Chatter

by Ethan Kross

  But the Berkeley team wasn’t solely interested in whether shooting down roaring rapids would lead the rafters to experience awe. They figured it would. What they really wanted to know was whether the amount of awe they experienced on the trip would have any lasting impact on their stress and well-being after it was over.

  So, at the beginning of the rafting trip and a week after it was complete, Anderson asked the rafters to fill out a set of measures indexing their levels of well-being, stress, and PTSD. Much had happened between the two assessments. They rafted dozens of miles over the course of their four-day trip, spent numerous afternoons hiking along the riverbanks, and looked at prehistoric petroglyphs created thousands of years ago that led them to muse on the forgotten societies that had once trod the same ground beside the river as they did now. Would the effects of these experiences dissipate after the trip, or would they leave something behind?

  When Anderson crunched the numbers after the study ended, he found that participants displayed significant improvements on each of the well-being measures after the trip ended; their stress and PTSD levels declined, while their overall levels of happiness, satisfaction with life, and sense of belonging improved. Those were interesting results on their own. But the most fascinating finding concerned what predicted them. As Anderson and his colleagues expected, it wasn’t a function of how much amusement or contentment or gratitude or joy or pride that paddlers felt during each day of the rafting trip. It was how awe inspiring it felt. Suzanne felt all of these boosts, including a more tranquil inner voice. “That rafting trip changed my perspective dramatically,” she told me two years later.

  When you’re in the presence of something vast and indescribable, it’s hard to maintain the view that you—and the voice in your head—are the center of the world. This changes the synaptic flow of your thoughts in similar ways as other distancing techniques we’ve examined. In the case of awe, however, you don’t have to focus your mind on a visual exercise or on reframing an upsetting experience. In this sense, it’s similar to saying your own name: You just have the experience, whatever it happens to be, and relief follows. When you feel smaller in the midst of awe-inspiring sights—a phenomenon described as a “shrinking of the self”—so do your problems.

  The Berkeley Green River white-water rafting study is just one example of a burgeoning line of research linking awe to physical and psychological benefits. Another study, for instance, showed that awe leads people to perceive time as being more available, pushing them to prioritize time-intensive but highly rewarding experiences like going to a Broadway show over less time-intensive—but also less rewarding—material ones like purchasing a new watch. Meanwhile, on the physiological level, awe is linked with reduced inflammation.

  The influence of awe on behavior is so strong, in fact, that others can’t help but notice it. One set of studies found that “awe-prone” people came across as humbler to their friends. They also reported higher humility and had a more balanced view of their strengths and weaknesses—both hallmark features of wisdom—and more accurately credited the role of outside influences on their successes.

  There is an important caveat to consider when thinking about the role that awe plays in our emotional lives. While the bulk of research links it with positive outcomes, scientists have shown that a subset of awe-inducing experiences can trigger negative feelings. Let’s call these encounters “awful” in the negative sense: the sight of a tornado, a terrorist attack, or believing in a wrathful God. (Research shows that approximately 80 percent of awe-related incidents are uplifting and 20 percent aren’t.) These kinds of experiences are considered awe inspiring in the sense that they, like a majestic sunset, are so vast and complex that we can’t easily explain them. The difference is that people perceive them as threatening. And it turns out that when you inject a bit of threat into the awe equation, that can, perhaps not surprisingly, turn thoughts into chatter.

  The operative power of awe is its ability to make us feel smaller, nudging us to cede control of our inner voice to a greater grandeur. But there is another lever that our physical environments can pull to improve our internal dialogues that is the opposite of giving in to life’s wild vastness—a lever that doesn’t help us cede control but rather helps us regain it.

  The Nadal Principle

  In June 2018, the Spanish tennis superstar Rafael Nadal stepped onto the clay courts of the French Open to battle in the tournament’s final match in pursuit of his eleventh championship there. That summer day in Paris, with fifteen thousand fans waiting restlessly to watch a world-class match, he and his opponent, the Austrian Dominic Thiem, came out of the locker rooms, ready to compete. Nadal did what he always does before a match. First, he walked across the court to his bench with a single racket in his hand. Then he took off his warm-up jacket as he faced the crowd, bouncing back and forth vigorously on the balls of his feet. And as usual, he placed his tournament ID card on his bench facing up.

  Then the match began.

  Nadal jumped ahead right away, winning the first set. After each point, he fiddled with his hair and shirt before the next serve, as if arranging them back in place. During breaks in the action, he sipped a power drink and water and then returned both exactly as they had been—in front of his chair to his left, one precisely behind the other, aligned at a diagonal with the court.

  Two sets later, Nadal beat Thiem and left the French Open victorious yet again.

  Although you might think that competing against world-class athletes and making sure you don’t pull a muscle are the most essential parts of professional tennis, that’s not true for Nadal, one of the greatest players in history. “What I battle hardest to do in a tennis match,” he says, “is to quiet the voices in my head.” And his quirky customs on the court, which many of his fans find amusing but strange, provide him with a perfectly reasonable method of doing so.

  By always placing his ID faceup, carefully arranging his water bottles so they are perfectly aligned in front of his bench, and making sure that his hair is just right before a serve, Nadal is engaging in a process called compensatory control; he’s creating order in his physical environment to provide him with the order he seeks internally. As he puts it, “It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.”

  This tendency to structure elements in our environment as a buffer against chatter goes beyond contexts in which our performance is being evaluated. It extends to any of the spaces that we occupy. As a result, humans infuse order into their external surroundings—and by extension their minds—in a variety of ways. Some are very similar to Rafael Nadal’s. This might explain the global influence of Marie Kondo and her 2014 best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Her philosophy of decluttering our homes by only retaining objects that give us joy is a strategy for influencing how we feel by imposing order on the environment.

  But how does the ordering of our surroundings influence what’s happening inside our minds? To answer this question, it’s crucial to understand the pivotal role that perceptions of control—the belief that we possess the ability to impact the world in the ways we desire—play in our lives.

  The desire to have control over oneself is a strong human drive. Believing that we have the ability to control our fate influences whether we try to achieve goals, how much effort we exert to do so, and how long we persist when we encounter challenges. Given all this, it is not surprising that increasing people’s sense of control has been linked to benefits that span the gamut from improved physical health and emotional well-being, to heightened performance at school and work, to more satisfying interpersonal relationships. Conversely, feeling out of control often causes our chatter to spike and propels us to try to regain it. Which is where turning to our physical environments becomes relevant.

  In order for you to truly feel in control, you have to bel
ieve not only that you are capable of exerting your will to influence outcomes but that the world around you, in turn, is an orderly place where any actions you engage in will have their intended effect. Seeing order in the world is comforting because it makes life easier to navigate and more predictable.

  The need for order in the external world is so strong, one study found, that after recalling a chatter-provoking incident and focusing on their lack of control, participants actually saw illusory patterns in images. In lieu of other avenues for simulating order, their minds led them to imagine the patterns. In another experiment, participants who couldn’t control the noise levels in their surroundings were asked to choose either a postcard of a water lily with a black border that conveyed the idea of structure or a similar postcard that lacked a border. On average, they preferred the one with the structured border, another visual shorthand for order.

  What scientists have discovered, however, is that just like Nadal we can simulate a sense of order in the world—and by extension in our own minds—by organizing our surroundings and making sure that our physical environments conform to a particular, controllable structure.

  The fascinating thing about seeking compensation for chaos in one area (that is, our minds) by creating order in another (that is, the physical environment) is that it doesn’t even have to have anything to do with the specific issue that is throwing off our inner voice. This is why imposing order on our environments is so useful; it’s almost always easy to do. And the value of engaging in this practice is impressive. For instance, one experiment demonstrated that just reading about the world described as an orderly place reduced anxiety. Unsurprisingly, research indicates that people who live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods—such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, and likely the areas of Iraq where Suzanne Bott worked—experience more depression, in part because of disorder they perceive in their surroundings.

  In contemporary culture, many people view overly frequent attempts to order one’s environment as a sign of pathology. Consider, for example, a subset of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder who are strongly motivated to arrange things so they are orderly. What this research on compensatory control suggests is that these people may simply be taking the strong desire people have to establish order in their surroundings—in order to gain a sense of control—to an extreme. There is logic to what they do, even if restraint is lacking.

  What makes OCD harmful—a psychological disorder—is that the need that people with this condition display for order in the environment is excessive and interferes with their normal daily functioning. As a parallel case, our need for order can also get out of control in our larger social surroundings. Just look at the recent proliferation of conspiracy theories online, in which the chaos and upheaval of events are attributed to the shadowy (and orderly) plan of diabolical forces. In this case, people are grasping for order through a narrative mechanism, but often to the detriment of others (the conspiracies are, after all, usually false and based on an absence of evidence).

  What research on our need for order and the benefits of nature and awe makes clear is how closely intertwined our physical environments are with our minds. They’re part of the same tapestry. We’re embedded in our physical spaces, and different features of these spaces activate psychological forces inside us, which affect how we think and feel. Now we know not only why we are drawn to different features of our environment but also how we can make proactive choices to increase the benefits we derive from them.

  * * *

  —

  In 2007, the last of the Robert Taylor Homes was demolished. The city had long since moved out all of the residents, and the once famous symbol of urban blight, segregation, and social disorder was set to be redeveloped into a new complex of mixed-income homes and retail and community spaces. Such a positive, orderly transformation would likely be awe inspiring to the people who remember the crime and violence the buildings were once home to.

  Whether the new iteration will have green space integrated into its design in a way that benefits its residents is yet to be determined, but the legacy the original complex left behind still reverberates through the history of Chicago, and the history of science. It is a lasting example of how our environments play a pivotal role in shaping what we think, feel, and do and the importance of actively taking control of our surroundings for our own benefit.

  For all the power of our environments, though, we don’t just gain psychological relief from our surroundings and the things that fill them. As we saw with the need to exert control, there are also specific things we do in our environments that can help us harness our inner voices, but imposing order the way Nadal does is only the beginning. The methods at our disposal are often so strange, and their effects so strong, that they almost seem like magic.

  Chapter Seven

  Mind Magic

  One morning in 1762, a three-year-old named Maria Theresia von Paradis woke up blind.

  The daughter of an adviser to the Holy Roman Empress, Maria Theresia grew up in Vienna and, in spite of her loss of sight, lived a relatively charmed life. Born a musical prodigy, she excelled at the clavichord, a small rectangular keyboard, and organ. Her talent combined with her disability earned her the attention and generosity of the empress, who ensured that she received a pension and the best education available. By the time she was a teenager, she was a celebrated musician, playing at the most exclusive salons in Vienna and beyond. Mozart would even write a concerto for her. Yet Maria Theresia’s parents didn’t give up on the idea of their daughter regaining her vision.

  As she grew up, doctors experimented with a variety of treatments, administering everything from leeches to electric shocks to Maria Theresia’s eyes, all to no avail. Her vision didn’t return. Even worse, the treatments left her with a host of maladies. By the time she was eighteen, she suffered from bouts of vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and fainting spells.

  Enter Franz Anton Mesmer, a mysterious Vienna-trained physician who had become well-connected among the city’s elite. He claimed to have pioneered a medical intervention that could cure a broad range of physical and emotional ills by altering the flow of an imperceptible force that coursed through the universe using magnetic principles alone. Mesmer cured people’s conditions by channeling this invisible energy with magnets and his hands. He called this technique animal magnetism. It would later be eponymized as “mesmerism.”

  In 1777, when she was eighteen, Maria Theresia began undergoing treatment with Mesmer. Over the course of several months, he touched her eyes and body with his magnets, telling her about animal magnetism and how it would heal her. She was a believer, as were her parents, and sure enough her sight miraculously returned. Not all at once, but in fits and starts.

  At first, she just saw blurry images. But then she started distinguishing between black and white objects. Eventually, her sense of color came back. While her perception of depth and proportions still lagged, she gradually began to make out human faces. Yet instead of filling her with joy after all these years, they frightened her, especially noses. The visual world had become alien to her. But the change was still incredible. She could finally see again.

  Briefly.

  Maria Theresia’s parents had a dramatic falling-out with Mesmer, which eventually caused their treatment sessions to end. Hearsay had it that her parents were worried their daughter would lose her pension if she fully recovered her sight. Another version suggested Mesmer and Maria Theresia had been caught carrying on an illicit affair. In any case, their time together was over, and amid swirling rumors Mesmer left Vienna. And when the medical master of animal magnetism disappeared from her life, so did Maria Theresia’s vision, yet again.

  Mesmer’s story, however, didn’t end there.

  After leaving Vienna and relocating to Paris, he opened a clinic and once again ingratiated himself with the upper classes. He even treat
ed King Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette, along with one of his brothers. During the following years, the demand for Mesmer’s services was so great that to increase his profits, he devised a method to increase the number of patients he could simultaneously treat: He directed many people to stand or sit shoulder to shoulder around a wooden tub filled with water and tiny shreds of iron that he had magnetized. Metal rods jutted out from the tub, and with music playing quietly in the background, patients applied the rods to the part of their body that was bothering them while Mesmer walked around adjusting the flow of magnetic energy between rod and patient.

  The effectiveness of Mesmer’s treatment differed depending on the patients he saw, in some cases significantly. Some people experienced small tinges of pain in the affected parts of their body; some convulsed as if they were having seizures. Others simply felt cured. But not everyone saw improvements. Some experienced something else: nothing at all.

  Eventually, in 1784, King Louis had heard enough about mesmerism. He ordered a royal commission of scientists to investigate Mesmer’s techniques, led by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who was living in Paris as a diplomat at the time. From the outset, the commission was skeptical of Mesmer’s claims. They didn’t doubt that some people benefited from being mesmerized. They just didn’t believe that the cause was an invisible magnetic force.

  The commission’s investigation did little to alter their opinion. In one experiment, for example, a woman who was a passionate believer in mesmerism sat next to a closed door. On the other side of the door a Mesmer-trained physician actively applied magnetic energy. When the woman didn’t know he was on the other side, she showed no signs of being mesmerized. The moment the same physician made his presence known, the woman began to jerk and flail wildly, indicating the treatment’s success. Many similar demonstrations followed.