The Exchanges

Q What words do you use when you talk to yourself about those competing priorities? And I don't want to plant any in your head. That's why I'm not saying any, but how do you think about them?

A I just try to remind myself of the, of, of the positivity of it, that I like playing Legos. You like playing Legos. Right now, you think that you need to be analyzing this data. Right now, you think that you need to be jumping back onto this work call that you know is going on, but you've committed yourself to playing Legos right now to stay in the moment, right? Enjoy the Legos, because in a year from now, Your six-year-old might not like Legos anymore, and he might not play, he might not like, well, he probably will like Legos, but he may not like playing with you anymore, so stay present, stay in this moment, and enjoy this moment, because you know you can't do two things at once, so enjoy the one that you are doing.

AI assessment note: “Right now, you think that you need to be analyzing this data.”

Q And how did you land on this idea of the perception gap?

A To be perfectly honest, it's because I didn't really know the literature well enough, and I thought I had discovered something totally amazing and mind-blowing, but no, because all of science is, is developed in this sort of incremental way, so to be completely transparent, it was a Fundamental misunderstanding of the scientists who've done great work before me. Um, so I had read a really important paper by somebody named John Barge, who's at, uh, Yale, faculty member at Yale University, and, and he had talked about the perception behavior, um, link that we react We can react very automatically, instantly to what it is that we're seeing, and we can sort of build up these habitual patterns of acting in a particular context, in response to a particular person, or when we see something like chocolate cake, oh, I just want to eat it right now. You know, all kinds of pairings can happen that when we see something, we act in a certain way. And he was talking about sort of the malleability of how those pairings come to be, that not everybody sees the same thing and does the same action. Not everybody sees a cigarette and wants, wants to Hold it or doesn't feel that craving, right? Of I want to smoke this. Not everybody feels that way, but some people really do strongly. The actions can vary with, with, um, with what it is paired against. The visual stimulus is paired against. So he wa…

AI assessment note: “it's because I didn't really know the literature well enough”

Q Are there any examples that come to mind as you're saying that about, uh, how somebody has visualized something going wrong and already prepared for it and it helped them succeed?

A Well, I think the most compelling example to me is Michael Phelps, that this is something that he routinely, uh, has integrated into his training sessions. And, you know, this, this, this came out about, about how he trains, um, a while back, actually, when he was in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, that was his first Olympics where he really hit the international stage hardcore. At the time of this story that I'm about to tell you, he had won seven gold Medals. He needed one more gold medal to do something that Olympians had never done in the history of the Olympic games, which is win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad. Uh, and all he had to do was the 200 fly. That was like his jam, right? That's what he's known for. As he dove into the pool for, for this 200 meter fly, uh, his goggles started to leak. And by the time he had just one length of the pool left, they were completely filled with water and he was essentially swimming blind. If this had happened to me, I would have sunk to the bottom. I mean, I wouldn't be in this situation anyway. I can hardly swim at all. My six-year-old son is much better at swimming than I am now after one summer of really trying, but I would have panicked, and I think a lot of people might have that intuition, too, that, well, that's the end, right? He did, he got seven. That's great. He's tied up, um, but he isn't gonna have won the eighth, but …

AI assessment note: “the most compelling example to me is Michael Phelps”

Q That's a great point. I want to switch gears and ask you a couple questions for we, or personal questions before we wrap up, if that's okay. Well, what do you need to remind yourself when you're stressed?

A Oh, be patient. Uh, you know, I think my biggest source of stress just comes from trying to juggle too many things, um, at one time that, you know, I have a six, a six-year-old and a seventh month, a seven-month-old, and I'm a director of a, uh, international research lab with, you know, 40, 50 people that I'm responsible for, and I, and I'm a wife, and I'm a daughter, and I'm a sister, like, you know, we all have all of these identities that are really important to us, um, And they are often in conflict with each other. And so that's the source of my stress is like, you know, I don't doubt my ability to be a really good mom. And I don't doubt my ability to be a really good scientist or a communicator or a daughter, whatever. I know that I can do a really good job at all of these things. That's not the source of my stress, but, but knowing that it's hard to figure out how to do them all at one time, well, do a couple of them at one time. And I just have to be patient with myself. Multitasking doesn't work for me. I have to remind myself of that. That I'm not a good scientist and mom to a seven month old at the same time. Those are incompatible. She doesn't understand what I'm saying, so I can't, I can't explain, you know, multiple regressions and statistics to her to, to work on the thing I need to work on and also be a good mom, right? So these things don't work together somet…

AI assessment note: “Oh, be patient. Uh, you know, I think my biggest source of stress”

Q Are there other aspects to that? So feedback being one of them, are there other things that come to mind?

A Yeah, there's things about the way that the eyes are constructed that I think are also really interesting. Again, it's all, it's always helpful to put it in, in contrast or in comparison. So if we think about how our faces are structured, we have, for the most part, two eyes on the front of our face that point forward. But think about a horse. Think about any other animal that's a, an animal of, um, of prey that, that it is what is eaten. Like horses, they have eyes on the sides of their head, like literally on the sides of their head. And so As a result, their field of view is like, you know, 270 degrees, three quarters of, of everything that's around them, they can pick up with their eyes. Now, that's not true for us. We have to move our heads around. That's not true for owls. We are so excited when we can see like what an owl's neck is capable of doing because it really moves its head all around. So when we look at the basic biology of our physical construction, we can see why don't we get the whole story? Why aren't we getting the whole picture? Because what our eyes are pointed at reflects a very narrow selection of what is in the world that we are, we are situated in at any given moment. Now, we know that, but are we really consciously aware of that at any given point in time? Of course, we know it, we can know it, but are we thinking about it and taking that into conside…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, there's things about the way that the eyes are constructed”

Q so many rabbit holes I want to explore with, with what you just said. I think the first one is There's multiple parts to a goal, right? So with exercise, there's sort of like getting started, there's, ah, while we're in it, and then there's near the end, so the finish line. And so does where you focus change your motivation depending on what stage you're at in the process?

A Yeah, so, uh, you know, my, my lab hasn't done this work, but a great suggestion comes out of IL at Fishbox, um, research at the University of Chicago that, again, if we realize that we have different places that we can look or that we can focus our, our attention, our cognitive attention or our visual attention, again, we can open ourself up to more possibilities than we might use as a default. So if we're thinking about a goal, oftentimes the, the tricky part is in the middle. You know, if we've set a goal, usually we've set the goal because we're excited to try something new. That's often the case is that we are setting these goals and, and there's a, there's a, a moment of, of excitement about it. Or we're getting towards the end and there's either the panic because we need to get this thing done or the excitement that we're almost done or the impending reward that we're, that we're looking forward to receiving. So, you know, the beginning and the end have sort of unique motivational properties in and of themselves for where they're at, but it's the middle. Where we've been working at it for a while, but there's still kind of a ways to go. Um, I don't know. How's my progress? There's obstacles. There's competing goals. The middle gets murky. And that's oftentimes, uh, when we see drop-off happening after people have given the, the first, the first stab at it, and then they …

AI assessment note: “a great suggestion comes out of IL at Fishbox, um, research at the University of Chicago”

Q One of the things that a lot of people do is set New Year's resolutions. Why do we break them? What can we do to keep them? I mean, we all have the best intentions, but then something happens and it doesn't work out the way that we thought it would.

A Well, there's no simple answer. And a lot of what we talked about already, I think, uh, is, is part of the problem that we're using the wrong strategies to motivate ourselves. We try talking to ourselves in encouraging ways. We try to constantly remind ourselves of the importance of the goal. Um, and those are really effortful. They were, they are a goal and of themselves to find the ways to best motivate yourself, to be the person who's always going to be the cheerleader for yourself every day. That takes a lot of work in and of itself, which is why I find value in trying to think about how can we set up habits Taking advantage of this perception, behavior, automatic link that we have, so that we don't have to do that work of reminding ourselves. If we can form a new habit to leave our, our running shoes at this part of our closet, that's nearer to the door that we open all the time, rather than this part of the closet that we hardly ever look into, and that's really quite dark. You know, we don't need to remind ourselves that we need to go out for more steps. We need to take another walk. Our environment can do that for us so we can make it easier. That's part of the reason why people break New Year's resolutions. And in fact, the vast majority of people break New Year's resolutions by Valentine's Day. Um, we give up pretty quickly into the year because of these things that w…

AI assessment note: “we're using the wrong strategies to motivate ourselves... set up habits”

Q So it's almost like if we perceive the goal to be too hard, we won't even get started. So we, okay. That's interesting. How would you use this in terms of, um, just goal setting for people? Like how do you use this information to, um, set better goals for yourself?

A Yeah, so one of, you know, we can sort of liken this conversation to something that's a really commonly used tactic, vision boards. People like vision boards, dream boards. If those words don't resonate with you, it's the idea of, you know, collecting visual icons that reflect what would your ideal life look like in this space? You know, what, what does it look like to have met your health goals? What will you look like? What would life be like? Or your professional goals? What would it look like if your business reaches a It's the goals that you've projected out for the next five years. What's that gonna look like? The idea here is you collect all these visuals, sort of scrapbook them together into this Combination. And then put that, put that somewhere that will motivate you. Maybe it's the backdrop or the, the, uh, desktop on your computer screen. Maybe if you cut out images from magazines, you put it next to your mirror in the bathroom to remind yourself each day of where it is that you, that you want to be. What is it that you're working towards? Now, a lot of times what people put into these vision boards or these dream boards reflects like You know, their farthest out, most loftiest goals. Like, what would my perfect life look like? That's a, that might be at that level of impossibility that we're talking about. That, like, you know, you might think that it's motivating.…

AI assessment note: “if those things reflect things that right now feel impossible, it might not actually be motivating.”

Q down into the week and the month. Is there an ideal sort of frequency or duration that we should be looking at? Like, should we be looking at a, um, you know, a lot of people use to-do lists or whatever. Should we be looking at these on a, what do I want to accomplish this week or today or this hour? Like how frequently... In practice, should those be?

A Yeah, I don't know that I have a prescription about that necessarily, about what to do, but instead what not to do. I think that a lot of us, especially I, I am not immune to this, even though I know the science, and I have tested myself on this science, it's still a challenge to implement, that when things get really hairy, when there's a lot that you've got managing, we often start thinking myopically, just about, I gotta get through the day, gotta get through the day, you know, when's my next moment today to, you To take a break, you know, to go to the bathroom even, or, you know, to try to troubleshoot, um, what's, what's, what's next for me, or even if we know we're about to have a hectic day, we wake up and we just look at the day. Now, that is problematic, because the, the day just keeps going, and the next day just keeps going, and we, we need to take some time to plan strategically about how we're going to get the things done that we need to get done. So within my team, we, we designed this experiment, um, where we were testing the impact, how many, the impact of different ways about using our calendar, looking at the day, which is what we all tended to do when things got really stressful, planning our day versus planning a longer timeframe. In this case, we tested a week. And what we did was have people think about a goal that they were working towards that was import…

AI assessment note: “I don't know that I have a prescription about that necessarily, about what to do”

Q Why do some people sort of see the glass half full and some people see it as half empty?

A That's such a big question. Which way to tackle that? Um, well, and, okay, so one perspective is, that people have resonated with is the idea of negativity dominance. That, that things that are negative pack a bigger hedonic punch. That we feel them more strongly than positive things that should be at the same magnitude. Like one, like one compliment You know, one sentence that's a compliment should be just as powerful as one sentence that's an insult. But we can probably all think of one compliment we've recently received and one insult, and we probably feel much more anger about that insult than we do good about that compliment. You know, that's the idea that the bad looms larger than the good. Now, why would that be the case? And people start speculating about that, that we, you know, needed to be attuned to the things that could cause us harm or the threats that our environment to evolutionarily keep us alive. Yeah, there's something to that. But if we weren't paying attention to all the good things like the food, the love, the warmth in our world, we'd also die. So, you know, there's, there's also that, but maybe it's about the severity that anything that could cause us harm could do us more harm more quickly than missing out on an opportunity that could provide warmth or food or growth or something like that. And so that's created this negativity dominance where our brain…

AI assessment note: “one perspective is, that people have resonated with is the idea of negativity dominance.”

Q When you talk to athletes and they're setting these sort of sub goals that are closer, like I want to make it to the next lamppost or I want to, you know, where I'm focusing my attention, is there a frequency at which it becomes too frequent?

A That's a great question. And the answer is yes. Uh, when, when we've done extensive studies, like of thousands of people who are runners, um, you know, at all levels of accomplishment, and we ask them about these strategies, you know, starting at the beginning of the race, let's take a five K the beginning at the beginning, when you're just coming out of the starting blocks versus you're a kilometer in you're halfway, you've got a kilometer left, you're nearing the finish line. You know, when we break a race down like that and ask them, How frequently are you using narrowed attention? How frequently are you using more expansive, widened attention? What you find is that for people who already can perform at that level, you know, to run a five K for most people is they have to train at least to some degree for that. So these are people who are capable of running and who have chosen to run and report on their experience about running. They use the narrowed attention a little bit more than the wide attention, but that gap grows tremendously over the course of the run. So that by the time You know, they're, they're nearing the end, reaching the half point, halfway point, you know, there's a kilometer left, they're nearing the end. They're really using narrowed attention quite a lot and really have dropped off on that wide attention. And that sort of, you know, sort of polarizing, po…

AI assessment note: “That's a great question. And the answer is yes.”

Q myself as somebody who goes to the gym every day, every obstacle becomes much larger, so that we have a visual perception impact. Also a self-talk impact, and so is how I'm talking to myself changing the information I'm getting from the world, or is the information that I'm seeing from the world changing how I talk to myself, or is it some sort of relationship between both of them?

A That's really deep. I'm not sure that I have a convincing answer for that, especially as it relates to the visual experience, but there is something called self, self-consistency theory, um, that we, that we want to hold consistent, um, Understandings of who we are. It can lead to some counterintuitive findings, which is how this idea has been demonstrated and supported by other researchers, which is that sometimes counterintuitively, we'd rather get negative feedback about ourselves than positive feedback. We relish that if it's consistent with what we think is true about ourselves. That getting something that maybe is even positive or at least neutral that isn't part of our self schema can be challenging for people. It can be, you know, a little bit weird for somebody to think you're good at something that you have forever thought that you're bad at. Uh, you know, you start to second guess them. Maybe, maybe they aren't a good assessor of, of people's abilities. Like, are they really paying attention? Like, do they really know who I am? That's not who I am. Um, Um, so that idea of self-consistency is important for, for people. Uh, you know, sometimes even at a, a detriment to like, you know, getting a compliment that can make you feel better.

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure that I have a convincing answer for that”