by A. J. Jacobs
SOURCE AMNESIA
Here’s one thing I’m learning: my brain is full of crap. I need a mental colonic.
It’s the end of Day One, and I’m grappling with the startling number of myths, half-truths, and outright lies that clog my brain. It’s not that I believe in ghosts. Or numerology. Or that Barack Obama secretly belongs to a mosque. My misconceptions are less obvious but just as false.
This struck me as I was brushing my hair. It sounds reasonable, and I suppose, for the first few seconds I get my hair into place, it is.
Problem is, I keep on brushing for another thirty seconds. I brush my hair till my scalp tingles. Why? Because someone—I think my mother—told me when I was about ten years old that you need to stimulate the scalp or you’ll go bald. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years.
As soon as I uncover the almost-unconscious belief, it smells rotten, and about three minutes of Googling confirms it: it’s a myth, about as effective as rubbing chicken manure on my head, another ancient remedy.
I call my mom to ask whether she was, in fact, the one who told me.
“That sounds like something I said,” she says.
“Well, it’s not true. It’s a myth.”
There’s a pause. “Sorry.”
“Well, I spent a lot of time brushing my hair because of that.” (More than three total days of hair brushing, to be precise.)
“I’m not sure what to tell you except sorry.”
Damn. Now I’m the bad guy in this scenario.
“Anyway,” she says. “Why were you taking advice from me about baldness? You should have talked to your dad.”
“I was ten!”
A huge chunk of my life has been wasted. Why? Because I’m the victim of two brain flaws. First, we place too much trust in authority. We follow the captain even if it’s clear he’s leading us right over Havasu Falls. It is hardwired into our brains. The second is just as insidious: Source Amnesia. We forget where we learned a fact. Facts are initially stored in a pinkie-shaped region called the hippocampus. But eventually the information shifts over to the cerebral cortex—where, as Welcome to Your Brain authors Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt put it, it is “separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.” A fact learned in the Wall Street Journal gains as much credulity as a “fact” learned from your cousin’s barber.
And it gets worse. Even if we are told—clearly warned— that something is false or unsubstantiated, we often remember it later as gospel.
I need to root out these untruths. With a little research, I refute some of my more dubious beliefs: Shaving your hair does not make it grow back thicker, turning lights on and off does not waste more energy, sugar does not make you hyperactive. Despite what Mom said, I don’t need to wear socks or slippers around the house for health reasons; you can’t get a cold from cold feet.
Yet when I try to go shoeless around the house, it causes me such low-grade angst, I give up and put my Merrells back on. They are stuck deep, these myths. And I know there are dozens, hundreds, of other undiscovered falsehoods lurking in my neurons and warping my choices. But how do I identify them?
THE HALO EFFECT
It’s Day Three and I’m pissed at the brain. It’s not just flawed; it’s superficial and cruel, like a cable TV pundit. This sunk in today when I was at Starbucks.
I bought a cappuccino and got back $1.35 in change. How much should I tip? Thirty-five cents or a dollar? I stuffed the dollar into the box and smiled at the barista.
As I poured my sugar, I realized I’d fallen for the Halo Effect. Terrible. One of the most evil biases on my little folded-up list. If a person is physically attractive, we unconsciously heap all sorts of wonderful, unrelated qualities onto them. Studies have shown we think attractive people are smarter than ugly people. We tend to hire them more often and promote them faster. We think they’re more virtuous. Teachers treat attractive children better than their unfortunate-looking peers. In short, we judge a book by its cover.
And yes, the barista was really cute. A Maggie Gyllenhaal type with a moderate smattering of piercings. I know that was the reason I tipped her the buck. If she’d looked like Vladimir Putin, I would have gone with the thirty-five cents.
I unconsciously assumed she was a good person and deserved a dollar. I also, no doubt, unconsciously wanted to sleep with her and spread my DNA. (And assumed the sixty-five cents would help with that cause, naturally.)
The Halo Effect runs deep in our genes. It probably made sense to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. If someone had a misshapen face, there could be a greater chance he had an inherited disease. So you might want to avoid breeding with him. You want your offspring to have grade A genes.
I hate the Halo Effect. It’s like Nature said, Hey, let’s make life as unfair as possible. Let’s load up the misery on one side and give all the happiness to the pretty people.
I call Richard Thaler, one of the authors of Nudge. (He’s agreed to be my rationality guru.) “If you think about it,” he says, “it’s more rational to give the homely one a bigger tip. Some investment banker is going to propose to the pretty one soon and she won’t be working at Starbucks.”
The next day, before going to lunch with my wife at a local café, I take countermeasures. I put duct tape on the top half of each lens of my glasses. I’m blind from the horizon up. This way, I figure, I can still function, but I won’t be able to see the waitress’s face. I won’t be swayed by her hotness. My wife reminds me I’m lucky to be married to her.
My plan works—for a bit. I can’t see our waitress’s face. But I spend a lot of time listening to her voice—a bit husky, breathy— to try to discern her hotness. Then I leave a big tip because I feel like a schmuck for never making eye contact.
I call Thaler for a debriefing. “That was a good example of what you don’t want to do,” he says. “You could have been hit by a truck, first of all. Here’s my advice: sit in the café, drink your coffee, stare at the barista, then give your dollar to the homely one.”
CONFIRMATION BIAS
For someone who once deemed himself relatively rational, I have an astounding number of superstitions. I suppose “obsessive-compulsive rituals” sounds a bit better than “superstitions.” Whatever they are, I’ve got so many, I can’t count them all.
After turning off the faucet, I touch it twice.
I never start or end a conversation with the word you.
Whenever I swallow, I must swallow in pairs.
And on and on. They take up a lot of mental bandwidth.
Superstitions, I learn, stem from the Confirmation Bias. The faulty reasoning goes like this:
I’ve swallowed in pairs for fifteen years, and I’m alive and relatively okay.
If I stop swallowing in pairs, who knows what will happen?
So I better keep on swallowing in pairs.
Highly irrational. Today, I’ve vowed to snap the superstition chains. I will have a superstition-free day. Perhaps even life.
I fetch my son, plop down on the couch, and start reading him a story about a dangerously irresponsible zookeeper. Out of habit, I swallow—the first big test. I suppress the urge to swallow again. A solo swallow, for the first time in two decades.
It feels odd. Where’s the closure? Man, I want to swallow again. I feel like I sang “Happy birthday to—” and just stopped midsentence. I mentally tuck away the fact that I’ve swallowed a single time, so that when this experiment is over, I can swallow a second time to even things out. Not good.
A few minutes later, I walk by the hall mirror. Whenever I glance at my reflection, I start to contort my face into a yawnlike position, my lips obscuring my teeth. This yawning superstition started because I’m insecure about my overbite, so I hide it. The yawn makes me resemble an orangutan in estrus. I stop myself, relax my face. I’d forgotten about this quirk when I was making
my list. These rituals are lurking everywhere.
The ritual-breaking has made me anxious. My heart rate has jumped. I’m hyperaware of everything going on, looking for any sign of catastrophe or disease.
“Everything okay?” I ask Julie.
“Uh, fine, thanks.”
“Nothing bad has happened to you this morning?”
She shakes her head.
A couple of hours later, I catch the digital clock in our bedroom change from minute 13 to 14. So what? I don’t need to stop and stare at the clock until it changes from 14 to 15 so that the 13 is washed out of my mind.
By the end of the day, I’m on a high. Why didn’t I do this twenty years ago? Think of the time I could have saved.
I wake up the next morning, ready for another day of freedom. An hour into the day, I spill coffee all over my MacBook keyboard. Yeah, well, it happens. A few minutes later, Julie asks me if I’ve seen her earring. She’s lost it somewhere. She looks upset—even more than lost-earring upset. Well, she says, a client of hers had just called and shouted some unreasonable demands. “She’s a bulldozer,” she says.
Then I get an angry e-mail about an essay I wrote. I’d committed a big mistake—I hadn’t made it clear that I disguised the identities of everyone in the essay—and it made me look like an insensitive tool.
I knew this would happen. What kind of an idiot am I to tempt fate? This experiment is over.
THE MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT
It’s a couple of days later. Maybe I’ve overreacted a bit. I’m sticking with my swallowing in pairs, but perhaps there’s other irrational behavior I can fix. Like my toothpaste preference.
I’ve brushed with Crest pretty much every day for the past thirty years. (The exception: one night last year, I brushed my teeth with Preparation H. The reasons were several: a poorly lit hotel bathroom, lack of sleep, a couple of Rolling Rocks, and two identically sized tubes in my Dopp kit.)
Why Crest? I can’t say for sure. No pro/con list was ever drawn up. Some friend of mine at Camp Powhatan in Maine used Crest. He was cool and had seemingly good dental hygiene. I started using Crest—and never stopped.
It’s scary once you start to scrutinize it. Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.
Psychologists call it the Mere Exposure Effect. The basic idea is, I like Crest because I’m accustomed to Crest.
That’s not good enough. I need a fully rational toothpaste. I need, first, to expand my dental hygiene horizons. I go to the drugstore and buy a sample platter of forty tubes of toothpaste. (The cashier doesn’t even bat an eye; I guess when your customers buy bungee cords and vats of K-Y Jelly in preparation for a Friday night, this isn’t a big deal.)
I go home and spend eighty minutes brushing. Pepsodent Smooth Mint. Colgate Luminous Crystal Clean Mint. Aquafresh Extreme Clean Whitening Mint Experience. I never realized how much I hate mint. What a tongue-stinging, foul taste. It brings back bad memories of the green goo that goes with lamb chops. What kind of stranglehold do the mint growers have on toothpaste makers? Bite me, mint lobby. The occasional cinnamon paste tastes a bit better, I guess.
But toothpaste No. 27—this is a revelation. Tom’s apricot toothpaste. It’s fresh and clean-tasting, but not heavy-handed, and with just a hint of licorice. It’s like something you’d eat at Chez Panisse. I might actually look forward to toothbrushing.
So that’s a winner in taste. But what about the other factors? Whitening. Cavity-fighting power. Price. The dispenser. The ethics of the manufacturer.
I could spend days researching and testing this decision. I feel like Buridan’s ass. This is a donkey in a philosophical parable: He’s hungry and thirsty and standing equidistant between a bucket of water and a bucket of food. He dies deciding.
The Internet has dozens of articles on comparative toothpaste studies. I consult Consumersearch.com, which aggregates reviews from other consumer sites. “Colgate leads the pack,” it reports. “Experts recommend Colgate Total most often.” Okay. So maybe Colgate Total will be my pick.
But here’s another key sentence: “Even the sites and publications which do make recommendations acknowledge that any approved toothpaste will benefit the consumer. Choices based on taste or consistency preferences are valid, and will not greatly affect oral health.”
Okay, so taste it is. Apricot is the way to go. Then I look carefully at the apricot tube—there’s no mention of ADA approval. I call the 800 number and find out approval is still “pending.” Ugh. I call Thaler.
“I hate the taste of toothpaste,” says Thaler. “If there’s one that tastes like apricot, I’m there.”
I promise to e-mail him the info.
“We don’t want to make the mistake that only quantifiable things—like number of cavities—go into a rational decision,” he says. “Rationality is all about trade-offs. Say I get a cavity once every decade. And with this toothpaste, I get a cavity once every nine years. The pleasure of the daily toothbrushing might make apricot the rational choice. Put it this way: if you choose the safest car even if it’s ugly and no fun to drive, then it might not be rational.”
That makes me feel better. Sort of. Now I’m worried I’ll never find the line between rationality and rationalizing.
THE TEXAS SHARPSHOOTER FALLACY
Two weeks in, and I’m turning into a bit of a pompous ass, it seems. I can’t resist pointing out other people’s cognitive biases.
My aunt Kate, an Orthodox Jew, sent me a viral e-mail today titled “God’s Pharmacy.” It’s about how the shapes of food contain clues from God about nutrition.
“A sliced carrot looks like the human eye . . . science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to the eyes.”
“A tomato has four chambers and is red . . . the heart has four chambers and is red. Research shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopene and are indeed pure heart and blood food.”
And on it went, with walnuts connected to brains and rhubarb resembling bones.
I reply, “Thanks, Kate!” I thought I’d start out polite, at least. “This seems like it’s an example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.” (This is a logical fallacy, as described on Wikipedia, in which information that has no relationship is interpreted or manipulated until it appears to have meaning. The name comes from a story about a Texan who fires several shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.) “I’m not saying God doesn’t exist, just that this food-shape idea is seriously flawed.”
I press SEND. I try not to feel smug. It’s just that these biases have given me a handy lens through which to view human thought. Simply being able to give a name—especially a cool one like Texas Sharpshooter—orders the chaos.
Kate replies that God designed the world in an infinitely subtle way to preserve our independence. So we must look deep to discover hidden truths.
I e-mail Kate again to say that the “God’s Pharmacy” e-mail is related to another brain quirk. This one is called the Law of Similarity. If X and Y look similar, humans believe they are somehow related, whether they are or not.
This can be seen in my favorite experiment of all time: Psychologists asked students to eat a piece of fudge shaped like dog feces. The students couldn’t do it—even though they knew rationally that it was just sugar, milk, butter, and cocoa. (This experiment, by the way, ruined my business plan for turd-shaped truffles.)
No response from Kate.
THE NARRATIVE FALLACY
I’m all cocky with Kate. But it’s not like I’m in much better shape. Rationality is an elusive goal.
Today, my son Zane threw a monster tantrum. (I have three sons now—my wife gave birth to twin boys soon after the Radical Honesty experiment.) Half an hour of flying arms and screaming (punctuated by his occasional pauses to look up and make sure we were watching his epic flailing). Julie blames all our kids’ tantrums on lack of sleep. I blame them on lack of food. He’s overtire
d. No, he’s overhungry. Same debate every time. Rationally, I know we’re both oversimplifying. There are probably a dozen factors. But we humans like to tell a story. X happened because of Y. The end.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his depressing but eye-opening book The Black Swan. When the newscasters report on the Dow dropping, they always have some explanation. Housing starts were slow, so the Dow dropped. IBM reported lower-than-expected profits, so the Dow dropped. Bernanke’s taking goiter medication, so the Dow dropped. Truth is, they have no clue. The actual causes are way too complex. A thousand factors played into the drop.
The same goes for the opposite direction. We like to take a simple incident and think we can predict its effect far into the future. We see a butterfly flap its wings in Jersey, and we think we can figure out whether it’s going to snow in Wyoming.
This I battle every day. Fatherhood has taken it to unhealthy extremes. As an overprotective dad, I analyze every little thing my kids do. I say to myself, “What will the consequence of that be in five minutes? In five years? In twenty years?”
Jasper got a DVD of the movie Surf’s Up for his fourth birthday. It’s about penguins who surf. My irrational thinking went like this:
Surfing is dangerous.
If he watches Surf’s Up, he might take up surfing later in life.
If he takes up surfing, he might suffer a serious injury.
So I hid the DVD. Julie foraged around for it for several days before I fessed up.
“I think it might be in the closet with the winter coats,” I said.
“Why might it be there?”
I knew the logic was flawed. My inner Tipper Gore had gone nuts. I was aware of that, and yet I still hid the DVD. I willfully ignored a hundred other variables: The joy Jasper might get from watching Surf’s Up. The millions of Surf’s Up viewers who won’t end up surfers. The millions of surfers who don’t end up in intensive care. I’m wasting a lot of mental energy.