There is a disconnect in there between the night me and the morning me. Most people encounter something similar when they promise themselves that they will begin exercising the very next day, or they will start that diet at breakfast. How do we explain this disconnect?

Psychology Professor Paul Bloom has this to say:

The alternative view keeps the angel and the devil, but casts aside the person in between. The competing selves are not over your shoulder, but inside your head: the angel and the devil, the self who wants to be slim and the one who wants to eat the cake, all exist within one person. Drawing on the research of the psychiatrist George Ainslie, we can make sense of the interaction of these selves by plotting their relative strengths over time, starting with one (the cake eater) being weaker than the other (the dieter). For most of the day, the dieter hums along at his regular power (a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, say), motivated by the long-term goal of weight loss, and is stronger than the cake eater (a 2). Your consciousness tracks whichever self is winning, so you are deciding not to eat the cake. But as you get closer and closer to the cake, the power of the cake eater rises (3 … 4 …), the lines cross, the cake eater takes over (6), and that becomes the conscious you; at this point, you decide to eat the cake. It’s as if a baton is passed from one self to another.

Sometimes one self can predict that it will later be dominated by another self, and it can act to block the crossing—an act known as self-binding, which Thomas Schelling and the philosopher Jon Elster have explored in detail. Self-binding means that the dominant self schemes against the person it might potentially become—the 5 acts to keep the 2 from becoming a 6. Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens, but he knew it would compel him to walk off the boat and into the sea. So he had his sailors tie him to the mast. Dieters buy food in small portions so they won’t overeat later on; smokers trying to quit tell their friends never to give them cigarettes, no matter how much they may later beg. In her book on gluttony, Francine Prose tells of women who phone hotels where they are going to stay to demand a room with an empty minibar. An alarm clock now for sale rolls away as it sounds the alarm; to shut it off, you have to get up out of bed and find the damn thing.

I don’t think many of want to admit that to get us out of bed requires an alarm clock that actively tries to escape from us. If I’m really honest with myself though, I think that sounds like a great idea. Mr. Bloom even relates about how he has a program on his computer that turns off all internet connections for a set amount of time so that he wont check email, surf, and google while he should be writing. 

On the one hand I look at my heroes and role models and I can’t imagine them having to install programs on their computers that forcibly terminate their internet connection so they can get some damn work done.

On the other hand, I’m weak, I can admit it, and maybe I do need just that. Maybe I need to uninstall the one video game I play and my torrent program which supplies me with an endless stream of cheap, mindless entertainment. I feel like a terrible failure admitting that, but I think the fact that the article by Paul Bloom rings so true for me means I should take heed of his advice. So what about you, do you need an alarm clock that runs away from you too?

First Person Plural by Paul Bloom

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I really believe that a desire to be average is ingrained in to us from a lot of different sources but being average really isn’t all that great of a thing to want to be. I think it’s much better to want to be above average, as high above average as you can get.

Anyway go read the post, it’s good, I promise!

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Imaginative Seniors

The year was 1979, but for a group of elderly men, the year was actually 1959. At least, Ellen Langer, the psychologist leading the study, had convinced them to pretend that the year was 1959:

The magazines, newspapers, and music the men saw and heard were all 20 years old and the men themselves were told to behave and talk as if it were 1959.

It doesn’t sound particularly impressive does it? Get a bunch of old men to play make-believe, what could that possibly do? Apparently it can do a lot, because at the end of the experiment the men:

• Looked visibly younger
• Had straighter posture
• Had more flexible joints

Now the problem with all of those is that they’re kind of hard to measure. There was, however, one area of improvement where the evidence was incontrovertible: finger length.

As we get older, our bodies succumb to gravity and generally shrink, and our fingers, which are no exception to this rule, get shorter. But the fingers of the men in this study were actually longer at the end of the experiment. The aging process had literally been reversed.

Healthy Hotel Maids

Just a year ago, in 2007, Ellen Langer started a new experiment, this time with colleague Alia Crum. The researchers took various health measurements from a group of 84 hotel workers, and then split the group in two. They told one group that the physical exercise they were getting by cleaning hotel rooms satisfied the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle and the maids were given specific examples of how their work was actually exercise.

Langer and Crum told the other group, the control group, nothing.

And the results:

Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some measurements of both groups: the control group hadn’t changed physically, but the test group had decreased all of the following: weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

It’s important to realize that the maids hadn’t actually done anything different, they changed all those physical aspects of themselves with their minds. It almost sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Your mind is an extremely powerful tool for change.

So what can we learn from this?

What was going on in the brains of the senior citizens and the hotel workers is a process called the psychosomatic effect. Most of you are probably familiar with the psychosomatic effect but don’t know it, because it’s what causes stress to be so unhealthy for us.

But rather than letting it make us unhealthy, we should be using the psychosomatic effect to our advantage:

• Think Young - It might be a stretch to surround ourselves with 20 year old magazines and T.V. shows like the seniors in the first study did, but there are other things you can do to stay young. First, don’t act your age! Most people would agree that people younger than themselves are more active and are out having more fun, so go be more active and have more fun. Second, recognize and enjoy the things in your life that are ‘young’, like that sport you love to play or that late night out with friends.
• Think Healthy - It would be difficult to sit on the couch and think your waist line smaller, but what you can do is recognize that the exercise you do get is effective and good for you.
• Think Happy - This may sound a little counter-intuitive, but just like stress has a lot of negative effects on the body, happiness has a lot of positive effects on the body. One thing you can do is just be mindful of your own mood. If you’re not happy, look for some aspect of the situation you find yourself in that is positive, and be grateful for it. Something else you can do is smile more. Our brains don’t know the difference between a real smile and a fake smile, so even a fake smile, although it might not look great, causes your brain to release a lot of the same ‘happy chemicals’ that it would release if your smile had been real.

These are all great ways to use the psychosomatic effect to your benefit, but remember that it’s equally easy for it to have a negative effect on your body. That means that you should also focus on banishing negative thoughts from your mind, lest they counteract all your positive thinking.

Further Reading:
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So I can’t really help with financial troubles, but I can certainly help with undue stress.

The good people over at eMindful.com have partnered up with Duke Integrative Medicine to offer some free stress reduction classes on the eMindul.com site:

Free online classes in stress reduction for people affected by the recent events in the financial markets are being offered by eMindful.com, a web-based mindfulness training resource, and Duke Integrative Medicine. Developed and taught by researchers at Duke Integrative Medicine, these classes are conducted in virtual classrooms where students can see, hear, and interact with live teachers and other students. Entering the virtual classroom is simple - and no software is required! Even novice computer users have easily accessed and enjoyed the eMindful classes.

According to the American Medical Association, stress accounts for approximately 85 percent of all illnesses. Excessive stress impacts people’s sleep patterns, eating habits, and emotional well-being. eMindful’s online, real-time classes offer simple, effective techniques for combating stress in day-to-day living.

The free classes will begin on Saturday, September 27th, and will be available periodically until October 10th at no charge. The courses are interactive and offer experiential exercises utilizing the techniques learned in class.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past where people lent a hand to each other just because… eMindful and Duke Integrative Medicine would like to lend that hand now.

If this is something that appeals to you I really encourage you to check it out, because stress is not something that people should have to live with.

You should also act fast, the first class was yesterday!

You can register for classes here.

Found via idealawg

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Smelly Dreams

My last post, The State of Consciousness You’re Missing Out On, was all about sleep, dreams, and the fact that consciousness never really quits. In the comments, Rod brought up an interesting point, that even in our dreams, our senses still have influence over our consciousness. Serendipitously, I found this article on Wired about a new study which showed that smells can influence our dreams.

Pleasant scents give rise to pleasant dreams, and foul smells turn fantasy to phantasmagoria: so concludes a small, unreplicated and wholly plausible study on odor and dreaming.

More specifically, smells actually affect the emotional content of our dreams, which cannot be said of touch or sound. That implies that our brains actually process smell differently than other senses, which is kind of fascinating I think.

You can read the Wired article here.

Self Inflicted OCD

I stumbled across another fascinating article that details how Leonardo Dicaprio actually brought back a mild case of childhood OCD and then made the OCD a lot worse when he played the OCD ridden Howard Hughes in The Aviator.

I think that really speaks to the fact that if you act a certain way it really does eventually become who you are, whether you want to be the person you’re acting like or not.

So who are you acting like right now? A better version of yourself, or a worse one? Who do you want to be, and why aren’t you acting more like that?

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So how is knowing about different types of consciousness useful? Im glad you asked.

When you wake up in a dream and actually take a look around — it’s bananas. It’s the absolute craziest goddamn thing in all of human life. Every night we beam down into an elaborate virtual world where we can pound the walls with our oven-mitt fists and sniff giant daisies and have elliptical conversations with archetypal bus drivers. From inside a dream there is nothing vague or washed out about the experience — dreams are totally real, as real as getting off the plane in Lagos and ordering a beer from some guy at the side of the road. You are at this place — you’re IN it! At the time it’s every bit as solid and real as waking. Except… and this is what’s so cool… except when you’re self-consciously aware inside the dream you can then squeeze up real close to the walls with your little magnifying glass and look for suture marks. You can conduct experiments. You come to realize that there is a set of laws operating in the dream world that is every bit as real as the laws of physics in the waking world. What are these laws? And why aren’t there as many scientists down here with their slide rules and theories as there are out there? We spend our lives in two worlds and yet we only pay attention to one of them — the other is seen as an embarrassing curiosity, a forum for banality-rehearsal and botched sex.

People protest: “but it’s not real, stop living in fantasy.” All experience is real. On the personal side, dreams reveal all kinds of junk about the self.

What Jeff is talking about is dreaming, and more specifically, lucid dreaming, which is where you wake up in your dream, realize you’re dreaming, and are able to control your dream.

This topic may seem a little strange for this blog, but that’s precisely it, it’s not! Imagine being able to explore your mind and everything in it. Imagine being able to control a dream; just think of the creative potential! In fact Raymond Kurzweil, a prolific modern day inventor and futurist, uses lucid dreaming for inventing.

As Jeff says in the interview, ”consciousness is 24-hours”, and our dreams are like pure consciousness:

without sensory input to dilute everything, you get consciousness in a pure culture. And it so happens that this pure culture — The Dream — runs like an underground creek beneath the waking world, muddying the ground in all kinds of interesting ways.

To understand ourselves and our own minds I believe it’s imperative that we also understand these different forms of consciousness that affect our experience of the world. In a way it’s a lot like meditation, which is used to increase mindfulness, and hence our awareness of the world around us and our place in it. When we meditate we are exploring another state of consciousness. Anyone that has meditated before will tell you that it’s a different kind of consciousness from being awake and walking around.

I really want to encourage everyone to look in to lucid dreaming and the dream state of consciousness in general. Like meditation, it’s an experience that can change your outlook on the world significantly, and I think a lot of people would benefit from experiencing it.

There is a great introduction to the mechanics of lucid dreaming here, and for anyone interested in the topic of different states of consciousness, I highly encourage you to check out Jeff’s book (linked to at the top of the page), it really is fascinating.

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The video is great, and it’s animated by the creators of South Park, of all people.

You can see it here.

found via Lynn Crymble on Twitter

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The article is actually an interview with Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, who is a leader in the field of studying creativity. In it, he shares some valuable insights that all creative people and people who want to be more creative should be aware of.

Here are the basic points of the interview:

• Everyone Can Do It - I think this is probably the most important thing to mention, which is that creativity is not some mysterious ability that only certain people are blessed with. Rather, it is process, a set of habits that anyone can adopt and be more creative as a result. Sawyer has this to say:
  

  Take risks, and expect to make lots of mistakes, because creativity is a numbers game. Work hard, and take frequent breaks, but stay with it over time. Do what you love, because creative breakthroughs take years of hard work. 

• Collaboration Is Key - Collaboration with other people is extremely important. By collaborating with another person, you have someone to bounce ideas off of, and you have someone with a different outlook and a different set of experiences to help build your ideas.
• Learn To Fail - Creative people have lots of ideas, many of them bad. Like Sawyer mentions in the quote from the first point, creativity is a numbers game. If you have enough ideas, it’s inevitable that one of them will be good. This is part of why collaboration is so important, because when you have someone to share ideas with, you get a whole new set of experiences that can potentially make your idea in to something great.
• There Are No Shortcuts - Sawyer mentions that a lot of his and other creativity psychologist’s research has gone in to studying how those ‘lightbulb’ moments come about, and what they’ve found is that even when people don’t realize it, they were gradually building up to their creative moment. Creativity, then, is a process rather than a moment of pure insight. Even if you don’t realize it, in the background your brain is constantly sorting through ideas, making connections, and building up to that one moment of creativity. So don’t wait around expecting for that one creative spark to come along, because it’s not going to happen. Instead, start learning about ideas, start combining ideas, start bouncing ideas off other people to get feedback, and then you’ll have breakthroughs of your own.

I think creativity is one of those areas where psychology is invaluable for shedding light on something that a lot of people find fairly mysterious. Creativity is not something that some people are just blessed with, it’s a set of beliefs and behaviors that ANYONE can adopt and benefit from. If you ever dreamed of being creative but thought it was simply something you weren’t good at, I think the research here shows that anyone can be creative if the willpower is there.

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I’ve never liked that belief about daydreaming though, because I get some of my most creative, imaginative thoughts while daydreaming, and I see it as a valuable tool for coming up with new ideas.

And as it turns out, there is some interesting research to back that up.

Daydreaming is important, neuroscientists have found, because it allows the brain to make novel associations and connections between unrelated ideas; and the freedom to drift allows our brains to imagine abstract, highly imaginative things. As any creative person knows, these are exactly the kinds of states of mind that lead to sessions of brilliant creativity, where ideas can come as fast as you can write them down.

Two Kinds of Daydreamers

In one particular study, it was found that there is a trick to getting the most out of your daydreaming. It turns out that there are two kinds of daydreamers, and one is better than the other:

• Unconscious Daydreamers - Unconscious daydreamers aren’t aware that they’re daydreaming. They daydream, but because they’re unaware of it, any insights they have while daydreaming go unnoticed, and they miss out on all the creative benefits of daydreaming.
• Conscious Daydreamers - Conscious daydreamers are aware of the fact that they are daydreaming. Conscious daydreaming is important because it’s not enough to just daydream, you have to be able to recognize that brilliant flash of insight when it comes along.

This is the crucial difference that seperates those who get brilliant creative flashes from their daydreams from those who just stare off in to space.

How to Go From Unconscious Daydreamer to Conscious Daydreamer

If you find yourself in that unconscious daydreamer group, it’s not such a difficult thing to get to the conscious daydreamer group. Like anything else, it takes practice. As silly as it might sound, just practice daydreaming, and practice being aware of your daydreams.

Another thing that everyone can do too is set aside more time for daydreaming, which means setting aside some distraction free time. Personally, I love to daydream in the shower as there are zero distractions and I find the white noise of the falling water really helps me drift off.

Find a place that works for you and get some serious daydreaming done, you’ll be glad you did.

One More Thing: T.V.

The Boston Globe article where I first heard about this study had a great anecdotal story on the perils of T.V. to the daydreamer:

Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were.

“The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative,” Belton says, “as if the children were stuck with this very restricted way of thinking. Even when they were encouraged to think creatively, they didn’t really know how.”

After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of “empty time,” or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. “It was a very automatic reaction,” she says. “Television was what they did when they didn’t know what else to do.”

The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. “The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere,” Belton says. “But that’s a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice.”

I think there’s a lesson in there for parents as well as aspiring daydreamers. Cheap entertainment like television can be a huge hinderance to daydreaming, and it only underscores the necessity of setting some ‘empty’ time aside to facillitate daydreaming.

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If the answer is no too many days in a row, I start doing something else.

—

I want to step back from psychology a bit today and talk about death as a motivator, because it’s a theme that has come up several times in my reading over the years, and I think it’s an important aspect of motivation that people either don’t know about or willfully ignore.

You WILL Die One Day

Quite simply, death is inevitable, but no one wants to think about it. In fact, we put it so far out of our minds that it becomes sort of unreal; we are aware that one day we will die, but we haven’t actually integrated that knowledge in to our lives.

In reading and hearing about cancer patients I’ve heard a story similar to the following one told a few times. The person learns that they’re probably going to die fairly soon, and suddenly, all the extraneous little things that they were so worried about aren’t even worth thinking about, much less worrying about.  Their entire lives get reprioritized and they realize just how precious time is, and they realize that they’re wasting their time with silly little things that don’t really matter.

For these people, death is a wake up call.

I think this quote fits nicely:

“Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.”

– Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

The Ultimate Motivation

I know that people are often looking for daily motivation techniques. They have the knowledge to change, but they lack a reason or a push to get them started.

Death, I think, is one of, if the not the most powerful motivator out there. It’s not a fun topic to think about, but it works.

Somewhere, I can’t recall now, I heard about someone who would wake up and look at himself in the mirror. He would ask himself, if this was my last day on earth, would I still do the things I’m going to do today?

If the answer was no too many times in a row, he stopped doing what he was doing and started doing something else. Nice and simple.

I’ve adopted this practice of daily motivation, and I would encourage everyone reading this to try it out. It’s a simple, powerful way to look at the world, and it puts your life in perspective in such a dramatic way that you can’t help but be motivated to make positive changes.

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