Overriding Our Brain’s Predisposition
Overriding Our Brain’s Predisposition
When we stop asking questions, we stop looking for solutions. When we stop seeking solutions, we amalgamate ourselves with our surroundings.
Worth Listening To
I’ve been a fan of Ted’s writing for months and have since subscribed to his newsletter. He is a wonderfully brilliant thinker, educator, and futurist. His conversation with David Perell demonstrates the value of reading, studying, exercising critical thought, and being disciplined. This is one of my favorite conversations I have listened to and I hope you enjoy it.
What makes Breaking Bad such a standout show
The value of reading for understanding culture
Being anti-formulaic (movies, tv show, pop music) and creating micro & counter-cultures
This episode gives a wonderful alternative take on writing and creating than much of what I’ve listened to and share with you. I’m not sure I’ve listened to anyone with such a remarkable, encyclopedic knowledge of history, philosophy, and art.
Overriding Our Brain’s Predisposition
“Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution to the knowledge of what happens when you think about something.” — Richard Feynman
Several years ago, I discussed the powerful impact our mind has on our body with a client. He’s been practicing clinical neurology and psychology for over thirty years, so I pay close attention to every detail when he speaks about the brain and behavior. While discussing both of our own struggles with consistency and exercise, he said the human brain has evolved to “be lazy.” To conserve energy, our brain naturally chooses the path of least resistance. Therefore, if you want to succeed in various endeavors, you must often go against your innate laziness. Why?
While the brain is only 2% of our overall body mass, it consumes an enormous amount of our overall energy, roughly 20%. A well-known part of the Theory of Evolution states that survival is based on the fittest. But the term “fittest” doesn’t necessarily mean athletically fit. It also encompasses one’s ability to endure challenges such as famine. In this scenario, conserving energy could mean the difference between life and death.
Social fitness is another evolutionary factor. How well did you fit in with your herd? Alone, you were an easy target and likely a predator’s dinner. In a herd, your odds of survival were far greater—I often joke that you don’t need to be the fastest, you just have to be faster than the person next to you. You were rewarded for confirmation and status quo biases. In other words, fitting in helped keep you alive.
Broader Implications
Today’s world looks very different than our hunter-gatherer ancestor’s world. Yet, our brains have not evolved much in the previous 40,000 years. In a world where we spend far more time sitting, far more time staring at screens, and far less time fearing predators, we have moved the goalpost on rewards while our natural instincts have remained the same.
Why is this important? Kids come into this world unforgivingly curious to the point where they would accidentally kill themselves trying to stick a knife either in their mouth or an electrical outlet (I’ve had to put a stop to both eventualities with each of my kids). But at some point, they go to school, and for most, the priority shifts. It becomes about fitting in. At the risk of sounding stupid in front of their peers, many stop asking, “Why is this the way it is?” or, “How does that work?” Many kids stop raising their hands.
In season 2, episode 9 of The West Wing, President Bartlet is preparing to talk to 6,000 kids about landing a robot on Mars called Galileo V. The episode spends much of the time trying to come up with a “broader theme” for the kids. After losing contact with the robot, C.J. Cregg, the White House Press Secretary, convinces Bartlet to do the talk anyway:
“We have at our disposal a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don't go to the blackboard or raise their hand because they think they’ll be wrong. You should say to these kids, ‘You think you get it wrong sometimes? You should come down here and see how the big boys do it.’ You should tell them you haven't give up hope, and that it may turn up. But in the meantime, you want NASA
to put its best people in a room and you want them to start building Galileo 6.
Some of them will Iaugh and most won't care but for some, they might honestly see that it's about going to the blackboard and raising your hand. And that's the broader theme.”
Fitting In Equals Average Returns
The downside to this behavior is it lingers into adulthood. Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Most people die at 25 and are buried at 75.” How often do the adults around you change? How often do their opinions change? How often are they willing to take a risk and be wrong about something?
Conversely, a kid’s true nature is to ask questions ceaselessly. It is only when that curiosity is usurped by fear that, for most, their behavior begins to change. That fear is dominated by a desire to fit in.
When we stop asking questions, we stop looking for solutions. When we stop seeking solutions, we amalgamate ourselves with our surroundings.
Rene Girard is famous for his work on mimetic theory and desire. He reasoned that humans don’t want things of our own free will but rather as a result of our desire to mimic others—precisely why social media influencers are such a lucrative investment for companies. Social media itself is perhaps the greatest example of this. In 2004, Peter Thiel famously became the first outside investor in Facebook (and for a 10% stake in the company) because he saw that our desire to copy each other would now be played out at a massive scale.
Another way to look at mimetic theory is, “I’m going to follow this path because this is how everyone else does it, and this is how it’s always done.”
One solution to mimetic theory is having an appetite for risk. How often do we find ourselves passionate about a particular activity, wishing we could turn it into our livelihood? How often do we sacrifice that desire in favor of the safe, predictable route? What if, during our days of insatiable curiosity, we had inquired about how to take measured risks? What if, instead of fearing being wrong, we learned failure is not just okay, but in many instances, it’s a necessary stepping stone to our success?
And it’s not just us as individuals. The same problem exists in companies. In this week’s Worth Listening To episode, Ted Gioia and David Perell discuss the “flattening of our modern culture” and the increasing pervasiveness of formulas governing our lives, from movies to books to media. Ted argues that legacy giants want predictable returns on their investments rather than taking risks. The problem is that we, the consumers, get predictable, boring content—same stories, different characters.
As these behemoths have established dominance over the media landscape, they have lost their appetite for taking risks. They instead fall back on genres or franchises—formulas—well past their prime, just as they did in the late 1950s. Clinging to their glory days, these companies sacrifice authenticity, creativity, and novelty in the pursuit of profit and industry dominance to the detriment of their audience. A case in point is the immense drop-off in quality Disney has produced with the latest Star Wars and Marvel movies.
But as long as people continue going to see them, why change? Except they aren’t. At least not as often as they used to…
Systems of Reward Have Changed
In 1997, a struggling Apple brought Steve Jobs back to run the company. He then gave perhaps the best marketing speech of all time, launching its “Think Different” campaign, leading to Apple becoming the biggest company in the world less than two decades later. In it, he said:
“Apple isn’t about making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody, in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple at the core, it’s core value is that we believe people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe… And that those people who think they are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who actually do.”
The outliers, the “ones we can’t ignore,” are those who challenge and reject status quo bias and alter our collective thinking as a society.
From 1843 to 1869, John Stuart Mill published some of the greatest literary works on individual liberties, individual rights, individual exceptionalism, as well as human happiness, and women’s rights. His ideas challenged the status quo of the time and became a bedrock for the defense of many of the freedoms we now take for granted, such as freedom of expression and speech:
“There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that condition an intellectually active people. Where any people has made a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox speculation was for a time suspended. Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable.”
Asked why he chose biographies as his vocation, Andrew Roberts answered:
“Because it concentrates the mind on one person. You emotionally connect with that person. You either love them or you hate them. It’s the great men and women theory of history, of course, and I do believe in that because I think that although of course there are enormous historical movements that happen, you know, the decline of magic and the rise of science… those come about as the result of millions, indeed billions of people.
You can’t look at something like the invasion of Russia in 1812, or Churchill’s decision to fight on and not make peace with Hitler in 1940 and not recognise that the individual does play an absolutely central role in some of the major world-changing decisions.”
Recent history has demonstrated that we are now rewarded for thinking differently and challenging society to move forward. And it’s the individuals—us—who make it happen, whether within our own community or society as a whole. We are rewarded for challenging our own mind’s predisposition for laziness.
Tabula Rasa
Very recently, I was exposed to my own confirmation bias. It’s no understatement to say I detested school. The confinement, the structure, the constraints, the external pressure, and the unrelenting urge to fit in. So, when I learned that the education system was a relic, unchanged from a time when corporations wanted kids trained to work in factories, unable to rise above their station, I said to myself, “Yes, that makes sense!” Only, that’s not at all the intent with which the school system was designed. It sounds good in a soundbite, but it’s factually inaccurate.
Aristotle, his students, and the stoics who followed centuries later believed each of us is born with a blank mind called a tabula rasa. We have no biases whatsoever. We learn and are shaped through our experiences alone. But what if we could create a blank slate as we age by repeatedly challenging what we think we know?
In school, we learn models: How to write, how to read, how to multiply and divide, and how to form a hypothesis and conduct an experiment. Models are great for establishing a baseline and, as another client said to me, forming useful constraints. But as the great physicist and educator Richard Feynman said, “The greatest discoveries, it always turns out, abstract away from the models.”
What the Hell Does This Have to Do With Health?
“Eric, you write about health. What the hell is this?” Rest assured, I’ve asked myself this question quite a few times while writing this piece.
At the outset, physical health wasn’t anywhere near my conscious mind. However, I realized there is a definitive crossover. Our health — how we feel, how much energy we have, how healthy we are — is a barometer for how willing we are to challenge our own laziness, especially when it’s something we don’t want to do. Moreover, our desire to copy others is frequently what gets us into trouble with exercising! “I want to look like them.” Why? That is never going to happen. Look like you and embrace the hell out of it.
If we can recognize, on a very conscious level, our own predisposition for laziness, we can do something about it. We can override the “I don’t want to work out today” feeling. Not everyone will. But at least we can have the same starting point, knowing what we’re up against: ourselves.
Conclusion
My question to you is, how often do you go against your initial impulse? “I should work out, but I really don’t want to.” Or, “I should really cook, but I can so easily have pizza delivered right to my door.”
A favorite saying of mine comes from Jerzy Gregorek, a Polish immigrant to the United States who struggled with alcohol abuse before taking up weightlifting and winning four world weight-lifting championships(!!). His personal motto is, “Easy choices, hard life; hard choices, easy life.”
We are each capable of pushing ourselves to think more critically, learn from different perspectives, challenge ourselves and those around us to think differently, and live healthier and happier lives. But it often takes overriding our evolutionarily predisposed tendency to conserve energy. As my client said to me, we have to override our brain’s desire to be lazy.
Other Learning
Podcasts
Ellen Fishbein | Make Art not Noise — Infinite Loops
Tyler Cowen - Hayek, Keynes & Smith on AI, Animal Spirits, Anarchy, & Growth — Dwarkesh Podcast
Andrew Roberts - SV’s Napolean Cult, Why Hitler Lost WW2, Churchill as Applied Historian — Dwarkesh Podcast
Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) - Craft, Beauty, the Future of Payments — Dwarkesh Podcast
What’s Wrong with Writing Education? | Ana Lorena Fabrega — How I Write
Microplastics Are Everywhere. How Dangerous Are They? — Plain English
Are Smartphones Really Driving the Rise in Teenage Depression? — Plain English
Peter Shares His Biggest Takeaways on Muscle Protein Synthesis, VO2 Max, Toe Strength, Gut Health, and More — The Drive
Articles
How I Went From Left to Center-Left — Slow Boring by Matthew Yglesias
The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons’s Success — The Alchemy of Money by Frederik Gieschen
Pop Music: The TV Dinner of Our Cultural Diet — Hot Takes by Adam Singer
A Bull Market in the Humanities — Luke Burgis
Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25? — The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia