Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

If you want to teach something quickly, reinforce it every time. But if you want it to stick once the teaching phase is over, reinforce it occasionally

There is some truth to the aphorism of Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

Based on the ideas of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this is the view that language doesn’t just change minds by transferring thoughts from one head to another; it configures how people make sense of the world, including about space, time, and causality.

Hari goes on: “What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

Richard Alexander, an evolutionary biologist known for his work on the origins of morality, describes an argument he had with his mentor. Alexander was trying to make a case for pure moral motivations, and he described how he went out of his way to avoid stepping on a line of ants. Isn’t that truly altruistic? And his mentor responded: “It might have been, until you bragged about it.

What is reality? I like the answer of the novelist Philip K. Dick: It is whatever, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

I often think of the power of partial reinforcement, of how a diet of rare and random rewards can make a behavior difficult to extinguish. I don’t currently have to deal with toddlers who throw tantrums and I’ve never been tempted by slot machines. But I often find myself lost online, staring at my phone, numbly clicking on links, watching videos, doing the drag-down-to-refresh gesture in the hopes of seeing something that makes me feel good, and when I do all this, I am reminded of a rat in the behaviorist’s cage.

If you’re looking for a word to refer to the process of coming to know things through exposure to the right sort of information in the environment, I’d recommend “learning.

Gustave Flaubert advised artists, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

I’ll end with a competing theory for why we act in such seemingly self-sacrificial ways. This is the idea that we do so to bolster our reputations to others, to look more appealing to sexual partners, allies, and friends. We don’t give to the poor or abstain from eating meat because we see these acts as good in themselves; rather the propensity to engage in such acts has evolved as a costly signal (one that is likely unconscious) of our fairness and our kindness. From this perspective, a man who marches for the rights of women, say, is ultimately driven to do so not because of a wish for a better and fairer world, but because of the advantages that come with being seen as the sort of person who wishes for a better and fairer world.

A final puzzle involves self-sacrificial moral acts. Some people give up airplane travel because they are worried about climate change and its effects on future generations. Some stop eating meat, even if they enjoy the taste of animal flesh, because they believe that it is wrong to be complicit in the suffering of animals. There are those who send money to help others in faraway lands and those who fight for the rights of others even when this involves giving up some of their own privileges, as when millionaires argue that their own taxes should be raised to support the poor, or when members of majority groups fight for the rights of minority groups. If asked why they are doing these things, people will say that they are motivated by morality; these are the right things to do.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.