatments that usually would work for depression are very much closely related to this, right? Because a lot of depression treatment is, uh, at least the conventional ones oh, I mean, I I bet the physiological ones, you know, medication would probably have similar effects. But if you think about the the kind of behaviour therapy when IT comes to depression, a lot of IT is how do I interpret events that happened to me in a more um useful way right um there is a lot of techniques about how do I dress rumination.

How do I not continue to think about this over and over and over again um all just highlight one is not necessarily the best but one kind of interpretation style that um a lot of your peace um try to to get a people depression to see um adopt is to interpret negative events as these negative events happened not because of a trait that I have that is unchangeable um and not IT doesn't have an implication for everything that I do so not to generalize and not too related to um everything that's going to happen in the future so let me be a bit more specific so you get negative grade here's what the person person with depression can do they can say, oh, I got this negative grade because I am not smart enough because I am lazy, right? So now what they are doing, they're interpreting the reasons of this event as related to a trait that they have. And then they say, well, if i'm lazy and i'm not smart, that means i'm not to you know, i'm going to get bad grades for the rest of the year, for the rest of the semester.

And now they generalize toward the future. And the other thing that they tend to do, they tend to expand to different domain. So they say i'm lazy and i'm not smart.

That means not only will I get bad grades, but because i'm lazy, i'm not gonna well in sports either, right? So now they're generalising ing to other ways. And what's the a lot of therapy kind of tries to to change is to try to interpret these negative events is not necessarily related to unchangeable traits, right?

Maybe they're not really related to traits at all, maybe IT related to circumstances, right? Maybe you ve got the negative grades because guess you didn't you didn't output in the worth this time. Not because like you're lazy, which is something that's unchangeable because that is a decision that you made or maybe you made a decision to do something else um and not interpreted as IT doesn't mean necessarily, but this has any implications on how you'll do in other domains. So that's um the approach um and there is some successors of study, for example, by Martin selig men showing success in this.

We can become as you mentioned earlier in the interview, we can become habituated to low expectations. And of course, that is not a good thing. You talk about this in the book and give a great example, for example, of the experience of women in the us. And why we need what you call the zeros, or this situation entrepreneurs tell us about that.

We have at least a couple of chapters about habituation to kind of norms around us, right? Um if we live in a society where, for example, there's discrimination based on sex, for example, and we've always lived in the society and you know IT hasn't changed. We may not even notice IT at all or we may notice that less than less over time because it's always been there.

And this, of course, is a problem for change and that is a problem for for society. And however, it's interesting that a lot of times you see that there are certain people who think to not 他 habituated um they seem to both notice these problems and then actually act upon them。 Many of the times, not always many of the times these people who don't habituate are people who are the victims themselves right?

Um so let's take a gender discrimination as an example. Let's take an example where there is a norm where most pilots are mail. Um so let's say you you walk on a plane and you look in the cockpit and there's a male pilot, your brain doesn't really encode this at all. IT doesn't IT doesn't. I mean, you're like, guess I always see males in in in the in the copy as pilots might not even notice IT.

Um so you're really kind of not taking in into consideration this and and more so unconsciously, if you see a certain pattern in the world that like pilots aren't almost always your brain unconsciously reaches a conclusion of why that is and you may say to yourself, probably unconsciously, well, maybe this means that meals are Better at Operating large machinery, right? And then imagine that at some point you need to hire um a certain individual to Operate large machinery. You would probably unconciously be more inclined to hire a mail.

And so all of this problems, now, imagine that you are the pilot and you are a female. Yes, you are going to be influenced by these norms. You might even think to yourself, i'm not you in my, is your own confidence in your own abilities.

However, at the same time, you have the experience yourself of Operating this machine, right? The pilot, the female pilot has the experience. And while she's doing IT, SHE might have the experience of doing IT really well. And this difference between what the norms are around you that creates your expectation of what the actual reality can cause, what we call a prediction error or a surprise, right? So IT doesn't really fit like the the society's expectations and what you're actually experiencing doesn't really fit.

And so there is kind of a surprise signal in your rain, and that means that you are not going to habitat as fast, right? So often you've see that these, this habituation to personal s which is our people who notice these problems and act upon them can be the victims themselves. But once they can make IT somehow clear to the rest of the world, that can create change.

Let me give you an example. We talk about a professor by the name of your own who's at prince and he is an hour scientist um and he wanted to address this problem that he saw, which is when he goes to conferences there is more male speakers than female speakers. So what you did, he wanted to make this transparent and cleared to everyone else so they can notice SHE created a website and the website is called, uh I think it's called bias neural and on the website, SHE list all the conferences that he knows off in the field and next to every name of a conference.

SHE puts the names of the organizers and he also puts the known ratio of females and males in the field. So let's say it's um the field of um newer signs of um vision, for example. And SHE puts in the the ratio of females, males in the fields based on data, for example from the government.

And then SHE puts the ratio of speakers female to ale speakers in that specific conference. So let's see the specific conference. The ratio of female, female speakers is want to but next to is she's like, well, actually in the field, it's too to free.

So that's a problem. So what does this do? IT means that everyone can see and notice the problem clearly.

And also by putting in the names of the organizers, the conference, she's making people accountable and accountable in front of everyone else. And no one wants their name right next to some data that says there is that perhaps discrimination. And this approach has been very helpful in in changing this specific problem in the field. So she's done IT in the field of north sign, but of course, you can do IT in any other field.

Two questions. I like to wrap up the interview with toy one is because the theme of the podcasts ers. Curiosity, what do you most curious about today?

You know if this is absolutely true but one of the things that are most curious about is curiosity.

It's a huge part of my my mister is not in this last book uh so much but one of the thing that that I study is what makes people curious um and why do people like information so much and you can say what people like information because it's useful, right I can use information to make Better decisions to you know maybe invest Better to um make bit, take actions and work and so on. But that's not only true because we also like to read and listen to things that. Are not very useful to us.

That's just really super interesting. I mean, you know like astronomy, I I don't really see how I could use um such a knowledge in my daily um work. But you know I find IT really interesting so i'm interested in how this evolved um how IT is manifested in the brain, individual differences, what causes some people to be more curious than others, what causes them to be curious about specific things than others um and we we use a lot of ways to answer this from really controlled experiments and looking at brain imaging data, but also just looking at how people interact on the web, what click and can we figure out why?

Let me ask to follow up on curiosity. Are there any findings from that? Is there one particular finding from some of the research that you've done, whether it's why people click on something or the kinds of curiosities they have, anything that's just been maybe surprising to you.

Some of the things maybe once I say then they sound, well, well, that makes sense. But you we didn't really think about IT in this kind of way and really putting IT in a very organized fashion, I think is very helpful. So for example, we one of the I mean, our theory about why do people curious or why they want information is that there's three main factors.

One is usefulness, right? I can use IT to make Better decision. The other is um I can have an a positive emotional impact on me. So is IT like good news that means you feel good. Um and the third is IT expands us, expands the way I understand the world.

And these three factors come together, we think that, you know, people estimate these three things when they decide whether took, for example, to click on something. They do IT unconsciously. But some people may put more weight on one element than the other.

So some people may be really driving by what we call instrumental ity. So like, how can I use this? And they really like, you know, they really read books that are that have this kind of use. One of some people are more about, I want to expand my knowledge of the world, unrelated to whether is useful, they put more sweig on that. Some people really care about emotions when they when they look at information, you know, if there's know, there's a lot of really negative information online in the news.

And on one hand, that expands your knowledge, you understand how the world works, right? And I could be useful if you know for a lot of decisions that you're making, for example, like who should I vote for? But also can make you feel bad. And some people put more weight on like, I don't want to feel bad and that's fine, you know they try to avoid that can information and some people put less way on that so we can really characterize different individuals um on on on these different things. And and IT turns out that these like there's patterns in the population like kind of personalities um of info types, week of them.

fascinating many as you think about classifying people as you do that. Is there a follow up from there is they're application that you seed up being applied to or yes.

absolutely. So you could both personalize information to individuals based on their preference, but you can also see some perhaps um characteristic of the population. Like for example, you know it's interesting to see how these things change over age, right over development.

How does that? What does IT what happens in kids for examples? So we've done this. We've looked at kids from the age of four to the age of twelve and characterize how these kind of informed pes change with age.

And so now if you want to give information to two children of different ages, you can use this right to reframe the information in the best way. We also um have this um plugging that we developed where it's not yet available for for the world widely. But what we have is if if you use a pluggin and then you new google something, you get the results of google like you usually would.

But next to each result, IT has a score next to the website and actually there's free scores. IT tells you about how negative positive the information is on this website. If you click on IT, IT tells you how useful IT is on average for people to direct their actions and IT also tells you um how likely IT is to expand people's knowledge.

On average, of course, there is a lot of individual differences. What can expand your knowledge maybe I really know, but this is based on and algorithm that does relatively well on average. And so now people can use those scores to make Better decisions of what they want to know cause for example, imagine that um i'm in a really bad mood now.

I don't want more than I give information so I might go for those websites who are A A little bit more positive or i'm asking about how to get a VISA, right. So I really want the useful information or I want to know more about world war two. So really i'm onna concentrate on the knowledge expansion score um so that's one application of of this work that .

is fascinating, wonderful. I love the idea of being able to to fill more deeply to get what you wonder, what you need. 嗯， last question, anything I haven't asked that you'd like to leave listeners with. There's so much in your book, we don't have time to cover at all. What have we not talked about maybe that you wish we did or that you want to say more about?

I think that the message is beyond, you know, understanding like how the mind works and and kind of being curious about, you know, how what happened to your brain, just thinking about how what take is for your life. We talked about breaking up the good. The one thing that you ask and I didn't answer was um swallowing the bad hole.

What is the idea here is that when you're doing tests that you do not enjoy, maybe it's household chores or maybe IT had many work. In that case, habituation is actually your friend. Because if at the beginning IT feels really bad, you will habitat, let's say you're cleaning the toilets or something, you're cleaning the house IT could be really annoying and the smell can be bad.

But over time, you habitat IT doesn't feel that bad. And so in this case, you actually don't want na take breaks. Again, it's counter intuitive.

But um you want a situation to be there and you want to help you feel less bad about your chore if possible. And so again, there have been cities doing this, for example, having people listen to annoying noise. And they asked me, hey, do you wanted listen to this annoying noise from beginning to end? No interruptions.

So do you want breaks? And people say, hey, I want breaks um which is intuitive. But then they did the experiment and then what they found was that, in fact, um having breaks made the whole thing feel worse because you dishabituated this time to do that.

That is a great final tip to leave us with, eat the bad stuff. Hall, yes. Well.

that but break up the good tell me.

Thank you so much. IT is such a pleasure to speak with you, and it's great to have you back on the show.

Thank you so much for having me again.

Curious minds at work is made possible through a partnership with the innovative or circle and executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. Special thank you to producer and editor rob. Make a belly for leading the amazing behind the scenes team that makes IT all happen.

Each episode would give a shout out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week it's cover oc bars novel marder, the story of a poet whose obsession with modern takes into manhattan to sit with a dying artist. It's a story of family and friendship. And what happens when you discover a truth you never expected? What a story.