Category: Psychology

Our Genes and Our Behavior

Reading Time: 8 minutes

“But now we are starting to show genetic influence on individual differences using DNA. DNA is a game changer; it’s a lot harder to argue with DNA than it is with a twin study or an adoption study.”
— Robert Plomin

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It’s not controversial to say that our genetics help explain our physical traits. Tall parents will, on average, have tall children. Overweight parents will, on average, have overweight children. Irish parents have Irish looking kids. This is true to the point of banality and only a committed ignorant would dispute it.

It’s slightly more controversial to talk about genes influencing behavior. For a long time, it was denied entirely. For most of the 20th century, the “experts” in human behavior had decided that “nurture” beat “nature” with a score of 100-0. Particularly influential was the child’s early life — the way their parents treated them in the womb and throughout early childhood. (Thanks Freud!)

So, where are we at now?

Genes and Behavior

Developmental scientists and behavioral scientists eventually got to work with twin studies and adoption studies, which tended to show that certain traits were almost certainly heritable and not reliant on environment, thanks to the natural controlled experiments of twins separated at birth. (This eventually provided fodder for Judith Rich Harris’s wonderful work on development and personality.)

All throughout, the geneticists, starting with Gregor Mendel and his peas, kept on working. As behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin explains, the genetic camp split early on. Some people wanted to understand the gene itself in detail, using very simple traits to figure it out (eye color, long or short wings, etc.) and others wanted to study the effect of genes on complex behavior, generally:

People realized these two views of genetics could come together. Nonetheless, the two worlds split apart because Mendelians became geneticists who were interested in understanding genes. They would take a convenient phenotype, a dependent measure, like eye color in flies, just something that was easy to measure. They weren’t interested in the measure, they were interested in how genes work. They wanted a simple way of seeing how genes work.

By contrast, the geneticists studying complex traits—the Galtonians—became quantitative geneticists. They were interested in agricultural traits or human traits, like cardiovascular disease or reading ability, and would use genetics only insofar as it helped them understand that trait. They were behavior centered, while the molecular geneticists were gene centered. The molecular geneticists wanted to know everything about how a gene worked. For almost a century these two worlds of genetics diverged.

Eventually, the two began to converge. One camp (the gene people) figured out that once we could sequence the genome, they might be able to understand more complicated behavior by looking directly at genes in specific people with unique DNA, and contrasting them against one another.

The reason why this whole gene-behavior game is hard is because, as Plomin makes clear, complex traits like intelligence are not like eye color. There’s no “smart gene” — it comes from the interaction of thousands of different genes and can occur in a variety of combinations. Basic Mendel-style counting (the sort of dominant/recessive eye color gene thing you learned in high school biology) doesn’t work in analyzing the influence of genes on complex traits:

The word gene wasn’t invented until 1903. Mendel did his work in the mid-19th century. In the early 1900s, when Mendel was rediscovered, people finally realized the impact of what he did, which was to show the laws of inheritance of a single gene. At that time, these Mendelians went around looking for Mendelian 3:1 segregation ratios, which was the essence of what Mendel showed, that inheritance was discreet. Most of the socially, behaviorally, or agriculturally important traits aren’t either/or traits, like a single-gene disorder. Huntington’s disease, for example, is a single-gene dominant disorder, which means that if you have that mutant form of the Huntington’s gene, you will have Huntington’s disease. It’s necessary and sufficient. But that’s not the way complex traits work.

The importance of genetics is hard to understate, but until the right technology came along, we could only observe it indirectly. A study might have shown that 50% of the variance in cognitive ability was due to genetics, but we had no idea which specific genes, in which combinations, actually produced smarter people.

But the Moore’s law style improvement in genetic testing means that we can cheaply and effectively map out entire genomes for a very low cost. And with that, the geneticists have a lot of data to work with, a lot of correlations to begin sussing out. The good thing about finding strong correlations between genes and human traits is that we know which one is causative: The gene! Obviously, your reading ability doesn’t cause you to have certain DNA; it must be the other way around. So “Big Data” style screening is extremely useful, once we get a little better at it.

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The problem is that, so far, the successes have been a bit minimal. There are millions of “ATCG” base pairs to check on.  As Plomin points out, we can only pinpoint about 20% of the specific genetic influence for something simple like height, which we know is about 90% heritable. Complex traits like schizophrenia are going to take a lot of work:

We’ve got to be able to figure out where the so-called missing heritability is, that is, the gap between the DNA variants that we are able to identify and the estimates we have from twin and adoption studies. For example, height is about 90 percent heritable, meaning, of the differences between people in height, about 90 percent of those differences can be explained by genetic differences. With genome-wide association studies, we can account for 20 percent of the variance of height, or a quarter of the heritability of height. That’s still a lot of missing heritability, but 20 percent of the variance is impressive.

With schizophrenia, for example, people say they can explain 15 percent of the genetic liability. The jury is still out on how that translates into the real world. What you want to be able to do is get this polygenic score for schizophrenia that would allow you to look at the entire population and predict who’s going to become schizophrenic. That’s tricky because the studies are case-control studies based on extreme, well-diagnosed schizophrenics, versus clean controls who have no known psychopathology. We’ll know soon how this polygenic score translates to predicting who will become schizophrenic or not.

It brings up an interesting question that gets us back to the beginning of the piece: If we know that genetics have an influence on some complex behavioral traits (and we do), and we can with the continuing progress of science and technology, sequence a baby’s genome and predict to a certain extent their reading level, facility with math, facility with social interaction, etc., do we do it?

Well, we can’t until we get a general recognition that genes do indeed influence behavior and do have predictive power as far as how children perform. So far, the track record on getting educators to see that it’s all quite real is pretty bad. Like the Freudians before, there’s a resistance to the “nature” aspect of the debate, probably influenced by some strong ideologies:

If you look at the books and the training that teachers get, genetics doesn’t get a look-in. Yet if you ask teachers, as I’ve done, about why they think children are so different in their ability to learn to read, and they know that genetics is important. When it comes to governments and educational policymakers, the knee-jerk reaction is that if kids aren’t doing well, you blame the teachers and the schools; if that doesn’t work, you blame the parents; if that doesn’t work, you blame the kids because they’re just not trying hard enough. An important message for genetics is that you’ve got to recognize that children are different in their ability to learn. We need to respect those differences because they’re genetic. Not that we can’t do anything about it.

It’s like obesity. The NHS is thinking about charging people to be fat because, like smoking, they say it’s your fault. Weight is not as heritable as height, but it’s highly heritable. Maybe 60 percent of the differences in weight are heritable. That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it. If you stop eating, you won’t gain weight, but given the normal life in a fast-food culture, with our Stone Age brains that want to eat fat and sugar, it’s much harder for some people.

We need to respect the fact that genetic differences are important, not just for body mass index and weight, but also for things like reading disability. I know personally how difficult it is for some children to learn to read. Genetics suggests that we need to have more recognition that children differ genetically, and to respect those differences. My grandson, for example, had a great deal of difficulty learning to read. His parents put a lot of energy into helping him learn to read. We also have a granddaughter who taught herself to read. Both of them now are not just learning to read but reading to learn.

Genetic influence is just influence; it’s not deterministic like a single gene. At government levels—I’ve consulted with the Department for Education—I don’t think they’re as hostile to genetics as I had feared, they’re just ignorant of it. Education just doesn’t consider genetics, whereas teachers on the ground can’t ignore it. I never get static from them because they know that these children are different when they start. Some just go off on very steep trajectories, while others struggle all the way along the line. When the government sees that, they tend to blame the teachers, the schools, or the parents, or the kids. The teachers know. They’re not ignoring this one child. If anything, they’re putting more energy into that child.

It’s frustrating for Plomin because he knows that eventually DNA mapping will get good enough that real, and helpful, predictions will be possible. We’ll be able to target kids early enough to make real differences — earlier than problems actually manifest — and hopefully change the course of their lives for the better. But so far, no dice.

Education is the last backwater of anti-genetic thinking. It’s not even anti-genetic. It’s as if genetics doesn’t even exist. I want to get people in education talking about genetics because the evidence for genetic influence is overwhelming. The things that interest them—learning abilities, cognitive abilities, behavior problems in childhood—are the most heritable things in the behavioral domain. Yet it’s like Alice in Wonderland. You go to educational conferences and it’s as if genetics does not exist.

I’m wondering about where the DNA revolution will take us. If we are explaining 10 percent of the variance of GCSE scores with a DNA chip, it becomes real. People will begin to use it. It’s important that we begin to have this conversation. I’m frustrated at having so little success in convincing people in education of the possibility of genetic influence. It is ignorance as much as it is antagonism.

Here’s one call for more reality recognition.

***

Still Interested? Check out a book by John Brookman of Edge.org with a curated collection of articles published on genetics.

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Maria Konnikova on How we Get Conned

Reading Time: 10 minutes

There’s a scene in the classic Paul Newman film The Sting, where Johnny Hooker (played by a young Robert Redford) tries to get Henry Gondorf (played by Newman) to finally tell him when they’re going to pull the big con. His response tells the tale:

You gotta keep his con even after you take his money. He can’t know you took him.

It’s this same subject that our friend Maria Konnikova — whom we interviewed a few years ago upon the release of her book Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes — has mined with her new book The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For it…Every Time.

It’s a good question: Why do we fall for it every time? Confidence games (cons for short) are a wonderful arena to study the Psychology of Human Misjudgment.

In fact, you could call a good con artist — you have to love the term artist here — a master of human psychology. They are, after all, in the game of manipulating people into parting with their money. They are so good, a successful con is a lot like a magic trick:

When we step into a magic show, we come in actively wanting to be fooled. We want deception to cover our eyes and make our world a tiny bit more fantastical, more awesome than it was before. And the magician, in many ways, uses the exact same approaches as the confidence man—only without the destruction of the con’s end game. “Magic is a kind of a conscious, willing con,” Michael Shermer, a science historian and writer who has devoted many decades to debunking claims about the supernatural and the pseudoscientific, told me one December afternoon. “You’re not being foolish to fall for it. If you don’t fall for it, the magician is doing something wrong.”

Shermer, the founder of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, has thought extensively about how the desire to embrace magic so often translates into susceptibility to its less savory forms. “Take the Penn and Teller cup and balls. I can explain it to you and it still would work. It’s not just knowing the secret; it’s not a trick. It’s the whole skill and art of presentation. There’s a whole narrative—and that’s why it’s effective.” At their root, magic tricks and confidence games share the same fundamental principle: a manipulation of our beliefs. Magic operates at the most basic level of visual perception, manipulating how we see—and don’t see—and experience reality. It changes for an instant what we think possible, quite literally taking advantage of our eyes’ and brains’ foibles to create an alternative version of the world. The con does the same thing, but can go much deeper. Tricks like three-card monte are identical to a magician’s routine—except the intent is more nefarious.

Psychology and show magic have more in common than you’d think: As Shermer says, there are many magic tricks that you can explain ahead of time and they will still work, and still baffle. But…wait…how?

The link between everyday psychological manipulation and show magic is so close that the magician Harry Houdini spent a good portion of his later life trying to sniff out cons in the form of mediums, mystics, and sooth-sayers. Even he couldn’t totally shake free of the illusions:

Mysticism, [Houdini] argued, was a game as powerful as it was dangerous. “It is perfectly rational to suppose that I may be deceived once or twice by a new illusion,” he wrote, “but if my mind, which has been so keenly trained for years to invent mysterious effects, can be deceived, how much more susceptible must the ordinary observer be?”

Such is the power of the illusion. The same, of course, goes for the mental tricks in our psychological make-up. A great example is the gambling casino: Leaving out the increasingly rare exceptions, who ever walks in thinking they have a mathematical edge over the house? Who would be surprised to find out the casino is deliberately manipulating them into losing money with social proof, deprival super-reaction, commitment bias, over-confidence bias, and other tricks? Most intelligent folks aren’t shocked or surprised by the concept of a house edge. And yet casinos continue to do healthy business. We participate in the magic trick. In a perverse sense, we allow ourselves to be conned.

In some ways, confidence artists like Demara have it easy. We’ve done most of the work for them; we want to believe in what they’re telling us. Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.

The Beginning of a Con: The “Put-Up” & The “Mark”

Who makes a good mark for a con artist? Essentially, it could be anyone. Context trumps character. Konnikova wisely retracts from trying to pinpoint exactly who is easiest to con: The truth is, in the right time and place, we can all get hit by a good enough con man. In fact, con artists themselves often make great marks. This is probably linked, in part, to over-confidence. (In fact, you might call conning a con man an…Over-confidence game?)

The con artist starts by getting to know us at a deep level. Konnikova argues that con artists combine excellent judgment of character with a honed ability to show the mark exactly what he wants to see. An experienced con artist has been drowned in positive and negative feedback on what works and does not. Through practice evolution, he’s learned what works. That’s why we end up letting him in, even if we’re on guard:

A con artist looks at everyone at that fine level. When it comes to the put-up, accuracy matters—and con men don’t just want to know how someone looks to them. They want to correctly reflect how they want to be seen.

What’s more, confidence artists can use what they’re learning as they go in order to get us to give up even more. We are more trusting of people who seem more familiar and more similar to us, and we open up to them in ways we don’t to strangers. It makes a certain sense: those like us and those we know or recognize are unlikely to want to hurt us. And they’re more likely to understand us.

There are a few things at play here. The con is triggering a bias from liking/loving, which we all have in us. By getting us committed and then drawing us in slowly, they also trigger commitment bias — in fact, Konnikova explains that the term Confidence Game itself comes from a basic trust exercise: Get into a conversation with a mark, commit them to saying that they trust you, then ask them if they’ll let you hold their wallet as a show of that trust. Robert Cialdini — the psychology professor who wrote the wonderfully useful book Influence — would certainly not be surprised to see that this little con worked pretty frequently. (Maria smartly points out the connection between con artists and Cialdini’s work in the book.)

The “Play,” the “Rope,” the “Tale,” and the “Convincer”

Once the con artist decides that we’re a mark, the fun begins.

After the mark is chosen, it is time to set the actual con in motion: the play, the moment when you first hook a victim and begin to gain her trust. And that is accomplished, first and foremost, through emotion. Once our emotions have been captured, once the con artist has cased us closely enough to identify what it is we want, feeling, at least in the moment, takes over from thinking.

[…]

What visceral states do is create an intense attentional focus. We tune out everything else and tune in to the in-the-moment emotional cues. It’s similar to the feeling of overwhelming hunger or thirst—or the need to go to the bathroom—when you suddenly find yourself unable to think about anything else. In those moments, you’re less likely to deliberate, more likely to just say yes to something without fully internalizing it, and generally more prone to lapses that are outside the focus of your immediate attention.

As far as the context of a good con, emotion rules the day. People in financial straits, or who find themselves in stressful or unusual situations are the easiest to con. This is probably because these situations trigger what Danny Kahneman would call System 1 thinking: Fast, snap judgments, often very bad ones. Influenced by stress, we’re not slowing down and thinking things through. In fact, many people won’t even admit to be conned after the fact because they feel so ashamed of their lack of judgment in the critical moments. (Cult conversions use some of the same tactics.)

Now begins the “Tale”

A successful story does two things well. It relies on the narrative itself rather than any overt arguments or logical appeals to make the case on its own, and it makes us identify with its characters. We’re not expecting to be persuaded or asked to do something. We’re expecting to experience something inherently pleasant, that is, an interesting tale. And even if we’re not relating to the story as such, the mere process of absorbing it can create a bond between us and the teller—a bond the teller can then exploit.

It’s always harder to argue with a story, be it sad or joyful. I can dismiss your hard logic, but not how you feel. Give me a list of reasons, and I can argue with it. Give me a good story, and I can no longer quite put my finger on what, if anything, should raise my alarm bells. After all, nothing alarming is ever said explicitly, only implied.

This is, of course, the con artist preying on our inherent bias for narrative. It’s how we sense-make, but as Cialdini knows so well, it can be used for nefarious purposes to cause a click, whirr automatic reaction where our brain doesn’t realize it’s being tricked. Continuing the fallacy, the con artist reinforces the narrative we’ve been building in our head:

One of the key elements of the convincer, the next stage of the confidence game, is that it is, well, convincing: the convincer makes it seem like you’re winning and everything is going according to plan. You’re getting money on your investment. Your wrinkles are disappearing and your weight, dropping. That doctor really seems to know what he’s doing. That wine really is exceptional, and that painting, exquisite. You sure know how to find the elusive deal. The horse you bet on, both literal and figurative, is coming in a winner.

 The “Breakdown,” and the “Send”

And now comes the break-down. We start to lose. How far can the grifter push us before we balk? How much of a beating can we take? Things don’t completely fall apart yet—that would lose us entirely, and the game would end prematurely — but cracks begin to show. We lose some money. Something doesn’t go according to plan. One fact seems to be off. A figure is incorrectly labeled. A wine bottle is “faulty.” The crucial question: do we notice, or do we double down? High off the optimism of the convincer, certain that good fortune is ours, we often take the second route. When we should be cutting our losses, we instead recommit—and that is entirely what the breakdown is meant to accomplish.

A host of biases are being triggered at this point, turning our brains into mush. We’re starting to lose a little, but we feel if we hang in long enough, we can probably at least come out even, or ahead. (Deprival super-reaction tendency, so common at the roulette table, and sunk-cost fallacies.) We’ve already put our trust in this nice fellow, so any new problems can probably be rationalized as something we “knew could happen all along,” so no reason to worry. (Commitment & consistency, hindsight bias.) And of course, this is where the con artist really has us. It’s called The Send.

The send is that part of the con where the victim is recommitted, that is, asked to invest increasingly greater time and resources into the con artist’s scheme—and in the touch, the con finally comes to its fruition and the mark is completely, irrevocably fleeced.

The End of the Line

Of course, all things eventually come to an end.

The blow-off is often the final step of the con, the grifter’s smooth disappearance after the game has played out. Sometimes, though, the mark may not be so complacent. If that happens, there’s always one more step that can be taken: the fix, when a grifter puts off the involvement of law enforcement to prevent marks from making their complaints official.

Like the scene in The Sting, the ideal con ends without trouble for the con-man: Ideally, the mark won’t even know it was a con. But if they do, Konnikova makes an interesting point that the blow-off and the fix often end up being unnecessary, for reputational reasons. This self-preservation mechanism is one reason so many frauds never come to light, why there are few prosecutions in relation to the amount of fraud really going on:

The blow-off is the easiest part of the game, and the fix hardly ever employed. The Drake fraud persisted for decades—centuries, in fact—because people were too sheepish about coming forward after all that time. Our friend Fred Demara was, time and time again, not actually prosecuted for his transgressions. People didn’t even want to be associated with him, let alone show who they were publically by suing him. The navy had only one thing to say: go quietly—leave, don’t make a scene, and never come back.

Besides the reputational issue, there are clearly elements of Pavlovian mere association at play. Who wants to be reminded of their own stupidity? Much easier to sweep it away as soon as possible, never to be reminded again.

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Confidence Game is an enjoyable read with tales of cons and con artists throughout history – a good reminder of our own fallibility in the face of a good huckster and the power of human misjudgment.

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Dan Ariely on How and Why We Cheat

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Three years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychology and behavioral economics professor at Duke, put out a book called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves. I read the book back closer to when it was released, and I recently revisited it to see how it held up to my initial impressions.

It was even better. In fact, this is one of the most useful books I have ever come across, and my copy is now marked, flagged, and underlined. Let’s get in deep.

Why We Cheat

We’re Cheaters All

Dan is both an astute researcher and a good writer; he knows how to get to the point, and his points matter. His books, which include Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, are not filled with fluff. We’ve mentioned his demonstrations of pluralistic ignorance here before.

In The Honest Truth, Ariely doesn’t just explore where cheating comes from but he digs into which situations make us more likely to cheat than others. Those discussions are what make the book eminently practical, and not just a meditation on cheating. It’s a how-to guide on our own dishonesty.

Ariely was led down that path because of a friend of his who had worked with Enron:

It was of course, possible that John and everyone else involved with Enron was deeply corrupt, but I began to think that there may have been a different type of dishonest at work–one that relates more to wishful blindness and is practiced by people like John, you, and me. I started wondering if the problem of dishonesty goes deeper than just a few bad apples and if this kind of wishful blindness takes place in other companies as well. I also wondered if my friends and I would have behaved similarly if we had been the ones consulting for Enron.

This is a beautiful setup that led him to a lot of interesting conclusions in his years of subsequent research. Here’s (some of) what Dan found.

  1. Cheating was standard, but only a little. Ariely and his co-researchers ran the same experiment in many different variations, and with many different topics to investigate. Nearly every time, he found evidence of a standard level of cheating. In other experiments, the outcome was the same. A little cheating was everywhere. People generally did not grab all they could, but only as much as they could justify psychologically.
  2. Increasing the cheating reward or moderately altering the risk of being caught didn’t affect the outcomes much. In Ariely’s experience, the cheating stayed steady: A little bit of stretching every time.
  3. The more abstracted from the cheating we are, the more we cheat. This was an interesting one–it turns out the less “connected” we feel to our dishonesty, the more we’re willing to do it. This ranges from being more willing to cheat to earn tokens exchangeable for real money than to earn actual money, to being more willing to “tap” a golf ball to improve its lie than actually pick it up and move it with our hands.
  4. A nudge not to cheat works better before we cheat than after. In other words, we need to strengthen our morals just before we’re tempted to cheat, not after. And even more interesting, when Ariely took his findings to the IRS and other organizations who could benefit from being cheated less, they barely let him in the door! The incentives in organizations are interesting.
  5. We think we’re more honest than everyone else. Ariely showed this pretty conclusively by studying golfers and asking them how much they thought others cheated and how much they thought they cheated themselves. It was a rout: They consistently underestimated their own dishonesty versus others’. I wasn’t surprised by this finding.
  6. We underestimate how blinded we can become to incentives. In a brilliant chapter called “Blinded by our Motivations,” Ariely discusses how incentives skew our judgment and our moral compass. He shows how pharma reps are masters of this game–and yet we allow it to continue. If we take Ariely seriously, the laws against conflicts of interest need to be stronger.
  7. Related to (6), disclosure does not seem to decrease incentive-caused bias. This reminds me of Charlie Munger’s statement, “I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. Never a year passes that I don’t get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” Ariely has discussed incentive-caused bias in teacher evaluation before.
  8. We cheat more when our willpower is depleted. This doesn’t come as a total surprise: Ariely found that when we’re tired and have exerted a lot of mental or physical energy, especially in resisting other temptations, we tend to increase our cheating. (Or perhaps more accurately, decrease our non-cheating.)
  9. We cheat ourselves, even if we have direct incentive not to. Ariely was able to demonstrate that even with a strong financial incentive to honestly assess our own abilities, we still think we cheat less than we do, and we hurt ourselves in the process.
  10. Related to (9), we can delude ourselves into believing we were honest all along. This goes to show the degree to which we can damage ourselves by our cheating as much as others. Ariely also discusses how good we are at pounding our own conclusions into our brain even if no one else is being persuaded, as Munger has mentioned before.
  11. We cheat more when we believe the world “owes us one.” This section of the book should feel disturbingly familiar to anyone. When we feel like we’ve been cheated or wronged “over here,” we let the universe make it up to us “over there.” (By cheating, of course.) Think about the last time you got cut off in traffic, stiffed on proper change, and then unloaded on by your boss. Didn’t you feel more comfortable reaching for what wasn’t yours afterwards? Only fair, right?
  12. Unsurprisingly, cheating has a social contagion aspect. If we see someone who we identify with and whose group we feel we belong to cheating, it makes us (much) more likely to cheat. This has wide-ranging social implications.
  13. Finally, nudging helps us cheat less. If we’re made more aware of our moral compass through specific types of reminders and nudges, we can decrease our own cheating. Perhaps most important is to keep ourselves out of situations where we’ll be tempted to cheat or act dishonestly, and to take pre-emptive action if it’s unavoidable.

There’s much more in the book, and we highly recommend you read it for that as well as Dan’s general theory on cheating. The final chapter on the steps that old religions have taken to decrease dishonesty among their followers is a fascinating bonus. (Reminded me of Nassim Taleb’s retort that heavy critics of religion, like Dawkins, take it too literally and under-appreciate the social value of its rules and customs. It’s also been argued that religion has an evolutionary basis.)

Check out the book, and while you’re at up, pick up his other two: Predictably Irrational, and The Upside of Irrationality.

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Meditation: Why Bother?

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Mindfulness in Plain English

Via the amazing Mindfulness in Plain English, which I’d recommend pairing with this guide to meditation.

Meditation is not easy. It takes time and it takes energy. It also takes grit, determination, and discipline. It requires a host of personal qualities that we normally regard as unpleasant and like to avoid whenever possible. We can sum up all of these qualities in the American word gumption. Meditation takes gumption. It is certainly a great deal easier just to sit back and watch television.

So why bother? Why waste your time and energy when you could be doing something else. We know that it can make you 10% happier but is that enough?

Why? Simple. Because you are human. Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time; you can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back, and usually when you least expect it. All of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue, you sit up, take stock, and realize your actual situation in life.”

Sometimes it hits us. We’re just barely hanging on while our life is flying by.

You manage to make ends meet somehow and look okay from the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything caving in on you— you keep those to yourself. You are a mess, and you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under all of that, you just know that there has to be some other way to live, a better way to look at the world, a way to touch life more fully.

We know there is more to life. As if there is another layer that we haven’t accessed yet.

You feel that there really is a whole other realm of depth and sensitivity available in life; somehow, you are just not seeing it. You wind up feeling cut off. You feel insulated from the sweetness of experience by some sort of sensory cotton. You are not really touching life. You are not “making it” again. Then even that vague awareness fades away, and you are back to the same old reality. The world looks like the usual foul place. It is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights.

And so we blame ourselves, forgetting that we’re human. This is the same malady that affects every human.

It is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms: chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, blocked up feelings and emotional deadness— many, many arms. None of us is entirely free from it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves with goals, projects, and concerns about status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception, a little voice in the back of the mind that keeps saying, “Not good enough yet. Need to have more. Have to make it better. Have to be better.” It is a monster, a monster that manifests everywhere in subtle forms.

The same themes repeat throughout our lives: jealousy, suffering, discontent, and stress. They are in the music we listen to and the shows we watch. They are in our very nature.

If Only Syndrome

Life seems to be a perpetual struggle, an enormous effort against staggering odds. And what is our solution to all this dissatisfaction? We get stuck in the “if only” syndrome. If only I had more money, then I would be happy. If only I could find somebody who really loved me; if only I could lose twenty pounds; if only I had a color TV, a hot tub, and curly hair; and on and on forever. Where does all this junk come from, and more important, what can we do about it? It comes from the conditions of our own minds. It is a deep, subtle, and pervasive set of mental habits, a Gordian knot that we have tied bit by bit and that we can only unravel in just that same way, one piece at a time. We can tune up our awareness, dredge up each separate piece, and bring it out into the light. We can make the unconscious conscious, slowly, one piece at a time.

Human culture has taught us odd responses to the ever-changing landscape of our world. When things are positive we grasp.

We categorize experiences. We try to stick each perception, every mental change in this endless flow, into one of three mental pigeon holes: it is good, bad, or neutral. Then, according to which box we stick it in, we perceive with a set of fixed habitual mental responses. If a particular perception has been labeled “good,” then we try to freeze time right there. We grab onto that particular thought, fondle it, hold it, and we try to keep it from escaping. When that does not work, we go all-out in an effort to repeat the experience that caused the thought.

Then there is the other side of the mind where we have a box labelled “bad.” We try to push these experiences away. We ignore.

When we perceive something “bad,” we try to push it away. We try to deny it, reject it, and get rid of it any way we can. We fight against our own experience. We run from pieces of ourselves. Let us call this mental habit “rejecting.” Between these two reactions lies the “neutral” box. Here we place the experiences that are neither good nor bad. They are tepid, neutral, uninteresting. We pack experience away in the neutral box so that we can ignore it and thus return our attention to where the action is, namely, our endless round of desire and aversion. So this “neutral” category of experience gets robbed of its fair share of our attention.

What’s the result? An endless treadmill of seeking pleasure and fleeing from pain, while ignoring most of what happens. And we “wonder why life tastes so flat.”

No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail. No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you. And in between those times, life is so boring you could scream. Our minds are full of opinions and criticisms. We have built walls all around ourselves and are trapped in the prison of our own likes and dislikes. We suffer.

Suffering

Suffering is a key word in meditation. Its understanding is important.

The Pali word is dukkha, and it does not just mean the agony of the body. It means that deep, subtle sense of dissatisfaction that is a part of every mind moment and that results directly from the mental treadmill. The essence of life is suffering, said the Buddha. At first glance this statement seems exceedingly morbid and pessimistic. It even seems untrue. After all, there are plenty of times when we are happy. Aren’t there? No, there are not. It just seems that way. Take any moment when you feel really fulfilled and examine it closely. Down under the joy, you will find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension that no matter how great this moment is, it is going to end. No matter how much you just gained, you are inevitably either going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have and scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die; in the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory.

That all sounds rather bleak when viewed through the lens of the treadmill that we’re on. But there is another way to look at the universe.

It is a level of functioning in which the mind does not try to freeze time, does not grasp onto our experience as it flows by, and does not try to block things out and ignore them. It is a level of experience beyond good and bad, beyond pleasure and pain. It is a lovely way to perceive the world, and it is a learnable skill. It is not easy, but it can be learned.

Happiness and peace are really the prime issues in human existence. That is what all of us are seeking. This is often a bit hard to see because we cover up those basic goals with layers of surface objectives. We want food, wealth, sex, entertainment, and respect. We even say to ourselves that the idea of “happiness” is too abstract: “Look, I am practical. Just give me enough money and I will buy all the happiness I need.” Unfortunately, this is an attitude that does not work. Examine each of these goals and you will find that they are superficial. You want food. Why? Because I am hungry. So you are hungry— so what? Well, if I eat, I won’t be hungry, and then I’ll feel good. Ah ha! “Feel good”: now there is the real item. What we really seek is not the surface goals; those are just means to an end. What we are really after is the feeling of relief that comes when the drive is satisfied.

We want to end the tension between desire and aversion.

You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them. This does not mean that you lie down on the road and invite everybody to walk all over you. It means that you continue to live a very normal-looking life, but live from a whole new viewpoint. You do the things that a person must do, but you are free from that obsessive, compulsive drivenness of your own desires. You want something, but you don’t need to chase after it. You fear something, but you don’t need to stand there quaking in your boots. This sort of mental cultivation is very difficult.

Have we overdeveloped the material aspects of life at the expense of the deeper emotional ones?

Meditation

Meditation is intended to purify the mind. It cleanses the thought process of what can be called psychic irritants, things like greed, hatred, and jealousy, which keep you snarled up in emotional bondage. Meditation brings the mind to a state of tranquillity and awareness, a state of concentration and insight.

In our society, we are great believers in education. We believe that knowledge makes a person civilized. Civilization, however, polishes a person only superficially. Subject our noble and sophisticated gentleperson to the stresses of war or economic collapse, and see what happens. It is one thing to obey the law because you know the penalties and fear the consequences; it is something else entirely to obey the law because you have cleansed yourself from the greed that would make you steal and the hatred that would make you kill.

The more we understand the more flexible and tolerant we become. The more compassionate we can be.

Meditation is a lot like cultivating a new land. To make a field out of a forest, first you have to clear the trees and pull out the stumps. Then you till the soil and fertilize it, sow your seed, and harvest your crops. To cultivate your mind, first you have to clear out the various irritants that are in the way— pull them right out by the root so that they won’t grow back. Then you fertilize: you pump energy and discipline into the mental soil. Then you sow the seed, and harvest your crops of faith, morality, mindfulness, and wisdom.

Meditation sharpens the mind.

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases, and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion.

While these are great reasons they are only promises on paper. The only way to know if it’s worth the effort is to see for yourself.

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Attentional Blink

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Despite my experiments with meditation, I have difficulty focusing on my breath if I take a few days off meditating or yoga.

The world is distracting, there are texts coming in, fire trucks going by, an ache in my back, and an itch on my nose.

This, however, is the way we move forward. After a few days of regular meditation, I’m back. My ability to concentrate and focus becomes so much higher. I read with greater ease and retain more information.

This passage by Winifred Gallagher in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, talking about attentional blink, is worth flagging.

… different types of attentional training affect the brain and behavior in different ways. Practices that feature neutral, single-pointed concentration, such as mindfulness meditation, particularly improve your ability to focus as you go about your daily life. ‘Attentional blink’ experiments suggest why. If you’re shown two letters flashed a half-second apart in a series of twenty numbers, for example, you’ll almost certainly see the first letter but miss the second one. The glitch is caused by ‘sticky’ attention, which keeps you glued to the first cue, preventing your from catching it the next time. After three months of breath-centered meditation, however, you’re able to ‘let go’ of the first letter quickly and be ready to focus on the second.

No mere psych-lab curiosity, the blink research, which offers yet more proof that the world you experience is much more subjective than you assume, has important real-life implications. Even when you think you’re focused on what’s going on, these data show, you miss things that occur in quick succession, including fleeting facial and vocal cues. … ‘Sensitive attention is a key substrate of successful social interactions, and the consequences of missing that kind of information can be quite significant.’ Indeed, research done by Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California at San Francisco, shows that slight, rapid changes in a person’s expression are highly meaningful, if unspoken, indications of what’s really on his or her mind. Most people don’t read these cues well, he finds, but attentional training can greatly improve this interpretive ability.

Because the blink phenomenon has long been regarded as relatively fixed, the fact that it can be modified helps prove that attention is indeed a trainable skill.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life is filled with tips and strategies on how to improve your ability to concentrate and pay attention.

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Cognitive Exhaustion: Resting Your Mental Muscle

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cognitive exhaustion

In the go-go-go world of today we need to be sure we’re giving our mind ample opportunity to rest and relax — recognizing when we need a mental break.

I usually take a walk. Or go to a yoga class.

It turns out how we rest our minds has a big impact. Taking a walk isn’t enough, it depends on where you’re walking.

In Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman elaborates on cognitive exhaustion:

Tightly focused attention gets fatigued—much like an overworked muscle—when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.

The antidote to attention fatigue is the same as for the physical kind: take a rest. But what rests a mental muscle?

Try switching from the effort of top-down control to more passive bottom-up activities, taking a relaxing break in a restful setting. The most restful surroundings are in nature, argues Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan, who proposes what he calls “attention restoration theory.”

Such restoration occurs when we switch from effortful attention, where the mind needs to suppress distractions, to letting go and allowing our attention to be captured by whatever presents itself. But only certain kinds of bottom-up focus act to restore energy for focused attention. Surfing the Web, playing video games, or answering email does not.

We do well to unplug regularly; quiet time restores our focus and composure. But that disengagement is just the first step. What we do next matters, too. Taking a walk down a city street, Kaplan points out, still puts demands on attention— we’ve got to navigate through crowds, dodge cars, and ignore honking horns and the hum of street noise.

In contrast, a walk through a park or in the woods puts little such demand on attention. We can restore by spending time in nature— even a few minutes strolling in a park or any setting rich in fascinations like the muted reds of clouds at sunset or a butterfly’s flutter. This triggers bottom-up attention “modestly,” as Kaplan’s group put it, allowing circuits for top-down efforts to replenish their energy, restoring attentiveness and memory, and improving cognition.

A walk through an arboretum led to better focus on return to concentrated tasks than a stroll though downtown. Even sitting by a mural of a nature scene— particularly one with water in it— is better than the corner coffee shop.

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