SYSK TRENDING - Curious Quirks of the Human Brain

Why does time seem to move faster and faster the older you get? Summers that once felt endless suddenly seem to disappear in a flash. There are some intriguing theories about why our perception of time changes — and what may actually slow it down. Your brain is constantly interpreting the world, making predictions and influencing what you think and do — usually without you realizing it. That helps explain some surprisingly common quirks of human behavior. Why do we tend to believe we have more control over events than we really do? Why are we so easily influenced by advertising even when we know exactly what advertisers are trying to accomplish? And why does your sense of time change so dramatically over the course of your life? Here to explore these and other fascinating questions about how your mind works is Art Markman, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Brain Briefs: Answers to the Most (and Least) Pressing Questions About Your Mind (https://amzn.to/2xcxdyJ). Art explains some of the hidden mental processes quietly shaping the way you experience the world — and why understanding them can help you better understand yourself. Your brain is doing a lot behind the scenes that you never notice. And some of what it is doing may explain behaviors and experiences you have probably wondered about for years. Art Markman’s website: http://www.smartthinkingbook.com/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS KA'CHAVA: Ka’Chava’s new Salted Caramel is the perfect balance of mouthwatering flavor and benefits. Embrace your salty side. Go to https://kachava.com and use promo code SYSK to get 15% off your first order! TREES. COM: Right now, ⁠https://Trees.com ⁠have great deals on planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% OFF their purchase when using the promo code SYSK at checkout. MONARCH: Write your own money story with Monarch! Use promo code SYSK at ⁠⁠https://Monarch.com⁠⁠ to get your 1st year of Monarch Core half off at just $50 VINTED: Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing! With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn and for a limited time, enjoy free shipping in the US on Vinted. WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. QUINCE: Find your next Fall favorites at Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! DELL: Built for those who want better. The Dell XPS, built for you! INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 0:44Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:22Mike Carruthers?

  Your brain is doing some pretty strange things right now, most of which you're completely unaware of. For example, why can you walk into a room and suddenly forget why you went in there? Why does your brain sometimes confidently remember things that never actually happened? Why can a song get stuck in your head for hours? And why is it almost impossible to get rid of? The human brain is remarkably powerful, but it's also filled with some very odd quirks, shortcuts, and glitches that influence how you think, remember, and behave. That's why today's SYSK trending topic is Curious Quirks of the Human Brain.

• 2:05Mike Carruthers?

  Art Markman is a cognitive scientist and an expert on how the mind works. And he's here to explain some of the strangest things your brain does and what those quirks reveal about you. And we'll get to that conversation right after this. Some days, I eat pretty well. Other days, meh. I get to the late afternoon and realize that, nutritionally speaking, today has not exactly been my finest work, which is one reason I've been using Kachava. This is ridiculously easy. Two scoops in a shake, and you're getting plant-based protein, fiber, greens, and a whole lot more. No artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners. No soy, gluten, or preservatives.

• 2:50Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:33Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:50Mike Carruthers?

  How can you not be fascinated by the human brain and how it works? Particularly when you step back and see that it sometimes works in very strange and mysterious ways. And I think the more we understand how the brain works, or at least shine a spotlight on it and observe how it works, the better insight we gain into ourselves. And someone who I think would agree with that premise is psychologist Art Markman. Art is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the co-host of a podcast called Two Guys on Your Head, and he is the author of several books, including Brain Briefs,

• 4:32Mike Carruthers?

  The Answers to the Most and Least Pressing Questions About Your Mind. Hi, Art.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  It's great to be here. Thanks so much.

• 4:39Mike Carruthers?

  So one of the questions you tackle, which I think a lot of people would be curious about, is why we find kitten videos so irresistible?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  The thing about kitten videos is that they are this perfect storm in the sense that one of the things that evolution has done is to recognize that infants are annoying in every species. And so what they do to make sure that parents still want to take care of them is they do things to make them look really cute to the people who are going to take care of them. And so infants of every species have big eyes, and they have little, small features. And so we love those. And so what happens is kittens have that aspect ratio. They have big eyes, very small face, you know, very symmetric.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  And so what we're doing is getting this evolutionary dose of cuteness. And then, rather than having to live life in all of its moments to wait for the one moment that's great, what a kitten video does is it's kind of like the highlight reel for football fans. You don't have to sit through the whole game. You just get the highlight, really the great part of it. And so what a kitten video does is it takes this extraordinarily cute thing and then just gives you the highlights. And it's, they're absolutely fascinating.

• 6:03Mike Carruthers?

  So talk about liars, because that interested me, how we can tell when people are lying, if we can at all.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  If you go on the internet and you start searching around, you will find all of these tips for catching liars. And a lot of these tips have to do with these unconscious tells that people are supposed to give off when they're lying. So they'll tell you if you look up, or down, or to the right, or to the left, that means you're lying, or if you make eye contact, or if you don't make eye contact, or if you hesitate. And it turns out that almost all of those cues, actually, pretty much every one of those cues is not a very effective means for telling you who's lying to you. So really, absolutely the best way to figure out if somebody's lying

• 6:53Speaker 01

  is to follow up with them and ask them lots of questions whose answers they should know if they were telling you the truth. So if someone said to you, yeah, well, I took the bus to get to this meeting. Well, what bus? You know, where did it go? What are some of the things that you passed? Where if you actually had that experience, you would actually know the answer to that. And what happens is people, when they lie to you, they haven't necessarily prepared the entire world around that. And so it's fairly easy to get people to trip people up. And there are actually really good studies showing that, for example, the agents who are trying to catch people who might be lying at customs

• 7:38Speaker 01

  and border control at various countries, if they use that technique, they're much more effective at catching people who are lying.

• 7:45Mike Carruthers?

  But wouldn't you have to know the answers to what the bus went by in order to catch them in a lie?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  You might have to know the answers. And certainly, if it were important enough, you could go back and check some of the things that they say. But the fact is that what ends up happening is when you catch people suddenly, where you start asking them a bunch of questions to follow up, most people have a really hard time actually coming up with answers to things that ought to be at the tip of their tongue if they'd actually experienced the thing.

• 8:18Mike Carruthers?

  Here's one that's always interested me. And I was just talking about it the other day with someone, that as I get older, it truly does seem that time goes by faster. And I think it's a fairly common experience. What is that?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So there's several reasons actually that come together for why time feels like it goes faster as you get older. One of them is that a lot of what makes time feel slow is that your brain, when your brain is doing a lot of work to understand a situation, then in the moment, your brain has to, is going to create lots of memories that will, when you look back on it, become these landmarks that feel like a lot of time has passed. Now, when you're young, everything is new, and so your brain is constantly doing lots

• 9:12Speaker 01

  of work in order to understand the situation, and that influences your sense of the passage of time. As you get older, more and more of your life becomes routine, more and more of your life becomes predictable, and as a result, your brain is laying down fewer and fewer landmarks that make the time feel like it's gone slowly. And that's one of the reasons why a great way to slow time down is to take up new skills, to learn how to play an instrument, or a new sport, or something like that, or to expose yourself to new classes. Because what that's doing is forcing your brain to set up a bunch of new landmarks.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Now, even if you do all of that, you're not going to slow the feeling of the passage of time completely, because there's another piece of it as well, which is that your brain is also taking into account how much other stuff you have learned about your life so far. So if you think about it, when you're six years old, and then you go through another year, that year occupies a tremendous amount of space in your brain, because you haven't been exposed to that much yet, you haven't learned that many things. But by the time you're 50, the amount of new stuff that you add to your brain in the next year is just a small fraction of everything.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  And so, all of that gives rise to this sense that time is just rocketing by as you get older.

• 10:43Mike Carruthers?

  You have a section in the book that's really interesting to me about slackers, and how we perceive other people to be flakes and slackers, and not very conscientious, and we would never do that, and how can they do that? And I think it speaks to like how we see our place in the world, and so talk about that.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Well, there are two parts to it, right? So one of them is that we tend to judge people based on a particular set of values that we have. And so some people, particularly folks who are pretty conscientious, would like people to just either do it or not do it, but let me know in advance. And so, and so there's a case where we're going to judge people on the basis of whether we would have done the same kind of thing. And that's, that's a piece of what's going on. But then there's another piece that's also kind of fun, which is, we have a lot of what's called an egocentric bias, which means, basically, we over-represent our own influence on the world relative to everybody else's.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Which is why, if you have a group do a project, and you ask everyone the percentage of the project that they were responsible for, and then you add up that number, the number's going to add up to way more than 100, because everyone is going to overestimate their own contribution to what happened. And so, when you look at what people have done, one of the things that happens is, you assume that you had a much bigger impact on results than other people did, and that ends up making you feel like, you know, you really carried the weight, and everybody else was just riding on your coattails.

• 12:25Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about things that go on in your head, and I'm talking about that with psychologist Art Markman. He's a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, and he is author of the book Brain Briefs: The Answers to the Most and Least Pressing Questions About Your Mind. There's probably no better endorsement for a company than this. I keep buying their stuff. That's exactly what's happening with me and Quince. It started with their clothes. I've bought sweaters, polos, pants, jeans, shoes, a belt. And Quince has become one of the first places I look when I need something new to wear,

• 13:08Mike Carruthers?

  and my wife and son buy from Quince too, all the time. What keeps bringing us back is the quality and the price. Quince uses premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, merino wool. Their cashmere sweaters start at just $60. And with colder weather coming, they have down jackets and classic wool outerwear as well. Quince prices everything 50 to 80% less than similar brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen. And it's not just clothes, they have bedding, bath, kitchen essentials, and furniture. We even have Quince pillows. So this isn't one of those endorsements where I try something once because they sent

• 13:53Mike Carruthers?

  it to me. We shop at Quince, and I absolutely recommend you try it. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was something you should know. It's the best way to support our show. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call "someday clothes." I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday, I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years.

• 14:38Mike Carruthers?

  Vinted offers another possibility: Sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear, list it on Vinted. Listing is quick and simple. And when an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And importantly, there are no seller fees on Vinted. So when you sell something, you keep everything you earn. I like this whole idea, because instead of clothes just taking up space, somebody else gets to wear them, and you get some money out of the deal. Your closet looks better too.

• 15:21Mike Carruthers?

  I mean, everybody wins, even the closet. So maybe it's time to stop waiting for someday. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees, so you keep everything you earn. So Art, I remember hearing someone say, and it's always stuck with me, I heard them say, "We judge ourselves by our intentions, and we judge other people by their actions."

• 15:49Speaker 01

  That's right, and not just their actions, but the outcomes that come from those actions. So, we don't even always see all of the effort that somebody put in, we just see the results. Whereas when we see our own actions, not only do we judge our intentions, we judge the amount of effort we put in, even if we don't completely succeed at the thing that we set out to do. Whereas with somebody else, most of what we see is the outcome. And so, we discount that amount of effort. By the way, that works also with how we credit other people for things that they've done. So, for example, if you go to a great concert, and you see this amazing musician play, you often at the end of it say, "Man, that musician is incredibly talented."

• 16:34Speaker 01

  And you call them talented, because up on stage, you don't really see all the work that they put in, all of the practice hours and everything that they, that they had to do to achieve that amazing level of performance. And so you assume that a lot of what allowed them to play the way they did was talent, rather than effort.

• 16:54Mike Carruthers?

  One of the interesting questions you look at is, why do we, why do we buy what we buy? And I think most people would think, "Well, you know, I'm a smart guy, and I sit down and I make a decision of, I'm going to buy this and not that, because I'm a logical, thoughtful guy, and you're going to probably tell me that's not, that's not how we do it."

• 17:17Speaker 01

  You probably are a logical, thoughtful guy, but most people are actually driven quite a bit by just mere familiarity to things. I mean, one of the scariest things is, is the influence that advertising has on the kinds of decisions that we make, and the kinds of things that we buy. There's a beautiful effect that was first categorized by a guy named Bob Zients back the 1960s, called the "mere exposure effect." And what he showed was, simply showing something to someone makes them like it better later. And you see this, for example, with music, where when you first hear a song, you're

• 17:59Speaker 01

  not 100% sure how much you like it, but after you've heard it several times, suddenly you like it quite a bit more. And the same thing happens with advertising. It really doesn't matter what the advertiser tells you about the product. Most of the effect of advertising is just taking something and making it feel familiar. And so, in the moment, when you go to a store, for example, and you're trying to figure out which of the products on the shelf you're going to buy, you will feel more warmly towards something that's been advertised, because it feels familiar. And then, and here's the beauty of it, then you're going to backfill a story about why that's actually a better product. And you see people do this, for example, with certain kinds of products that are legally mandated to be identical.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  So, for example, if you go to the store and you buy an over-the-counter cold remedy, that cold remedy has to have a formulation that fits within a particular set of FDA guidelines, which means that chances are, every single brand of product that is that type of cold remedy actually has an identical formulation. And yet, people still consistently buy the brand-name products, in part because those products feel familiar relative to a generic product. And so, then they'll tell themselves, "Well, it must be higher quality, it must be a better formulation." But in fact, it's actually identical to everything else on the shelf.

• 19:26Mike Carruthers?

  Something I think people universally experience is choking under pressure. And it might seem somewhat self-evident, we choke under pressure because there's pressure, but there's got to be more to it than that.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  So the thing about pressure is, it does a couple of things. One of the things that it does is it decreases the amount of what's called working memory. So working memory is the amount of information that you can hold in mind at the same time. And the less information you can hold in mind, the less complicated a decision you can make. And so the more pressure that you're experiencing at any given moment, the less information you get to take into account when you are working. And so that's one source of choking under pressure. And then there's another, which is particularly important for motor skills, for actions that you're performing.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  So if you ever think about, if you've ever played golf or tennis or something like that, and you find in a pressure situation that suddenly you're hitting the ball terribly, one of the reasons for that is because another thing that you tend to do under pressure is to monitor your own performance. So you start paying attention to what you're doing in a way that you don't do when you're performing without pressure. Now, the thing about motor skills, about movements, is that actually paying attention to those movements tends to discoordinate those things, rather than make them more coordinated. And so the more that you pay attention to your own movements, the more that you lose that coordination that's important for skilled performance.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Which means that when you are practicing a skill that you're going to perform under pressure, a motor skill, one of the things that you want to do is to learn to pay attention to the situation you're in, rather than to the motor movement itself. So this way, if you're playing tennis or golf or something like that, when you get under pressure, you start monitoring the situation, rather than the performance of the skill itself.

• 21:34Mike Carruthers?

  What about punishment? Does it work the way we think it works? That punishment deters future problems? Or how does the brain deal with punishment?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the fascinating thing about punishment is, it works depending on the time horizon you care about. So punishments are negative things that you do to somebody, that engage what's called the avoidance motivational system. And rewards, positive things that you give to people, engage what's called the approach motivational system. And so here's the paradox. If you want to get somebody to do something right now, it is absolutely critical that they do it right at this moment. Absolutely the best way to get somebody to do something right now is to threaten them.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And to threaten them with a punishment or some harm. Because in the moment, people would rather do something than to avoid that punishment. The problem is that the avoidance motivational system, one of the ways that you know it's active is through the emotions you experience. And the emotions that are associated with avoidance are fear and stress and anxiety. And nobody really enjoys experiencing fear and stress and anxiety. And so as a result, over the long term, people actually go out of their way to try to avoid situations in which they might experience fear, stress, and anxiety.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  And so in the long term, if you keep punishing people and you keep threatening people, they just find ways to avoid you altogether. So a workplace that's full of threats of punishment will, in the moment, get people to hop to it and get stuff done. But in the long term, you'll see lots of turnover and absenteeism and things like that, because people don't really want to be around a lot of those punishments.

• 23:31Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah. So talk about life's little nuisances and aggravations and the best way to deal with them. I've got to know this.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So, man, there's a lot going on, right? I mean, each of us has a set of pet peeves, that are just things that people do that just annoy the heck out of us. And, you know, one of the things that we have to remember is that we have a tremendous amount of choice about what it is that we want to pay attention to, and what kinds of information are going to influence us in the future. And it turns out that when you create a mindset where you start looking for the things that bother you, you start seeing the things that bother you. Your world actually becomes more and more surrounded with the negative things that are out there in the environment, because you get this state-dependent memory, so when

• 24:23Speaker 01

  you're in a negative mood and looking for negative stuff, you remember negative things, you see negative things, you start feeling badly, so that feeds on itself. And the fascinating thing is, if you flip that switch and you start looking for the good things that people are doing, so you ignore those pet peeves, and you actually start trying to look for better things, you begin to notice more good things in the environment, and it actually creates a situation in which people start interacting with each other in a way that starts to bring about those good things. So if you spend your time, rather than trying to be critical of everybody, if you spend your time finding really good things somebody has done, then you find they're smiling at

• 25:08Speaker 01

  you, and then you smile back, and suddenly you're having a pleasant conversation. And so these things can really become a self-fulfilling prophecy in either direction. And so absolutely the best thing to do is, for those things that are not going to threaten anyone's life, giving those things an opportunity to just pass by without comment, and focusing on the more positive things, actually just makes life infinitely better, almost immediately.

• 25:35Mike Carruthers?

  Good advice, and interesting insight into how the brain works in real life situations. Art Markman has been my guest. He is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. And his book is called Brain Briefs: The Answers to the Most and Least Pressing Questions About Your Mind. Thanks for joining me, Art.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my pleasure. It's great talking with you again.

• 26:00Mike Carruthers?

  And that's it for this SYSK Trending episode. I'm Mike Heruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know.