Winning the Battle Against Yourself

Many of us have been raised to believe that if we want to get something done, we just need to set our minds to it. Where there's a will, there's a way, right? Yet somehow we end up polishing off that pint of ice cream in the freezer, or spending more than our budget allows. It's almost as if we're not the ones in charge. This week, we talk with psychologist and neuroscientist Emily Falk about why our minds often conspire against our best interests, and how we can regain control.

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

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the fall of 1999, a new film debuted in just 25 theaters across the United States. Its name was Being John Malkovich. The premise was outlandish. A down-on-his-luck puppeteer named Craig finds a small, hidden door at the office where he works. When he crawls inside, he goes through a strange portal and ends up inside the mind of the actor, John Malkovich. For 15 minutes or so, he gets to inhabit the actor's body before being spit out on the side of the New Jersey turnpike.

• 0:42Shankar Vedantam?

  Things only get more wacky from there. Craig and a coworker start charging people to go through the portal. And soon, plenty of people have had the experience of being John Malkovich. When John Malkovich, the real John Malkovich, inevitably learns about this, he is determined to go through the portal himself. When he does so, he enters a world where everyone has his face and can only say one word.

• 1:13Shankar Vedantam?

  The movie is thought-provoking and has long been one of my favorites. That might be because it is a metaphor for a central idea that we explore on this show. We like to think that we are in charge of our own minds. We decide what we are going to think and what we are going to do. We decide what to cook for dinner, where to go on vacation, and whom to marry.

• 1:37Shankar Vedantam?

  But it turns out that there are a vast number of unconscious mental processes that direct much of how we think and act. Often, we are unaware of these hidden puppeteers. They make us say and do things that we haven't consciously chosen ourselves. Sadly, there's no way to spit these puppeteers out on the side of the New Jersey turnpike.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  It's my head, Schwartz. It's my head!

• 2:08Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, why our minds often conspire against our best interests, and how we can regain some control over the puppet masters pulling at our strings.

• 2:30Speaker 02

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• 3:00Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:32Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Where there's a will, there's a way. Most of us have been raised to believe that if we want to get something done, we need only to set our minds to it. And yet, something odd and discouraging often happens when we set out to lose weight, or exercise more, or save money. Somehow, we end up polishing off that pint of ice cream in the freezer, or skipping our session at the gym, or once again, spending more than our budget allows. It's not what we set out to do, but it seems as if we are not the ones in charge. Emily Fock is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how we make choices and how we can initiate change in our lives. Emily Fock, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 4:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Emily, I understand that you recently made a promise to yourself about what you would eat at a graduation ceremony that featured many desserts at the buffet. What was the promise you made to yourself?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Well, I was in the very exciting situation that there were many desserts that looked delicious, and I was very curious, so I wanted to try all of them. But I knew, of course, that if I ate many different desserts, I would not feel amazing afterwards. So I decided that I was going to get one of each of them, try each one, and then eat the full thing from the one I liked the best.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  I went and I sat down, and I did try each of them, and it turned out that they were delicious. I was also in a ceremony that was about an hour long, and they were just there in front of me. And so, in the moment, it went well, in the sense that I had many desserts in front of me and a lot of time, so I ate them. And that was really fun for a little while, until it wasn't.

• 6:00Shankar Vedantam?

  When Emily got home, she swore to her partner Brett that she was only going to eat healthy foods the rest of the day.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Well, I went and I lay down on the couch, and I said, "I am so sugared up, I am not going to eat any more sugar today."

• 6:17Shankar Vedantam?

  And what happened?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  A little embarrassed to tell you what happened. What happened was, that evening, we went out to dinner with my grandma Bev, and there's a diner in her building called Little Pete's. And we went there and had what my kids considered to be probably the ideal meal, including things like, you know, a griddled grilled cheese and waffles and things that you get at a diner. And at dessert time, the kids said they wanted a milkshake.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  And my kid Emmett asked the waiter, "How big is the milkshake?" And the waiter said, "It's pretty big." And so I said, "Why don't you guys split the milkshake?" So they agreed to that deal. And the waiter brought out two fairly sizable glasses full of milkshake, which I assumed was half in each glass. But no, he also had one of those large metal containers, like you get at a soda fountain. And he handed it to me. And that contained just as much milkshake. So he gave me this enormous milkshake. And basically, what was I gonna do, right? Like, I didn't want to sugar my kids up anymore. Milkshakes are delicious. So despite the fact that directly before coming to this dinner,

• 7:32Speaker 03

  I had just said to Brett and my kids, "I am not gonna eat any more sugar today. I am just gonna detox and eat all the green vegetables and feel amazing later." I proceeded to polish off the entire rest of that milkshake.

• 7:53Shankar Vedantam?

  I reminded Emily of that perceptive scene from the sitcom Friends. Chandler and Rachel find themselves eating a cheesecake that was supposed to be delivered to a neighbor. When a second cheesecake arrives, they vow not to eat it and place the dessert outside the door of the rightful owner. But soon enough, they find the cheesecake has not yet been picked up.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Do you see what I see?

• 8:13Speaker 05

  It's still there.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Mrs. Braverman must be out.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  She could be out of town. Maybe she'll be gone for months.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  By then, the cheesecake may have gone bad. We don't want her to come back to bad cheesecake.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  No, that could kill her.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Well, we don't want that.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  No, so we're protecting her.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Well, we should take it.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, but we should move quick.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Why?

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Because I think I just heard her moving around in there.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Go, go, go.

• 8:35Shankar Vedantam?

  So I understand that part of your motivation in having that milkshake, Emily, was you wanted to shield your children from the dangers of too much sugar. That sounds a lot like what Chandler and Rachel were doing in the scene.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's certainly something that I said verbally at the table. I mean, Brett did remind me of the resolution that I'd made earlier to be kind to my body and not totally poison myself with large amounts of sugar. And I had a milkshake in my hand. And I said, "Well, I have a milkshake, and it looks delicious." So that was a pretty good argument.

• 9:17Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, Emily, what you make of this because I feel many people go through what you go through, which is that we want to do something, we aspire to do something, we plan to do something, and then somehow we don't.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Exactly, and this happens in all different parts of our lives. It happens with work projects that maybe we wish we had gotten to invest in a little bit more, or school projects, if we're still in school. It happens with decisions where there's some kind of payoff that's far off in the future. Maybe we want to do something because we know that it'll make us healthier, happier later. It happens with the people that we care about and making time to spend time with them when they're available and when we still can. So that's just a small set of examples. There are so many times where we make these kinds of choices, and then later we wonder why we made them.

• 10:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Have you heard this from your students, from your partner, from your children?

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've heard this. Everybody that I know experiences this. One example that comes to mind is my grandma Bev. Every time I see her, regrets that she hasn't been reading books. And I ask her, you know, why haven't you been reading books? She loves reading books. And she says, well, there's just so many things that I need to do. And I ask her about what those things are, and it's usually things that have to do with basic, you know, cleaning up her apartment, or doing errands, things that that take some time. And I say, well, why don't you just carve out some time and read some books? And she's like, I'll do it tomorrow.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Or, you know, my kids are extremely interested in a wide range of things that they would like to be doing. And then sometimes on the weekend, when they're allowed to have screen time, they end up playing a ton of Minecraft. And then later, they feel frustrated that they didn't do all those other things that they had in their plan for the weekend.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Those are two small examples that come to mind. I mean, this also happens all the time with my team at work. Like, when people are doing research and we meet and we discuss all of the ambitions that we have for the things that we're going to do. And then we meet with each other a week later, and only a very small number of the things that were actually on the list maybe have been accomplished. And it's not that anybody has been slacking off or anybody had bad intentions, but just that everything always takes longer than you think and then other things come up. And sometimes there's 20 things that didn't make it onto that original to-do list, but that were really important in the moment.

• 11:53Shankar Vedantam?

  So this phenomenon of failing to follow through is so common that it's become a trope in many films and TV shows. I want to play you a clip from the television series Parks and Recreation. The character Ron Swanson has had a really bad relationship with this woman, but keeps getting back with her. After one of their traumatic breakups, he records a message to his future self.

• 12:16Speaker 06

  Hello, Ron. It's Ron. If you're watching this, it means that once again, you have danced with the devil. Right now, you're probably thinking, Tammy's changed. We'll be happy together. But you're only thinking that because she's a monstrous parasite who entered through your privates and lodged herself in your brain. So you have two choices. One, get rid of Tammy. Or two, lobotomy and castration. Choose wisely.

• 12:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So Emily, what do you hear when you hear that warning that Ron is giving to himself?

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, what I hear is somebody who has tried to do something in the past, right? He set a goal and then other things that he hadn't accounted for come up. And so he gets back together with Tammy. And clearly, he's done this multiple times because he's made a video and tried to protect himself against it in the future, right? So we do this all the time. We try to talk to ourselves or make resolutions or write down ideas about how our future selves should behave.

• 13:24Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering in some ways if this is like the story of, you know, Ulysses tying himself to the mast of his own ship. I mean, this is a problem that really goes back to mythology, to ancient times. I mean, the challenge that we often have in overcoming what seems to be, you know, almost a hijacker who lives inside our own heads.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's an idea that goes back for centuries, millennia. And it's also an idea that's represented in all kinds of modern media. And like the clips you played earlier, it's funny because we can relate to it. Right. It's funny because it's so common that none of us is thinking, why are Chandler and Rachel interested in eating more of the cheesecake? Or, you know, well, Ron should just be able to stop himself because so many of us have been in that kind of situation.

• 14:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So often, we sincerely want to make changes in our behavior, changes that we know would leave us better off. And almost as often, we end up not making those changes to our own frustration and bafflement.

• 14:38Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the mysterious but powerful presence inside our heads that works against our conscious goals to improve our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 15:07Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:09Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:53Shankar Vedantam?

  now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 17:04Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies why our resolutions often fail and what we can do about it.

• 17:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Emily, most of us imagine that if there's a choice we want to make or a change we want to initiate, we can simply decide to do it and then we will carry through. Your study of the brain suggests that there's more to this process. In particular, a network known as the value system gets involved whenever we face a decision. What is this value system?

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Value system is a constellation of brain regions that handle our choices, the choices that we're making consciously between drinking a milkshake or not drinking a milkshake, between whether we're going to go out on a date with somebody or stay home and deal with our emails. And the value system calculates these choices in what neuroscientists call a value calculation.

• 18:07Shankar Vedantam?

  So in some ways, it's doing a sort of cost benefit analysis?

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically, for each of our choices, it's identifying what are the different things that we're choosing between? It's assigning a subjective value to each of those different choices that depends on our current context, our past experiences, our future goals. And then based on that subjective value, that subjective reward that it's anticipating from each of the choices, it chooses the one that it thinks is going to be the best for me right here, right now. And then it is connected to other brain systems that take action that's relevant to that choice.

• 18:51Shankar Vedantam?

  So you raised something really important here just now, which is that the value system is really focused on the here and now. So when Emily says, I don't want to eat too much dessert or too much sugar, because that's not going to be good for me in the long run. But then Emily is confronting three delicious desserts that are sitting in front of her on the table. The value system has to make a judgment, and it has to prioritize either the short term or the long term.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. So when I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to eat the delicious dessert that's sitting in front of me, the short term reward of how delicious it's going to taste is more salient. That weighs more heavily in that value calculation than the long term consequence if I do that over and over again over the course of years, or even how I'm going to feel tomorrow or later this evening.

• 19:40Shankar Vedantam?

  And you can see how this works in all kinds of different ways. If I'm making a choice between buying some expensive gizmo or saving for my retirement, the expensive gizmo gives me a joy and a pleasure in the here and now, and saving for retirement is a very far-off benefit.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Right. Not only is it far off, but it's less vivid, right? I can totally imagine how much fun it's going to be to play with that toy right here that's in front of me, whereas who knows what kind of toys are going to be available during my retirement.

• 20:09Shankar Vedantam?

  So very often, the trade-offs we consider involve what you might call apples and oranges. They're very different choices that we often have to evaluate. And in the real world, we might establish committees to compare these very different choices, but somehow, our brains reduce the complexity of these choices and turn messy, real-world decisions into simple choices. You say it's useful to think of this value calculation as a hidden game of would you rather. What do you mean by that, Emily?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Well, you're probably familiar with the party game would you rather, where I might ask you different kinds of things that are usually not as simple as the option that you brought up, like would you rather eat an apple or an orange? Or would you rather eat a blueberry tart or a lemon cheesecake? Though, of course, the value system can handle those kinds of would you rather choices. But I also think it's pretty incredible that it can handle the more abstract kind of choices that we usually give it at a party that are not inherently comparable. Like, would you rather have a cat's tongue? Or would you rather have roller skates for hands? Right? Like, those are totally different things. And it's not like you can directly compare what the advantages and disadvantages would

• 21:22Speaker 03

  be, but you might have some intuition about which one you would choose.

• 21:26Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, when I see some of these questions, would you rather be able to speak every language or have the most beautiful singing voice on earth? Again, very difficult to actually compare and contrast these choices. But again, intuitively, when I think about it, I almost instantly have an answer in my mind about what I would choose.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. Likewise, we can do this with money. Like, I could say to you, would you rather have $5 or would you rather snuggle with a puppy? And you could choose whether you'd be willing to pay $5 to snuggle with a puppy or not. And you can probably come up with an answer depending on how you feel about puppies and how flush you're feeling.

• 22:06Shankar Vedantam?

  When the value system makes these quick intuitive calculations, it tends to prioritize the here and now. Of course, most of our resolutions are about prioritizing long-term goals, not short-term gratifications. So what do most of us do when the value system nudges us toward that extra serving of dessert? We try to overcome it using willpower. We tell ourselves to think about the long-term benefits of not yielding to temptation. The problem is, those long-term goals tend to be abstract compared to the tangible pleasures of the here and now.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  They're essentially far away from us in some way. We can't imagine them as vividly. And we can't imagine things as vividly when we think about things that are far off in the future, like, for example, a long-term health benefit of what I choose to eat today or whether I choose to get exercise is offset by how nice it would feel to stay and watch another show or eat something delicious that is available to me right now. And likewise, those same kinds of abstract trade-offs come into play when we think about other kinds of shoulds, like, I should care about what's happening globally to people who are suffering in other parts of the world.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  But when that's abstract and we know statistics about people that are dying, that's maybe less salient than we hear specific stories about the suffering of a particular individual or even better, when we get to know people whose lives are impacted by particular policies or decisions that are being made.

• 23:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Another way, Emily, that we make ourselves vulnerable to losing control of our behavior is that we think of ourselves as independent autonomous agents. But you say the brain is exquisitely sensitive to what other people think and do by what you call the social relevance system. What is this, Emily?

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, the social relevance system is a set of brain regions that help us understand what other people think and feel. And so you might also hear scientists refer to a theory of mind system, or a mentalizing system, that helps us think about other people's thoughts and feelings. And this social relevance system can help us connect and coordinate with other people, and it also shapes the decisions that we make. Like, it keeps us aligned with other people. It can help keep us on trends, but it can also do harmful things, like maybe deluding us into resharing a false social media post.

• 24:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So you yourself had an experience recently that gave you a sense of how powerfully influential the views of other people can be. And I understand it involved the actor Benedict Cumberbatch?

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So before the story I'm about to tell you, I had really never thought very much about Benedict Cumberbatch. I mean, I think if I saw him and I thought anything, it was like, there's a guy. Like, he's a pretty average-looking guy. And then my friend Rebecca gave me a book called This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, in which an Australian author, Tabitha Carvan, spends a few hundred pages talking about how amazing Benedict Cumberbatch is. She thinks he's incredibly attractive. She just, you know, is completely enamored of Benedict Cumberbatch. And so after reading this book, which is really a

• 25:46Speaker 03

  book about joy, and about what we value, and about how we spend our time, I loved the book. It made me think, like, I wonder what all the, you know, excitement about Benedict Cumberbatch is. And I said to my partner Brett, like, maybe we should watch Sherlock. And Brett was like, oh, I've already watched all of Sherlock. I love Sherlock. And I was like, what? Like, when did you watch Sherlock? And, but he said he'd watch it again, because he apparently also really likes Benedict Cumberbatch. And he told me that he thought Sherlock was a really hot character. So apparently, I was, you know, out of line. So... So we watch a couple of episodes of Sherlock.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  And with other people's voices in my head, I'm noticing like, yeah, he's pretty charming. Like, he's pretty smart. And then I started watching videos of him being interviewed online. And, you know, people ask him these questions about like, how does it feel to be named the sexiest man alive? And he's like, so charming, right? He says something like, oh, it makes me giggle. Or like, you know, he's totally delightful about it. And my friends, you know, we started talking about this. My friends, it turns out, thought Benedict Cumberbatch was really attractive. And all of this just made me reconsider my entire position on Benedict Cumberbatch.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  You should watch the video of where he mispronounced penguins. And then a BBC reporter asks him about it. And he says, penguins and penwins. Like, he just, he keeps mispronouncing it.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  Of fjordland crested penguins, named after this corner of South New Zealand.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  He can't seem to get it right in filming this documentary. And so then afterwards, they ask him about it. And he just totally fesses up, like, yeah, I was having a hard time. And he's like, so lovely and self-deprecating about the whole thing.

• 27:39Speaker 08

  Just try the word penguin again. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe they just gave up.

• 27:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So you got sucked into the Benedict Cumberbatch portal?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like the people in the study. It's not like I would necessarily say that I think that he is the most attractive person on the face of the planet. But I went from thinking like, all right, here's an average guy. I don't really know what the fuss is all about, to appreciating the charming nature of at least how he comes across on the internet, right? And I think that that increased appreciation was motivated almost exclusively by this kind of social force of other people appreciating him.

• 28:25Shankar Vedantam?

  We like to think that we're captains of our own ships, but the evidence of everyday life tells a different story. There is a co-captain at the helm, and this co-captain does not always share our goals.

• 28:40Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to make the changes we say we want. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 28:59Shankar Vedantam?

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• 30:28Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist and neuroscientist Emily Fark is the author of What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. She has spent many years studying why our brains seem to have minds of their own and why our resolutions and plans often get hijacked and waylaid. If you have follow-up questions or thoughts for Emily after listening to today's conversation, and you're willing to share those thoughts with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Mental Barriers." That email address again is [email protected].

• 31:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Emily, you know, it can be dispiriting to learn that the value system is, in a sense, making our judgments for us. And these judgments are often different from the ones we say that we want. You say that by understanding the operation of the value system, we can learn to work with the network in the brain rather than struggling against it. What do you mean by this?

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, what I mean is that when we think about our bigger picture goals and values, or even small goals that we might have, that the way that we frame those choices can make it easier to make choices that are congruent with what we would ultimately want if we were, let's say, operating as our best selves. So one example that I really like is a study that researchers at Stanford did, where they looked at people's decisions in dining halls. And they changed the labels of the foods to either focus on the long-term health benefits of things or the kind of short-term taste.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  So, for example, they might have vegetables that were labeled as healthy choice turnips, or balsamic glazed turnips, or nutritious green beans, or sizzling Szechuan green beans. And the dish itself is exactly the same. But when they foreground the tastiness of the option, people chose a lot more vegetables than when they foreground that sort of longer-term health benefit. And so what I mean when I say that we can work with our value system is like building on what we talked about before, where people tend to prioritize the immediate or psychologically close or vivid consequences of our choices.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  We can focus on what is gratifying, what is rewarding, what is immediately useful about the thing that we want to do.

• 33:16Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, this is a very different model than trying to fight our value system, right? Because it's not the same thing as saying, my value system wants X, I'm going to exercise willpower to suppress it. It's basically saying, how do we actually work together?

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Exactly. How do we collaborate with ourselves in order to make the choices that feel good now and feel good later? So if we think about an exercise example, maybe we try to do something that we think is going to make us as fit as possible, and we choose something that isn't ultimately that fun or enjoyable, and where we have to exercise a lot of willpower to make ourselves do it. And that's probably not sustainable. Whereas when we make choices that are really fun and joyful, like maybe, I really love to dance, so going dancing for me doesn't feel like a workout specifically, it feels like something I would want to do for my mental well-being, even absent the physical benefits.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  Or going for a run with my neighbor is a great chance to catch up with her and hear about how her week is going. So focusing on those kinds of things can make it immediately rewarding, as opposed to just focusing on some longer-term goal about getting healthier, when in reality, it also has those benefits as well.

• 34:35Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that for a long time, you had an intention to visit your grandmother more often. You told me that you are close to her, but you kept failing to keep your resolution because you dreaded the traffic you would encounter on the way to her house. So keeping in mind what we just talked about, the idea of working with the value system rather than against it, what did you do, Emily?

• 34:57Speaker 03

  I was listening to a podcast called How to Save a Planet, where Kendra Pierre-Louis made this very delightful episode about biking. And it reminded me that biking doesn't have to be this sweaty, stressful thing where you're taking your life in your hands, weaving in and out of traffic. Like, the people that Kendra interviewed for the biking episode were just having fun. Like, they were out there joyfully, teetering around on their bikes. And it made me think about the possibility that I could bike to her house instead of driving there.

• 35:31Shankar Vedantam?

  What did you do?

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Well, I got my bike out of the basement and I biked down my street on a beautiful fall afternoon and I biked up to the path that takes me to the route along the river, which is really beautiful. So pretty soon I was on this jogging path, but I was just flying past the joggers and the light was reflecting off of the Schuylkill River and I just felt amazing. Like I went all the way from where I live in West Philadelphia over to where she lives, near the art museum, in this kind of state of feeling like this

• 36:14Speaker 03

  is exactly where I want to be right now. Like I'm out on this beautiful fall afternoon and having that time outside, having that me time, felt really good.

• 36:32Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, I think some of us shy away from doing this because it almost feels like cheating. Because in some ways now, you're visiting your grandmother in part now because you actually like biking. You like being outside. You like the look of the Schuylkill River. And I think perhaps some of us have in our heads that for things to be good, they actually have to be hard. That if for exercise to be meaningful, it has to involve suffering. And what you're saying is, no, it doesn't.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Exactly. I think that, you know, the more places in our life where we can find moments of joy, moments of connection, moments of happiness, like I think we should take them where we can get them.

• 37:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Emily and other researchers find that our resolutions are more likely to stick when we can link them with aspects of our identity, or what researchers call the self-relevance network in the brain.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  I think one thing that we can do is think about how the goals that we have or the things that we want to do, but that we might not necessarily immediately connect with our sense of who we are, could be connected to strengths we already have or things that we're already doing. So, one thing that happened for me was, you know, I go for jogs mostly to de-stress, to blow off some steam. And I have two siblings who are much more serious runners. And one day, my brother was pitching me on the idea that if I did some targeted workouts, that I could get faster. And initially, I sort of wondered, like, why would I care about getting faster in the first place? Like, growing up,

• 38:10Speaker 03

  I was, you know, thought of myself probably more like as a nerd than as a jock. And it wasn't immediately part of my identity to think of myself as a runner in that way. And my brother framed it a different way. He said, you know, academics often make really good runners because academics are good at planning, academics are good at working hard on things that, you know, have some payoff in the long term. And so that shifted it from something where, you know, doing these harder workouts to get faster would just be to do it, to something that I already had the skills, the disposition to do. He

• 38:55Speaker 03

  also added another social reward, which was that if I got faster, I could run with my brother and sister and hear the gossip, which of course is very motivating for me.

• 39:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Was your brother, you think, aware of what he was doing? That was it, was he just sort of offering this as a helpful piece of guidance? Or had he read some of your work and figured out that this was what was going to be effective?

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know if you had read my work specifically, but I think it was a strategic way to frame things.

• 39:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Because in some ways, I think what he got you to do was, instead of saying Emily is not a runner, he got you to say, well, running is the kind of thing that Emily should be doing. And in some ways, that's a very clever and important shift.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so, you know, I will admit, I'm not like doing speed workouts all the time. But after learning a little bit about what I was capable of by doing that with my brother and with my sister, now at the end of my run, sometimes I will work in a little bit more. You know, I'll push myself for the last couple of blocks to see how fast I can run or do those little things that over the long run, they promise me are going to make me a faster runner. And when I do that in my runs, then it gets incorporated into my identity. And there's this feed forward cycle of the more that I think of it as something that I do, the more I do it.

• 40:17Shankar Vedantam?

  And of course, when we think about our self identities, there are some things that feel very core to us. So you might have previously thought, you know, I'm an academic. I'm primarily interested in the world of ideas. You know, running is not for me. But your brother found a way in some ways of connecting one aspect of what it means to be an academic with a very central aspect of what it means to be a runner. And that tells me that in many ways, as we're looking for things to do, there are probably ways to harness many of the goals we have with aspects of our identity that in some ways that we're not doing already. That if we're strategic about how we connect our resolutions to our identities, we can find things in our core identities that are better harnessed or connected to our resolutions.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  That's right. So let's say that you have somebody that you work with who is really nervous about making a big presentation. And they don't necessarily think of themselves as being a great presenter. But you've seen them at the office party and you know that they are an extrovert who is the life of the party. And so you might help them see the connection between that way that they are able to connect with other people in a crowd in one situation with that same kind of connection that they might have in other situations.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  And so as we think about, you know, what are the goals that we have and what are the things that are getting in the way? One of the things that might be getting in the way is if we think, well, I'm not a person who does X. And in reality, we can shift to think about like, well, what are the things that are true of me that could support being able to do that thing?

• 42:03Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked earlier about the power of our social worlds in shaping the value system in the brain, Emily. You say that one way to enlist the power of social influence is to make use of what psychologists call social proof. Now, we've discussed this idea previously on the show, but what is social proof? How does it work and how can we take advantage of it?

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Social proof is the idea that we are influenced by what the people around us are doing or thinking. And so when we see that other people are doing something, then that makes us think that it's a good idea. And social proof influences people, often outside of their conscious awareness even. So, for example, in California, researchers studied the energy use of different people, of different households. And what they found was that when they asked people what they thought was influencing their energy use behaviors, that people said that, you know, their costs and other factors

• 43:06Speaker 03

  were influencing it, but they didn't actually think that their neighbor's energy use was particularly impactful in their decisions. And yet, when the researchers looked at what was actually influencing their decisions, it turned out that other people's energy use behavior was pretty predictive of what those folks were doing. And so, based on that, what the research team did was they ran an experiment where they gave some people messages that were focused on social proof, like, for example, 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer. So that's a message that's highlighting that a lot of your neighbors are doing this thing.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  And other people got messages that were focused on, you know, just asking them to consider how they might conserve energy, like, for example, by using fans instead of air conditioning. And other people got other kinds of appeals, so things like saving money. And they found, the researchers found, that the households that were told about their neighbors' conservation efforts, that they ended up saving more energy than people in the other groups. And the thing that I think is really fascinating about this study is that those folks who are influenced by the messages still reported that what other people were doing was the least important reason for them making the energy decisions that they were making.

• 44:34Shankar Vedantam?

  So I understand that you have a very interesting technique of deploying social influence with others in your lab, and it involves working on something that you call "whatied what what"?

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that term, the credit goes to Elliot Berkman, who's also a neuroscientist who studies goal pursuit. The idea of "wadi what what" is an acronym for "work on that thing you don't want to work on time." There are a lot of things that we don't necessarily want to do, you know, things that we don't feel like doing, but that we know we need to do. And what we do in our lab is we try to make those things that we know we don't really want to work on more rewarding by doing them together. So somebody might post on our messaging...

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Platform, you know, does anybody want to have a work on that thing session? And then a bunch of other people will get together. And the idea is that there's a set amount of time. You don't have to do a thing that you don't want to do forever. But we give each other support and encouragement and hold each other accountable for the thing. And so having somebody else there kind of helps rebalance the value calculation. Because it's fun to get to catch up with somebody else and committing to doing it together with somebody else taps into that idea of social rewards as well. And makes it more likely that we'll get it done.

• 46:02Shankar Vedantam?

  So you've had your own experience with different approaches to working on a goal. At one point, you were trying to learn to play the guitar. And you've had different teachers who've emphasized different aspects of the guitar. Tell me about your experience with these different teachers and what's proven to be most effective?

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. In 2019, my dad died. And my dad, when I was growing up, would always play the guitar and fill our house with music. He would come over and play with my kids. And when I was younger, we would, you know, sing and he would play rock and roll music or folk music, other kinds of things. And after he died, I really felt that absence very strongly. And so much that I decided that I was going to learn how to play the guitar.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  And I started trying to figure out how to do that. I watched videos online and I was trying to motivate myself. And I learned that, I'm really lucky that at Penn, there's a program where they will connect you with a music teacher. And so I got connected with a music teacher who was great. He was really enthusiastic. He was a classical guitarist. But he was also really focused on classical music. And I had this goal to learn how to play the guitar for really personal reasons. And when I asked him about, you know, the kinds of music that my dad liked or that my dad and I would play together. It was sort of something that he was like, yeah, you'll figure that out.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  But it wasn't central to the practice that we were doing together. And so I would kind of bribe myself through practice sessions. Like, all right, if you practice for 10 minutes, then you can eat a chocolate truffle at the end or something. And, you know, again, trying to like bring the reward as close as possible. But it was hard. And the pandemic struck and I paused the lessons for lots of reasons. But then, you know, as the pandemic eased and my kids went back to school face to face, I had a little bit more bandwidth again, and I decided I was going to try again.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  And I got a recommendation for a guitar teacher who mostly teaches kids. And I think that's key because, you know, guitar teacher who really teaches kids tells you something about what they're willing to engage with. And I met Gabriel, who's my guitar teacher now and also my son Theo's guitar teacher. And Gabriel took a totally different approach. So he was very focused on why I wanted to play. And he would take little like audio clips that I had of my dad playing and transcribe

• 49:02Speaker 03

  them for me and ask me for a list of songs that I was interested in. And then he would write them out at a level that was appropriate for where I was. And so when I was practicing, all of a sudden now it didn't feel like work. It didn't feel like, okay, now I'm doing my etudes and I'm doing the hard thing that's going to get me to this goal later. I was already there, right? I was already doing the thing that was the future goal, just at a level that was appropriate for me. And, you know, that's worked really well for my kids, too, that they get to choose the music that they start with. And, you know, he has them do exercises sometimes as well, but he connects it to their goal,

• 49:46Speaker 03

  their motivation of the particular song that they want to work on. And then it doesn't make it feel like there's a separation between The repetitions and the practice that we're doing right now and some future abstract, you know, time when we're going to be able to play music.

• 50:05Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I'm so struck that Gabriel did so many of the things that we've talked about in this conversation, Emily. You know, he basically asked you, what's relevant to your life? How do we make the fun start now as opposed to start later on? How do we make this as accessible and as self-relevant as possible? So you are directing your own course of learning. I mean, in some ways, he is a student of yours as much as you are a student of his.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, I really appreciate the way that that he has done that. And, you know, also just holding space for why I was there. Like, sometimes at the beginning, I would get really emotional and that didn't seem to fluster him. He would just kind of wait or maybe sit there and play himself for a little bit. And I think that kind of holistic understanding of like, sometimes we kind of segment off, like, okay, we're here because I'm going to try to get Emily to learn how to play the guitar, rather than like, we're here to have this experience together. And so like, I try to channel some of that when I'm trying to get my kids to practice. Theo plays the guitar and Emma

• 51:15Speaker 03

  plays the piano with Gabriel. And, you know, if I'm sitting there practicing with Theo and he starts, you know, playing some other song that's not technically his homework for the week, when I'm being my best self, I can take a step back and think about like, well, actually, the goal of this whole thing is for us to be able to connect and do this fun thing together. And so rather than being like, hey, you're supposed to spend 10 minutes focusing on Bach, like, you know, I can remind myself that like, actually, this is the thing that we're trying to do. We're doing it right now. Rather than like, you know, he's probably never going to be a concert musician. And so, so this is why we're here.

• 52:08Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, this speaks to a really important idea, Emily, which is that I think we often have this very compartmentalized view of our own selves. So we have the sense of the person who says, I want to be, you know, whatever, pick the, pick the resolution. I want to be healthier. I want to be, you know, eat less dessert. I want to practice the piano. I want to call my grandmother. And we have this very compartmentalized view of saying, how do I make the rest of me fall in line with this vision that I have to do this particular thing? And it's a very top-down, you know, almost hierarchical vision of how we imagine ourselves behaving and being. And I think what you're describing here with Gabriel is actually something that's much more integrated, where in some ways, you are one, Emily. You are the daughter of, of someone who you loved

• 52:52Shankar Vedantam?

  and who you miss, and you're the musician, and you're the student, and you're the academic, and it's all, it's all one person. It's not five different people at war with each other.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it makes me feel emotional even just thinking about it. But one thing that comes to mind is there was this, like, warm-up that my dad used to play. And

• 53:26Speaker 03

  I remember when I gave that MP3 to Gabriel and he came back and he was playing it and I was in the living room.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  And it turned out that it was actually, like, really simple. And it was something that I did have access to be able to do. And that kind of, like, feeling connected to somebody who's not physically there, but where we've had the experience of doing something really special with them, like, just felt so good. And, you know, now, playing with my kids, like, when they play music.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Sometimes we choose songs that my dad wrote, and they learn how to play those songs, or songs that I used to sing with my dad. And when I'm sitting there with a kid snuggled in my lap and a big guitar on his lap, and I get to sing there, it feels like a really full circle kind of feeling. Like, it feels like...

• 54:37Speaker 03

  I did not expect for you to make me cry. It feels amazing.

• 55:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Next week, we bring you part two of our conversation with Emily. We look at one particular obstacle to change: defensiveness. Have you ever noticed when you offer a friend or a colleague or a partner a suggestion for improvement? They often experience an urge to dig in their heels rather than listening to how they might change or do something better. They try to preserve the status quo. Like generals fighting a war, they try to protect every square inch of the person they are instead of embracing the person they might become. We'll talk with Emily about how we can break through the barrier of defensiveness and help the people in our lives make valuable changes. If you have follow-up questions or thoughts for Emily that you'd be willing to share

• 55:51Shankar Vedantam?

  with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Mental Barriers." That email address again is [email protected]. Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Emily, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 56:38Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Burns, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung heroes this week are a group of super fans who joined me recently for a meal after our Hidden Brain live show in the Boston area. Laura Sabia, Matthew Fleming, and Deena Ben-David, it was wonderful to have the opportunity to connect with you. Thanks for your interest and support of our work at Hidden Brain. We're truly grateful.

• 57:20Shankar Vedantam?

  If you'd like to support our work and have access to conversations you won't hear anywhere else, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Listeners who join in the month of September on Apple Podcasts will have access to an extended 30-day free trial. To subscribe, find Hidden Brain on Apple Podcasts and try the Try Free button, or go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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• 58:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out, the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain Podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or hiddenbrain.org.

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