0:00

LinkedIn Presents. I'm

0:06

Rufus Griskim. And I'm Michael Kovner. And

0:08

this is The Next Big Idea. Today,

0:11

the power of noticing what's

0:14

always there. Hi,

0:33

everyone. How's it going? How are things?

0:35

How's your life? Mine?

0:38

Thanks for asking. Things are

0:40

pretty good, I guess. I've got a

0:43

pretty cool job, a great family. I got

0:45

a new house a few years ago, and

0:47

it's fine. I guess

0:49

if I'm being honest, everything's okay. But

0:51

it's not amazing. Not like it was

0:53

when I first got married, or first

0:55

had a kid, or first bought this

0:57

house. Back then, everything

1:00

was fresh and kind of thrilling.

1:02

Now, I don't know, I guess

1:04

I've just gotten used to things.

1:06

I've habituated, to use the word psychologists

1:09

use. It's a

1:11

pretty common problem, I guess. It's why

1:13

we go on vacation or seek out

1:15

great art to freshen our perspective. Less

1:18

benignly, it might be why some people

1:20

have affairs or do drugs. They've just

1:23

gotten bored with their lives, bored even

1:25

with the things and people they enjoy.

1:28

If we could learn to dishabituate, if

1:30

we could look at our lives with

1:32

fresh eyes, think of the benefits. We

1:34

might appreciate the wonders all around us,

1:36

bring a little joy back into the

1:38

everyday. We could be more creative.

1:41

We might also see the bad things

1:43

around us more clearly, like that messy

1:45

pile in the corner of the office,

1:48

or more importantly, the injustices in our

1:50

society. Dishabituation might be

1:52

a powerful tool for inspiring

1:55

gratitude and sparking change. So

1:57

today, I'm going to talk with someone who's studied. the

2:00

roots of this issue. Tali

2:02

Sharat is a cognitive neuroscientist

2:04

who splits her time between MIT

2:07

and University College London. Tali

2:09

also runs something called the Effective Brain Lab,

2:11

where she and her colleagues try to understand

2:14

the neurological underpinnings of human

2:16

emotion and behavior. It's

2:19

an interdisciplinary approach, one

2:21

that tries to explain, for example, why

2:23

some people are optimists and some are

2:25

pessimists, how our emotions

2:27

impact our decision-making, and why

2:30

some of us are better at persuasion than others. For

2:33

her latest book, Tali teamed up

2:35

with another interdisciplinary thinker, Harvard Law

2:37

professor and bestselling author Cass Sunstein.

2:41

Cass teaches law, but his research interests

2:43

touch on economics, psychology,

2:45

and public policy. He made a splash

2:47

with his 2008 bestseller Nudge, and

2:50

he served for a few years in the Obama

2:52

administration. Their book is called Look

2:54

Again, the power of noticing what

2:57

was always there. The book

2:59

certainly woke me up to the issue, and I'm

3:01

hoping this conversation with Tali is eye-opening for you

3:03

as well. Tali

3:37

Sharat, welcome to the next big idea. Thank

3:40

you for having me. Really glad to have you here. I really

3:42

enjoyed reading your book, Look Again, the power of noticing what

3:44

was always there, and I'm glad to have you on the

3:46

show. I'm really looking forward to

3:48

talking some of these ideas through with you,

3:51

partly because I think I'm personally in a little bit

3:53

of a rut in my life, and

3:55

I think maybe I could

3:58

use some guidance on disabituating. So

4:01

I'm going to use you as my personal

4:03

therapist, if you don't mind. Before

4:06

we get into it, though, I'd love to just hear

4:08

a little bit about your academic

4:11

background and sort of how, what

4:13

sort of your intellectual progress has been that

4:15

has brought you to this set of ideas.

4:19

So I'm in the middle

4:21

between psychology, neuroscience, and some

4:23

behavioral economics as well. So

4:26

that's where I'm coming from. I

4:28

want to understand why people do what they

4:30

do, why they behave in the way they

4:33

behave, believe what they believe, interact

4:35

with the way that they do.

4:37

And to answer those questions, I

4:39

look at clues both from biology

4:41

and physiology, you know, and

4:44

also from social sciences as well. So

4:46

it's really a combination of

4:48

the two. And I think the topic of

4:50

this book exactly is that,

4:54

which is we're looking at a phenomena

4:57

that at the base of it

4:59

is a very biological, physiological phenomena

5:02

habituation. And the

5:04

same principle that we can see in

5:07

different animals, we can see also in

5:09

humans, but we can see that it

5:11

affects things that are very basic, like

5:13

perception, but also it affects things that

5:16

are very complex and large, like social

5:18

movements, right, and daily life

5:22

as well. And how did you

5:24

come to collaborate with Cass Sunstein? We've featured

5:26

a few of his books in the Next

5:28

Big Idea Club, and he is an original

5:31

thinker. How did you two come to

5:33

work together on this? Yeah, so

5:35

we've been actually working together for 10 years already.

5:38

We have articles together and op-eds together, so

5:40

we have more than a decade of working

5:42

together. So that wasn't new. We

5:45

came to work together because when

5:47

my first book came out, The Optimism Bias,

5:49

on the very first day that it came

5:52

out, Cass wrote me an email. We've

5:54

already read the book, like Cass

5:56

does, right, and he

5:58

wrote me just a one-sentence like he often

6:00

does, just saying how much he loved the book. And

6:03

I was like, Kath Bernstein, the offer

6:05

of nudge. And

6:08

it just went from there. So from there, we started

6:10

working together on a

6:12

lot of different projects, and we've done so for

6:14

a decade now. So

6:16

let's turn to talk about habituation.

6:19

And I wonder what brought you

6:21

to this interest in habituation? Yeah.

6:24

Yeah, so in fact, it was one study

6:27

that we conducted that's in the

6:29

book that came out

6:31

in 2016. And

6:34

that study, we showed the people

6:36

habituated to their own dishonesty. What

6:40

we did is we brought people in a lab,

6:42

and they had an opportunity in this task to

6:45

lie. And if they did, they

6:47

would gain more money at the expense of another person.

6:49

Now we never told them to lie. We didn't say

6:51

the word lie, but they could figure out, hey,

6:54

if I lie here, I'm actually gaining more money,

6:56

and my partner is losing, but I'm going to

6:58

gain more. And what was

7:00

interesting is that at the beginning, we found that

7:03

people lied by just a tiny little amount, just

7:05

a few cents. And then the

7:07

next opportunity they had, they lied more. Now it's

7:09

like a dollar, and then more, a few

7:11

dollars, and a few dollars. So

7:14

over time, the amount by which

7:16

they lied escalated. It snowballed. At

7:19

the same time, we recorded their brain activity. And

7:21

what we found was that at

7:23

the beginning when they lied, despite the

7:25

fact that they lied by just a

7:27

little bit, there was strong activity in

7:29

their amygdala, which was important for emotional

7:31

reaction. So it suggested at

7:33

the beginning when they lied, there was strong

7:35

reaction, like a negative emotion, which

7:38

makes sense because people don't ... I

7:40

mean, they think lying is wrong, and they feel bad about it

7:42

usually. But then because of

7:45

something known as emotional habituation, the

7:47

amygdala activity went down and down and down over

7:49

time. They felt less and less bad

7:52

over time. The more they lied, the less

7:54

bad they felt about it because of what's

7:56

known as emotional habituation, which is we have

7:58

less of an emotional ... response to

8:00

something that's repeated again and again. This

8:02

idea of habituation, it's interesting because on

8:04

the one hand it's very common sensical.

8:07

I think we all sort of know we get used

8:09

to things, you know, and that's we

8:12

understand that as part of life. But

8:15

I think by really shining a

8:17

light on it, you're showing the

8:19

many ways we don't really realize

8:21

how it is shaping our lives

8:23

and our behaviors, whether we're taking

8:26

more risks, relying more, or

8:29

failing to appreciate things we have

8:32

in our lives, good or bad. So

8:34

I really appreciated the chance to really take a

8:37

look at that mechanism and appreciated

8:40

that it's also really grounded in brain

8:42

activity, as I understand, and that even

8:44

at the level of cells,

8:48

like I think you show an

8:51

optical illusion where after

8:53

looking at it in a fixed way for a

8:56

while, the color drains out. And I think it's

8:58

because you're some sort

9:00

of retinal fatigue, like something happens in

9:02

your optic nerve where it

9:04

just doesn't fire the same way

9:06

after the first few cycles.

9:08

Is that right? Yeah. So maybe we'll

9:11

quickly define what habituation is. Yeah, that'd help.

9:13

So habituation is our tendency to respond

9:15

less and less and less to things that

9:17

are constant or are frequent or

9:20

change very slowly. Okay. So

9:22

our physiological response is reduced, our

9:24

physiological response is reduced. And so yeah,

9:26

we have this visual illusion that, I

9:28

don't know if listeners could find it

9:31

with a link or something, but basically

9:33

it's a cloud of colors. So

9:37

there's green and yellow and red, it's kind of

9:39

very pretty, with a little fixation

9:41

point in the middle. And what you

9:44

need to do is fixate your eyes on that

9:46

fixation point for about 30 seconds and just don't

9:48

move your eyes at all. And

9:50

what you find is that those colors

9:52

then become gray. And

9:55

if you do it really, really, really well, this

9:57

requires some practice, the gray actually

9:59

becomes gray. white. And the

10:02

reason this happens is because if you're not

10:04

moving your eyes, the same information

10:06

is coming to the same neurons.

10:09

And so this one neuron

10:12

will just get the visual

10:14

input. And after a while,

10:16

it just stops responding because that's what neurons do.

10:18

If they get the same input after a time,

10:21

they just stop responding. Interesting.

10:23

And that's habituation, basically. But the principle

10:25

itself, which is we respond less to

10:27

things and things that are constant, are

10:29

true to this more complex things. And

10:31

this visual illusion

10:34

is a good analogy for life. If

10:37

you think about something that really excited you

10:39

in the past, perhaps you moved into a

10:41

new home, and it was just so wonderful.

10:43

It was full of color. But

10:46

after a while, you've been in your home

10:48

day after day after day after day, you

10:50

can't see the color anymore. Meaning

10:53

the amount of joy that it gives you is not

10:55

as much as it was in the beginning. And that's

10:57

true for a nice home. It's true for an interesting

11:00

job that it still

11:02

may be interesting, but it's not quite exciting as

11:04

it was at the beginning. Or

11:06

a relationship as well.

11:09

We sort of habituate to these good

11:11

things around us, sometimes to quite a

11:13

large degree, that they actually don't bring

11:15

us everyday joy anymore. But also to

11:17

the negative stuff. Maybe

11:20

when you first got your job, there were

11:22

some inefficiencies that bothered you. But over

11:24

time, we get used to those things,

11:26

small things like inefficiencies at work, and

11:28

big things like racism, sexism, cracks in

11:30

our personal relationships. If they have

11:32

been there for a long time, we get used to

11:34

them and then we stop seeing them. And

11:37

as you said, to some extent, some

11:40

of this is intuitive.

11:43

But then there are so many

11:45

things that are not intuitive. So

11:48

let me give you an example of an experiment in

11:50

the book where they ask people, you're about to hear

11:52

a song, a nice song, maybe a song that you

11:54

really like, one of your favorite songs. And they ask

11:56

people, hey, would you like to listen to the song

11:58

beginning to end? No. interruptions? Oh,

12:01

do you think you'd enjoy it more if

12:03

we had interruptions? So we break the song

12:05

every 20 seconds and you know, we stop

12:07

for 10 seconds or so. And

12:10

99% of people say, I don't

12:12

want interruptions. I want to listen

12:15

it from beginning to end. Right? Makes sense.

12:17

That's our intuition. But then when

12:19

they actually did the experiment, what they

12:21

found was that people enjoyed the song

12:23

more with interruptions. Why

12:26

is that? If the song

12:28

goes on from beginning to end, you really

12:31

enjoy it at the beginning. And the joy

12:33

kind of goes down over time. You still enjoy

12:35

it. It's not that you don't enjoy it, but

12:37

the joy goes down over time. But

12:39

if I have an interruption, then

12:42

you have a little break and then

12:44

you dishabituate, like moving your eyes, right?

12:46

You're dishabituating. And then the joy jumps

12:48

back up. And then you

12:50

listen to the next part of the song goes down a

12:52

little bit. I break, disabituate, you

12:54

pop back up. So overall, if I sum

12:57

it all together, the amount of joy that

12:59

you get from having listening to a song

13:01

with breaks is larger, which is super not

13:03

intuitive, right? And it turns out not only

13:05

people enjoyed it more, they were willing to

13:08

pay double to listen to this song in

13:10

concert. They did the

13:12

same with massages. People prefer a massage.

13:14

They say, I want a massage with

13:16

no interruptions, obviously. But then

13:18

in fact, when they measure, they find

13:20

that people enjoy a massage more if

13:22

there are a few interruptions in

13:25

between. So what

13:27

these breaks do, they

13:29

let us dishabituate, right?

13:31

They let us get away from the

13:33

thing that is good, that we enjoy, and

13:36

then come back so we can see it

13:38

again. We can feel it again. Yeah.

13:41

In some ways, you're pointing to the

13:43

problems with habituation, that it sort of

13:45

numbs us to some of the pleasures

13:48

in life. But there

13:50

are limits to it. I mean, there's a reason

13:52

habituation exists. We couldn't live in that state of

13:55

fresh experience every single moment of our lives.

13:57

I was thinking about this in the shower.

14:00

a nice hot shower and I thought, this is nice.

14:02

And I tried to imagine, you know, what if I

14:04

were experiencing the way I did when I first took

14:06

a hot shower or after a week of camping and

14:08

I came and I took a shower and I just

14:10

couldn't believe it, how great it

14:12

was. But I think I

14:15

would probably be psychotic if I were

14:17

taking every shower with that same level

14:19

of intensity and joy, right? So you

14:23

have to habituate. I mean, I'm sure, you know,

14:26

there's a reason why those neurons don't

14:28

keep firing. There's a reason why you

14:30

don't keep being startled by the things

14:33

around you in your house. To function, you

14:35

have to kind of get used to things,

14:37

isn't that right? Yeah.

14:40

So as a rule, if there's something

14:42

that most humans exhibit

14:44

and if there is something that you

14:47

can see in other animals as well,

14:49

that suggests it is adaptive.

14:52

So then the question is, why is habituation adaptive?

14:54

So there's a few reasons. One,

14:57

it goes back to motivation because think

14:59

back to your first entry-level job. You

15:02

probably really enjoyed it. You were really excited about

15:05

it. It was great. Now, if

15:07

you were as excited about this

15:09

entry-level job 10 years later, well,

15:12

you wouldn't be as motivated to get

15:14

that next promotion, right? So it's good

15:16

that we habituate to things because that

15:18

keeps us going. It keeps us wanting

15:20

to do the next thing, to move

15:23

forward, right? And so in

15:25

some respects, that's how our species

15:27

evolved, right?

15:30

Without habituation, we may have not progressed in

15:32

a way that's not possible. Because I would just be

15:34

so satisfied with that shower, I might never get out

15:36

of it. Or I would be, if I

15:38

was just so pleased with everything that

15:40

happened, I might not make any positive

15:43

changes in my life. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

15:45

To get more. And then there's

15:47

the really basic survival issue, which is

15:51

when there's a lot of information coming

15:53

away, if our brain would

15:55

continue processing and responding to all

15:58

the things around you, visual. auditory,

16:01

you wouldn't have resources to

16:04

respond to the next things that coming

16:06

your way. The thing that you may

16:08

actually kill you. So

16:10

you need, the neurons are responding and then they're

16:13

like, okay, I'm still alive. I'm going to quiet

16:15

down now. And now I'm ready for

16:17

the next thing that is coming my way. So

16:19

that's a great thing. And

16:21

the next thing, you said something that was

16:23

actually true. You said something, I'll be psychotic

16:26

or something like that. Right? If

16:28

I didn't, if I didn't have a choice. That is in fact

16:30

true. So problems

16:32

with habituation are

16:34

related to a whole range of

16:36

mental health issues. And

16:38

there could be different types of problems

16:41

with habituation. There could be more

16:43

perceptual habituation, just very

16:45

basic. In schizophrenia, for example,

16:47

people don't habituate as fast

16:50

to just perceptual stimuli.

16:53

But for example, let's go back to depression. We talked about

16:56

that a little bit. So people

16:58

with depression habituate to negative events

17:00

in their life slower. They

17:03

don't bounce back as fast. One

17:06

example is a study conducted at

17:09

the University of Miami by Professor

17:11

Aaron Heller, where he

17:14

had students who just got a grade

17:16

on a really important exam. He

17:19

asked them how they were feeling. And then he

17:21

went back to them every 45 minutes for the rest of the

17:23

day to ask them how they were feeling. And

17:26

what he found is when people got a bad

17:28

grade, everyone felt bad. It didn't matter if you

17:30

had depression symptoms, the history of depression or none

17:32

at all. People felt bad to

17:34

the same extent when they got a fail. The

17:37

difference was how fast they then

17:40

kind of overcome it. Right? So

17:43

people with depression, they continued ruminating

17:45

over this negative event. Right? And

17:48

they kept causing them to feel as bad as

17:50

it did in the beginning for many, many hours.

17:53

So people that did not have a

17:55

history of depression and no history of

17:57

mental health conditions, they tended to kind

17:59

of climb back faster. and eventually just

18:02

go back to their baseline level

18:04

of well-being. Because they habituated

18:06

more quickly to that bad

18:08

news? Exactly. Okay.

18:11

Habituate emotional habituation, right? They're like at the

18:14

beginning, something bad happens, you feel really negative.

18:16

So this goes back a little bit. We

18:18

talked about dishonesty and how like when you're

18:20

dishonest, you feel bad, right? But

18:23

the next time that you're dishonest, not

18:25

as bad. That's emotional habituation. So any

18:27

negative things that happen to you, you

18:29

feel bad about it. But over

18:32

time, that negative feeling kind of

18:34

declines. You respond less, right? I see. So

18:37

that's an interesting example of a way

18:39

habituation can help with happiness in

18:41

a way. But I think you talk about

18:43

happiness a lot early in the book. And

18:46

there's this idea that I could be

18:48

a lot happier than I am right now.

18:52

Especially because I've stopped

18:54

really appreciating some of

18:56

the good things I have. My house, my

18:58

relationship, that I have food in the refrigerator.

19:01

These things are kind of amazing. They're

19:04

wonderful, shockingly wonderful things that

19:06

I have in my life. And

19:08

yet I don't feel that shock.

19:11

I don't feel that excitement day

19:13

to day because I've just gotten used to it. And

19:16

how much richer could my life be? How much more

19:18

joy would I experience if I could bring back some

19:20

of that thrill? Of realizing,

19:22

I'm so blessed to have this house. I'm

19:24

so lucky to have this partner that I

19:26

have. Is that part of what you

19:28

were looking at? The way

19:31

that disabituating could increase a sense

19:33

of happiness and joy. So

19:35

I think the key is really

19:38

this quote from an economist named

19:40

Tiber Skitovsky. And he

19:42

says, pleasure results from incomplete and

19:45

intermittent satisfaction of desires.

19:48

Pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent

19:50

satisfaction of desires. It's not immediately

19:52

obvious because you'd think it would come

19:55

from complete satisfaction of desire. But it

19:57

doesn't. Right. It's like the

19:59

song. It's like in a song. you have to pull away

20:01

and then you have to come back. And just

20:03

like you need to pull away from the song

20:05

or from the massage, you also, it helps to

20:07

pull away just from your life to

20:09

take a break and then come

20:11

back. And then when you do that, and

20:14

it could be because, you know, people may

20:16

go away for business, travel, and then come

20:18

back home, and there's a phenomena which

20:21

we call respracling, which is that, you

20:23

know, after you've been away and then

20:25

you come back home, like things seem

20:27

like they were sparkled suddenly, right?

20:30

And I'll tell you where we got the word from,

20:32

but before that, so there's, after

20:34

we completed the book, we finished the

20:36

book, I found this wonderful quote from

20:38

Jodie Foster, and she describes this experience

20:41

that she has where she went away

20:43

for six months to film somewhere else,

20:45

and then she got back home to

20:47

LA. And she said, I came

20:49

back from somewhere that is amazing and beautiful,

20:51

but you know, you long for really dumb

20:53

things that you've just used to, that six

20:55

months ago, I'm sure I was bored by,

20:58

but right now I'm like, my God, avocados

21:00

are amazing. Or I'm so

21:02

glad I get to go to the gym again. Things

21:04

that six months ago were sort of what I

21:07

was trying to escape from, now everything is amazing,

21:09

right? It's only the avocado is amazing. It's only

21:11

go to the gym is amazing, right? The hot

21:13

shower is amazing. Things

21:15

were sparkle. I don't think

21:17

it lasts very long, but it

21:20

lasts for a little bit, right, when you do

21:22

that. And we actually got

21:24

the word resparkling from another actress. So

21:26

all these, okay, so it's another Hollywood

21:28

actress. That may like sound like, oh,

21:30

it's only these Hollywood actresses, they come

21:32

back to the wonderful home and then

21:34

they get sparkled. But I do think

21:36

in this instance, both Jodie Foster and

21:38

Julia Roberts, which I'll tell you about

21:40

in a second, they actually describe a

21:43

very like humane, regular

21:46

experience, right? And so

21:49

this word resparkling was from an

21:51

interview with Julia Roberts where she was describing

21:53

her normal life and her normal life is

21:55

like, she gets up, she makes breakfast with

21:57

the kids, she takes them to school. goes

22:00

back. Maybe she goes on a

22:02

bike ride with her husband. They have lunch. She

22:04

picks up the kids. Your regular kind

22:06

of day. And she says, well, if I

22:08

had to do this every, every single day, it will

22:10

probably be boring, but I don't. I go away and

22:12

I come back. And so there's like pixie

22:15

dust all over it, right? So her well

22:17

seems to her very modern day in regular

22:20

words seems so wonderful because she doesn't do

22:22

it all the time. I mean, I think

22:24

these lessons from Hollywood, by the way, are

22:26

perfectly appropriate. I mean, they wouldn't

22:28

be good actors if they weren't also sensitive

22:31

human beings, you know, be aware of what

22:34

they're experiencing and share it like that. So

22:37

that's right. I mean, I definitely feel it when

22:39

I'm away, you know, and I get back, I'm

22:41

away now, I'm getting back tomorrow. And I was

22:43

like, I can't wait. And probably

22:46

that's, that's why we take vacations in the

22:48

first place. That's, you know, sort of the

22:50

idea of getting away from it all has

22:52

been around for a while. But I wonder,

22:54

have you also looked at ways we

22:56

can resparkle without having to physically

22:59

go somewhere else for a

23:01

few months and come back? Like, are there

23:03

techniques or practices one can do in life?

23:06

I know some people do a gratitude journal

23:08

where they just try to focus on their

23:10

appreciation of things around them. Are there any

23:12

things we can do without going away that

23:14

could resparkle our lives? Yeah, so there's

23:17

two things. One is still this idea of

23:19

breaks. But maybe take your

23:21

breaks while you're still where you are.

23:23

So for example, one of

23:25

the times that I had COVID, I had

23:27

to go down to the basement for a

23:29

few days, right? So my family wouldn't wouldn't

23:32

get it for me. And first of all,

23:34

I found that being in the basement was

23:36

actually kind of like an exciting experience. It's

23:38

like going camping. Although I do, I do

23:40

have a shower with hot water down there.

23:43

And then when I finally after

23:45

a few days got to bed, go back

23:47

up to the ground level, I was like,

23:49

Oh, this is amazing, right? This is so

23:51

great. And then there's another

23:53

thing, which is this one we took

23:55

from Lori Santos. And she kind

23:57

of in one of her talks, she describes how You

24:00

could just close your eyes and imagine

24:02

not having all of these things, right?

24:04

Imagine not having your home. Imagine not

24:06

having your job. Imagine not having your

24:08

loved ones. And then, you

24:10

know, try and imagine it with vividness and details.

24:12

And when you open your eyes, then thanks for

24:15

sparkle again. So I think

24:17

that is true. Now the other

24:19

different, it's related, but a different approach

24:23

is diversifying your life,

24:25

shaking things up, making

24:27

changes. And the reason

24:29

is that when you think about what

24:32

makes a good life, usually

24:34

people mention being

24:36

happy, right? When you ask me what's a good life,

24:38

it'd be like, oh, I want to be happy. I want

24:40

to feel joy. I don't want to be sad. And

24:43

it's not only happiness that people care about. People

24:45

always also say, well, I want my life to

24:47

have meaning. I want to have purpose. And

24:50

that makes sense. But the problem is

24:52

that often the things that give

24:55

you a feeling of happiness and purpose tend

24:57

to do so less and less over time

24:59

because of habituation. So even if

25:01

you're a cancer

25:04

researcher, maybe at the beginning or for many

25:06

years, there's kind of a sense of purpose.

25:08

And maybe there still is, but it probably

25:10

has reduced to some

25:13

extent. And your research now kind of

25:15

feels a little bit more routine. But

25:17

there's this first component that

25:20

can actually counter the impact

25:22

of habituation on happiness and meaning. And

25:25

that is variety. If you

25:27

diversify your life, and people who do, people

25:29

who lead more diverse lives, such as they

25:31

live in different places, they interact with diverse

25:33

people, they work in different projects,

25:36

they tend to have a more

25:38

psychological rich life. And

25:41

what variety does, it basically

25:44

causes you to dishabituate, right? You're

25:47

moving yourself from one environment to another

25:49

environment. So you're basically disabituating constantly. And

25:52

by moving yourself, perhaps from environment to

25:54

another one or from taking a course

25:56

in something that

25:58

is not something that's really important. The you'd usually do

26:01

re you're putting yourself in a in a

26:03

state of learning. You. Need to learn

26:05

if it's a course the Odyssey need to learn. But even

26:07

if it's a new environment, you need to learn one of

26:09

the rules when of the hierarchy. Here, mates

26:11

and. Learning is a state

26:13

the people zili enjoy being

26:15

in. Subsidies. Show the people

26:18

really good joy from seeing them self

26:20

learning progressing. Once said he showed that

26:22

people aren't They had to do a

26:24

task and they got some money as

26:26

they did well and they were happy

26:28

when they got money. but they were

26:30

actually happier when they learned something new.

26:33

About the task person. So learning

26:35

actually gives us more joy. The material

26:37

things, material things we have between two

26:39

over times but learning we don't have

26:41

situate because learning is scenes and we

26:43

time between the chains. So diversify your

26:46

life rates, shake things up. They can

26:48

be small, he could be on gonna

26:50

comey to toward using a different route

26:52

day or he can be like well

26:54

maybe there's a new skill that I

26:56

can learn or a new course that

26:59

I can take you know outside of

27:01

work. Or a new friends.

27:03

I could make a new friend via

27:05

new kind of friend. You know, it's

27:07

the type of person I haven't spent

27:09

much time with before or going to

27:11

add new coffee shops other than the

27:13

one I usually go to. So trying

27:15

to build a lot of diversity? eat

27:17

even into your routine. Even if you're

27:20

not changing your life that much, you

27:22

can still find ways to spirits in

27:24

the in and little ways like that.

27:26

That makes us. And interestingly not only

27:28

does that enhance your will been enjoy

27:31

this city silly also enhances your creativity

27:33

And so there's say showing that even

27:35

small changes in your environment like a

27:37

work in your office for a little

27:39

bit than you go work in a

27:41

coffee shop. A you go walk in,

27:44

think about the problems and come back.

27:47

From Bees changes say so actually

27:49

enhance your ability to come up

27:51

with creative solutions. Run if is

27:53

your ten, your environment and than

27:55

your brain kind of. This is

27:57

more open to the new information

27:59

that. coming more likely

28:01

to take information from different places. Now,

28:04

studies show the enhancement in creativity

28:06

only lasts for six minutes every

28:08

time you change on average. But

28:12

you know, those six minutes could be the six minutes

28:15

that you come up with the next big idea. Six

28:18

minutes is a lot of time actually. A lot can happen

28:20

in six minutes. I don't know

28:22

if you have any interest in or have studied

28:25

at all the topic of meditation

28:28

practices, but I know from my

28:30

own interest in that that there

28:32

are some practices that are about

28:34

cultivating a beginner's mind. And

28:37

it's specifically the idea of training yourself

28:39

to look at things in

28:41

a fresh way so that when you

28:44

come out of your meditation, you can

28:46

appreciate what's going on around you in a way that

28:48

you might not have.

28:50

So there are these practices

28:53

of disabituation, I think, that maybe people

28:55

could look into. And interestingly,

28:57

I mean, we talked a little bit about people

29:01

who don't habituate much. A

29:04

lot of them, I mean, it's not a lot,

29:06

but people who habituate slower, we talked about how

29:08

the fact that that's related to mental health problems,

29:10

but on the good side, people

29:12

who habituate slower are also more

29:14

creative. And it's not necessarily the same

29:16

people. It's not the people with mental health are more creative.

29:19

But they found, you know, on one hand,

29:22

slow habituators have

29:24

some of them may have mental health problems. On

29:27

the other hand, slow habituators are also more creative. And

29:30

I think the reason is when you habituate

29:32

slowly, that means that there's more bits of

29:35

information in your mind kind of flowing around

29:37

like a soup, right? Bits

29:39

of visual imagery and sound and

29:41

bits of information. And that could be

29:44

really distracting because they continue being there.

29:46

It's not habituated. So they go

29:48

around in your brain and it can be distracting.

29:51

And on the other hand, it

29:53

also means that there will be these

29:55

unexpected combination of

29:57

bits of information and idea that will collide.

30:00

Right. Right. And then

30:02

come up with this new creative idea. Yeah. If

30:05

I've quickly habituated to the sound of birds

30:08

in the park or something, I literally won't

30:10

hear them when I'm going for a walk.

30:13

But if my habituations were slowly, I hear

30:15

them, so I'll continue to have that bird

30:17

song in my head, and that might butt

30:20

up against some other sensory experience, and that

30:22

might lead to a creative idea. Yeah,

30:24

that makes a lot of sense. You have a

30:26

richer environment if you're not just

30:28

habituated to everything. Related

30:31

to this idea of taking breaks, you did some

30:33

research on vacations and travel

30:36

and how there might be

30:38

a benefit to taking more short

30:40

vacations rather than fewer, longer ones.

30:44

Can you explain that? This was some

30:46

work that I did for a large

30:48

tourism company. I

30:50

helped them with their project, and they wanted to know

30:53

when are people happiest on vacation and

30:55

what makes them the happiest. So

30:58

first of all, we found that people were

31:00

happiest 43 hours into a vacation. So

31:02

43 hours gave them the time to kind of

31:04

settle in and focus on fun. And

31:07

from that 43 hours, they

31:10

joy started going down slowly, slowly, slowly,

31:12

slowly. Now, it's not that they weren't

31:14

happy on day 8, 7, 6, 5, right? But

31:17

they weren't as happy as they were on day

31:19

two. The second interesting

31:22

thing was that when we asked them, hey, what

31:24

was the best part of your vacation, there

31:26

was one word that they used more than any

31:28

other word, and it was the

31:31

word first. The first

31:33

view of the ocean, the first cocktail that

31:35

I had, the first Sun Castle that I

31:37

built, the second view of the ocean

31:39

was quite good, but it wasn't as good as the

31:41

first. And the second and third and fourth and even

31:43

fifth cocktail was quite good, but it wasn't as good

31:45

as the first because first are

31:48

kind of novel and exciting, right? Right.

31:51

So you experience these things again and again. There

31:53

is this habituation, this emotional habituation,

31:56

which makes them a little bit less so. like

32:00

always from this could be that it

32:02

might actually be the case

32:04

that you would get more joy from several

32:06

vacations that are shorter, right? So get more of

32:08

those 43 hours in, more first,

32:12

right? I should take a lot of two-day

32:14

vacations, do things for the first time,

32:16

and then don't do them again, and then wait a

32:18

while and do another two-day vacation to do something for

32:20

the first time, right? And come back.

32:22

Yeah, that makes sense. You need more than two days,

32:24

yeah. But I want to maximize it. If the peak

32:26

enjoyment is at 43 hours, I'd want to get there

32:28

and have it. Yeah, but... Yeah,

32:31

I know what you mean. All right.

32:33

So I'll see if I can take

32:36

more short vacations. And then another big

32:38

topic that relates to habituation is relationships.

32:40

So let's get some relationship advice from

32:42

you because I think one of the most common

32:45

problems you hear about in

32:47

marriage or long-term relationships is

32:49

a sense of staleness,

32:52

that you no longer see your partner with

32:54

the same enthusiasm as

32:57

you did when you first met. This

32:59

can cause, I'm sure, big problems in

33:02

long-term relationships. What

33:04

are some ideas about

33:06

disabituating your long-term relationship?

33:09

So for advice on that, we actually quote

33:12

Esther Perel. What she

33:14

recommends really fits nicely with all

33:16

the theories in this book because

33:19

basically what she says is that when

33:21

she surveyed people and she wanted to

33:23

know what time are you

33:26

most attracted to your partner, she found

33:28

that there were two answers that were

33:30

most common. The first answer was, when

33:33

I was away and I came back. So

33:35

this is like the break, you come back,

33:37

things were sparkle. And the second

33:40

thing that she heard was, when

33:43

my partner is in a novel

33:45

situation that I haven't seen them

33:47

before, maybe they're talking to strangers,

33:50

maybe they're up on a stage. And

33:53

that is like the shake it

33:55

up idea. They diversify, right? So

33:58

she's basically describing the

34:01

two ways to create

34:03

this habituation, which is

34:05

take breaks and changes,

34:07

diversification. And she's saying, well,

34:09

it turns out that when people do that, they

34:12

become more attracted to their long-term partners. So,

34:15

on the one hand, you might, you know,

34:17

take a weekend away from your partner. On

34:19

the other hand, you might take a weekend

34:21

away with your partner, but doing something unusual,

34:23

something different, so that you see your partner

34:25

in a new light. Yeah. And this

34:27

does not mean at all that routines are

34:30

not good, right? I mean, I'm sure couples

34:32

have these kind of things that they tend

34:34

to like to do once a year or

34:36

like whatever. And yeah, that's great.

34:39

It's not one or the other. It's

34:41

just that I think a lot of times we tend

34:43

to do more of

34:45

this routine and habit, right,

34:48

and don't. Because the diversification

34:50

is what requires more effort. So,

34:52

that's the part we're missing. The

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code podcast. So

36:33

we've mostly been talking about the process

36:36

of habituating to positive things,

36:39

you know, the good things in our life that we

36:42

stop seeing as good. But you

36:44

talk a lot about also the issues

36:46

around habituating to negative things. You gave

36:48

the example of lying and how small

36:51

lies can easily turn into

36:53

bigger lies. Stealing, you

36:55

know, that people are willing

36:58

to cheat a little bit at

37:00

first, and then they get used to

37:02

it, and they'll cheat more, and they'll steal more.

37:04

Tell me, you actually have a quote from Bernie

37:06

Madoff that made that pretty visible. Yeah,

37:09

so he says, it starts

37:11

out with you taking a little bit, maybe

37:13

a few hundred, a few thousand, you get

37:16

comfortable with that. And before you know it,

37:18

it snowballs into something big. I

37:20

think this quote is important for a few

37:22

reasons. One, it displays exactly what I told

37:25

you about earlier about the experiment that we

37:27

did, right? But even if you take the

37:29

average Joe, and you put them in a

37:32

situation where they could lie for their own

37:34

benefit at the expense of another person, they

37:37

do A, on average, and B, they start

37:39

by just a little bit, and then they,

37:41

you know, it snowballs exactly like he says.

37:43

But I think what's interesting here, and what

37:46

he says, is he says that you

37:48

get comfortable with that. And

37:50

I think what that means to me is that

37:53

he wasn't comfortable with that to begin

37:55

with, right? So this is not like a psychopath

37:57

who just never had any emotion. never

38:00

had any guilt, was always comfortable with lying

38:02

and taking money from people. It sounds like

38:04

what he's saying is that he was not

38:07

comfortable with it in the beginning, but the

38:09

more he did it, he became comfortable with

38:11

that. And this is, of course, an extreme

38:14

example, but I think a lot of

38:16

these extreme examples are probably

38:18

these type of cases, right? Whether it's

38:21

Elizabeth Holmes or... I don't think these

38:23

are... I mean, I don't know them

38:25

particularly, but I don't think these are

38:27

necessarily psychopaths, that they got themselves in

38:29

this situation and it

38:32

just kind of became a

38:34

habit and not a good habit and

38:36

one that reduced their guilt

38:39

and negative feelings. Yeah. No,

38:41

I'm sure we'd find a similar pattern in a lot of

38:45

behaviors, a lot of criminal behaviors, a lot of things

38:47

we might call evil, violent people

38:49

or serial killers, kind of

38:51

getting away with small things

38:54

can escalate. And

38:56

I think your advice when it relates to this is

38:58

nip it in the bud. You

39:02

want to disobituate, you want to notice when

39:04

you've said a lie or someone has said

39:06

a lie, a small lie, a white lie,

39:09

and call it out and

39:11

make sure that it's noticed so that

39:14

it doesn't just become a pattern. Yeah.

39:17

So whether it is interacting with your

39:19

children or interacting with people in work,

39:22

I think often if the

39:24

lie is really small, we just let it

39:26

go. But I think the idea

39:28

here is that those small lies

39:30

can actually snowball. So it's better actually

39:32

to call it out, right? If kids

39:35

call that dishonest behavior out, if

39:38

it's at work, someone may

39:40

just take a little bit

39:42

off, a few more dollars extra on

39:44

expenses or something, which doesn't seem

39:46

that consequential. But in

39:48

fact, it's better to call out these

39:51

small acts because by doing

39:53

that, you're potentially stopping the larger ones as

39:55

well. And this

39:57

kind of plays out on a social level

39:59

as well. personal level, right? I

40:01

mean, you talk about we've in

40:04

some ways as a

40:06

culture can get habituated to racism

40:08

or sexism, climate

40:11

change, you know, these things which sort of,

40:13

you know, if we were really looking at

40:15

them and fully experiencing them,

40:17

we might be outraged, but we've sort of

40:19

forgotten to get outraged because they've just there's

40:22

something pervasive or kind of background

40:25

about them. I think

40:27

about this, you know, with news stories, you know,

40:29

the first time you hear about a school shooting,

40:31

for example, you're completely upset and

40:33

outraged. The first time, you know,

40:36

when a war begins, it's like the most shocking

40:38

and upsetting thing. And then if

40:41

the newspaper is filled with a day

40:44

after day, your own response goes down.

40:46

And there's something

40:48

disempowering about that. There's something awful

40:50

about that, because to make change

40:52

and to live in the world we kind of want

40:54

to live in, sometimes we need to be outraged, we

40:56

need to feel that same sense

40:59

of drama around the thing

41:01

that we've just sort of slowly gotten used

41:03

to. So I wonder if you have any

41:05

ideas of how we can get outraged again

41:07

at the things that are outrageous. Yeah,

41:10

so we do talk about this a lot in the book.

41:12

There's, and we go, you know,

41:14

as far back as World War Two and

41:16

Nazi Germany, and there's actually quite a lot

41:18

of documentation of people who were living there

41:21

at the time. And what

41:23

they're describing is exactly this very,

41:26

like, gradual change. I mean, there's a

41:28

few quotes that we have in the

41:30

book that are taken from other

41:33

books about people describing, citizens

41:35

who, well, they are describing their experience. And this one

41:38

German citizen, he says, each step

41:41

was so small, so inconsequential, so

41:44

well explained, or on occasion, so regretted,

41:46

that people could no more see it

41:48

developing from day to day than a

41:50

farm on his fields sees the corn

41:52

growing one day it is over his

41:54

head. And that's about things changing. But a

41:56

lot of things also are horrific, and they're

41:58

not changing. They're just fine. It's even

42:00

more difficult for us to see and

42:03

detect, right, whether it's racism and sexism

42:05

that have been there for so, so,

42:07

so long that we aren't able to

42:09

see it. And yeah, so your

42:11

question is, what can we do with that? Well, and

42:13

just quickly, I'll say that some people are

42:15

better than others at that,

42:18

right? There are people who just

42:20

feel the same sense of shock and

42:22

outrage at a higher level

42:24

and are able, maybe those people are activists or

42:27

I think you

42:29

call them disabituation entrepreneurs to their people

42:31

who are just good at calling out

42:33

the things that are going on and

42:35

noticing them. Those people

42:37

are important for making social change

42:39

and maybe we could all learn

42:42

that a little bit ourselves. And

42:45

what can you do? I think

42:47

the, and we call disabituation entrepreneurs,

42:49

these are people who A, notice,

42:52

and B, call it out

42:54

or do things to get other people

42:56

to disabituate. And

42:58

that requires making things very

43:01

apparent. And so, for example, let me give

43:03

you an example of someone who's not famous.

43:05

There's a lot of famous examples

43:07

that you can think of, Malali

43:09

Sisi and a lot of

43:12

other individuals, but this is kind

43:14

of just more of an everyday

43:16

example. It's a professor at

43:18

Princeton. Her name is Yael Neeves. And

43:20

what she noticed is that

43:22

there's discrimination, gender discrimination in

43:24

academia. And one of the

43:27

consequences of this is that if you

43:29

go to a conference, there's usually an

43:31

imbalance between female and male speakers, the

43:33

more male speakers and female speakers. And

43:35

that is true even if in the field maybe

43:38

there's equal female and male individuals in

43:40

that field. So what she did is

43:42

she made this website and on

43:44

the website she lists all the conferences in her

43:46

specific field in neuroscience, but you can do it

43:49

in anything else. So in her field she has

43:51

all those conferences. Next to each name

43:53

of the conference is the ratio

43:55

of female and male speakers in that specific

43:57

conference. So let's say female to male

43:59

in this. conferences one to five. And

44:01

next to it, she puts the ratio of

44:04

females to males in that field at

44:06

large. So maybe the ratio is two

44:08

to three at large, but in the conference the

44:10

speakers are one to five. So then it makes

44:12

it really clear. And she does something very

44:14

important. She puts the names of

44:16

the organizers next to that. So

44:20

now there's accountability. And

44:23

no one wants their name next to

44:25

data suggests that they are doing something

44:27

that's discriminatory. And so that

44:29

has a huge impact. It had a really large

44:31

impact and people started changing their ways. That's a

44:34

great idea. I think that's just one example.

44:36

It's very creative. It's very

44:38

impactful as well. Yeah. And it's

44:41

based on data. It's just making

44:43

something visible. It's not necessarily

44:46

accusatory. Like it's

44:48

not necessarily saying you are a bad person because you

44:50

did this. You can draw your

44:52

own conclusions. I'm just presenting this data. I

44:54

think that probably makes people more receptive to

44:57

taking it in so that they're not defensive.

44:59

They're like, oh, I'd

45:01

rather not have my name next to

45:03

an imbalanced panel like that. Interesting.

45:06

So this idea of being

45:08

a disabituation entrepreneur, it does seem like it

45:10

plays out at multiple levels. On

45:13

the social level, we can call

45:15

out injustice where we see it. In

45:17

our personal lives, I

45:20

think we can call out

45:22

the small lies. I was thinking about how

45:24

we can help our friends. When

45:26

we see someone who's kind of stuck

45:29

in a rut or they've become used

45:31

to something, one of

45:33

the ways we can help them diversify is

45:36

by having conversations with them. We can give

45:38

them another perspective on their situation. And just

45:40

that kind of interaction with people in our

45:42

lives, we can sort of provide a little

45:44

disabituation for them, help them see things that

45:46

are going on in their life that they

45:48

might not be able to see because they've

45:50

just gotten, they've just started accepting it. And

45:54

then there's also an organizational level. As you

45:56

say, I think at work, there

45:58

are so many practices. that

46:00

happen inside of organizations that

46:02

are either not efficient or not fair

46:04

or otherwise suboptimal

46:08

that everyone's just gotten used

46:10

to. It's just the way it works. And

46:12

if we can train ourselves to notice those

46:14

things and call them out, we will be

46:17

valuable members of that organization. Is that

46:19

right? Yeah. And one

46:22

idea of how to notice things is what

46:24

we call, we take it from Stuart Mill,

46:26

John Stuart Mill, experiments in living. And so

46:28

the idea is that we don't, we can't

46:30

really know what is good for us in

46:32

our life or what is good for our

46:34

society if things are always

46:37

the same, right? We need

46:39

to do experiments, just like we need to do

46:41

experiments in science to figure out what the truth

46:43

is. We also need to do experiments in living,

46:45

try different things to see what is actually good

46:47

and what is not so good. And how do

46:49

we do these experiments in living? Well, one

46:51

way to do it is actually to expose

46:54

yourself to different cultures, right? You might go

46:56

visit in different places, live in different places,

46:58

and you can't experiment in living yourself

47:01

in every possibility because life

47:03

is just not long enough. But

47:05

you can also learn from a

47:07

diverse group of people about their

47:10

experience in their living from

47:12

both art, film, poetry, books,

47:14

and so on. Experiments in living

47:16

is a great phrase and a great sort

47:18

of way to think about the projects here, right?

47:21

That we can, if

47:23

we can keep our minds open in

47:25

a scientific way to what's

47:27

happening around us and

47:30

test out different versions

47:32

of our life, we can

47:34

get around this problem of

47:36

habituation and live a richer,

47:38

fuller life. I'm

47:41

on board. Yeah. Sign me up. That's right.

47:43

Because you

47:46

learn from the failures, right? You get

47:48

information from the failures. Well,

47:50

I want to thank you and

47:52

Cass for being such great disabituation

47:54

entrepreneurs for us, your readers,

47:57

the research and background that you

47:59

and me have brought to this have put

48:01

a fresh spin on some of

48:03

these ideas and really helped me as a

48:06

reader with my own experiments

48:08

in living. Thank you

48:10

for having me. It was a real pleasure. Tali

48:18

Sharat's new book, Look Again, is out

48:20

now. Grab a copy at your favorite

48:22

independent bookstore. You can also listen to

48:24

Tali summarize the book's five key insights

48:26

in just 12 minutes and

48:29

23 seconds by downloading the Next

48:31

Big Idea app. There you'll also

48:33

find hundreds of other book summaries

48:35

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48:37

themselves. Just go to your app

48:39

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48:42

it happens, you can hear the creme de

48:44

la creme of those summaries on my podcast,

48:46

The Next Big Idea daily. Every

48:48

weekday morning in under 15

48:50

minutes, I share an espresso shot

48:52

of intellectual inspiration that you can

48:54

listen to while walking your dogs

48:56

or taking a shower. I won't

48:58

judge. Follow The Next Big Idea

49:01

daily wherever you get your podcasts.

49:03

Today's episode was hosted by me,

49:05

Michael Kovnath, and produced by Caleb

49:08

Bissinger, sound design by

49:10

Mike Toda. Our executive producer is

49:12

Rufus Christgum. We couldn't

49:14

make the show without support from

49:16

the disabituation entrepreneurs at the

49:18

LinkedIn podcast network. Come back

49:20

next week to hear how a journey into the

49:23

bowels of the art world taught one wide-eyed journalist

49:25

how to see. See you then.