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Have We Got It All Backwards?
Don’t shoot!
The concept of cause-and-effect is very slippery. We think that A causes B only to find that C really causes both A and B. Or, perhaps it’s really B that causes A. More subtly, A might influence B which turns right around and influences A.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that we’ve been looking at a lot of things from the wrong end of the telescope. Some examples:
Our brain creates us – what creates our personality and the essence of who we are? Why our brains, of course. My brain is the cause; my personality is the effect. Further, the brain is what it is; there’s not much we can do about it. Well…not so fast. Maybe we got it backwards. It turns out that the brain is plastic; we can change it through our habits, actions, and thoughts. In many ways, we create our brains rather than the other way round. Norman Doidge is a leading writer on brain plasticity. You can find his books here and here.
Mutate first; adapt later – our general model of evolution suggests that random mutations happen in our DNA. Mutations that provide a competitive edge are then preserved and passed on. Mutations that aren’t so helpful just fade away. But, according to a recent article in New Scientist, we may have it backwards. Again, plasticity is a key concept. “A growing number of biologists think … plasticity may also play a key role in evolution. Instead of mutating first and adapting later, they argue, animals often adapt first and mutate later.”
I am the master of my fate – I used to believe that I was in control. Now I realize that my System 1 often makes decisions without any input from “me”. Indeed, I don’t even know the decisions are being made. But it’s not just my “primitive brain” that molds my behavior. It’s also how fast my heart beats and how healthy my vagus nerve is. But it’s not even just my body that steers me. It’s also the microbes in my gut. When the microbes team up, they can make me do bizarre things – like eating chocolate. They may even contribute to schizophrenia.
OCD starts with thoughts – we’ve always assumed that irrational thoughts create obsessive compulsive disorder. Irrational thoughts begin in the brain and radiate outward to produce irrational behavior. But, as Clare Gillan points out, we may have it backwards. When she induced new habits in volunteers, she found that people with OCD change their beliefs to explain the new habit. In other words, behavior is the cause and belief is the effect.
The gardener manages the garden – Suellen loves to garden and will spend hours at hard labor under a hot sun. When I see how hard she works, I wonder if she’s managing the flowers or if they’re managing her. It’s not a new thought. The Botany of Desire makes the same point.
What else have we gotten backwards? It’s hard to know. But, as the Heath brothers point out in Decisive, if you believe A causes B, you owe it to yourself to consider the opposite.
Just Imagine You’re Doing It
I’m imagining I’m a Viking.
My sister, Shelley, is a big fiction reader. She recently sent me a link to an article that suggests that people who read fiction are more empathetic than people who don’t. Suellen, of course, is also a big fiction reader. (She highly recommends All The Light We Cannot See).
As for me … well, I mainly read nonfiction. So, does that mean that Shelley and Suellen are both more empathetic than I am? And how does fiction – and imagination – affect us emotionally and biologically?
First, there’s the question of cause and effect. Does reading fiction make people more empathetic or do empathetic people read more fiction? To sort his out, Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp conducted several controlled studies comparing fiction to nonfiction. (Click here).
Bal and Veltkamp found that reading fiction does indeed stimulate empathy if the narrative creates “emotional transportation.” By this they mean that the story absorbs the reader and transports them to a fictional world. In other words, a really good story that sucks you in can make you more empathetic.
The general idea here is that intensely imagining a situation is almost as good as actually experiencing the situation – at least as far as empathy is concerned. Is imagination good for anything other than building empathy?
How about exercise? Can imagining that you’re exercising make you more physically fit? Or, as Jonathan Fields asks: Can Your Brain Make You Buff?
Apparently, the answer is yes. Erin Shackell and Lionel Standing conducted a three-way comparison of college athletes. (Click here). The objective was to strengthen the hip flexor muscles. One group used physical exercise; a second group used imagination; a third (control) group did nothing. The results? Those athletes who exercised increased their hip flexor strength by 28%. Those who used imagination increased their strength by 24%. The control group got nada. I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I should be training my imagination rather than my biceps.
What else can imagination do for you? We’ve known for some time now about the effects of walking through a door. As we’ve all experienced, the mere act of passing through a portal makes you forget stuff. It’s not that we’re inattentive, it’s that walking through a doorway induces forgetfulness. (Click here).
I recently read an article that suggests that merely imagining walking through a door induces the same forgetfulness effect. Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I saw the article. Perhaps it’s because I walked through a doorway. Or perhaps I’m just imagining it.
The Mother Of All Fallacies
An old script, it is.
How are Fox News and Michael Moore alike?
They both use the same script.
Michael Moore comes at issues from the left. Fox News comes from the right. Though they come from different points on the political spectrum, they tell the same story.
In rhetoric, it’s called the Good versus Evil narrative. It’s very simple. On one side we have good people. On the other side, we have evil people. There’s nothing in between. The evil people are cheating or robbing or killing or screwing the good people. The world would be a better place if we could only eliminate or neuter or negate or kill the evil people.
We’ve been using the Good versus Evil narrative since we began telling stories. Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics follow the script. So do many of the stories in the Bible. So do Republicans. So do Democrats. So do I, for that matter. It’s the mother of all fallacies.
The narrative inflames the passions and dulls the senses. It makes us angry. It makes us feel that outrage is righteous and proper. The narrative clouds our thinking. Indeed, it aims to stop us from thinking altogether. How can we think when evil is abroad? We need to act. We can think later.
I became sensitized to the Good versus Evil narrative when I lived in Latin America. I met more than a few people who are convinced that America is the embodiment of evil. They see it as a country filled with greedy, immoral thieves and murderers who are sucking the blood of the innocent and good people of Latin America. I had a difficult time squaring this with my own experiences. Perhaps the narrative is wrong.
Rhetoric teaches us to be suspicious when we hear Good versus Evil stories. The word is a messy, chaotic, and random place. Actions are nuanced and ambiguous. People do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons. A simple narrative can’t possibly capture all the nuances and uncertainties of the real world. Indeed, the Good versus Evil doesn’t even try. It aims to tell us what to think and ensure that we never, ever think for ourselves.
When Jimmy Carter was elected president, John Wayne attended his inaugural even though he had supported Carter’s opponent. Wayne gave a gracious speech. “Mr. President”, he said, “you know that I’m a member of the loyal opposition. But let’s remember that the accent is on ‘loyal’”. How I would love to hear anyone say that today. It’s the antithesis of Good versus Evil.
Voltaire wrote that, “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.” The Good versus Evil narrative is absurd. It doesn’t explain the world; it inflames the world. Ultimately, it can make injustices seem acceptable.
The next time you hear a Good versus Evil story, grab your thinking cap. You’re going to need it.
(By the way, Tyler Cowen has a terrific TED talk on this topic that helped crystallize my thinking. You can find it here.)
How To Lower Your IQ
I need a glass of lemonade.
I sometimes think of the brain as a muscle rather than a computer. A muscle gets tired; so does the brain. A computer doesn’t. A computer can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. A muscle can’t; nor can the brain.
When a muscle gets tired, its performance degrades. After a long hard bike ride, I need to rest and replenish. My muscles need to recover. Until they do, I’m a weakling.
Our brains work the same way. Did you ever have that burnt out feeling? It’s your brain telling you that it needs a break. Take it easy. Give it a rest. Don’t make a big decision when you’re tired – your IQ is too low.
You probably have a good idea of what it takes to overwork your muscles. You know when to stop. But do you know what it feels like to overwork your brain? Here are some clues.
Your mental performance declines when:
You’re dealing with scarcity – when something we value is scarce, we use some of our brainpower trying to replenish it. That leaves less brainpower available for complex thought. As a result, we make poorer choices in other domains. Do you know anyone who has made a string of bad decisions? Perhaps he’s dealing with scarcity in some part of his life.
You’re hungry – conscious thought consumes huge amounts of energy, mainly in the form of glucose. If you’re short on energy-producing nutrients, you can’t think clearly. You’re more likely to argue with your spouse when you’re hungry. Drink a glass of lemonade and you’re less likely to bicker.
You’re sleepy – when you’re sleepy, you can’t focus. You can’t keep a moving train of thought. You can’t filter out random ideas. I do my best thinking in the morning. On the other hand, I’m more creative in the evening, precisely because I can’t filter out random ideas.
Your willpower is low – conscious thought is often described as effortful. Just like physical exercise, it takes willpower to exercise your brain. Willpower is like a muscle, too. If you use up a lot of willpower by resisting the temptation to, say, smoke a cigarette, you’ll have less willpower left to do the heavy lifting of thinking. Your IQ sinks.
Your heuristics trip you up – we all use shortcuts, called heuristics, to get through the day. Think of them as habits of the mind. Mental habits save me time and energy. And, most often, they work. But they’re prone to certain biases – like confirmation bias, availability bias, stereotyping, and satisficing. If I’m not aware of my biases and don’t correct for them, my IQ drops significantly.
You’re seduced by timeworn stories – I counsel my clients to tell stories to explain complex phenomena. But the economist, Tyler Cowen, points out that the stories we tell vastly oversimplify a complex and messy world. Even so, we love our stories; they’re very comforting. The good-versus-evil story is especially hard to resist. We love its ability to explain the world around us. But is it true? Probably not. Cowen claims that our IQ drops by ten points when we’re seduced by an overly simple good-versus-evil story.
I could go on. Your mental performance drops when you’re angry. Or dehydrated. Some people think cholesterol-reducing drugs – statins — can lower your brainpower. Your brain, after all, is made up mainly of cholesterol. But the science isn’t settled. Here’s an article that says you’re dumber on statins. Here’s an article that says the opposite.
So what to do? Eat right, get plenty of sleep, identify your biases, and work on your willpower. Be suspicious of stories that oversimplify the world, especially if they’re seductive. If that doesn’t work for you, try taking my class on critical thinking.
Fallacy of Fallacies
It’s true!
Let’s talk about logic for a moment. When you hear the word argument, you may think of a heated exchange of opinions. It’s emotional and angry. A logician would call this a quarrel rather than an argument. In the world of logic, an argument means that you offer reasons to support a conclusion.
An argument can be valid or invalid and sound or unsound. Here’s an example of an argument in a classic form:
Premise 1: All women have freckles.
Premise 2: Suellen is a woman.
Conclusion: Suellen has freckles.
We have two reasons that lead us to a conclusion. In other words, it’s an argument. Is it a good argument? Well, that’s a different question.
Let’s look first at validity. An argument is valid if the conclusion flows logically from the premises. In this case, we have a major premise and a minor premise and – if they are true – the conclusion is inescapable. Suellen must have freckles. The conclusion flows logically from the premises. The argument is valid.
But is the argument sound? An argument is sound if the premises are verifiably true. The second premise is verifiably true – Suellen is indeed a woman. But the first premise is not verifiably true. All we have to do is look around. We’ll quickly realize that the first premise is false – not all women have freckles.
So, the argument is valid but unsound. One of the premises that leads to the conclusion is false. Can we safely assume, then, that the conclusion is also false? Not so fast, bub.
This is what’s known as the fallacy of fallacies. We often assume that, if there’s a fallacy in an argument, then the conclusion must necessarily be false. Not so. It means the conclusion is not proven. The fact that something is not proven doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s false. (Indeed, in technical terms, we’ve never proven that smoking causes cancer in humans).
Our example demonstrates the fallacy of fallacies. We agree that the argument is valid but not sound. One of the premises is false. Yet, if you know Suellen, you know that the conclusion is true. She does indeed have freckles. So even an unsound (or invalid) argument can result in a conclusion that’s true.
What’s the moral here? There’s a big difference between not proven and not true. Something that’s not proven may well be true. That’s when you want to consider Pascal’s Wager.
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