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Episode 44: Willpower and Change
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all right good evening dr. Lyle how are you doing good good to hear your voice excellent good to have you on again so you know this week we're talking about willpower and change and I know that if livers were to visit your website this team dynamics org they would see a lot of different audio clips and video clips and and things with relation to evolutionary psychology and a couple of the things that you have on there is about willpower and I first heard about your take on willpower called the willpower paradox this is through a health program and you were kind of explaining why it is that people have such a difficult time to beat their genes and with regards to health and food choices and how it doesn't make any sense it's quite a paradox that they might have plenty of willpower in one area of their life well yet when it comes to food they have quite a difficult time doing that and so I'm looking forward to hear you talk about a little bit about that but also it kind of in general about willpower and change sure but but but before we talk about willpower and change kind of the theme of the show has always been to beat your genes and to understand what our genes are trying to get us to do and then try to see if that matches up with whether that whether it's our long-term happiness or not and if it is great but if it's not we have to learn how to outsmart our genes and a lot of listeners have emailed me and I know I've talked with some of my friends and family members who listen to the show and the underlying argument tends to come up the nature versus nurture argument whether we are just born in a certain way and things aren't going to change and that's just how our nervous system is wired and on the other hand whether we are born a certain way and society crafts us our friends craft us our parents craft us in a particular mold and and we are the product of those experiences and that's kind of the heart of part of a lot of the understanding of evolutionary psychology is which one is which and you've made some very very compelling points that it's actually overwhelmingly nature it's how we are built and how we are designed and how our nervous system is is is is processed by how our nervous system is excuse me yeah so this is a this is interesting to me because there's a video right now going viral and it a video it's it's a it's a big jerk of a father who decides to scare his daughter and he scares his daughter she's sitting inside this convertible of his and she wants to see the roof go up and as the roof is going up and closing onto the car he is mimicking his facial expressions and mimicking his voice as though she's getting eaten by a car and of course she's a young child so she doesn't know any better and she starts to believe that the car is actually going to going to eat her so I want to listen listen in the video that we have here oh my god I told ya oh my god oh my god now the daughter is crying after this and she eventually feels a little bit better but you know for any normal person this is not something fun to watch a child is crying for no reason and so started looking at some of the comments and some of the pages where this is shared and a lot of people were saying that well the dad is now scarred the child for life and that he is going to have serious emotional issues for the rest of her life because of this and while this is a very cruel thing to do to your own kid or really to anybody what say you dr. Lau is just going to star her for life yeah this is sort of unfortunate it's actually quite unfortunate that that are that the psychologists of the world are very uneducated in the architecture of the mind and so a lot of the clinician social workers counselors etc the the academics wouldn't weigh in on this just because this is not there this is not their thing and they they would be smart enough to know that they wouldn't know in most cases so if you're if you're a perception psychologist you actually would say that you you wouldn't know but believe me all the clinicians in the world that are working with people they're going to step right up and they're going to have a cow about this as if this is a big deal is of course not a big deal so let's let me explain why this is so the what what traumatic experiences do is that they are essentially they are mechanisms you have mechanisms to tell you to calibrate for you how traumatic a situation is in other words what was the extent of the possible loss and what were the circumstances and so the minds job is to actually engineer biological success and so in this case this little girl now is now now temporarily traumatized from being in that car for God's sakes because this idiot father right it's hard to believe that anybody would pull a stunt like this I I'll tell you whose traumatized is the guy's wife and she'll never forget this so uh here's the that's the price this guy will pay behind this the but no the little girl has now had an experience of many experiences that she will have when she will be frightened and and there will be experiences that will be painful in her life and painful and frightening experiences do not diminish your capacity for happiness at all any more than if you if you slice your finger then you know and you when you're cutting cutting an apple it's going to hurt like The Living Daylights and and and there's going to be a process of that healing up it's going to take a while depending upon how bad the cut is but if the cut does not do permanent damage to because it's such an incredible trauma and doesn't slice its way through a nerve that can't repair itself then we're going to be fine and so you you have many many traumatic experiences physically in your life and most of those have no lasting impact a few of them might and in if it's if it's bad enough the experiences will be you know it could actually damage you physically the mind is essentially very much equivalent to the body in this way so for example let's suppose that you got sent over to Vietnam and you didn't have one terrifying experience like this little girl just had you had hundreds of them and it went on for months okay so now you have a situation where the mind had to be hyper-vigilant for months at a time and to become highly sensitized to sudden sounds or and certain certain you know patterns of movement certain conditions about where the person was relative to visual sight line whether wood they were exposed or not exposed and then they actually didn't didn't hear or think or have a told to them that they were going to die they actually saw deaf all around them so this is an entirely different order of magnitude of the of trauma as to what this little girl is going through so this little girl will have no memory of this thing within three years or less and it will have absolutely no impact on her psychology as she goes forward in the future any more than you have any impact on you on you for a skinned knee that you that you suffered on the playground at age seven and then you got up crying about like she's crying because your knee was skinned up and it hurts and it was upsetting and you cried a little bit and then two or three weeks later it's over that is the architecture of the mind and our our friends in in the social sciences in the in the counseling side of the social sciences are not aware of this they don't understand that the mind is designed to engineer biological success in gene production if you understand that then you would never design an organism to be somehow terrified and compromised and have its ability to experience happiness and to be hyper-vigilant behind one short-term incident that didn't wind up with any bodily damage at all and therefore is of relatively small consequence in this organisms natural history mm-hmm and now would we expect that this girl would have trouble twenty years down the line in maybe completing certain goals or exercise that willpower and say her finances or studying her food intake of course not the we have we have all kinds of people walking through years here is one of my favorites so there are people who live through the Holocaust and and then there's people that live through the Holocaust and then they told stories to other people so little kids you know in 1960 heard stories of their grandparents who lived through the Holocaust about how the Nazis knocked on the doors now terrible it was and it was terrible so they're recounting their stories now what's really entertaining for me is to hear people now saying well my grandfather told us these stories and I'm terrified and it really changed my life no it didn't it didn't change your life one iota so here's what happens you are capable of having a great many painful memories in your nervous system that have essentially no impact on your day-to-day functioning whatsoever those memories will be called up when the stimulus conditions are consistent with those memories and by God if it's secondhand memories they're much weaker because your nervous system you know isn't really so sure that any of this really happened and this might have been such a bogus story and so when you're a little kid if you go to go to bed at night and your mom your grandmother just told a horrible story of the Nazis then while that is in your mind for a few nights or several nights even you might think about that you know you and you might you might listen on the to the door the door knocks a little bit it might cross your mind oh my god I wonder if it's the Nazis that is quite possible but to think that that is having any appreciable impact on your nervous system as you continue in your life under stimulus conditions that have absolutely nothing to do with that is just the the height of absurdity and of course it has nothing to do with it so this is why we find that trauma has almost essentially nothing to do with people's futures and how it is that they go about and live their lives and the reason is is that the traumas the memories of the traumas and the impact on traumas are essentially little little chips inside your head that say the following if a situation comes up very much like this again in the future that happens then I need you to experience some anxiety to try to avoid it and to organize and avoidance reactions in order to avoid the possible loss that is how the system is constructed so if the SS doesn't knock on your door these things never get activated now in in pop psychology the notion is is that the mind is this sort of sort of dumb recording device that actually works in in hot wax so if you have some terrible thing happen to you when you're three it's embossed into the hot wax and it biases the system and how it works for the rest of its life that is a that is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of how the brain works and so what does this have to do as well actually no what does this have to do with willpower and change because I know in my practice I've regard I've heard certain stories from from patients and I know that that I've you know I've talked to friends here and there and something that keeps coming up as well when they do go on the on the topic of you know trying to change something or trying to accomplish a certain goal or they can't keep finances straight or can't keep you know an exercise program or anything like that it's that oh I don't really have a lot of willpower because you know I just I grew up in a really tense environment because my mom or dad were just really strict and so I decided to rebel and so I've never really you know whatever whatever explanation is but it tends to work in the past sure so people are just pootle or ministers yeah people are mystified as to why it is that they are having difficulties essentially getting themselves organized and have behavioural commitment to some kind of positive change the if we're going to try to understand change we could talk about willpower which we will willpower has more than one aspect to it that's interesting there is a specific aspect we'll talk about a little bit later that's a very interesting discover discovery by Roy Baumeister and others having to do with sugar in the brain so that's that's a that's a short term phenomenon that that's quite interesting that we can will talk about in a little bit but more importantly when it comes to the the more general concept of the determination and and follow-through on making in any sort of change what we're going to do is we're going to try to understand the whole process of change from a from the brass tacks perspective where we really where we really understand the mechanics of how change takes place so you can order to understand change we're going to have to understand why there's behavior as it exists in the first place and the reason why there's a given behavior that is repetitive or a behavior pattern of an individual or an animal in the first place is simply because the mind is running cost-benefit analyses on the situation and it's arriving at what it believes is the most efficient behavioral strategy in order to achieve the ends of optimal survival and reproductive goals so that's what what a brain is is this it's a device that computes probabilities in order to arrive at biological optimum behavioral strategies so when you want to see that the Jo always goes down to Taco Bell and gets a couple of tacos and comes home after work you're saying well I wonder what he does that the answer is is that his brain is computer - cost-benefit analysis on on all of the alternative strategies that it can consider so it can't consider going to a fresh french restaurant six miles away that it doesn't even know exists so that that doesn't get computed inside of his brain what gets computed inside of his brain all the are the alternatives that he is aware of know the alternatives that he hypothesizes he might hypothesize getting a hamburger hamburger Hamlet but it might turn out that hamburger Hamlet shut down last week and he doesn't know it so he's considering that possibility even though that possibility doesn't exist but he perceives that it exists so what individuals are doing is they're running a cost-benefit analysis on estimation as to what what the real situation is in reality and their brain automatically arrives at the optimum for the the ratio between effort and benefit in other words it runs a cost-benefit analysis and it's simply a shopper as it just in the way that you would shop for a set of new tires and you pick up the phone and you call five or six places and you'd find out who sells those specific tires for the least that's exactly what your mind is doing is it shopping through its alternatives and it's looking for the best ratio you might not for example decide to go with the cheapest tire somebody may tell you oh well for just five dollars more we can get you a substantially better tire that'll loot last 20% longer and therefore it's cost-effective since it's got a better ratio with respect to energy expended you might then buy the most amor expensive tire because you felt like it was a better value so what the nervous system is doing is its computing values and what values are is they're simply situations or interactions that that the living entity has with things outside of it and those things outside of it are potential targets for interaction for the exchange of molecules or energy and as a result of that as a result of those exchanges there is a potential increase in the statistical likelihood of the gene survival of the organism so if it's a young guy trying to hit on on a young girl then he is she is a stimulus entity is you know is housing some eggs that his nervous system wants to get to through sexual activity that would then it'd be worded to do that that it would increase the statistical likelihood of his genes surviving so this is actually what's happening inside of brands and it doesn't matter the brain that we're talking about it's an aardvark or a Toronto Saurus Rex or or a you know a bower bird or a human it's all the same process and it's going to turn out that there's going to be two major sources of data as well as a computational system that is going to determine what it is that this organism is going to do so what it's going to get has a a universal value system that's already precomputed at birth that it's already preset so for example so for example suppose that you had a a worm living in a primordial swamp and this thing has the ability to detect temperature so it can detect you know if it gets below 80 degrees it's too cold and it's going to freeze gets above 90 it's too hot it's going to fry so this thing has a preference for being in the middle and so that that would be a a computational input that this thing gets sensory information in and it is essentially now is informed about a variance in the environment and by having information on this thing and if that information is associated with an increase or decrease likely to gene survival then it values a good temperature on a dis values bad temperature so it doesn't it but it's not that simple so then I want you to think of the same organism as that it can also smell food so it can feel temperature and it can smell food so it may turn out that it's getting very hungry and it's staying where it's comfortable for it but it can smell that there's food over to the last and over to the left it can also detect that it's getting too cold so what this thing has to do is it has to compute whether or not it's worth going into the cold in order to get the food and it must be able to run that computation accurately in order to arrive at an optimal behavioral strategy so when we start it gets much more complicated we can now add that it can hear a predator and then we're going to all see that it can see a mate so it can see a mate hear a predator you can you can smell food and the concealed temperature when we start getting in different sensory inputs those sensory inputs all can be informing it in a different way about variances in the environment that are associated with its survival reproductive chances and then the job of the brain is to run a mathematical calculation that will arrive at the optimal solution and that's what that organism does and it doesn't matter if it's an aardvark or Saurus Rex or a beetle okay or a human it is all doing the same thing a more complicated organism is simply an organism that runs more more possible contingencies it has more more in different sensory inputs the sensory inputs are richer in terms of the amount of data that it's bringing in about the environmental variance and something else winds up being extremely important and that is if you have an organism with a very big brain what you can do is you can actually record data from the past and so what you have is a memory system and so with a memory system what happens is is that you can vastly improve the accuracy of the organism in order to run the optimal clock calculations so for example if you're a rabbit and you're thinking about getting food and you go out there and you can smell the food you can't hear a predator but you know that about this time of day about 3 p.m. there's always a fox that seems to be coming by this area at about that time then if you have a memory system even if you don't have sensory data about the Fox you have sensory data about a variance that is associated with the Fox so you run a correlation coefficient on the time of day along with the likelihood of the Fox arriving and you wind up altering your behavior in a way that is not actually organized by the innate system so it is the innate system is the relationship between how far the foxes away and how far the food is away that's and that's a fixed mechanism that resides inside the system but the fixed mechanism is very flexible because what happens is if it has a memory system that memory system then runs correlates as to environmental variables that are associated with variables that are already computed and prefixed relative to each other inside the system and this now makes this organism extremely flexible in its behavior okay so what what motivation is is simply the organism is bringing in information with its sensory environment it's computing that against variances in its memory as well as the direct inputs to the sensory environment it now computes a whole bunch of possible behavioral alternatives depending upon how creative and flexible this particular organism is and how how ingenious its mind is about about coming up with alternative possible behavior patterns as it tries to work the calculus as to what is the best solution for the problem of what's the next best move that I can make for survival and reproductive success that is how this thing works so if we're looking at change it's going to turn out that there's going to be two avenues of change in the system we are not going to change the underlying fixed universal value system and when I say that it's fixed let me explain that if this organism can smell food in the cold water and it can detect that if it goes towards that food there's a 90% chance that it's going to die by the time it would get the food and get back to the warm water and yet there's a hundred percent chance that it's going to die if it doesn't get some food then it will take that chance okay it's going to run those it's going to run those those mathematical estimates that's in fact what a brain is it's a mathematical estimator gene reproduction statistics and so the so it's going to turn out the bat system you're not going to change give an X amount of threat to my survival by food deprivation versus X amount Y amount is survival as a result of freezing the system knows how to calibrate those relative relative intensity of those sensory inputs and to come up with the solution that has been the solution that the genes encoded because that those were successful so that is that is a fixed value system that you are born with and that we're not going to modify however it's going to turn out that there's going to be two primary ways that you're going to watch the change of behavior patterns and that's going to be number one if the environment changes so you're going to watch people change their behavior patterns if the environment changes so Joe goes down to the sandwich shop and always gets the same sandwich but then they close the sandwich shops and he's been going there for 14 years well now we're going to observe that his behavior changes so he's not going to do the same thing as he did before he's got it he has to now run the computations on the existing data now and come up with a new solution so it's going to turn out that one of the most effective ways to change people's behavior it's actually to change the structure of their environment that winds up being a very effective way to get to get things done now there's a second way that behavior gets changed and that is that the the information changes inside the brain so the so it's going to turn out for example that you thought that you were safe going 60 miles an hour on on a road that had had some wetness and then one day you in swerving to to miss a rabbit you slide very out of control on a slightly wet road and going 60 miles an hour and you survived but now it's you've now got new information inside your brain your brain now says you know what I'm not as safe as I thought I was I had overestimated my ability to manage the car at 60 miles an hour with the road wet and so now the nervous system is altered okay so it is through new information or a change in environment which is also new information is how it is that behavior gets changed so psychologists are notoriously frustrated with the fact that people do not change their behavior there's the old joke about you know how long how so I don't know how many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb answer one but the lightbulb has to want to change you know I mean this is these sort of frustration because psychologists are very often frustrated that their clients don't change their behavior and the reason they don't change their behavior is because they don't get any new compelling information that alters their cost-benefit analysis that a new behavioral pattern would be more effective okay this is why they don't change and so if you're trying to figure out why you keep doing something over and over again and even though you suspect that you might it might be a more optimal behavior pattern to do X but instead you continue to do Y the answer you continue to do Y is because the stimulus environment and the information in your head you essentially are continuing to come up with the same equation you run the same math and you wind up with the same solution and the cost-benefit analysis says we were as far as we know this is the right solution okay so that is why the human behavior is so consistent over time is because the the people will will continue to run essentially what they do is they optimize their life their life's behavior according to the ecological constraints and their understanding of the ecological constraints in other words it's not only the app illogical constraints that you can see it's also what you can't see so that rabbit may be almost starving to death and he may decide that he cannot risk going out into the meadow because this is the time of the day that the damn Fox comes every day and that Fox has been out there every day for the last twenty seven days but it turns out unbeknownst to the rabbit that the Fox got killed last night so now that rabbit may have literally starved to death even though there was a you know even though he would have been safe and so your what you think is true versus what is true is almost always two different things so your brain is only an estimate that what you believe to be true about reality is only an estimate about what is true it's a guest okay smarter better informed people are more accurate about what reality really is and they make less mistakes all right so that's why smarter people have less auto accidents they have they have less bad drug interactions that kill them they you know they fell off the buildings laughs why because their brains are out really analyzing risk rewards more effectively and they make less mistakes okay in fact the entire concept of quote smart is the notion that there is additional information that is accurate and therefore aiding the reduction of error that's what a smart phone is that's what you know smart bombs are what this is all about the reduction of error okay so the change happens when people get new information that makes them believe that they're all vision of how reality works is incorrect and so as a result they then they really don't have any choice when when you get when you get information that is very compelling ie compelling meaning that their reasoning mechanisms that are that you are born with inside your head that understand how reality works the reality doesn't have contradictions in it so it has apparent contradictions but it doesn't have any real contradictions in it anybody that's a mystic that doesn't believe that we actually know the forces of the universe is a hypocrite every time you step on an airplane because obviously that's an incredible thing that is happening that you can go up in the air 37,000 feet fly to Rome and be safe and expect overwhelmingly to get there without any problem how does that happen because it turns out that an awful lot of people know you know an awful lot about physics and it has been worked out and we know that things work in a certain way your brain absolutely can figure this out and it can it can figure out all kinds of things and as beautiful logical mechanisms that are built into it very smart brains can work on very smart very complex problems brains that aren't so smart that our human brains can reason very well about problems that are less complex and they are there then they will come up with their understanding about how life works and then from there they will run their cost-benefit analysis and they relieve it live their life now if we're going to try to figure out you know why what is it's going to take to actually shift their behavior of something that we believe is not in their best center it's going to take compelling evidence it's going to take figuring out what it is that they think and why it is that they think that and then we're going to have to engage them in a reasoning process where we present them with evidence that they see in fact that what they believe to be true is not true okay and if they come to believe something new and different whether it's right or wrong if they come to believe something different they will shift their behavior in the direction of what it is that they think to be true okay in with new information in order to optimize their cost-benefit analysis so in the final analysis the most effective therapy is nothing other than education and what that education is is the most insightful education about the nature of the problem that the person is facing why it is that they are unhappy and frustrated okay there's reasons why they are unhappy and frustrated and that is because they have self calibrating mechanisms that actually inform them about how effective they should be in one of the three major pursuits of life which is mating friendship or trade and so they are self calibrated by their interaction with the world as they observe others and they observe the talents and trading resources of other people in these domains and then they they calibrate themselves in these same domains and if it turns out that their feedback is below what it is that they expect then they are frustrated and depressed about this if their feedback is about right there there are fine if their feedback is better than they think it should be they are quietly elated and a little bit paranoid that they're going to lose it okay so this is this is sort of how the nervous system works so if you think about this what you have is you have very sophisticated self calibrating equipment that tells you how well you should be doing at something this is like for example somebody that needs to get a B in chemistry to finish their major and maybe go to grad school or something so they're working out there B in chemistry and they are they are about a B student in this type of class so when they work very hard and they get it all is fine with the world if they work very hard and they get an A they are ecstatic if they work very hard and they get a D they're depressed okay so in other words it all has to do with their self calibration if they're an A student and an expectant a and they work really hard and they get a C they're devastated if they're a D student and they work really hard and they get a B they're elated so how it is that a person feels all depends upon how successful a my being relative to what my self-calibration is the the process of trying to have goals and change is the notion that I expect that if I put my energies in I can get an improvement in performance in one of these three areas and that and and so this is this is what a goal is and when someone is frustrated or unhappy about something it's because they are surprised and confused about the degree of the negative feedback and they don't understand it okay and so this is an example then we could wander into is someone who is overweight and they are seemingly not changing their diet and so the therapist that they're talking to of course everybody is in such consternation as they're trying to figure out why this person you know can't lose weight and so what do we get we go to the shrink and the shrink tells you it's because you know your your interactions with your with your harsh father caused you to be fixated at the oral stage of development and now you have a repetitive pattern in dealing with anxiety with authority figures so this real problem is because your boss or your husband okay this is this is the sort of fantasy that gets spun out in the world now this is untrue okay and all the talking in the world about the underlying dynamics between them and their father is not going to change this person's behavior pattern not going to happen this person's behavior patterns taking place they're making the food and lifestyle choices they're making based on a cost-benefit analysis that their mind is running on the situation that they're and number one what they believe to be true and number two what the sensory input is into the nervous system so it is no mystery why people are overweight they're overweight because the sensory evidence tells them if they eat richer food there's more calories in it and therefore it increases their likelihood of survival and if they eat food with less calories in it relative to the richer food it tells them that they're making a mistake okay so it's very simple that the nervous system has a fairly unsophisticated chip in it that says eat really rich food relative to food that is less rich and by rich I mean the caloric density of the food essentially what the taste bud and olfactory system are is they're essentially like a a metal detector for somebody who's trying to find gold and so as a result of this the nervous system says eat the richest food that you can get that's available and in that case what that person is doing is the reading the rich food and now that food is inconsistent with the natural history of the species that the food is far too rich now the person's overweight and so the person remains overweight and so they are systematically overeating as a result of the fact that their nervous system is running a cost-benefit analysis on their food choices in exactly the way it was designed by nature to run and it just so happens you've got a change in the environment that the system was not designed for so the person inexorably makes a mistake now what do we do about this well they're going to look for help because it's going to turn out that they are less attractive less healthy people think less of them in essentially possible trade situations they're less attractive sexually they're less attractive as friends and they're less attractive as trading partners this is the brutal reality of that situation so as a result of that they're highly motivated to do something about it so they go to the shrink and of course that fails and then they read one of the 75,000 different diet books that's been published on the subject and it turns out that everybody's got a story to tell and the vast majority of those stories are going to be bogus and the reason why the stories are going to be bogus is because that the people that are selling the books are motivated to sell they're not motivated particularly to tell the truth so we've got an interesting problem cost-benefit analysis of Europe if you're a diet author it behooves you to tell people what they want to hear rather than what they need to know and so as a result there's tremendous misinformation in this world about in this entire arena about what people should be doing about it but even if they find the truth which is the fact that the processed foods have removed all the natural fiber from the food and therefore the food is now artificially concentrated and because the food is artificially concentrated it requires more of it to activate the sensory mechanisms in the stomach in order to signal the hypothalamus that you've had enough to eat okay it's really quite it's really basically pretty simple so as a result of that all the foods have now of course been hyper concentrated by removing the fiber of the food and the reason why they would do that is because it makes the food much much tastier because the food is now more calorically dense and therefore appears to be more valuable for survival to an organism that was designed for an environment of caloric scarcity so as you have that problem this person now if they're sitting in my office I'm going to explain to them that their nervous system is lying to them and it doesn't know it that in fact they have to eat food of less caloric density rather than greater caloric density and the foods that they have to eat are going to be foods that are consistent with the natural history of the organism at which point they're this mechanisms of satiation will work and accordingly is the way that they're supposed to so the person will neither overeat nor under eat and they will be just like any of the other tens of thousands of species on the planet that do not have to monitor their food intake in order to be optimally healthy so the the problem is is that this person now lives in an environment where the sensory evidence keeps telling that brain the basic neural structure of the brain that if you eat the food of less calorie density you're doing the wrong thing so now we arrive at the issue of willpower okay willpower is effectively the problem we're a very sophisticated organism like a human and realize that there are more than one there's more than one possible pathway that it could take here and it's computing out the two different courses of action and it's trying to figure out which is the right one and the problem is is that one of them is much more compelling for short-term goals and one of them is much more compelling for long-term goals and so there's a conflict between those two and so if you knew that you were going to die in three days and you had a choice to eat a head of lettuce or Snickers bar the rational thing to do would be the Snickers bar because it would be much it would be dinging the the mechanisms of rich food much more heavily and be much more pleasurable and there'd be absolutely no reason to worry about the long-term consequences of the Snickers bar so the the sort of more primitive computation is to say we'll go for the short-term and optimize it the however if it turned out that we had no such threat to our survival in the long term and that we were going to live with the consequences of eating Snickers bars instead of salads and that was going to make us substantially less sexually attractive substantially less attractive generally as a human being and that there would be economic and social cost that would be substantial if we were designed to actually compute those costs naturally it would be an easy program to to simply do the long-term best thing but here's the problem Nate there's certain problems for which we were not designed to compute those long-term costs very effectively and that's because the issue of eating too rich of calories and winding up with these social consequences is not a natural contingency that human beings were designed to compute because it didn't exist so this is a novel problem for the brain and again it's going to turn out but when the brain has novel problems where it has a very compelling answer to what the question is in its environment between for example less concentrated food and more concentrated food if it already has a compelling answer that says you should go for the more concentrated food it is unbelievably difficult for the organism to actually override that with education okay it can be done and it is in it and it is being done and it's been done by many people but it doesn't come easily and it actually takes pretty profound deep education on most people's part to to understand that that's what it is that they need to do and then we're going to get to the the next part of what will sustain behavior change so behavior change is going to take place when we get new information that changes our understanding about the way the world works and a Senate run four important issues for ourselves and therefore alters the cost benefit analysis the brain comes up with and then the person will change okay so there's no magic little genie in there the decides the trees are going to do something or not do it or this is going to be the day now what there is in fact is tremendous networks of cost-benefit analytics that are churning through and as we learn more about an issue we're particularly where we may be failing we continue to get we may get we may come upon information that is compelling in some way and that will cause us to do it so I've seen many people for example that will go on the Atkins diet and the reason they'll go on the Atkins diet is they had a friend that did and they lost weight so they saw that and they said okay that works so I'm going to try that and not only that when they go on the Atkins diet they can eat a bunch of rich food surprisingly and so the Atkins diet is kind of a tricky process it's not healthy and my judgment at all but it's sort of a biological trick and as a result of that people can lose weight and now they are motivated to continue because as you get feedback from a behavior change if you change your behavioral strategy and it actually improves then you are quote motivated to continue because why because it's just running cost-benefit analysis okay if you go to a new sandwich shop and even though you've been going to the old one you happen to wander into the new one one day on your visit to the shoe store and you go to the new Shan wood shop and it's better and cheaper than your old sandwich shop and it's no further from your house you will shift your behavior okay so this is the message that there is no magic to to change and no magic to will power per se what's really happening here is that the mind is shifting its analysis either on based on a change of your environmental inputs or a changing of your understanding of the environment that you can't see including for example you may learn that the scientists have have shown that high amounts of animal food in humans will reliably result in cardiovascular disease and since you saw your three brothers and your sister and your aunt and uncle and your father and your mother died of cardiovascular disease by the time they were 55 and it turns out that you're 52 that may get your attention or it may not get somebody else's attention okay so the as you as you learn more about what you think the case is this will now infect the cost-benefit analytics of your mind and you will shift okay so if we're trying to figure out why people change what the change behind is new information so you'll hear all kinds of people talking about for example will change with experiences well it isn't experiences that change you it's the information okay so that information could be in a book it could be a friend telling you something it could be simply you analyzing a situation then coming up with what you believe to be a theory about how you think something works or it could have been an experience there there's a multitude of ways that the mind brings in data and grinds and then tries to find a solution to a problem and remember the things that it's usually working on or when there is a discrepancy between the performance the feedback that you're getting versus what your self calibration believes you should be getting those are the problems that the human mind is generally constantly grinding on that it that frustrated that motivated to seek new information okay so it is the seeking of new information that is in fact the roots of change and so now we can get to a prescription for poor positive change in your life all with respect to any possible goal that you can imagine and the the the motivational force that will be lit it will be lit automatically when you come upon new information where there's somebody knows something about a problem that you are working on and they know more than you know and they can essentially disillusion you about something that you thought was true there was actually the root of your frustration of the discrepancy between your performance feedback and what you thought was was coming to you by virtue of your essentially standing in that competitive arena so when someone knows something that you didn't know then then that will change you so we seek out experts we seek out how the show is made okay you can sort of see how people know this intuitively so they are often very much more interested for example in some beauty queens telling us about how to be beautiful then we might be in a scientist to a studied beauty that looks like a nerd okay and yet we would be making a mistake so it's useful you know the Stone Age brain says imitate success so let's go talk to Cindy Crawford and find about how she keeps her face pretty okay that's a nice guess and it's a hell of a lot better than nothing but it's a there are better guesses in the world and the better guesses in the world are let me find out who's at Harvard who has studied the problems of you know I don't know skin elasticity and diet and exercise and and whatever else you know additives the one uses two in soap that actually helps the skin okay we're much more interested in that guy even though if he looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame I'm really interested in what he has to say and as evidence and I'm not so interested in Cindy but I will watch her commercial okay but this is part of beating your jeans is to to understand how your jeans are built in terms of trying to learn things and to recognize that sometimes those learning mechanisms although they were the best ones that we had in our natural history they're not actually optimal for today so one of the the useful things to understand is that that science as polluted and chaotic as it can be is generally you know the the place that we want to look and we were trying to want to find whether or not there's a toehold if people have steadied elements of the problem sometimes they haven't sometimes the best thing that we can do is to go to experts in the field who have had a lot of success at for example coaching other people out of these problems so we don't go to Cindy okay we go to somebody who runs a salon that is you know that is very effective and popular that would be a better place to go to find out about what you put on your face yeah this is also why it seems like a lot of people will listen to somebody who's genetically gifted they've got a nice body they've got you know big muscles or well-defined abs and so they're selling like you know the latest shoes or the latest protein powder or the latest you know you know hiking equipment or whatever and it's that that's why people will listen to them yes this is all imitative function so obviously success leaves clues and people are going to particularly when very gifted people of course it can be disingenuous and basically and they always are about oh yeah you know essentially I put on this Cologne and I turn into Catherine Deneuve you know I'm an s-1 it's like okay the but the point is is that that they will they will tell their story about how it is that they were failing until they they got you know just this this bomb from Malaysia and then they put that on and then a little thing changed for him so this is this is uh you know I went to Tony Robbins thing and I walked across the clothes and I realized that there was a giant within me and now I'm the head of a fortune 500 this is the this is the sort of snake oil that of course is going to be sold and and it's when brains are gullible and looking for shortcuts which they relentlessly do a lot of money changes hands to people who are clever about duping people about what the real factors are and success mm-hmm and the truth of the matter is is that there really isn't a magic pill potion powder supplement or sentence or you know or process that's going to change people's lives or change their course of their lives it's it's it's a lot of hard work and a lot of what you're saying is there is no magic here we have to change our environment before we start to change ourselves because we really can't change our nervous systems we can't change ourselves yeah there's other things that we have to do particularly in SOL yet essentially what there are almost any pursuit that any goal or anything that you have ever wanted to change about yourself and your existence other people have done it they are competing you're already doing you already have your act or your strategy and a given domain in the romance domain friendship domain the domain of Commerce you already have a strategy that you're playing and if it's not working very well you're already motivated to try to figure out what little permutations can you do on this thing that would improve it and if you're stuck you just don't know you can't come up with something that is more compelling so the thing to do is to to start looking for answers and the best place to look is for people who are successful in coaching people through that problem and people that are successful in coaching people through that problem are not mysterious people that are truly successful have identified what I'm going to call the rudiments there's the rudiments to being a great drummer there's the rudiments to being a great guitar player there's the rudiments to being great basketball player there are the rudiments to being a good psychologist there are the rudiments to being a good chiropractor there are the rudiments to being a good small business person you know with the door-to-door sales there are fundamentals okay and we need to know what the fundamentals are and we need to get better at executing the fundamentals because there's no magic to being Michael Jordan what there is is that there's a tremendous amount of effort in getting extremely competent at the fundamentals and when you see a magnificent performance what you're really seeing is the execution of a stream of fundamentals and it looks very creative and elegant and it may be but it yet but the truth is within that creativity all you see is the execution of fundamentals whether we're looking at a Michelangelo statue or we're talking about Michael Jordan on a basketball court or anything else where you see human beings attempting to execute a strategy on anything to accomplish a goal what you are watching is you are you are watching the execution of fundamentals and so people can almost always get better at the fundamentals but that selling the fundamentals is generally not going to make for good stories and it's not going to make for bestsellers and it's not going to make for you know some kind of fancy snake oil that's going to do this quickly usually the competitive problems that you are facing and the reason why you are struggling in a given domain is not because you are missing some magic element that somebody can tap on your head it's usually that you are missing the the information and effort involved in executing some fundamental in a stream of fundamentals that is necessary you need to do that you need to have an expert tell you perhaps what that fundamental is that you're missing you need to then work and improve it and then your performance will improve and then you will wind up with better feedback and then you will wind up out of the unhappiness that was there to signal you that all along you thought you could have gotten more and it turned out you were right Wow can you tell us the story I remember you hearing telling us about John Wooden and how he made his teammates you know pull on us measure their shoes and measure their socks and cetera et cetera yes the the famous story was that the group of recruits was was sitting down for the first day of practice at UCLA when John Wooden came out to greet them and one of them I think it was Bill Weldon was was waiting for what the great sage would say that was going to motivate them and to carry them to the championship and he expected this sort of raw raw sort of speech about this great season that they were going to have and instead what he said was he wanted them to put on their socks and he wanted to see it and he went around from kid to kid and made sure that their socks were on properly he measured their feet and he made sure that their shoes fit their feet properly and then he explained to them that the reason why they did that is because if they're their shoes and socks did not fit properly then when they practice they would get blisters and if they got blisters then they couldn't practice as effectively if they didn't practice effectively they wouldn't play as effectively in the game if they didn't play as effectively in the game that the team wouldn't reach their potential so it begins here with making sure that you've got the right shoes on your feet and then you know how to put on your socks properly this was a beautiful demonstration of Wooden's overall philosophy that the notion is we don't we don't look at failure as failure we look at it as evidence that there is is a place to look at our fundamentals where we probably need to give those more attention and if we work harder on the fundamentals our performance will improve and as Wooden said then we will be happy with the results - John Wooden notion was it isn't about winning it's about a peace of mind that success is a peace of mind of knowing that you have done what you could reach your potential you are not designed to only be happy if you're a quote winner you're designed to be happy if you are clear that you have received the feedback from the world that is reasonable given your native talents so person who is not that smart not that good-looking not that fancy but if that person does an excellent job of actualizing their potential they can be just as happy as the fanciest guy in the world okay because their feedback make sense to them and their internal feedback from their self-esteem mechanism will feel very solid about who it is that they are and what they've accomplished fantastic are there any closing points you want to make about willpower and change now we forgot about bio Meister but that's alright that's an effort we we can talk about Roy Baumeister is excellent book and exit one of the one of the shows following this one so doctor thank you very much what a wonderful what a wonderful explanation about willpower change you know I'm listening to this and I'm thinking man this is a missing link for me and a lot of the stuff that I've been I've been trying trying to change my own personal life so I really appreciate them that's that's amazing absolutely that's what we're here for and I hope some people benefit that's great Nate absolutely well have a wonderful night and we'll look forward to speaking with you next week
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