Learn about two new neuroscience studies that show why birds are so dang smart. Then science writer John Tierney will talk negativity bias and how you can use it to your own benefit.
Learn about two new neuroscience studies that show why birds are so dang smart. Then science writer John Tierney will talk negativity bias and how you can use it to your own benefit.
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Two new bird-brain studies show why birds are so smart by Grant Currin
Additional resources from science writer John Tierney:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/how-to-make-the-most-of-your-negativity-bias-w-john-tierney
[MUSIC PLAYING] ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you learn about two new neuroscience studies that show why birds are so dang smart. Then science writer John Tierney will talk negativity bias. And how you can use it to your own benefit.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
[SWOOSH]
NATALIA REAGAN: Man, birds are smart, dangerously smart. Just ask the mouse I had to wrestle out of Jeanette's mouth. Jeanette's a chicken, by the way. Now, that might come as a bit of a surprise given that bird brain is an insult. In the United States alone, nearly a billion birds die every year from flying into windows. Maybe we should be blaming the Windex.
Scientists believe the bird brain stereotype for a long time. But some new insights from avian neuroscience has shown that our feathered friends are more thoughtful than they sometimes appear. Over the years birds have demonstrated the ability to use tools, solve puzzles, pick locks, do simple math, categorize objects, plan for the future, and even dance to a beat. Some even lay eggs on their humans desks. But that's an extra story for a different day. Yet despite all these impressive feats, a lot of neuroscientists were unconvinced of their genius.
Why the skepticism? Why? It comes down to what their brains look like. For the most part, human brains work like every other animals brain. But we have something extra that sets us apart. That's the cerebral cortex, the wrinkly, ridged outer layer that you think of when you imagine a brain.
Only mammals and some non-avian reptiles have a cerebral cortex. And ours is particularly big. That's why we think it enables us to do the kind of thinking that seems to be uniquely human. We're talking the big stuff like, consciousness and metacognition, or thinking about the act of thinking. What's all this have to do with birds?
Well, new research is starting to tear down the wall that supposedly divides our smart mammal brains from bird brains. We've actually known for a while that bird brains have an outer layer that corresponds to a human's fancy cerebral cortex. It's called the pallium. And it's smooth and fairly flat. But this is a situation where size doesn't matter that much. What's important is the number of neurons.
It turns out that birds can pack as many as 1 to 2 billion neurons into that brain region. That's nothing compared to our 16 billion neurons. But it is about the same number that's found in monkeys. Recently, researchers made some very careful comparisons of how the regions within these brain areas are wired together. They discovered that the bird pallium and the human cerebral cortex are organized the same way. Not only that, but when researchers recorded neuron activity in crow's pallium while they performed a visual task, they found that the neurons actually represented with the birds perceived.
That's a hallmark of consciousness. That means that not only do birds pretty much have the same neural circuitry that you use to think conscious thoughts. But that circuitry actually functions in the same way too. This suggests that the tools for consciousness may have existed before mammals did. Either that or they evolved independently in both birds and mammals. Either way, this is the latest addition to a large and growing collection of clues that show humans aren't as different from the rest of the living world as we thought.
[SWOOSH]
ASHLEY HAMER: Bad news seems to be everywhere these days. That was even true before we were living through a global pandemic. After all, newspapers have been saying, if it bleeds, it leads, for decades. But it's not just the news. Our own brains have a tendency to focus on bad things over good things in a phenomenon psychologists call, negativity bias, or the negativity effect. But today's guest says that once we understand this bias, we can use it to our advantage.
And in the next two episodes, he'll tell us how. Science writer, John Tierney is a co-author of the book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. Cody and I talked to him just before the pandemic hit. But his words are surprisingly relevant for our current times. We began by asking him a simple question, what made him want to write a book about negativity?
[SWOOSH]
JOHN TIERNEY: My own reason is because I'm a journalist. And I kept wondering, why do we always hype bad news? I mean, there are bad things that happen. But why do we keep hyping it? And then I came across this similar paper by Roy Baumeister called Bad is Stronger than Good. And people knew that people respond more to financial losses in the financial games. But what Roy did was he discovered that this is a universal effect.
Now, the negativity effect is the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. So when you hear a mix of compliments and criticism, you obsess over the criticism. You ignore the praise. And this negativity skews our thinking all day long. It skews our decisions. It skews our relationships. And it skews the way that we look at the world.
So we wrote the book trying to show people how to harness the power of bad when it's useful. And it really can be very useful in a lot of ways. That's why it evolved. But we also want to show people how to overcome the power of bad when it's not useful. And we want to show them how to go on what we call a low bad diet.
ASHLEY HAMER: But this doesn't actually seem that rational. Like, why did it evolve?
JOHN TIERNEY: Well, to survive, life has to win every day. Death has to win only once. So the people who survived on the ancestral Savannah were people who paid a lot of attention to threats like, hungry lions or poisonous berries. And they didn't spend a lot of time enjoying the good things in life. It really is more important to pay attention to threats for sheer survival.
And also, paying attention to bad stuff, it helps you learn. You learn more from failure than success. People are more motivated by penalties than prizes. So this serves a lot of good purposes. It keeps you alive. It helps you learn. It motivates you to improve.
The problem, though, is that we tend to not appreciate how strong this effect is. And we're in this world today, where it's just a high bad environment. We're surrounded all day long. We just see screens all the time with messages telling us how awful things are, and new things we should worry about. We're surrounded by so much of this negativity in this high bad environment that we're in.
[SWOOSH]
ASHLEY HAMER: I don't think anyone would disagree that we are in a high bad environment right now. But how do we make our focus on negativity work for us? John had some really easy tips you can start using today.
[SWOOSH]
JOHN TIERNEY: It's really important not to overpromise. Some of these experiments in the past I barely talk about, that really interest me, where they did experiments where somebody would help another person. And they would promise to help them solve a certain number of puzzles. If they did a lot more puzzles than they promise to do, the other person really wasn't that grateful. They didn't rate them that much higher. But if they fell short at all, that's when they really got downgraded.
What inspired it was this researcher noticed that when stuff from Amazon arrived early, she didn't really feel very grateful. But she was really upset if it came late. And so she found that this is the universal thing. Breaking a promise, you pay a big price. Delivering extra, doesn't make that much difference.
And that same thing holds in relationships. It holds in parenting, super good parenting. We feel we have to go to every soccer game. We've got to go to every-- help with every project, get the best tutors. That really doesn't make that much difference. The main thing is avoiding bad. As long as you avoid being neglectful or abusive, the child will turn out pretty much the same.
So our advice is, don't try to be a super parent, just try to be a good enough parent. Avoid the bad stuff. And that holds whether it be a good enough partner, be a good enough worker. As long as you avoid the bad stuff, that's much more important than doing good.
Now, we talk about the rule of four where it's either-- That it takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. And when you look at that ratio, you realize that you get a lot more leverage by focusing on minimizing the negative than by doing extra good stuff.
[SWOOSH]
ASHLEY HAMER: Again, that was science writer, John Tierney. Co-author of the book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. He'll be back tomorrow to talk about how negativity bias shows up in relationships. And how we can make use of it for the better.
[SWOOSH]
NATALIA REAGAN: Let's recap today's takeaways.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, first we learned that bird brains are more brilliant than we often give them credit for. Even though, they lack that wrinkly cerebral cortex that we're so proud of, they have a pallium, which is pretty much the same thing. And it has 1 to 2 billion neurons packed into it. That's not the same as our 16 billion neurons. But it's on par with monkeys. This means that complex thoughts and concepts like consciousness may have evolved further back than we thought, or each of us evolved the tools independently, which is also pretty cool.
NATALIA REAGAN: It's an excellent story. It's for you Cody.
[LAUGHS]
And it's also going to make me watch The Birds.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, and feel a little bit more fearful.
NATALIA REAGAN: They're consciously trying to make my life a living hell.
[LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: It really are. All you have to do is just look at a raven the way they look at you. They are thinking thoughts. And they are forming judgments about you when they look at you.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, yeah. I joke that my chickens have more emotional intelligence than all of my partners combined.
[LAUGHS]
No, because they can be really harsh. I mean, they literally will look at you like, I will cut you. I will end you right here. But then I've had bad days. And they'll jump up and sit with you. And it's just like having a cat or dog, who wants to curl up in your lap except, they want to jump up on my shoulder.
Yeah, they try to be parrots. But they fail miserably. But no, I think there's a lot we don't know. And years ago, I actually, developed a show called AI, for animal intelligence. And one of the things we were looking at, how do we gauge Intelligence? Why do we get to create this weird barometer of what is smart and what is not when all you have to do is survive?
If they can survive, you don't need to be able to do calculus. I'm sorry. Social intelligence, being able to adapt to your environment is all you need. So for us to sit there and be like, I don't know. I don't know if how intelligent you are. You couldn't pick this lock. Sorry, you don't have opposable thumbs. So you must be a moron.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's like someone telling me that I don't have mechanic skills. So therefore, I'm a failure as a human. Like, there are a lot of skills out there, and not all of them are useful for everyone.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right. You don't need the skill. It doesn't matter. Who are we to say if they're smart or not? Especially, if they can eat us.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right.
NATALIA REAGAN: And we also got some good news for people who love bad news. We all seem to have a negativity bias, which means we're more apt to remember and obsess over the bad things that happened to us, rather than notice, reflect, and celebrate the good things. This goes for world news, parenting, relationships, compliments versus critiques, et cetera. And this negativity bias seems to evolve to ensure that our ancestors were always on the lookout for bad things that could befall us.
Hey, if we're too busy relishing in that sweet, new hand ax Oog made us, we might become big cat food. But modern day humans can stand a little positivity. So maybe it's time to take a break from doomscrolling, and make a gratitude list.
ASHLEY HAMER: I was trying to make a gratitude list for a while. I actually started a bullet journal, which is-- This is the most successful I've been at starting any sort of notebook or journal or to do list. I am 30 pages in, very proud of myself. But I had a list of good things that happened. And every day, I had to say one thing. And sometimes, it was just I love my job or something like that. But I need to get back on that, because it is a very blank list right now.
NATALIA REAGAN: No, but that's great. I remember years ago hearing about gratitude lists. And I'm kind of a cynical hippie, where I have a lot of hippie attributes. But sometimes I'm just like, Oh no. That's too much. But I do think there's something to be said for-- just be thankful for the little things.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely.
[SWOOSH]
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's first story was written by Grant Curran, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting and editing by Natalia Reagan. Our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Write something down that you're thankful for. And join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]