What your brain wants and what your brain needs aren't always the same. In fact, the shortcuts our brains take can lead to biases and distortions that make us our own worst enemy. Science writer David DiSalvo, author of "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite," discusses our brain's shortcomings and how we can identify and conquer them. Additional resources from David DiSalvo: "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite" "Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain's Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life" "The Brain in Your Kitchen: A Collection of Essays on How What We Buy, Eat, and Experience Affects Our Brains" David DiSalvo's website David DiSalvo on Twitter @Neuronarrative Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
What your brain wants and what your brain needs aren't always the same. In fact, the shortcuts our brains take can lead to biases and distortions that make us our own worst enemy. Science writer David DiSalvo, author of "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite," discusses our brain's shortcomings and how we can identify and conquer them.
Additional resources from David DiSalvo:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-makes-your-brain-happy-and-why-you-should-do-the-opposite
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious. Why is it important to not listen to our brain sometimes?
DAVID DISALVO: It's a bit of a paradox, right? Everything we do requires us to rely on our brains, obviously. But at the same time, this same incredible organ that is the embodiment of all these amazing abilities also embodies this set of biases and thinking distortions and, really frankly, delusions that can lead us astray and frequently do. So we have to always balance between our reliance on the amazing capabilities of our brains while also acknowledging that there's these tremendous drawbacks.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi. I'm Cody Gough with the amazingly capable curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today we're going to learn about the shortcuts our brains take and what we can do about them.
CODY GOUGH: Every week, we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is the Curiosity Podcast.
CODY GOUGH: The human brain is a double-edged sword. The same parts of our brain that let us learn, love, and achieve can also make us compulsive, impulsive, and addicted.
ASHLEY HAMER: And the energy that fuels drive and passion is the same energy that fuels impulsiveness and rage. So how do we control it?
CODY GOUGH: David Disalvo is the author of What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. And he just released an updated 2018 edition with new research about how our brains respond to rewards, designed to address the age of the smartphone.
DAVID DISALVO: Today we'll learn how to be aware of our brains' biases and how to overcome them.
CODY GOUGH: Your book is called What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. What's the biggest problem you saw where you said to yourself, I need to write a book about this, and I need to fix this problem.
SPEAKER 2: It really came down to my observation of beginning with myself, asking this question, why do I think as I think and do as I do when, in so many instances, my thoughts and behaviors turn out to be counter to my best interest? They didn't seem that way in the initial analysis. Of course, nobody begins with believing that they're going to lead themselves in the wrong direction by making a decision or taking an action that they do. But we do it all the time.
And so through the course of writing about these topics-- I've written for magazines and other publications for quite a while in this area-- and a combination of doing that research and also just observing my own behavior and that of others that I work with and interact with, it felt like a very rich area to explore, this paradox of relying on our brains, but also being led astray by the same incredible wetware. Neuroscientists sometimes refer to it as the wetware we carry around with us in our heads.
CODY GOUGH: So you're just talking about day-to-day life in general, maybe hitting the snooze button too many times when you know it's going to make you late to work, or speeding on the highway too fast when you know you're going to get pulled over, just day-to-day like that?
SPEAKER 2: Sure. That's a big part of it. And it runs the gamut of things that are trivial or silly to things that are extremely dangerous to life threatening. One example that we see in the news all the time now is people texting while driving. This is something that is repeated to an extreme degree in the news and other sources.
This is a dangerous thing to do. We know it's dangerous, and yet we do it all the time. And we catch ourselves doing it all the time. Just seems like a natural thing to do. We should be able to communicate while we're driving. And yet we know-- it's just evident not only from a research perspective, but also just the facts the statistics that are being borne out every day from people doing this. We know that passing our attention in that way is dangerous, and yet we do it anyway.
So this really gets to the core of the book and the core of the book's title, which is admittedly a little bit tongue in cheek. But what it really comes down to is that our brains are inherently biased toward certainty, stability, and consistency. And as a result of that, unpredictability, instability, vagueness, uncertainty are perceived as threats.
And I don't mean this in the sense that we're always like consciously thinking about what's a threat to us because so much of this is happening subconsciously. And all of these biases and thinking distortions largely come out of this tension between our brain's native leaning and those things that we perceive as threats and are trying to avoid. And so these biases and shortcuts, a lot of them, they just kind of immediately go into effect without us thinking about it because that's the way our brains are wired.
And that's part of what we really have to keep in mind as we're evaluating all of these topics that are addressed in this book and a lot of other good books is that our brains are going to move in a particular direction. And they're going to do it without us having a conscious awareness of it happening. And so the more we can build in that, we kind of have to-- I use another term in another book I wrote called The Awareness Wedge. We need to really consciously insert the awareness wedge to when we have the ability to time to do it to stop those native tendencies from just going automatically into effect.
And I think once we can kind of develop that discipline, and immediately a very, very difficult one to develop, I think then we're making-- we find ourselves making better decisions, feeling more confident about the actions we take, and so forth.
One great example of this, which comes up frequently in our politically and ideologically charged culture, is that we all have these positions. And whether they're well-thought-out positions, or they're positions we've inherited through our life experience, however we got to them, we have these positions, whether they're political positions, ideological positions, belief positions.
And we're comfortable with those positions. And any information, evidence, arguments that are presented that challenge them are internalized as a threat to us. And so that's where this set of biases that come out-- the one that gets talked about a lot is confirmation bias, where we really want to defend-- we want to maintain the certainty and comfort level with our existing position.
And so we're going to look for information that supports it. And we're going to try to discredit information that doesn't support it. And that allows us to come back to that comfort level.
We do it all the time in all manner of-- it often is a political discussion that this comes up in, but it doesn't need to be. It really cuts across all different categories of our lives.
CODY GOUGH: And so all biases, not just confirmation bias, are intended to protect not really necessarily ourselves, but our brains so our brains don't have to work that hard.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah. There's the protection element. There's the need-- we had these shortcuts that we go to. We appeal to these shortcuts because they get us to a conclusion. They get us to a decision faster. We also have to acknowledge that our brains are very energy intensive. It takes a lot of energy to power our brains. It's somewhere between 10% and 15% of our circulating blood glucose goes to fueling our brains.
And as a result, our brains are very energy conscious. They are these energy hogs, but they also are energy conservers. So there's another paradox there that we were always living in between. We don't have the ability to evaluate all of it, so we're going to use shortcuts to come to conclusions about it-- good, bad, or indifferent. So yeah. All of the different biases we could talk about that are touched on in this book get us to those positions, get us back to that stability, consistency position that our brains are most comfortable with.
ASHLEY HAMER: There are a lot of biases David talks about in the book. But we've got time to touch on at least a handful. Here it goes. There's heuristic bias, the way your brain relies on the same old rules of thumb even when they're wrong or don't apply to the situation.
There's symbolic punishment, the way you'll accept a worse outcome for yourself just to spite someone else. There's the backfire effect, which says that when you hear evidence that contradicts your beliefs, those beliefs just get stronger. Then there's the framing bias, which is how the words you use can change your perception, like, which is worse, getting dumped or breaking up?
Speaking of heartbreak, David also writes about something called the jilted lover syndrome, how when you can't have something you want, you just want it more. Another bias with a fun name is the oh-what-the-heck effect, which is that snowball of failure that happens when you fail at one goal and then give up on all the others. In the book, David gives an example of a dinner with friends where you plan to eat healthy, but nosh on one too many appetizers. And before you know it, you're ordering the ribeye and an extra dessert. There are many, many more in the book and on curiosity.com. Both are linked in the show notes.
DAVID DISALVO: So on that One of the things that we always run into is that we tend to offload decision making. Because making decisions processing information is a very cognitively challenging thing, it requires a lot of resources. So we tend to offload decisions.
And so that makes us tend to put a lot of weight on the information we're receiving, which goes into the processing all this energy consumption that goes into processing. But it may lead us to put too much weight on it, we may be overly influenced on it, overly persuaded. We can tend to be very malleable in that regard, because we do rely so much on that to help frame and shape our decision making.
And so that plays out constantly, right? Because we're always particularly in our information saturated culture, we're always getting information from all different sources. And that's an example of where our brain kind of offloading can have a very negative effect, if we let it, not that it has to, but it can certainly go in that direction.
At the final analysis, we're making a decision, but it's very frequently that later on we come back to thinking about the decision, we think why do we, why did we do that? Why did we think that way? What led us to that decision? And if we break it down and trace it to the root of facts, we probably find that there was this whole slew of stuff that we relied on that wasn't really very well based, it wasn't grounded information, but we took it that way, and it led us to where it led us.
CODY GOUGH: So I think this is really relevant, in the age of really, really fast information and information sharing. And we all know about the spread of fake news or articles that are false or scientific articles that don't really make sense. It's too much effort you're saying for our brains to possibly scroll down our Twitter feed.
If we see 35 headlines, we're not going to click on every single headline, and then Google a bunch of sources to verify the accuracy of every single story. And that's why our brain is just taking shortcuts and kind of accepting the information that we're receiving as is correct, is that what you're saying?
DAVID DISALVO: Yes, we're relying on those shortcuts, and you're right, because it's a real pitfall of the age we live in, that so much information is coming at us from these different sources. And not only is it cognitively challenging to have to process through all that. But you're right, it's a huge time sink, right? If we had to try to track down the source of everything that's coming at us, it's simply not possible, nobody has a time to do that. And yet we are saturated by this information.
And so we do use these shortcuts. And the shortcuts are wired directly into these cognitive biases that we're all prone to. The one that comes up very frequently in discussion now is confirmation bias.
CODY GOUGH: We've written about it on curiosity.com and I think a couple of our other guests at this point now have kind of mentioned it, because so I think that confirmation bias is really coming to the forefront of what people are understanding is happening. And in your book, you write about a couple of other biases that I was not familiar with at all. And I found really interesting, like the recency bias, can you talk to that a little bit?
DAVID DISALVO: Yeah, recency bias is the shorthand for that is being influenced by what's happened lately, right? And the example of this, it's very frustrating to most of us is that a manager will tend to evaluate an employee based on what's happened in the last few weeks, or maybe a couple of months. And not evaluate the full span of that person's contributions to the company.
So the recency on whatever's happened that can be recalled most quickly from memory tends to shape the evaluation. And if you're a manager in an organization and let's say you've got 30 employees, or more, and you're evaluating them, right? Well, you're limited too. What you can process cognitively speaking and the time that you can allocate to doing that is limited as it would be for anybody.
And so you're that person, the manager in that position is also looking for shortcuts.
CODY GOUGH: I remember, in one of my previous positions we had regular reviews. I think it was quarterly or twice a year performance reviews. And all of my coworkers at this position recommended having a Word Document or a Notepad file save somewhere, where whenever I accomplish something, you just go into that file jot something down.
Because when that review came up and they asked, all right, what have you accomplished? If you haven't been tracking that, sometimes it's really hard to go back. And even when it's yourself that you're evaluating to do that.
DAVID DISALVO: Excellent point. Yeah, again, it comes to this cognitive resource management issue, right?
CODY GOUGH: You're Right.
DAVID DISALVO: Even for yourself, if you were put on the spot, and said, OK, tell me why you're a valuable employee? You'd be hard pressed to come up with the full array. I mean, you could probably come up with a couple of things. But you'd be hard pressed to come up with a full array of stuff that's happened throughout the many years, that you've been with that company to be able to make the best case in that moment for yourself, right?
So as you just described a great way to counterbalance that is using a tool, which allows you to gather that information, and then easily access it when you need to.
ASHLEY HAMER: Even if you don't think your boss is going to confront you one day and make you prove your worth, keeping a brag book, as some industries call it, is an incredibly useful habit. Like David says, you can't trust yourself to remember all the amazing things you've done in your job when the pressure is on. And it's surprising how often those things are necessary to remember.
Beyond performance reviews, you need to be able to sell your accomplishments when asking for a raise, trying for a promotion, or interviewing for a new job. Even polishing up your resume is easier when you can refer to everything you've accomplished in a book. So what counts as a brag? Almost anything, keep a record of big projects you've worked on, ideas you've put into practice, and wins you got for the company.
Print out any official reports or rankings that show your value. And keep emails when your boss compliments you or assigns you important new duties. Just keep any proprietary information out of them.
Be sure to include what your company or clients got out of each of these brags. Your boss telling you you're the best widget maker on your team is good, but making such quality widgets that widget sales increase by 5% that month is better. Then when the time is right, refer back to all the amazing things you've accomplished, and watch their jaws hit the floor.
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CODY GOUGH: There's one other bias, there was interesting to me, it was the intensity bias.
DAVID DISALVO: Yeah, intensity bias is our failure to accurately forecast how we'd react under particularly emotionally challenging or charged circumstances. So the example of this is, we're listening to or reading a news story. And in this story a person was faced with some situation, they were witness to a crime, just this average person on the scene just unknowingly was witness to this crime.
And they didn't do anything about it, or they froze or whatever the circumstances were they didn't act. And we're reading this or hearing about it and, of course, we say, Oh, well, if that had been me, I would have done XYZ, PDQ, of course, it's obvious. But that's the intensity bias, we can't really forecast how we react in that situation. Because we're not being faced in the moment we're making that evaluation, we're not actually being faced with the emotionally charged circumstances of being in it.
And so we can't say with any degree of accuracy how we'd act, that's what intensity bias is all about.
CODY GOUGH: And there's a lot of that flying around in the news these days, almost any time there's anything violent happens or a shooting or a hostage situation or whatever it may be, you go on Twitter and everybody is like, Oh, well, clearly, I would have done this, or you can expect to do this. But that's it is hard to predict how you'll react under an emotionally distressing situation. Why do we have that bias? Or what drives humans to believe that we know better?
DAVID DISALVO: It's a shortcut to closure in the decision or the evaluation. So, I mean, and it's also reinforced by how we want to perceive ourselves. We want to perceive ourselves as having the ability to make the best decision, or take the most beneficial action in any given circumstance, that's how we want to perceive ourselves.
But what we know, and if we're being honest, we just know this anecdotally is it when we're faced with different circumstances and different factors. It changes how you think, right? It changes how you think, it influences how you'll act, you and others around you.
And so we have a limitation there, we have a truncated perspective that doesn't allow us to get in that place, that future place to actually say, OK, we would act this way, we would think this way. We want the shortcut though to lead us to where we'd how like to perceive how we would act, and how we think.
CODY GOUGH: The book is called, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. But how about how you should do the opposite, did you make any changes to your day-to-day life and the way you operate after you wrote the book? Did anything jump out as a wake up call that I'm going to do this, and it'll fix something right away?
DAVID DISALVO: I think for me one of the biggest things that came out of writing this book was that I'm much more aware of the biases and distortions, which is not to say that I am significantly better at counteracting them. But I think my awareness of them increased quite a bit. And so at minimum then I can identify, and this gets to another term that's used in the book and has become quite popular recently which is, metacognition, thinking about our thinking, right?
This is the core of-- we hear a lot about mindfulness exercises, and other methods to make us more mindful, it really comes down to metacognition. It's about being aware of our own thinking, being able to turn the introspection on how we're thinking in a given situation.
And so being able to identify, well, I think my decisions being skewed by something. I mean, is it recency bias, is it intensity bias, is it availability bias, what is it? I mean, it's not even important to know what the terminology is, right? We don't need to accurately name the biases.
But having a sense of how we're being skewed, or how our thinking is being swayed any given situation, can be very useful to kind of rewinding. And saying, wait, wait, wait, I need to reevaluate.
Now the limitation of that, of course, is when we're in these split second kind of situations, where we have to make split second decisions or actions. Not as useful there, because you don't have the time to do it.
But in the cases where you do have a little bit more time to be introspective, and to figure out where you may be going wrong. I think having an awareness of all of this can be very useful.
CODY GOUGH: That time element is extremely important that would fix just so many problems, just taking a step back and taking some time, whether it's a few seconds or a few minutes or a couple of days in some cases to evaluate how we're thinking about it and make sure that we've got a little bit of distance. Is that kind of a universal tip you think?
DAVID DISALVO: Yeah, there's a section at the end of the book, towards the end of the book, where I go through a number of recommendations, takeaways. And the very first one in that section is slowed down. Because part of what we get caught up in, particularly in our act-act go-go culture, is we're having difficulty separating situations that we really need to think and act with urgency. And separating those from situations where we can actually build in a little bit more time to evaluate.
And so the takeaway is simply slow down when you can slow down, when a situation affords you the ability to slow down, you need to do that. Because that is what's going to let you make this evaluation about where you're thinking might be going off the rails a little bit. And where you could end up making a better decision taking a better action, if you just built a little bit more time to do that.
Again, there are situations that just simply don't allow it, there are many of those. But I think if we spend a little bit more time separating those from the ones that we can slow down, I think we'd all be way, way better off.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, the velocity of everything that we take in as a society. Now, this book was first published in 2011. And now there's of course, the updated 2018 edition. And in that span of time quite a lot has changed technologically.
ASHLEY HAMER: New edition of David's book dedicates an entire section to smartphone addiction. In it David explains how technology interacts with the reward center of your brain in three ways. Triggers, offerings, and access points, quote, the triggers are catalysts for reward pursuit, access points are the entry ways to engage the pursuit, and offerings are what we're pursuing, end quote.
As an example, a gambler's trigger might be thinking about getting in on a gambling game. His access point would be any way to reach that game from gambling on a website or app to booking a trip to Las Vegas. And his offering is whatever the game is, like poker, blackjack, or roulette.
Before the age of Digital Immersion, an access point might be hard to find, since a gambler would have to physically find a game to join. But in the digital world, especially in the era of smartphones. There are so many access points you can hardly avoid them. They're available all the time and your brain is structured to respond to them.
This can be good if you're trying to start a workout routine or research ways to eat healthy. But can also turn out bad, like if you've had a gambling problem in the past, and you're tempted to gamble. But there's one more important component to smartphone addiction. The brain chemical dopamine that fuels the brain's reward center.
David mentioned that the brain wants stability, certainty, and predictability. But when uncertainty is introduced, we experience a dopamine overload that saturates our brains reward center. This is why checking your favorite social network or scrolling through texts is so addictive. For every 50 or so messages, only a few will really deliver the goods we want, that leaves you coming back for more.
The omnipresence of smartphones can also leave you feeling less anxious and combat FOMO or Fear of Missing Out, because of how connected they make you feel. But as addictive as technology is, David points out in the book, that just by knowing what's going on in your brain, you have a starting point for taking action.
CODY GOUGH: Based on just all the fundamentals that you've mentioned, it really sounds like our technology and our dissemination of information has really outpaced what our brains are designed to process.
DAVID DISALVO: That's right, and as it's pointed out in the book. And as you say in the span between the book was first published, and then the revised updated version came out.
So much had changed it was a real eye opener for me going through the exercise of updating the book, just to have to see how much had changed going over for instance the research, on cognitive psych and neuroscience research. I mean, in just a five or six year span just an amazing amount of new information had come out to have to take into account.
But you're right, things are changing so quickly. And something we also have to keep in mind is that the techno culture that our brains have created is outpacing what our brains are natively wired to handle. And there's always going to be that gap, because we can never evolve to the level of what we're coming up with in terms of what we're developing technologically.
So we're always going to be a little bit behind. And we have to keep that in mind constantly, is that we're dealing with-- we have a set of cognitive capabilities that were not created initially designed whatever terminology you want to use, to address this world that we're now living in. And so we're always kind of playing a bit of a catch up game.
CODY GOUGH: So our brains may have just worked perfectly, our animal brains 2000, 3,000 years ago, and we just had to worry about a handful of people around us, and animals and making sure that we survive. But as society has progressed and become more and more complex and complicated.
And people have to think really long term with their 401(k) and with going to the Casino, how much do I gamble. And with who am I going to vote for in this election that has complicated issues. Our brains aren't necessarily so perfectly wired to actually deal with the civilization that we've created.
DAVID DISALVO: That's right. And there's been a lot of great research done recently, that compares the effect of tangible threats, versus perceptual threats. And so a tangible threat is getting hit by a car as you're crossing the road. A perceptual threat could be any number of things that we think about that could happen, might happen, based on any array of information, right?
And as it turns out the threat category that has the biggest influence on our thinking, are perceptual threats, not the tangible threats. There's a relatively limited number of tangible threats that are actual threats in our lives. There is a universe of perceptual threats, and they tend to morph in thousands of different directions in our brains the more we consider them.
So, Yeah, we're in a different point in history where tangible threats have decreased, but the number of perceptual threats are immense.
CODY GOUGH: That's afraid to get fired from your job, afraid of an airplane crashing, afraid of a relative becoming sick.
DAVID DISALVO: Right. And even lesser things that happen, what is this person thinking of me? I just had this discussion with, well, what was their take away from the discussion? Are they perceiving this situation the same way I'm perceiving it? Next time I run into so-and-so, what should I-- how should I consider my interaction with them?
I mean, each of those things embodies a certain kind of threat. They're all perceptually based, right? There's really very little tangible evidence behind any of them. Were morphing them in our brains as we go along. And that's the stuff that's really getting to us, that's the stuff that's really, really influencing us.
CODY GOUGH: Is the book really about people sacrificing long-term gains for short-term pleasures?
DAVID DISALVO: That's certainly one category, but, Yeah, I think it's a lot broader than that. I think it touches every thinking capability, every decision making influence, social interactions, how we're influenced by our surroundings, everything. It touches on all of these different areas.
And certainly one of those is the forecasting failures, where we tend to overweight things that are immediate to us. And this speaks to another bias called availability bias, where we tend to put undue weight on information that's presented to us that becomes most available. It's most available and accessible to us. Therefore it tends to color our thinking the most heavily.
So Yeah, there's plenty of shortcomings in that category. But it's Yeah, it's a lot broader, it touches a lot a lot of areas.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, including not just doing something for yourself now and ignoring what's going to happen in the future. But doing something now as a reward for good behavior in the past, that may then negate that behavior in the past. I'm thinking especially of when you talk about dieting, and after people have been on a diet for a while, maybe rewarding themselves a little too much.
DAVID DISALVO: Yeah, this is a tough one, right? And we've all felt this is that, when you you're dieting, or even if you're not strictly dieting, you may be just managing your weight through being a little more conscious of what you're eating and exercising, and you've got a goal in mind, right?
And you get to that goal or you get close to that goal, or perhaps you exceeded the goal. And you're then you're thinking to yourself, well, you know, what? I've arrived, I've where I need to be, I want to stay here. But I think now I can let off the gas a little bit, maybe work in a little of that stuff I was avoiding eating or work that back in. I can kind of start sampling things again, I can go back to some of those things.
And there's nothing kind of inherently wrong with that, and we all think that way. But the problem is that there tends to be a compounding effect of doing that. And so we're all familiar with the term yo-yo dieting. And this is a big part of it, is that our brains lean towards attaining that goal. And then the effort doesn't have any longer seem justified the goal has been attained. So we can let off, we can't though, we all know this, right?
The first sign that you're going to fail in your diet or exercise program is that thinking. As soon as you start thinking that way, you can pretty much count on the fact that you're going to start backsliding. And so this is another case of you got some time to reflect on it, so reflect on it, think about it, is it true? Can I really? I probably can't? I probably do need to stay pretty close to as vigilant as I have been. Because I don't want to get caught up in that yo-yo cycle. So Yeah, it's an excellent example.
CODY GOUGH: And it's possible to do it a bit, right? I do have a friend that lost a massive amount of weight, more than 150 pounds. And he did sneak a piece of pizza here or there into his diet after he'd lost that gigantic amount of weight, which is great. And somehow he was able to stay disciplined and not fully backslide. And it didn't explode into I'll have a whole pizza two nights a week, which would really do it. Is there a trick to maybe backsliding a little bit, but not negating the positive effects of what you've accomplished?
DAVID DISALVO: Yeah, there's a term called, the rebound effect. And this has to do with our tendency to want to go back to existing patterns. Patterns of behavior are so powerful, such powerful elements of our lives.
And so in that case, what your friend was able to do, he's able to integrate some of this stuff without going back to those patterns that had been established previously, that if he had gone back to those patterns, he'd be heading right back into the situation he was before.
So Yeah, I think the trick there you want to call it that, is to be aware that our tendency is going to be to go back to those patterns, they have kind of a magnetic pole. And yet to start rev up the metacognition engines, right? You've got to think about your thinking, you've got to see where you could go wrong, you've got to be totally aware of that in particular. And then you've got to take whatever actions.
And everybody is going to have a different set of tools or tricks for themselves, right? That work for themselves. You just got to make sure you're being vigilant about doing those things to keep yourself from going back to those patterns.
CODY GOUGH: I'd like to wrap up with the curiosity challenge. And give you a little trivia question of something I learned about on curiosity.com. So according to a 2017 study from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, there are benefits and drawbacks to being the target of trash talk. A benefit is that you're actually more motivated to succeed when somebody is trash talking you. But there are a couple of drawbacks, can you name any of the drawbacks that the researchers found?
DAVID DISALVO: Well, I mean, from the hip response to that is, I think it might change your self-perception, right? It may feed into if you've got an existing self, like these chinks in our self-esteem armor, right? And even if trash talking, even if it's totally not even close to being correct. It might get to those self-esteem issues, and it might compound them. And I think it could create worse self-perception issues.
CODY GOUGH: Definitely, an excellent guess. And probably very true, if people get personal with their trash talking. But what the researchers found specifically is that actually made the recipients of trash talk less creative. And more likely to cheat.
DAVID DISALVO: Oh, Wow.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, because they so desperately want to rub their win in their rivals face, that they're more likely to cut corners. And as motivating as it is, it can also be distracting. And that can throw a wrench into the free flow of creative ideas. And in these tests with the study participants, the researchers found that in the more creative tests, they really didn't do a really fantastic job. So there are--
So next time somebody's trash talks you, take a page out of David Disalvo his book. And maybe take a moment. And slow down, and get into your zen place. And don't get too angry and try to flex your creative juices. And then really show him who's boss. And then I believe you brought a question for me?
DAVID DISALVO: I did, and I think I've got a good one for you.
CODY GOUGH: Great.
DAVID DISALVO: And this has nothing to do with anything we've talked about.
CODY GOUGH: Perfect.
DAVID DISALVO: Which company is the world's biggest distributor of toys?
CODY GOUGH: Ooh, biggest distributor of toys?
DAVID DISALVO: Yes.
CODY GOUGH: I would-- let's go with, Walmart?
DAVID DISALVO: No, it is McDonald's.
CODY GOUGH: No way.
DAVID DISALVO: McDonald's distributes 1.4 billion toys a year through their Happy Meals. Making them the world's biggest distributor of toys.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. That is a phenomenal trivia question. That is such a cool fun fact.
DAVID DISALVO: I thought you'd like that.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I love that. That's great, great way to wrap up the episode. And I want to thank you again, David Disalvo. Thank you for joining me on the Curiosity Podcast.
DAVID DISALVO: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.
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ASHLEY HAMER: It's time to wax scientific about the extra credit question. This week's question comes from Angie in Calgary, who writes, what would happen to the Earth if the moon disappeared? If you've got a question about the world that's been nagging you, send it in to Podcast@curiosity.com, and I might answer it on a future episode. The answer after this.
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CODY GOUGH: I'm excited to announce that you curious listener can learn something new in just a few minutes every day in podcast form with our new daily podcast.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm so excited about this, because with curiosity.com, you can learn something new every day. But you're on the go, so why not do it through audio?
CODY GOUGH: Right, exactly. It's a busy world, you cannot read while you're driving your car. So please don't do that. And we also know you've got a packed schedule. So we're going to keep these episodes short and sweet.
ASHLEY HAMER: We're going to keep bringing you a deep dive with experts every Tuesday. But now every weekday, you can learn something new in just a few minutes.
CODY GOUGH: Exactly, if you're looking for a daily podcast episodes, you can find them in our email newsletter. So visit curiosity.com/email to subscribe. And every day right at the top of the email, click Here, tap Here. There's your podcast.
ASHLEY HAMER: Or your smartphone can just download episodes automatically, if you're subscribed on your favorite podcast app. We're everywhere, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, I like to listen on Pocket Casts.
CODY GOUGH: I listen on Player FM.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: And huge shout out to Julian in Maryland and Angie in Calgary, for letting us know that you're excited about a daily podcast. This is new ground for us. So we really want your feedback, please email us to let us know what you think at Podcast@curiosity.com. And we hope that you join Ashley and me every day to learn something on the podcast.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm back to shoot for the moon for this week's extra credit answer. Angie in Calgary asked, what would happen to our planet if the moon disappeared? The answer a lot and a little. The minor changes first. Because the pull of the moon's gravity is what causes high on low tides, those would be different. We'd still have tides, but they'd be less than half the size, thanks to the much weaker gravitational pull of the sun. Nighttime would obviously be a lot darker too.
But there would also be some pretty major changes, the moon's pull also gradually slows the Earth's rotation. So if it didn't exist, the length of our day would shorten. Scientists believe that more than a billion years ago, before we had a moon the Earth rotated so fast that days only lasted 10 hours.
Finally, the moon stabilizes our axial tilt, the way the imaginary axis that goes through our planet's poles is kind of off kilter. That's what gives us the seasons. Without a moon to steady things, that axis might tilt all over the place.
When it tilted exactly upright, the seasons would disappear, if it tilted all the way over the way Uranus does, half of the planet would experience darkness and frigid temperatures for six months out of the year, while the other half experienced 24 hour daytime and incredible heat for the same amount of time. The moral of the story, be happy we've, got the moon.
CODY GOUGH: We'll have another feature length episode for you next week. In the meantime visit curiosity.com to learn something new every day. And subscribe to our podcast if you want to hear Ashley and me talk about our latest and greatest stories.
ASHLEY HAMER: Thanks for listening, I'm Ashley hammer.
CODY GOUGH: I'm, Cody Gough, talk to you soon.
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SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.