The De-Textbook

by Cracked. com

  That’s right: The whole nobler aspect of human existence is substantially easier to erase than a VHS tape.

  Your Own Facial Expressions: Everyone knows that happiness makes you smile, anger makes you frown, and louder-than-expected farts make you raise one eyebrow and point at the guy next to you. Well, scientists have found that your facial muscles are actually controlling your emotions more than you think. If that’s not weird enough, Nicole Kidman’s weird new face is indirectly responsible for the discovery.

  Botox has been making women look sexier since the 1980s, assuming you’re sexually attracted to smooth skin and people with awesome poker faces. See, in addition to paralyzing your face’s muscle tissue until wrinkles disappear, Botox also firms up everything else on your face, until people can’t tell whether you’re smiling warmly or weeping in terror. But hey, it’s not like conveying emotion is your job or anything.

  Well, according to a recent study, injecting Botox into your face not only makes you look like you have no emotions but also actually inhibits your ability to feel them at all. We tend to think of the relationship between our emotions and our face as a one-way street, but apparently your brain likes to check in with your facial muscles before deciding what emotion it should be feeling at any given moment. Even if you have every reason to be delighted, if your brain checks in and you’re not smiling, you’ll still be unhappy. We need a complex series of interactions to occur involving our body, hormones, and brain to truly feel something like happiness. And it turns out that the part involving our facial muscles is way more important than previously thought.

  Researchers found that the people who’d frozen their faces with Botox had lost the ability to feel strong emotions or, in some cases, pretty much any emotion at all.

  8.B

  Lies Your Brain Naturally Tells You

  That Screw You on a Regular Basis

  Our brains were designed for survival in a world that no longer exists—a world where calories leaped out of our stomachs when we weren’t looking and starvation was only a cold snap away. True, we evolved our way up the food chain, which was admittedly awesome of us, but now we’re sort of stuck with the brains we had when we first got to the top. In other words, while we’ve got a lot of great tools for surviving a cold winter without getting eaten by a bear, those same tools distort some really important modern-world stuff.

  Your Brain Has Not Evolved to Understand Money

  FIGURE 8.6 A monkey humping a piggy bank. Did you need a caption for this? Are you still not clear on what’s going on? All right, Jesus, also the Piggy Bank isn’t happy about the whole ordeal, and apparently the baby monkey was humping so hard that money came out. Is that— Can we take a shower now?

  THE MYTH: “People who don’t save for the future or make smart investments are irresponsible jerkoffs!”

  THE TRUTH: Thanks to evolution, the human brain has no idea how money works and will fight you every inch of the way to a responsible financial decision.

  Your broken thinking leads to logical fallacies that you can observe in your everyday life, often by looking at your own bank statement. These fallacies are known as . . .

  Hyperbolic Discounting: Your Brain Thinks the Future Is an Urban Legend

  Natural selection designed your brain back when the future was a complete crapshoot. Assuming the world around you would behave predictably was a great way to get your genetic line disqualified from the human race.

  You got here because your ancestors were more likely to compulsively hoard provisions than they were to get too caught up worrying about the details of what the future was going to look like. When they had to choose between eating a bunch of filthy tubers right now or holding out for some tasty fish a week from now, their brains told them to make do with tubers: the balls of the plant world. And they were right! Being able to imagine how good fish would taste on some later day had no evolutionary advantage, and so we just never got around to being good at long-term thinking. Hell, most humans didn’t make it out of their twenties, anyway.

  Now fast-forward to today, when financial success is almost entirely based on the ability to think and plan long term. Even now, when a guy offers to pay us a hundred dollars in a year or fifty dollars right now, our brain still tells us to go for the tubers (see Figure 8.7). This is what’s called hyperbolic discounting, and there are entire industries that rely on it. Our whole economic crisis was kicked off by borrowers taking on loans they couldn’t afford after lenders offered them lower payments (or no payments at all) for the first year, based on the unspoken assumption that the future was not a real thing that would ever exist. Credit card companies bank on your making purchases now that you won’t be able to pay for at the end of the month.

  In fact, our economic system is based on people who have learned to think long term taking advantage of those who haven’t. It’s the classic deal with the devil: You get a little pleasure now (easy credit, drugs, etc.), and they own you over the long term.

  FIGURE 8.7 ”Well, it’s Franklin Wright Capital’s belief that the waning moon has spooked the money gods who live in our wallets.”

  Sunk Cost Fallacy: “I Need to Spend Money to Make Up for All the Money I Lost!”

  Back when your genetic line was sailing around in the man-pouch of a hunter-gatherer, you only made it through a long winter by making every last deer testicle count. How can that be a bad thing? Well, that’s left us with a brain that’s really worried about making sure we don’t waste money we’ve already spent, or, as it’s known in the field of economics, “money that doesn’t exist anymore.”

  For instance, let’s say you’re in the market for a replacement computer, and the best thing for what you want is a five-hundred-dollar PC. However, you’ve always been a Mac user and recently dropped six hundred dollars on a wireless Apple keyboard (yeah, you went with the cheap one). Now, even though you like everything better about the PC, your brain will tell you that buying this one would mean you’d be wasting the money you spent on that keyboard. So you need to spend more on the Mac to justify your previous bad decision.

  This is what’s known as the sunk cost fallacy. If you were a perfectly rational being, you’d realize that the ship has sailed on that six hundred dollars, and it had every cent of every purchase you’ve ever made on board with it. The only thing that should figure into any economic decision is the money and possessions you have in the present tense, and how they can be best used to make your life better in the future.

  Of course, there is also the element of not wanting to admit you were wrong to make that last purchase, which leads to . . .

  Irrational Escalation of Commitment: Throwing Good Money After Bad

  The competitive instinct isn’t just something announcers made up to try to get us to admire athletes. Our brain’s natural tendency toward competition is arguably the reason your family survived the Great Hunter-Gatherer Knife Fight of 2000 B.C. But competition is all about motivation, and motivation is all about convincing yourself you’re right.

  Of course, sometimes you’re not right, but you want to win anyway. Economists call it irrational escalation of commitment. As we’ve already established, when faced with the prospect of making a $3,000 repair on your 1998 Saturn sedan or purchasing a slightly better car for $2,500, your brain will tell you to go with the repairs because you “already sank ten grand into this wheeled turd.” But what happens the next time your car needs a repair? Well, since you’ve now sunk thirteen grand into the Saturn Turdmobile, you definitely have to stick with it. And so on.

  The real-world implications are everywhere, and they’re tragic. For instance, it can justify escalation of a war. In 2005, America’s president said that we “owed” it to the two thousand American soldiers who had died in Iraq to “finish the task that they gave their lives for.” Regardless of what your politics are, to a certain part of your brain, that sounds like a logically constructed argument. Why do more troops have to die? Because these other troops died, of cou
rse. What else can we do, cut and run?

  The Disposition Effect: Our Refusal to Ever Get Rid of Anything

  Put up your hand if somewhere in your home, basement, or garage you have an old computer (or maybe just computer parts) that you refuse to throw away. On some level, you know that your 1998-era HP Pavilion cannot perform a single modern computing task and, as such, is worthless even to the homeless. But you can’t get rid of it, because, damn it, you paid two thousand bucks for it.

  This is the disposition effect. Investors suffer from this all the time; when a stock is losing value, instead of selling it and taking what they can get, they hold on to it. It’s not optimism that it’s going to go up (they’ll do it even if all evidence says it won’t), but rather being too pissed off at the idea of selling it for less than they paid. It’s the same impulse that makes people hoard useless stuff, unable to grasp the fact that it’ll never be useful again.

  Once again, there are entire industries profiting from our malfunction. Self-storage companies bank on us being willing to pay two hundred dollars a month to store a bunch of crap so useless that we don’t even want it in our garage, instead of just selling it (or doing something really tacky, like donating it to charity).

  The Gambler’s Fallacy and the Focusing Effect: Your Brain Sucks at Figuring the Odds

  The human brain sucks, and sucks hard, at probability. We just haven’t evolved to need it. The lottery commercials can tell us until they’re blue in the face that only 1 in 200 million tickets will win, the oddsmakers can insist our favorite team has a 1 in 800 chance of winning the title—it doesn’t matter the number, our brain will still default to “Hey, it could happen.”

  There are two ways this screws us: the gambler’s fallacy and the focusing effect.

  The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that short-term actions have an effect on long-term odds. You see the roulette ball fall into red three times in a row and you think it’s “due” to fall into black next, or that the color red is somehow on a “hot streak.” Of course, in reality, every time the ball is dropped into the wheel, your chances are exactly the same. You’re just looking at a display of total and utter randomness and seeing a pattern that isn’t there. Even if you don’t gamble, you trick yourself into thinking similarly in your everyday life: “I’m due to catch a break at some point, damn it!”

  The focusing effect, also known as anchoring, is even more prevalent in your daily life. It refers to our tendency to be heavily influenced by things we see with our own eyes, and this includes things in movies and TV commercials. Seeing a “3” in the hundreds column in the price “$300” has been shown, time and again, to make our brain think it is way more expensive than something that costs $299.99. Having strong visual memories was useful back in the day, before you had the media and marketers filtering the information before it reached you. You saw the negative consequences of the guy who tried to feed his family by sowing a field full of meat and decided you should stick with corn. But thanks to marketers, we rarely see the positive and negative consequences of actions in the appropriate balance. We see one-in-a-million weight-loss stories, like that guy who lost 250 pounds eating Subway sandwiches, and come away thinking that weight loss is easy.

  No One in the History of Arguing Has Ever Convinced Their Opponent of Anything

  FIGURE 8.8 The New York Times, always burying the lead.

  THE MYTH: Debates are one of the most important forms of reasoning we have as a species.

  Arguments over conflicting ideologies always have a winner and a loser because we are rational beings and we are smart enough to identify when someone else is right and we are wrong. Why else would we waste any time debating religion, conspiracy theories, and the superiority of Star Trek or Star Wars?

  THE TRUTH: We don’t argue to find the truth. We argue to win.

  Our innate urge to argue isn’t grounded in a desire to discover the truth of the matter; it is grounded in our desire to win. Try to think of the last big argument you had with someone who was blatantly wrong. How did that conversation end? Did the person sheepishly admit that maybe their conspiracy theory about no planes being present on 9/11 had a few holes? Of course not. They likely moved on to the next point they could argue and continued believing in ridiculousness. That little tactic is called the argumentative theory of reasoning, and it is present in every one of our minds. Humanity doesn’t argue in search of better understanding but in order to dominate someone else.

  While blindness to reason may seem like a cognitive flaw, it’s actually a trait that has survived through years of evolution, because arguing, regardless of how right we may be, has taught us how to bully other people into caving to our will. It’s rarely in our best interest to admit we’re wrong during an argument, even when the opposing side has piles of proof that we are idiots. Back when our brains were evolving, “the truth” was never the point—at least not as far as our ability to survive and procreate was concerned. In that context, the point of every debate was being the victor, and since that’s when your brain was designed, that’s what it’s good at.

  THE MYTH: Everybody’s out to get you, and they’ll lie at the drop of a hat.

  Our bullshit detectors have a lot more false positives than we think. Chances are you’re not pledging allegiance or vowing betrayal all the time, but rather stumbling around in a drunken haze of ambivalence. But every once in a while you put yourself out there, and life comes down to two things: trust or mistrust. So which one is right? Optimism? Pessimism? Turns out, over the long run, both strategies make the world around you about 30 percent more suspicious looking than it really is.

  THE TRUTH: The world is nice; you’re the jerk.

  We didn’t just pull that number out of our ass. At the University of Cologne in Germany, researchers asked a group of students to rate the likeliness that a group of strangers would screw them out of money they were supposed to share with them. The students assumed about half of the strangers were trustworthy enough to be honest and split the cash, but when it came time to actually share the money, about 80 percent of the people actually shared.

  Over time, this self-fulfilling model begins to affect how you interact with people every day. Ever been in an argument about religion or racism or whether Edward is better than Jacob and immediately felt it stall when one of you suspected the other might be doctoring facts? No amount of proof will ever sway either side in that case, because your brains turn off as soon as you assume that the opposition is lying. Of course, you don’t have to think they’re lying to be impossible to convince, thanks to the fact that . . .

  THE MYTH: You’re a reasonable, rational human being who only wants the facts . . .

  Our entire government system, from the way we elect officials to the way we convict criminals, is based on debate and deliberation. Everyone has a chance to argue their case, because, as rational beings, we know that even the hardest heart can be swayed by an honest appeal to reason. Even the Internet is inherently diplomatic, allowing everyone with a keyboard the ability to speak their mind and, if their point is well articulated and valid, sway the opinions of others.

  THE TRUTH: You disappeared up your own ass a long time ago, and you’re never coming back out. . . .

  Well-thought-out, articulate opinions swaying the base beliefs of others? Great! In theory. Now try to think of a single instance in which that’s ever occurred.

  It doesn’t actually matter what facts any lawyer has to present, what talking points a politician chooses, or even what conclusive proof we present in this section labeled “The Truth,” because if you’ve already made up your mind about a subject you feel passionately about, there’s not much anyone can do to change it. That’s all thanks to a hardwired amenity in your brain called confirmation bias. Think of it as your brain’s slick PR agent: Every time you encounter information that runs contradictory to your beliefs, regardless of how irrefutable it may be, your mind will spin the facts in any way it can to keep you shielded fro
m humiliation. Obviously, the fervor of your beliefs will determine the amount of confirmation bias. That’s why you can argue with a friend that Rick James did “Play That Funky Music” and still feel OK about it when you’re proven wrong. But when the topic is God or gay rights, your entire belief system is called into question, and no amount of evidence or eloquence from the other side can ever make you stop and say, “Maybe I’m completely wrong about this.”

  To prove it, researchers set up neural detectors and tracked the activity in people’s brains while they read newspaper reports. When the subjects read stories about embarrassing mistakes made by their favorite political candidate, the part of the brain dedicated to logic and deductive reasoning stayed silent, while the emotional part of the brain lit up like an angry bonfire. Their reaction to the story was not based on reason, but based on the social consequences and fear of being wrong.

  When the proof runs contradictory to conviction, our brains either justify how both proof and belief can exist together or throw a temper tantrum and lash out at the facts for being so mean.

  Stuff You Don’t Know About Yourself

  THE MYTH: You know yourself like the back of your hand.

  Everybody’s met someone whose self-esteem is either way too high or way too low, but they’re the exception, right? Generally, we’re pretty self-aware creatures. Almost to a fault: We spend so much time navel-gazing and self-improving that the world around us is crumbling into oblivion just so we can fit in a Pilates class and some “me time.” But it’s all worth it, because look at us. We look good, we’re spiritually centered, we’re philanthropic, we’re hung like a fire truck . . .