September 8, 2011 • 38 mins
Could fretting over insignificant choices decrease your decision making effectiveness later in the day? Join Robert and Julie as they look at the causes -- and effects -- of decision fatigue.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what would you like in your sandwich? Would you like? Wait?
First of all, would you like rye bread, wheat bread,
white bread, pumpernickel bread, or banana bread? JUNI sour do? Yes?
(00:27):
Sour dough? Would you like it wheat Saturday? Yes? And
would you like European wheat sour dough. You're a sweet
sour dough. Um, I will like the European sweet sour dough. Okay,
so you're already feeling tired. Well, yeah, this is the
This is the way I feel whenever I go to
a place where they do like any kind of a
sandwich assembly line, where you go in and there's there's
(00:50):
an individual there that's gonna build you a sandwich. Sometimes
they have the hilarious title of sandwich artists. Uh, and
but they are sandwich artists. Well, an artist doesn't add
for my input on the art. I'm just like, hey,
give me, give me one art, and they're like, here's
the art, and I'm like, that's great. You're so creative
in your creation of that you don't go into an
art gallery and then there's an artist standing there and uh,
(01:11):
he's like, so do you like usurrealist or you know,
there's there's no of that. So you go through this line.
You have to pick the bread, you have to pick
which vegetables, you have to pick which meat if you're
going with meat, or which fake meat if you don't
want to go with that. Cheese options, different dressings, Um
you want to heat it up or not? Do you
want to cut in half? I mean, it just it
goes on and on, and by the end of it,
(01:32):
you just feel exhausted because you had to make so
many decisions and generally for a very limited uh you know, payoff,
especially if you're on some of the some of the
more you know, mainstream sandwich shops. I like this analogy
of the way that we move through life, right, because
that's what it feels like. You feel like you've got
to backup people behind you, right, and you're getting rushed
through your decisions. A NonStop sandwich line for a really
(01:56):
crappy sub that's life right. Possibly, possibly, hopefully you have
a sandwich artist who could perhaps liven it up a
little bit. Um, but this actually nawse on thist, These
constant choices, these being bombarded by what we have to
move through every day just to to sort of get
(02:19):
things done. Yeah, it's called the decision fatigue. And it's
a real thing. It's a real thing, and it's it's
been sort of making the rounds are recently over the
past few years, but but especially in the last few
days because and by the time this says the last
few weeks, because there was a New York Times article
about it, and it forced everyone to re examine their
lives and the decisions, the multiple decisions that make up
(02:40):
every hour of the day, and what it's doing to
us on a on an emotional and physical level. It's
really interesting. So we are going to draw from this
article h called do you Suffer from Decision Fatigue? In
New York Times. UM, and I recommend that you guys
check it out. It's pretty long, but it's definitely worth it,
you know, like ten or so. UM. I mean, I
(03:03):
thought it was interesting that the article pointed out that
the word decide shares the same etymological route with the
word homicide, meaning that on a linguistic level, we realize
that we're killing off all of our other options, which
sort of float away into some sort of unseen parallel
universe for us. Exactly, it's kind of like every time
we make a decision, we're we're we're extrapolating, We're imagining
(03:28):
a future in which we make the choice. Be it
something like I wonder if what would happen if I
decide to go with the rye bread or if I
go with the plain bread. What if I get the
salad opposed to what if I get the soup? And
then with larger things too, it's like, well, what have
I major in in English versus what if I major
in pre law? That kind of thing, right, And of
(03:49):
course you can even see instances of this in quantum
suicide for instance. Right. Um, But from you know, our
day to day basis of having to deal with the
minutia um, it's really easy to start to over inflate
the importance of a choice, right because we can think,
you know, all of the storylines and books and movies
for helping us to feel that every single choice we
(04:09):
make could alter the reality that we are living well.
But the thing is that it kind of could. It
may not know, but mostly probably not right. And that's
the problem with it is we were not omniscient beings, right, right,
But but there is you know, it's like the butterfly effect,
which is which relates to chaos theory, um, which is
on the surface, the idea that say, a butterfly flaps
(04:30):
its wings on one side of the world and the
cascading effects from that one little um of action will
cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.
And this was created by a weatherman, right, um, neurologists
working with computer models. Yeah, okay, Edward Lawrence, right. And
so it's just a theory right obviously that we we
don't know if the action of a butterfly's wings and
(04:54):
just example you know, yea of how this works, of
how chaos theory works. Um. But it again, you apply
your day to day decisions and you can really start
to perhaps overweigh them. Yeah. There's a great line from
Coral McCarthy. I believe this one is in No Country
for Old Men, where a character says that every moment
in your life is is a turning and everyone at
(05:15):
choosing somewhere you made a choice, and all followed to this.
The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn, no line
can be erased. I had no belief in your ability
to move a coin to your bidding. How could you.
A person's path through the world seldom changes, and even
more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of
your path was visible from the beginning. There's a lot
(05:36):
of this kind of thing, and Court McCarthy with him
ruminating over um, the effects of choices and the choices
we make. There's a there's a part in UM all
the Pretty Horses where characters, Uh. There are two characters
and they're about to make a decision regarding a third
character and um, and one of the characters turns to
the other and says, you know, every time you do
something stupid in your in your life, you can always
(05:58):
trace it back to one decision. And that decision is
never like the stupid decision, but it's the decider, uh,
in this timeline. It's where you split off from the
timeline where you wouldn't make this really dumb choice versus
the one where you do well. But in this explains
why we drive ourselves exactly, because in retrospect we can
always trace it back and say that was you know,
(06:19):
it was insignificant, But what have I done the other thing?
It's I mean, it's a big part of grief too.
Like whenever someone dies, um that we care about, we
can always trace it back to these little insignificant moments
and be like, what if that had gone the other way?
And you know what have it had? Uh? It's still
an insignificant moment out of many insignificant moments. It just
sort of happens to loop into a very elaborate um
(06:42):
timeline of events, uh when we look back at it
from the present. So so yeah, it's easy to get
strung out over choices to the point where we end
up fretting over which bread to order with our sandwich,
even though generally this is not the kind of thing
that the spirals out of control, one thing that you
wouldn't normally worry about. Um. The New York Times article
(07:03):
again that do you suffer from decision fatigue? Says that
we have a finite store of mental energy for exercising
self control. And this was basically witnessed time and again
through a series of experiments carried out by social psychologist
Roy Baumeister. And we're gonna talk a lot about some
of the experiments that that he and his colleagues undertook. Um.
(07:24):
It is the reason why otherwise reasonable people do illogical things,
right from flying off the handle and rage to buying
junk food when you didn't mean to, or flying off
the handle and rage at junk food right right, slapping
that junk food upside it's head um, to spending big
bucks on stuff that you regret later you think, why
in the world did I do that? Kind Yeah, impulse splies.
(07:48):
It's because, as bow Master says, you are experiencing ego depletion. Yeah.
To to run some of this down again, it's to
really simplify it. It's kind of like the idea that
the mind is this hustle. And anyone who ever has
ever worked out knows, um, you know, with with weights
or anything, knows that there's like this whole idea of
you know, it's like reps versus weight. Are you gonna
(08:09):
are you gonna pick up a ten pound weight? Like
ten times? Are you gonna pick up a hundred pound
weight once? That sort of thing. Again, I'm not a weightlifter,
so maybe this may not be a perfect example, but
but still it's like if you pick up a small
weight enough times, your arms will get as tired as
if you picked up something really heavy once. Well you
know what. And and as a side note on the
(08:30):
mind body connection, did you know that if you are
exercising and say doing reps and really focusing on your
arms that day, that when you go to sleep at night,
the part of the brain that controls the functions of
your arms is actually going to be much more active
in sleep than the other parts of your brain. So
there there's connections. Idea that energy expended is being manifested
(08:55):
in the body. And again this is this is borne
out by a lot of about Masters research, which is
really cool. So if I have to go through a
line and choose every single option that goes into the
creation of my sandwich, and then I have to make
a decision about like who to fire at work or
something later on, I'm picturing like a big wig and
you know, New York going through a sandwich line here,
(09:17):
cigar in here. Yeah, so let's just do that. Let's
give him a cigar. Yeah, I was giving a cigar
as well. Yeah. By by the by the time that
you have picked out your sandwich, you have made all
these choices. You're less um prepared to make a big
choice later in the day. Well, that's the problem is
that when you have been bombarded by all these little decisions,
by the time four o'clock rolls around, you do not
(09:38):
want to make the big decision that you have to
make for the day. You do don't want to have
to push the red button, so to speak, because you're
seriously going to be incapacitated, because your mental energy is
already going to fold up on top of itself and say,
I want to batten down the hatches. I want to
make the safest choice for myself, which is not always
the right choice, right, and I don't want to think
(09:58):
about it that much. UM. Usually, like you would want
to be the kind of person who was like someone's like, hey,
you want to I need you to come help me
move furniture, and you're like, great, I'm gonna go lift
some weights first, Like that wouldn't make any sense, right, Well,
but you could immediately before it, right right. I understand
what you're saying is that you don't want to fatigue
yourself in the muscle. I mean, the brain is like
a muscle, and and you don't necessarily want to do that. Um,
(10:20):
but I think it's really interesting because it does explain
why we do what we do. Bau Master says, no
matter how rational and high minded you try to be,
you can't make a decision of decision without paying a
biological price. It's different from ordinary physical fatigue. You're not
consciously aware of being tired, but you're low and mental energy.
The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder
each one becomes for your brain. Eventually it looks for shortcuts,
(10:44):
usually in either one of two very different ways. One
shortcut is to become reckless okay, to act impulsively instead
of expending the energy to first think through the consequences.
Um And they use this example in the article sure
tweet that Phoe know what could go wrong? Right? The
other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver, do nothing instead
(11:06):
of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision
often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for
the moment, it eases the mental string. You're you're basically
differring mental anguish. And you've talked. You said something about
a Japanese proverb. Japanese proverb that basically says, by by
doing nothing, all problems are solved by by refusing to
come to a decision. You're solving that problem one way
(11:28):
or another, but probably not in the way that is
beneficial to you. Right, And I'm sure we've all been
there at one point or another and understand that. So um,
a bunch of studies have basically carried out this this
um idea that ego depletion and its effect on willpower
is actually pretty stunning. Um. Initially these studies would focus
on food, right, because how what better way could you
(11:51):
study at someone's willpower and the ability to self censured
than by throwing a bunch of donuts at exactly literally
throwing them at them. That there was a postdoc fellow
in bomb Muster's lab and she had an epiphany about
the laboriousness of all those choices. After going through the
process of registering for gifts for her upcoming wedding, she
(12:12):
found that she was incredibly exhausted just when she went
to go and register for gifts. Yeah, weddings are a
huge suck on the whole decision portion of the brain
because it's it's NonStop decisions beforehand and then afterwards to
is you're deciding, Uh, you know which, like which picture
you're gonna pick up for your album's situations where people
(12:33):
don't get their wedding album actually completed until you know,
years after the marriage or you know, begins or after
the marriage ends. Yeah. Well, and I will tell you
too that the first time I went to get register
with my husband, I kind of had a not a
melt down in which I was crying, but I was like,
you know, we need to leave. I don't know what
towels to get. I don't I never considered towels. I
(12:53):
never considered this. I'm picturing you being physically removed in
tears from Craton Barrel by security. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
I can't go there anymore, which is fine, but I
can shop online. Um. But basically she had a hunt here.
So the labs set out to replicate a sort of
quasi department store of wedding gifts, and they had two
groups peruce the offerings. Group one had to make a
(13:16):
decision about what one item they could keep at the
end of the experiment, okay, Group two was asked to
give their opinions on the products and if they had
ever used similar products in the last six months. So
Group one has to make decision, group too not so much. Um.
Both groups were then given a classic impulse control test.
I love us holding your hand in ice water for
(13:37):
as long as you can so group one. The deciders
I lasted for just twenty eight seconds, but the non
deciders sixty seconds on average, so almost double. You know, this,
this physical manifestation was found in this, this very simple
impulse control test. Now they did this over and over
(13:59):
a so the more decisions you make, the less control
you have over holding your hand and water. Right, So
it's not just that you're making decisions, but your actual
physical being is going to be decided by this as well. Right,
So it's not the abstract you know, becomes a concrete thing.
So when g Gordon Liddy did the famous thing with
the cigarette lighter under his palm, he was basically saying,
(14:20):
try me, I haven't made a decision in weeks. You know,
It's like he's got that's never find Um, I'll go
with it. But anyway, this is an illuminating study. Yeah yeah, yeah,
And it was a sea change in studying the ego
uh depletion effect because it really had this idea of
(14:40):
no matter what it was tied to um, you know,
these choices could have an effect on your willpower, even
if it was just something that wasn't that important. Um.
So they began to do this over and over again,
and they even saw this and car buyers. Right, there
was an experiment in which they had real customers spending
their own money and they had to choose, for instance,
(15:01):
among four styles of gearship gearshif not, thirteen kinds of
wheel rims, twenty five configurations of the engine and gearbox,
and a palette of fifty six colors for the interior.
See I'm already I'm feeling fatigued and um. As they
started picking out features, customers would like carefully weigh the
choices at first, but then fatigue would set in and
(15:21):
they'd start to go into default options. Okay, well you know,
essentially at the end of this exercise they were like, okay,
give me whatever, um, And they left the dealership by
paying extra two thousand dollars in options that they probably
didn't want, but because they had this barrage of choices
put forth, which is sort of a typical sales technique, right,
(15:43):
especially at car dealerships. Yeah, a nefarious tactic of the
hard self like get somebody in a room and do
not let them leave until they make a decision, or
rather make the decision you want them to make. Right.
And at this point you've probably put a lot of
research in time into finding the car that you want,
negotiating it UM, and then trying to meet out these
(16:04):
details about what you want the final project to look like.
You know, you've probably been there for five hours and
you're like, fine, if you will let me leave this
dealership with my car, I will pay two thousand dollars.
It's essentially what you're saying, without even knowing that you're saying.
There's I actually ran across another study that also involves UM.
This one involves cake as well, UH, which is which
(16:25):
is always fun. And this was a Stanford University Graduate
School of Business test where they had they had two
groups UH in one. In one group, the subjects were
asked to remember a one digit number, which is pretty easy,
and then the other group was asked to remember seven
digit number and H Then they were asked to walk
down the hallway to where they would have to report
(16:46):
this number, and along the way UH coworkers would come
to them and offer them either a big slice of
chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad, and uh
by by a huge, huge percentage, those who were trying
to remember the seven the seven digit numbers picked the
cake over the fruit salad. So the idea was that
(17:06):
the people trying to remember the seven digit number were
already taxing their brain enough to where they lacked sufficient
mental energy to stand up to the temptation of the cake,
and therefore their impulse control was compromised. Well, yeah, they
haven't remember a seven digit number. There just wasn't enough
gas in the tank to resist cake. Also, it should
(17:27):
note that again in this article that's on long. Um, Yeah,
I can intend. Uh. There are instances of these studies
over and over again, and we're not obviously going to
talk about all of them. All of them involved cake
is weird. Yeah, a lot of suites in these studies, Um,
but they do bear out this familiar idea that you know,
your willpower is going to be greatly affected and um,
(17:48):
so much so that there's something called the Marti Gras effect.
And we're going to get to that right after this break.
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(18:12):
And we're back the Mardy Gras effect. So let's let's
get down to it. This involves beads and streets lined
with people and partial nudity, partial nudity and a string
of parades and spicy food right. M Yes, to the
degree that it is a metaphor for this idea that
(18:34):
you could exert better willpower later if you indulge yourself
with something pleasurable. Now, this is the idea that bown
Master and into his colleagues had, so to refresh it's
with Mardy Gras. Marty Gras immediately proceeds lent, which is
a period of of fasting or what, Well, you're giving
up something you choose what you're going to give up.
(18:56):
For a lot of people, this may be alcohol, um
or it maybe something kind of weenye like well, I'm
going to give up fried foods or using the word
cloaca in a podcast, why would you do that? Well,
that's what that's what we're doing next year. Get ready.
That's the thing. In accordance with the Marty Gras fact though,
before we gave up using the word floaca in a podcast,
(19:17):
we would have an all out cloaca blowout podcast edition
where it was just NonStop discussion of feel like cloaca
and articles, right, yeah, so the a yeah and then
yeah exactly. So if you could make for a fascinating podcast,
which but the but the idea with Marty Grays you
have the big old party because you're going to be
good for over a month afterwards, with occasional breaks for
(19:40):
feast days beef steaks, Feast days, Feast days beef steaks
like beef steaks coming to the equation. There are different
feast days where they're like holy celebrated days. So it's
all right to break your lent faster. We'll see. Now,
I don't know a lot about this lent thing, but
that just seems like cheating. We'll see. Nine. My mother
in law thought the same thing. She was like, she
(20:03):
was like, I don't know about these feast days in
and I'm like, but but but a priest told me this.
This is this is legit. But anyway, but yes, they
so they you know, in this lab, they took the
same tact, right like we're gonna go ahead and try
to get these groups to indulge. And so what they
did is they gave two groups milkshakes. Sounds good right. Um.
(20:24):
One was tasteless, low fat glop, absolute glop, right, a glock,
but a milkshake nonetheless tas. The other one was decadent,
calorie laden and and yummy. Right. So the researchers expected
that the decadent milkshakes would perform better on willpower tesk right.
(20:45):
So the result is that both groups performed well on
these these tasks that they were given after they consumed this,
and it was a head scratch until they figured out
that the gluca glucas was mitigating the ego depletion and
sometimes completely reversing it both of the milk shapes. So
basically you had is you had these two groups and
(21:06):
they were going through similar to the other study where
they were given choices and their willpowers being eroded. They
took break, they had the milkshakes, they came back to
do some more difficult tasks. They both performed really well.
So they thought, oh this this uh, this experiment went
terribly awry. It didn't meet our expectations. But what they
(21:27):
figured out is that it was the actual glucose in
the milkshake. It didn't really matter whether or not it
was calorie laden or delicious or you know, it was
the actually the food itself that was tripping the mind. Yeah,
So again and again in lab experiments dealing with self
control exercises, researchers found that people naturally gravitated towards sugary,
(21:49):
glucose filled snacks when given the choice between say, like
potato chips and candy. It's and and it's really effective, right,
but it's a temporary fix. And researchers also took dieters,
which is the classic group that you would want to study, right,
forty five women. What they did is they showed them
pictures of food, and they scan their brains okay, And
(22:12):
then they made them watch a comedy a film okay,
and they made them suppress their laughter. It just seems,
you know, okay, um, not not exactly cruel. But what
they're trying to induce was ego depletion because it takes
a lot of mental energy to try to do something
that is coming to you naturally, right, and also you're
you're robbing yourself with a little reward center ding right,
(22:35):
because we all know that laughter in comedy is is
something that lights up our brains. So afterwards, they showed
these the group food images again and they scan their
brains again, and what they found is that there's more
activity in the nucleus incumbents, which is the ward of
the ward center, and less activity in the amigda, which
processes emotions and control impulses. So their ability to exercise
(22:57):
um willpower was compromised. And could see this in the scan, right.
And then the researchers wondered what a shot of glucose
could do if they added that to the scenario, and
they found that the brain changes were completely reversed, which
is what I talked about earlier. So again this link
is born out in the scan as well. It's not
(23:18):
just it sounds like a big excuse, right, like I've
I've had to make so many choices today and that's
why I did this. I think you call this that
the double made me do it, uh rationale, But in
fact you do see real evidence that this is something
that is working at play and uh really eroding our
confidence and our ability to make decisions and making wise
(23:39):
decisions too. Yeah, sort of like I was thinking in
terms of the TV show Madman, kind of like a
Don Draper effect, where Don Draper has a lot of
decisions to make about who he's gonna fire and who's
going to be mean to generally Peggy um and uh
and and so he makes all these decisions and at
the end of the every show it's pretty much Don
Draper doing something really stupid. There you go, you just
(24:01):
cracked the writer's secret right there. Yeah. Yeah, if only
he had a little glucose shot, then he would just
be you know, well, he has most narrat shots throughout
the the late morning, afternoon, and evening, but it's just
not the glucose ones. But they saw listen judges too.
They saw this in it Israeli parole board. They studied
(24:24):
the judges there and they found that they would grant
parole much more so in the morning than in the afternoon.
And so if you had a ten o'clock case, you
were pretty lucky, right, you probably would get parole because
you're getting more thought into it. They're making more thoughtful,
informed decisions, right, they're not as inundated at three o'clock. Sorry,
you're probably not gonna get parole. And Uh, they apply
(24:48):
this glucose test to them as well. So they started
giving them a little snacks throughout the day and whoa,
right after the snack, guess what you were going to
get parole? Huh. So it's pretty amazing to see a
lot of in play. And that's really cupcake. Is the
take home here a deconan smoothie? Perhaps? Yeah, But the
reason that the in case you're wondering why they weren't
(25:11):
granting parole is because this really was the safest choice
for them, because they were essentially deferring the decision because
they could say to themselves, I can I'm gonna bat
down the hatches on my mental energy because I know
that this case is going to come up again at
six months, two months, a year, and I can decide
them this feels like the safer choice. Okay, well that
this seems like a solid I mean, I'm taking you
(25:32):
outside of a criminal um, you know, injustice scenario. The
idea of deferring the choice of of sort of trusting
another body with your choices, uh, seems like a good
way to deal with decision fatigue, Like instead of going
stepping through every process in getting the sandwich, just the
way you want it, or think you might want it
(25:53):
to be able just to point and say I will
have the number three. Well, and that's and you're trusting
your sandwich artists or whoever to give you the type
of sandwich you would want. And of course that that, um,
that sort of makes a lot of us knee jerk,
especially Americans, because we like our choice so much, right right,
even with our most mundane things like Okay, what sort
(26:15):
of crappy sandwich am I gonna get? Yeah, I should
have complete free reign to just just have no vegetables
at all, just me. Yeah. Yeah. And there have been
studies that suggest that less choices make more sense for us. There's,
you know, less fatigue that we're experiencing. Um, perhaps we're
happier with less choices. I tell you one example of
(26:37):
like in my case when it comes to listening to music,
I tend to absorb a lot of my music through
mixed podcasts, so to a certain extent, instead of saying,
I wonder what albums I'm gonna listen to for the
next hour or two hours, or which individual tracks I'm
going to choose to listen to instead, I'm going to trust, uh,
this individual DJ to give me a nice assortment of
(26:57):
tracks that I wouldn't In that way, I don't have
to have to find out who these artists are. I
don't have to to go out and discover new things.
I will let this guy discover things and deliver them
to me in a as a sonic meal. So and
that this person is vetted for you, right, so it
feels like, okay, I can seed my control over to
this person. Well, either it's somebody that I trust already,
like you know it's a it's a it's a DJ
I follow, or since a lot of these are you know,
(27:19):
they did to be podcast properties, so um it may
say it's like the Solid Steel Radio show, or um
like a Body Tonic podcast or any of these other
music podcasts. There'll be multiple DJs that come through, So
then there's like a larger level. Am I trusting that
particular podcast to give me a DJ I can trust,
who will then give me music I can trust? Okay?
So this actually um is similar to a jam study
(27:43):
believe it or not or jelly for further, folks who
don't prefer jam and and not asn't kick out the jams,
but is then spread on the jam as in PB
and j jam. Right. Sheina I Anger, a professor of
business at Columbia University, conducted a study in which she
her research assistant set up a booth of samples of
Wilkins and Sons jams. Seems innocent enough, right, Every few hours,
(28:08):
they switched from offering a selection of twenty four jams
to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted
two jams regardless of the size of the assortment, and
each person received a cub on good for one dollar off. Okay,
the really interesting part of this is that sixty percent
of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only
stopped by the small one. But thirty percent of the
(28:31):
people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to
buy jam, as opposed to only three percent of those
people confronted with a big assortment of jelly. So that again,
here's this, here's this idea that you have this wide assortment,
you have all of these choices, and you're going to
back away. Whereas you cull it down a little bit,
all of a sudden, your sales go from three percent
to so yeah, So like with me, it's like I
(28:54):
would rather choose one of eighteen podcasts versus one out
of you know, several hundred DJs versus like one artist
out of you know, hundreds and hundreds represented in those mixes.
It's just easier to refine it down. And I guess
in a much larger way people make these choices when
(29:15):
they choose various religions, philosophies, um political ideologies, because you're
sort of saying, I want instead of going through and
customizing your preferences, like the sandwich, you will just say,
you know what, give me the Catholic sandwich, give me
the um Tea party sandwich, give me the you know,
(29:37):
give me the give the Zen Buddhist sandwich, give me
the Hindoo sandwi. You know, It's like you're you're saying,
give me those set of of preordained preferences. Uh, and
let me take that on because I I generally like
the shape of that sandwich and the look of it.
So I'm going to trust the various factors in that
sandwich to do me right. All right, Right, So I
feel like, okay, give me the atheist sandwich because that
(29:59):
that works, and and I'm going to run with that model.
And it's but then something. The only thing is what
if you get that sandwich and you really don't like lapenas?
So do you learn to like kalepenas? Maybe you do.
I mean again, this is it's really interesting if you
apply it to the way that we we wield our
(30:19):
choices in the world and why you sometimes look back
and think, how how did I make that choice? That
seems so rational in the moment, but now it seems
like how how could I have made that choice? Or
what if the sandwich ends up containing say, um, you
know baby seal or condor patties, you know, like some
sort of endangered species, and you're but you're like, oh,
(30:39):
but the rest of the sandwich is so good. I
just accepted the bad with the good for the You've
just minimized your choice to witness relocation. My friend, you
got to put your mustache on. But no, wonder you know,
we get ourselves in a tizzy because did you know
that three to four hours of our day is spent
in some sort of state of desire? Okay, okay, ballmeister again.
(31:04):
This guy his group gave pre programmed blot berries to
more than two hundred people for a week. The phones
went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report
whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or
had recently felt a desire. They collected more than ten
thousand momentary reports than this is from Morning Tonight, and
the results suggested that people spend between three and four
(31:26):
hours a day resisting desire or some sort of urge
and uh. As the New York Times article put it,
if you tapped four or five people at any random
moment in the day, one of them would be using
willpower to resist a desire. And the most common desires
eat in sleep right makes sense, followed by leisure activities,
and then followed by the urge to have sex. The
(31:49):
three or four hours of this it seems like a lot.
It does. I mean, obviously this is not, you know,
in in constant three or four hours state of desire,
but it does. It does tie in rather nicely with
the you know, the the idea that that's that the
desire is one of the roots of suffering in the world. Well,
this is the this idea of this temptation that that
(32:10):
sort of throws us off, and that's why our old
magdala is taken up there so to speak, trying to
keep us on the street and narrow. Well, that's well,
there you go. That's uh. So that's pretty fascinating and
it is one of those things that definitely forces you
to take another look at your life and look at
the the numerous decisions that fill it and uh and
and perhaps figure out ways where we can cut down
(32:30):
on the number of decisions we're taxing our brain with
at the expense of the decisions we really need to make.
So that's the truth. That's that's that's sort of my takeaways,
Like try to eat more consistently throughout the day, right
so I can make better decisions. Try to make the
decisions earlier in the day. Yeah, and uh and uh,
I don't know what else, and believe what other people
(32:50):
tell you to listen to and uh and why you
know fun get some good vetted people to make some
decisions for you. I mean seriously, it's like it saves
so much time and energy if you can just find
like a good DJ or a good uh or maybe
there you know it's a it's a particular blogger you
agree with them, or a movie critic. I mean seriously,
like when it comes to finding out whether you want
(33:10):
to watch rain go or not. It's nice to be
able to just turn to Eager and see, like, all right, Eber,
what do you think of it? You give it four stars? Okay,
I'll give it. Yeah, that's true. Stick in Google and
getting like ten different results, going through like and mucking
through a bunch of them and saying like, well, I
don't know who's this guy? Should I vet him? He
liked listening? You know, it's just just pick somebody you
like and go with it. There you go. Yeah, that
(33:31):
that's the answer to life right there. Well, hey, we
have some listener mail. We kind of neglected it in
the last few podcasts because we either I either forget
to print it out or we end up going a
little too long and don't really have time for it. Uh,
and maybe we went too long today. I don't know.
We'll find out. We have some email here from a
listener by the name of Jonathan Jonathan Wright, Senuss, Hi, Robert,
and Julie. I'm catching up on your podcast, having started
(33:52):
listening to it after listening to the other How Stuff
Works podcast over a hundred podcasts, but I listened a
lot on the road. I listened to the one on
subliminal messaging. Today, I think it's your fifty newest. When
talking about smells, it reminded me of a store I
bet you would love. There's a great outdoor mall in
San Diego, California called Corton Plaza. There is a Cinnamon
(34:14):
Roll Bakery was bought out by Cinnamon unfortunately, but there's
an exhaust event from the inside the kitchen that pumps
cinnamon roll smell into the walkway in front of the store.
Maybe not subliminal as much as pure evil, but was
always a great It was always such a clever idea.
Now if you walk a few more doors down there
is a sparky house of glue, close your eyes and
(34:37):
you can appreciate, really appreciate the smell wafting from their
fan delicious rendered horse paste and so so that's that's fascinating. Um.
And of course I think we discussed that the cinnamon
bun smell is is really powerful when it comes to
controlling people. Yeah, that's right, it's it's the siren song
of temptation. Yeah, one would have to make a Ulysses
(34:59):
pack to discover it. Which, by the way, if you
if you're listening to this podcast, and you have not
listened to our one um uh, the the accompanying podcast
that we did on procrastination. Uh, stop putting on putting
it off and listen to that, because there's a lot
of crossover between the two companion. We also heard from
a listener by the name of Trent, and Trent rights
(35:19):
in and hit some some very interesting things to say
about our Religion and Space episode. He says, Hey, guys,
I've actually been meaning to send this email for a
while and I'm only just getting around to it. There
you go, Procrastination against UM. I enjoyed your podcast on
religion in Space and thought Robert's comment on taking the
best bits from different religions very interesting. However, I do
(35:40):
see some problems, the main one being what if there
are parts of a religion that may not seem to
be beneficial according to currently held ideas, and it isn't
much later that it turns out to be quite beneficial.
I am thinking of one example in particular. I am
a Jehovah's witness, and we take the Bible's instruction to
abstain from blood very literally, including the refusal of blood transfusions.
(36:01):
For years, we have been looked down upon by not
only the medical community but people in general because of
our refusal to accept accept blood transfusions. However, in part
due to the witness witnesses, huge advances in bloodless surgery
and medicine have been made and it is now accepted
by many medical practitioners that it has many advantages and
in almost all cases is more beneficial than a traditional
(36:23):
blood transfusion, which leads me to the next point of
the email. UM a show suggestion. I think a podcast
on bloodless surgery would be interesting. Um So, anyway, he
does bring up an interesting point and one that um,
I've kind of thought of two and think because to refresh,
I kind of have often played with this idea of religion, uh,
the religion buffet where you go through, and of course
(36:45):
you end up making a lot of choices in this.
It's kind of like say, here, here we go. We're
at the buffet line again. Yeah, where you go through
and you're like, I like this from this religion, this
from that religion, or I like these ideas from this
given UM view on the world, and I'm going to
adopt these and leave this UM. But yeah, on one hand,
you're making a lot of decisions In this you're so
(37:05):
you're taxing your decision making ability and uh indeed, it's
kind of like we were talking about. UH. But by
choosing I can avoid the hillo the Halopenias that maybe
I don't want. But what if I really need Halopinians
and I don't realize it? What if there's something? What
if in picking and choosing from different uh faiths and philosophies,
(37:26):
what if I'm neglecting to get the things my body
actually needs. What if I'm like the kid who refuses
to put vegetables on his sandwich just because he doesn't
like them, when really that scurvy kid needs vegetables like
nobody's business. Well, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about
it and the Great Spaghetti Monster. Maybe I need some
garlic bread with my spaghetti monster. There you go with Basically,
(37:49):
it's like a made up deity, Yes, yes, as opposed
to all the other deities which are not made up.
Well there, yes, yes it was recently in the news,
but that's for another time. I suppose. So, hey, if
you have anything that you want to share with us
that you've been putting off sharing with us, um and
that order that you can't quite decide on sharing with us,
then get in touch with us. We are on Twitter
(38:12):
and Facebook. You'll find us as blow the Mind on
both of those, so you know, go on at us
as your friend, follow us. We'll keep you updated on
what we're podcasting about, what we're thinking about podcasting about,
and you can help you decide that's right. And you
can always send us an email at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
(38:33):
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what would you like in your sandwich? Would you like? Wait?
First of all, would you like rye bread, wheat bread,
white bread, pumpernickel bread, or banana bread? JUNI sour do? Yes?
(00:27):
Sour dough? Would you like it wheat Saturday? Yes? And
would you like European wheat sour dough. You're a sweet
sour dough. Um, I will like the European sweet sour dough. Okay,
so you're already feeling tired. Well, yeah, this is the
This is the way I feel whenever I go to
a place where they do like any kind of a
sandwich assembly line, where you go in and there's there's
(00:50):
an individual there that's gonna build you a sandwich. Sometimes
they have the hilarious title of sandwich artists. Uh, and
but they are sandwich artists. Well, an artist doesn't add
for my input on the art. I'm just like, hey,
give me, give me one art, and they're like, here's
the art, and I'm like, that's great. You're so creative
in your creation of that you don't go into an
art gallery and then there's an artist standing there and uh,
(01:11):
he's like, so do you like usurrealist or you know,
there's there's no of that. So you go through this line.
You have to pick the bread, you have to pick
which vegetables, you have to pick which meat if you're
going with meat, or which fake meat if you don't
want to go with that. Cheese options, different dressings, Um
you want to heat it up or not? Do you
want to cut in half? I mean, it just it
goes on and on, and by the end of it,
(01:32):
you just feel exhausted because you had to make so
many decisions and generally for a very limited uh you know, payoff,
especially if you're on some of the some of the
more you know, mainstream sandwich shops. I like this analogy
of the way that we move through life, right, because
that's what it feels like. You feel like you've got
to backup people behind you, right, and you're getting rushed
through your decisions. A NonStop sandwich line for a really
(01:56):
crappy sub that's life right. Possibly, possibly, hopefully you have
a sandwich artist who could perhaps liven it up a
little bit. Um, but this actually nawse on thist, These
constant choices, these being bombarded by what we have to
move through every day just to to sort of get
(02:19):
things done. Yeah, it's called the decision fatigue. And it's
a real thing. It's a real thing, and it's it's
been sort of making the rounds are recently over the
past few years, but but especially in the last few
days because and by the time this says the last
few weeks, because there was a New York Times article
about it, and it forced everyone to re examine their
lives and the decisions, the multiple decisions that make up
(02:40):
every hour of the day, and what it's doing to
us on a on an emotional and physical level. It's
really interesting. So we are going to draw from this
article h called do you Suffer from Decision Fatigue? In
New York Times. UM, and I recommend that you guys
check it out. It's pretty long, but it's definitely worth it,
you know, like ten or so. UM. I mean, I
(03:03):
thought it was interesting that the article pointed out that
the word decide shares the same etymological route with the
word homicide, meaning that on a linguistic level, we realize
that we're killing off all of our other options, which
sort of float away into some sort of unseen parallel
universe for us. Exactly, it's kind of like every time
we make a decision, we're we're we're extrapolating, We're imagining
(03:28):
a future in which we make the choice. Be it
something like I wonder if what would happen if I
decide to go with the rye bread or if I
go with the plain bread. What if I get the
salad opposed to what if I get the soup? And
then with larger things too, it's like, well, what have
I major in in English versus what if I major
in pre law? That kind of thing, right, And of
(03:49):
course you can even see instances of this in quantum
suicide for instance. Right. Um, But from you know, our
day to day basis of having to deal with the
minutia um, it's really easy to start to over inflate
the importance of a choice, right because we can think,
you know, all of the storylines and books and movies
for helping us to feel that every single choice we
(04:09):
make could alter the reality that we are living well.
But the thing is that it kind of could. It
may not know, but mostly probably not right. And that's
the problem with it is we were not omniscient beings, right, right,
But but there is you know, it's like the butterfly effect,
which is which relates to chaos theory, um, which is
on the surface, the idea that say, a butterfly flaps
(04:30):
its wings on one side of the world and the
cascading effects from that one little um of action will
cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.
And this was created by a weatherman, right, um, neurologists
working with computer models. Yeah, okay, Edward Lawrence, right. And
so it's just a theory right obviously that we we
don't know if the action of a butterfly's wings and
(04:54):
just example you know, yea of how this works, of
how chaos theory works. Um. But it again, you apply
your day to day decisions and you can really start
to perhaps overweigh them. Yeah. There's a great line from
Coral McCarthy. I believe this one is in No Country
for Old Men, where a character says that every moment
in your life is is a turning and everyone at
(05:15):
choosing somewhere you made a choice, and all followed to this.
The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn, no line
can be erased. I had no belief in your ability
to move a coin to your bidding. How could you.
A person's path through the world seldom changes, and even
more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of
your path was visible from the beginning. There's a lot
(05:36):
of this kind of thing, and Court McCarthy with him
ruminating over um, the effects of choices and the choices
we make. There's a there's a part in UM all
the Pretty Horses where characters, Uh. There are two characters
and they're about to make a decision regarding a third
character and um, and one of the characters turns to
the other and says, you know, every time you do
something stupid in your in your life, you can always
(05:58):
trace it back to one decision. And that decision is
never like the stupid decision, but it's the decider, uh,
in this timeline. It's where you split off from the
timeline where you wouldn't make this really dumb choice versus
the one where you do well. But in this explains
why we drive ourselves exactly, because in retrospect we can
always trace it back and say that was you know,
(06:19):
it was insignificant, But what have I done the other thing?
It's I mean, it's a big part of grief too.
Like whenever someone dies, um that we care about, we
can always trace it back to these little insignificant moments
and be like, what if that had gone the other way?
And you know what have it had? Uh? It's still
an insignificant moment out of many insignificant moments. It just
sort of happens to loop into a very elaborate um
(06:42):
timeline of events, uh when we look back at it
from the present. So so yeah, it's easy to get
strung out over choices to the point where we end
up fretting over which bread to order with our sandwich,
even though generally this is not the kind of thing
that the spirals out of control, one thing that you
wouldn't normally worry about. Um. The New York Times article
(07:03):
again that do you suffer from decision fatigue? Says that
we have a finite store of mental energy for exercising
self control. And this was basically witnessed time and again
through a series of experiments carried out by social psychologist
Roy Baumeister. And we're gonna talk a lot about some
of the experiments that that he and his colleagues undertook. Um.
(07:24):
It is the reason why otherwise reasonable people do illogical things,
right from flying off the handle and rage to buying
junk food when you didn't mean to, or flying off
the handle and rage at junk food right right, slapping
that junk food upside it's head um, to spending big
bucks on stuff that you regret later you think, why
in the world did I do that? Kind Yeah, impulse splies.
(07:48):
It's because, as bow Master says, you are experiencing ego depletion. Yeah.
To to run some of this down again, it's to
really simplify it. It's kind of like the idea that
the mind is this hustle. And anyone who ever has
ever worked out knows, um, you know, with with weights
or anything, knows that there's like this whole idea of
you know, it's like reps versus weight. Are you gonna
(08:09):
are you gonna pick up a ten pound weight? Like
ten times? Are you gonna pick up a hundred pound
weight once? That sort of thing. Again, I'm not a weightlifter,
so maybe this may not be a perfect example, but
but still it's like if you pick up a small
weight enough times, your arms will get as tired as
if you picked up something really heavy once. Well you
know what. And and as a side note on the
(08:30):
mind body connection, did you know that if you are
exercising and say doing reps and really focusing on your
arms that day, that when you go to sleep at night,
the part of the brain that controls the functions of
your arms is actually going to be much more active
in sleep than the other parts of your brain. So
there there's connections. Idea that energy expended is being manifested
(08:55):
in the body. And again this is this is borne
out by a lot of about Masters research, which is
really cool. So if I have to go through a
line and choose every single option that goes into the
creation of my sandwich, and then I have to make
a decision about like who to fire at work or
something later on, I'm picturing like a big wig and
you know, New York going through a sandwich line here,
(09:17):
cigar in here. Yeah, so let's just do that. Let's
give him a cigar. Yeah, I was giving a cigar
as well. Yeah. By by the by the time that
you have picked out your sandwich, you have made all
these choices. You're less um prepared to make a big
choice later in the day. Well, that's the problem is
that when you have been bombarded by all these little decisions,
by the time four o'clock rolls around, you do not
(09:38):
want to make the big decision that you have to
make for the day. You do don't want to have
to push the red button, so to speak, because you're
seriously going to be incapacitated, because your mental energy is
already going to fold up on top of itself and say,
I want to batten down the hatches. I want to
make the safest choice for myself, which is not always
the right choice, right, and I don't want to think
(09:58):
about it that much. UM. Usually, like you would want
to be the kind of person who was like someone's like, hey,
you want to I need you to come help me
move furniture, and you're like, great, I'm gonna go lift
some weights first, Like that wouldn't make any sense, right, Well,
but you could immediately before it, right right. I understand
what you're saying is that you don't want to fatigue
yourself in the muscle. I mean, the brain is like
a muscle, and and you don't necessarily want to do that. Um,
(10:20):
but I think it's really interesting because it does explain
why we do what we do. Bau Master says, no
matter how rational and high minded you try to be,
you can't make a decision of decision without paying a
biological price. It's different from ordinary physical fatigue. You're not
consciously aware of being tired, but you're low and mental energy.
The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder
each one becomes for your brain. Eventually it looks for shortcuts,
(10:44):
usually in either one of two very different ways. One
shortcut is to become reckless okay, to act impulsively instead
of expending the energy to first think through the consequences.
Um And they use this example in the article sure
tweet that Phoe know what could go wrong? Right? The
other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver, do nothing instead
(11:06):
of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision
often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for
the moment, it eases the mental string. You're you're basically
differring mental anguish. And you've talked. You said something about
a Japanese proverb. Japanese proverb that basically says, by by
doing nothing, all problems are solved by by refusing to
come to a decision. You're solving that problem one way
(11:28):
or another, but probably not in the way that is
beneficial to you. Right, And I'm sure we've all been
there at one point or another and understand that. So um,
a bunch of studies have basically carried out this this
um idea that ego depletion and its effect on willpower
is actually pretty stunning. Um. Initially these studies would focus
on food, right, because how what better way could you
(11:51):
study at someone's willpower and the ability to self censured
than by throwing a bunch of donuts at exactly literally
throwing them at them. That there was a postdoc fellow
in bomb Muster's lab and she had an epiphany about
the laboriousness of all those choices. After going through the
process of registering for gifts for her upcoming wedding, she
(12:12):
found that she was incredibly exhausted just when she went
to go and register for gifts. Yeah, weddings are a
huge suck on the whole decision portion of the brain
because it's it's NonStop decisions beforehand and then afterwards to
is you're deciding, Uh, you know which, like which picture
you're gonna pick up for your album's situations where people
(12:33):
don't get their wedding album actually completed until you know,
years after the marriage or you know, begins or after
the marriage ends. Yeah. Well, and I will tell you
too that the first time I went to get register
with my husband, I kind of had a not a
melt down in which I was crying, but I was like,
you know, we need to leave. I don't know what
towels to get. I don't I never considered towels. I
(12:53):
never considered this. I'm picturing you being physically removed in
tears from Craton Barrel by security. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
I can't go there anymore, which is fine, but I
can shop online. Um. But basically she had a hunt here.
So the labs set out to replicate a sort of
quasi department store of wedding gifts, and they had two
groups peruce the offerings. Group one had to make a
(13:16):
decision about what one item they could keep at the
end of the experiment, okay, Group two was asked to
give their opinions on the products and if they had
ever used similar products in the last six months. So
Group one has to make decision, group too not so much. Um.
Both groups were then given a classic impulse control test.
I love us holding your hand in ice water for
(13:37):
as long as you can so group one. The deciders
I lasted for just twenty eight seconds, but the non
deciders sixty seconds on average, so almost double. You know, this,
this physical manifestation was found in this, this very simple
impulse control test. Now they did this over and over
(13:59):
a so the more decisions you make, the less control
you have over holding your hand and water. Right, So
it's not just that you're making decisions, but your actual
physical being is going to be decided by this as well. Right,
So it's not the abstract you know, becomes a concrete thing.
So when g Gordon Liddy did the famous thing with
the cigarette lighter under his palm, he was basically saying,
(14:20):
try me, I haven't made a decision in weeks. You know,
It's like he's got that's never find Um, I'll go
with it. But anyway, this is an illuminating study. Yeah yeah, yeah,
And it was a sea change in studying the ego
uh depletion effect because it really had this idea of
(14:40):
no matter what it was tied to um, you know,
these choices could have an effect on your willpower, even
if it was just something that wasn't that important. Um.
So they began to do this over and over again,
and they even saw this and car buyers. Right, there
was an experiment in which they had real customers spending
their own money and they had to choose, for instance,
(15:01):
among four styles of gearship gearshif not, thirteen kinds of
wheel rims, twenty five configurations of the engine and gearbox,
and a palette of fifty six colors for the interior.
See I'm already I'm feeling fatigued and um. As they
started picking out features, customers would like carefully weigh the
choices at first, but then fatigue would set in and
(15:21):
they'd start to go into default options. Okay, well you know,
essentially at the end of this exercise they were like, okay,
give me whatever, um, And they left the dealership by
paying extra two thousand dollars in options that they probably
didn't want, but because they had this barrage of choices
put forth, which is sort of a typical sales technique, right,
(15:43):
especially at car dealerships. Yeah, a nefarious tactic of the
hard self like get somebody in a room and do
not let them leave until they make a decision, or
rather make the decision you want them to make. Right.
And at this point you've probably put a lot of
research in time into finding the car that you want,
negotiating it UM, and then trying to meet out these
(16:04):
details about what you want the final project to look like.
You know, you've probably been there for five hours and
you're like, fine, if you will let me leave this
dealership with my car, I will pay two thousand dollars.
It's essentially what you're saying, without even knowing that you're saying.
There's I actually ran across another study that also involves UM.
This one involves cake as well, UH, which is which
(16:25):
is always fun. And this was a Stanford University Graduate
School of Business test where they had they had two
groups UH in one. In one group, the subjects were
asked to remember a one digit number, which is pretty easy,
and then the other group was asked to remember seven
digit number and H Then they were asked to walk
down the hallway to where they would have to report
(16:46):
this number, and along the way UH coworkers would come
to them and offer them either a big slice of
chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad, and uh
by by a huge, huge percentage, those who were trying
to remember the seven the seven digit numbers picked the
cake over the fruit salad. So the idea was that
(17:06):
the people trying to remember the seven digit number were
already taxing their brain enough to where they lacked sufficient
mental energy to stand up to the temptation of the cake,
and therefore their impulse control was compromised. Well, yeah, they
haven't remember a seven digit number. There just wasn't enough
gas in the tank to resist cake. Also, it should
(17:27):
note that again in this article that's on long. Um, Yeah,
I can intend. Uh. There are instances of these studies
over and over again, and we're not obviously going to
talk about all of them. All of them involved cake
is weird. Yeah, a lot of suites in these studies, Um,
but they do bear out this familiar idea that you know,
your willpower is going to be greatly affected and um,
(17:48):
so much so that there's something called the Marti Gras effect.
And we're going to get to that right after this break.
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(18:12):
And we're back the Mardy Gras effect. So let's let's
get down to it. This involves beads and streets lined
with people and partial nudity, partial nudity and a string
of parades and spicy food right. M Yes, to the
degree that it is a metaphor for this idea that
(18:34):
you could exert better willpower later if you indulge yourself
with something pleasurable. Now, this is the idea that bown
Master and into his colleagues had, so to refresh it's
with Mardy Gras. Marty Gras immediately proceeds lent, which is
a period of of fasting or what, Well, you're giving
up something you choose what you're going to give up.
(18:56):
For a lot of people, this may be alcohol, um
or it maybe something kind of weenye like well, I'm
going to give up fried foods or using the word
cloaca in a podcast, why would you do that? Well,
that's what that's what we're doing next year. Get ready.
That's the thing. In accordance with the Marty Gras fact though,
before we gave up using the word floaca in a podcast,
(19:17):
we would have an all out cloaca blowout podcast edition
where it was just NonStop discussion of feel like cloaca
and articles, right, yeah, so the a yeah and then
yeah exactly. So if you could make for a fascinating podcast,
which but the but the idea with Marty Grays you
have the big old party because you're going to be
good for over a month afterwards, with occasional breaks for
(19:40):
feast days beef steaks, Feast days, Feast days beef steaks
like beef steaks coming to the equation. There are different
feast days where they're like holy celebrated days. So it's
all right to break your lent faster. We'll see. Now,
I don't know a lot about this lent thing, but
that just seems like cheating. We'll see. Nine. My mother
in law thought the same thing. She was like, she
(20:03):
was like, I don't know about these feast days in
and I'm like, but but but a priest told me this.
This is this is legit. But anyway, but yes, they
so they you know, in this lab, they took the
same tact, right like we're gonna go ahead and try
to get these groups to indulge. And so what they
did is they gave two groups milkshakes. Sounds good right. Um.
(20:24):
One was tasteless, low fat glop, absolute glop, right, a glock,
but a milkshake nonetheless tas. The other one was decadent,
calorie laden and and yummy. Right. So the researchers expected
that the decadent milkshakes would perform better on willpower tesk right.
(20:45):
So the result is that both groups performed well on
these these tasks that they were given after they consumed this,
and it was a head scratch until they figured out
that the gluca glucas was mitigating the ego depletion and
sometimes completely reversing it both of the milk shapes. So
basically you had is you had these two groups and
(21:06):
they were going through similar to the other study where
they were given choices and their willpowers being eroded. They
took break, they had the milkshakes, they came back to
do some more difficult tasks. They both performed really well.
So they thought, oh this this uh, this experiment went
terribly awry. It didn't meet our expectations. But what they
(21:27):
figured out is that it was the actual glucose in
the milkshake. It didn't really matter whether or not it
was calorie laden or delicious or you know, it was
the actually the food itself that was tripping the mind. Yeah,
So again and again in lab experiments dealing with self
control exercises, researchers found that people naturally gravitated towards sugary,
(21:49):
glucose filled snacks when given the choice between say, like
potato chips and candy. It's and and it's really effective, right,
but it's a temporary fix. And researchers also took dieters,
which is the classic group that you would want to study, right,
forty five women. What they did is they showed them
pictures of food, and they scan their brains okay, And
(22:12):
then they made them watch a comedy a film okay,
and they made them suppress their laughter. It just seems,
you know, okay, um, not not exactly cruel. But what
they're trying to induce was ego depletion because it takes
a lot of mental energy to try to do something
that is coming to you naturally, right, and also you're
you're robbing yourself with a little reward center ding right,
(22:35):
because we all know that laughter in comedy is is
something that lights up our brains. So afterwards, they showed
these the group food images again and they scan their
brains again, and what they found is that there's more
activity in the nucleus incumbents, which is the ward of
the ward center, and less activity in the amigda, which
processes emotions and control impulses. So their ability to exercise
(22:57):
um willpower was compromised. And could see this in the scan, right.
And then the researchers wondered what a shot of glucose
could do if they added that to the scenario, and
they found that the brain changes were completely reversed, which
is what I talked about earlier. So again this link
is born out in the scan as well. It's not
(23:18):
just it sounds like a big excuse, right, like I've
I've had to make so many choices today and that's
why I did this. I think you call this that
the double made me do it, uh rationale, But in
fact you do see real evidence that this is something
that is working at play and uh really eroding our
confidence and our ability to make decisions and making wise
(23:39):
decisions too. Yeah, sort of like I was thinking in
terms of the TV show Madman, kind of like a
Don Draper effect, where Don Draper has a lot of
decisions to make about who he's gonna fire and who's
going to be mean to generally Peggy um and uh
and and so he makes all these decisions and at
the end of the every show it's pretty much Don
Draper doing something really stupid. There you go, you just
(24:01):
cracked the writer's secret right there. Yeah. Yeah, if only
he had a little glucose shot, then he would just
be you know, well, he has most narrat shots throughout
the the late morning, afternoon, and evening, but it's just
not the glucose ones. But they saw listen judges too.
They saw this in it Israeli parole board. They studied
(24:24):
the judges there and they found that they would grant
parole much more so in the morning than in the afternoon.
And so if you had a ten o'clock case, you
were pretty lucky, right, you probably would get parole because
you're getting more thought into it. They're making more thoughtful,
informed decisions, right, they're not as inundated at three o'clock. Sorry,
you're probably not gonna get parole. And Uh, they apply
(24:48):
this glucose test to them as well. So they started
giving them a little snacks throughout the day and whoa,
right after the snack, guess what you were going to
get parole? Huh. So it's pretty amazing to see a
lot of in play. And that's really cupcake. Is the
take home here a deconan smoothie? Perhaps? Yeah, But the
reason that the in case you're wondering why they weren't
(25:11):
granting parole is because this really was the safest choice
for them, because they were essentially deferring the decision because
they could say to themselves, I can I'm gonna bat
down the hatches on my mental energy because I know
that this case is going to come up again at
six months, two months, a year, and I can decide
them this feels like the safer choice. Okay, well that
this seems like a solid I mean, I'm taking you
(25:32):
outside of a criminal um, you know, injustice scenario. The
idea of deferring the choice of of sort of trusting
another body with your choices, uh, seems like a good
way to deal with decision fatigue, Like instead of going
stepping through every process in getting the sandwich, just the
way you want it, or think you might want it
(25:53):
to be able just to point and say I will
have the number three. Well, and that's and you're trusting
your sandwich artists or whoever to give you the type
of sandwich you would want. And of course that that, um,
that sort of makes a lot of us knee jerk,
especially Americans, because we like our choice so much, right right,
even with our most mundane things like Okay, what sort
(26:15):
of crappy sandwich am I gonna get? Yeah, I should
have complete free reign to just just have no vegetables
at all, just me. Yeah. Yeah. And there have been
studies that suggest that less choices make more sense for us. There's,
you know, less fatigue that we're experiencing. Um, perhaps we're
happier with less choices. I tell you one example of
(26:37):
like in my case when it comes to listening to music,
I tend to absorb a lot of my music through
mixed podcasts, so to a certain extent, instead of saying,
I wonder what albums I'm gonna listen to for the
next hour or two hours, or which individual tracks I'm
going to choose to listen to instead, I'm going to trust, uh,
this individual DJ to give me a nice assortment of
(26:57):
tracks that I wouldn't In that way, I don't have
to have to find out who these artists are. I
don't have to to go out and discover new things.
I will let this guy discover things and deliver them
to me in a as a sonic meal. So and
that this person is vetted for you, right, so it
feels like, okay, I can seed my control over to
this person. Well, either it's somebody that I trust already,
like you know it's a it's a it's a DJ
I follow, or since a lot of these are you know,
(27:19):
they did to be podcast properties, so um it may
say it's like the Solid Steel Radio show, or um
like a Body Tonic podcast or any of these other
music podcasts. There'll be multiple DJs that come through, So
then there's like a larger level. Am I trusting that
particular podcast to give me a DJ I can trust,
who will then give me music I can trust? Okay?
So this actually um is similar to a jam study
(27:43):
believe it or not or jelly for further, folks who
don't prefer jam and and not asn't kick out the jams,
but is then spread on the jam as in PB
and j jam. Right. Sheina I Anger, a professor of
business at Columbia University, conducted a study in which she
her research assistant set up a booth of samples of
Wilkins and Sons jams. Seems innocent enough, right, Every few hours,
(28:08):
they switched from offering a selection of twenty four jams
to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted
two jams regardless of the size of the assortment, and
each person received a cub on good for one dollar off. Okay,
the really interesting part of this is that sixty percent
of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only
stopped by the small one. But thirty percent of the
(28:31):
people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to
buy jam, as opposed to only three percent of those
people confronted with a big assortment of jelly. So that again,
here's this, here's this idea that you have this wide assortment,
you have all of these choices, and you're going to
back away. Whereas you cull it down a little bit,
all of a sudden, your sales go from three percent
to so yeah, So like with me, it's like I
(28:54):
would rather choose one of eighteen podcasts versus one out
of you know, several hundred DJs versus like one artist
out of you know, hundreds and hundreds represented in those mixes.
It's just easier to refine it down. And I guess
in a much larger way people make these choices when
(29:15):
they choose various religions, philosophies, um political ideologies, because you're
sort of saying, I want instead of going through and
customizing your preferences, like the sandwich, you will just say,
you know what, give me the Catholic sandwich, give me
the um Tea party sandwich, give me the you know,
(29:37):
give me the give the Zen Buddhist sandwich, give me
the Hindoo sandwi. You know, It's like you're you're saying,
give me those set of of preordained preferences. Uh, and
let me take that on because I I generally like
the shape of that sandwich and the look of it.
So I'm going to trust the various factors in that
sandwich to do me right. All right, Right, So I
feel like, okay, give me the atheist sandwich because that
(29:59):
that works, and and I'm going to run with that model.
And it's but then something. The only thing is what
if you get that sandwich and you really don't like lapenas?
So do you learn to like kalepenas? Maybe you do.
I mean again, this is it's really interesting if you
apply it to the way that we we wield our
(30:19):
choices in the world and why you sometimes look back
and think, how how did I make that choice? That
seems so rational in the moment, but now it seems
like how how could I have made that choice? Or
what if the sandwich ends up containing say, um, you
know baby seal or condor patties, you know, like some
sort of endangered species, and you're but you're like, oh,
(30:39):
but the rest of the sandwich is so good. I
just accepted the bad with the good for the You've
just minimized your choice to witness relocation. My friend, you
got to put your mustache on. But no, wonder you know,
we get ourselves in a tizzy because did you know
that three to four hours of our day is spent
in some sort of state of desire? Okay, okay, ballmeister again.
(31:04):
This guy his group gave pre programmed blot berries to
more than two hundred people for a week. The phones
went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report
whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or
had recently felt a desire. They collected more than ten
thousand momentary reports than this is from Morning Tonight, and
the results suggested that people spend between three and four
(31:26):
hours a day resisting desire or some sort of urge
and uh. As the New York Times article put it,
if you tapped four or five people at any random
moment in the day, one of them would be using
willpower to resist a desire. And the most common desires
eat in sleep right makes sense, followed by leisure activities,
and then followed by the urge to have sex. The
(31:49):
three or four hours of this it seems like a lot.
It does. I mean, obviously this is not, you know,
in in constant three or four hours state of desire,
but it does. It does tie in rather nicely with
the you know, the the idea that that's that the
desire is one of the roots of suffering in the world. Well,
this is the this idea of this temptation that that
(32:10):
sort of throws us off, and that's why our old
magdala is taken up there so to speak, trying to
keep us on the street and narrow. Well, that's well,
there you go. That's uh. So that's pretty fascinating and
it is one of those things that definitely forces you
to take another look at your life and look at
the the numerous decisions that fill it and uh and
and perhaps figure out ways where we can cut down
(32:30):
on the number of decisions we're taxing our brain with
at the expense of the decisions we really need to make.
So that's the truth. That's that's that's sort of my takeaways,
Like try to eat more consistently throughout the day, right
so I can make better decisions. Try to make the
decisions earlier in the day. Yeah, and uh and uh,
I don't know what else, and believe what other people
(32:50):
tell you to listen to and uh and why you
know fun get some good vetted people to make some
decisions for you. I mean seriously, it's like it saves
so much time and energy if you can just find
like a good DJ or a good uh or maybe
there you know it's a it's a particular blogger you
agree with them, or a movie critic. I mean seriously,
like when it comes to finding out whether you want
(33:10):
to watch rain go or not. It's nice to be
able to just turn to Eager and see, like, all right, Eber,
what do you think of it? You give it four stars? Okay,
I'll give it. Yeah, that's true. Stick in Google and
getting like ten different results, going through like and mucking
through a bunch of them and saying like, well, I
don't know who's this guy? Should I vet him? He
liked listening? You know, it's just just pick somebody you
like and go with it. There you go. Yeah, that
(33:31):
that's the answer to life right there. Well, hey, we
have some listener mail. We kind of neglected it in
the last few podcasts because we either I either forget
to print it out or we end up going a
little too long and don't really have time for it. Uh,
and maybe we went too long today. I don't know.
We'll find out. We have some email here from a
listener by the name of Jonathan Jonathan Wright, Senuss, Hi, Robert,
and Julie. I'm catching up on your podcast, having started
(33:52):
listening to it after listening to the other How Stuff
Works podcast over a hundred podcasts, but I listened a
lot on the road. I listened to the one on
subliminal messaging. Today, I think it's your fifty newest. When
talking about smells, it reminded me of a store I
bet you would love. There's a great outdoor mall in
San Diego, California called Corton Plaza. There is a Cinnamon
(34:14):
Roll Bakery was bought out by Cinnamon unfortunately, but there's
an exhaust event from the inside the kitchen that pumps
cinnamon roll smell into the walkway in front of the store.
Maybe not subliminal as much as pure evil, but was
always a great It was always such a clever idea.
Now if you walk a few more doors down there
is a sparky house of glue, close your eyes and
(34:37):
you can appreciate, really appreciate the smell wafting from their
fan delicious rendered horse paste and so so that's that's fascinating. Um.
And of course I think we discussed that the cinnamon
bun smell is is really powerful when it comes to
controlling people. Yeah, that's right, it's it's the siren song
of temptation. Yeah, one would have to make a Ulysses
(34:59):
pack to discover it. Which, by the way, if you
if you're listening to this podcast, and you have not
listened to our one um uh, the the accompanying podcast
that we did on procrastination. Uh, stop putting on putting
it off and listen to that, because there's a lot
of crossover between the two companion. We also heard from
a listener by the name of Trent, and Trent rights
(35:19):
in and hit some some very interesting things to say
about our Religion and Space episode. He says, Hey, guys,
I've actually been meaning to send this email for a
while and I'm only just getting around to it. There
you go, Procrastination against UM. I enjoyed your podcast on
religion in Space and thought Robert's comment on taking the
best bits from different religions very interesting. However, I do
(35:40):
see some problems, the main one being what if there
are parts of a religion that may not seem to
be beneficial according to currently held ideas, and it isn't
much later that it turns out to be quite beneficial.
I am thinking of one example in particular. I am
a Jehovah's witness, and we take the Bible's instruction to
abstain from blood very literally, including the refusal of blood transfusions.
(36:01):
For years, we have been looked down upon by not
only the medical community but people in general because of
our refusal to accept accept blood transfusions. However, in part
due to the witness witnesses, huge advances in bloodless surgery
and medicine have been made and it is now accepted
by many medical practitioners that it has many advantages and
in almost all cases is more beneficial than a traditional
(36:23):
blood transfusion, which leads me to the next point of
the email. UM a show suggestion. I think a podcast
on bloodless surgery would be interesting. Um So, anyway, he
does bring up an interesting point and one that um,
I've kind of thought of two and think because to refresh,
I kind of have often played with this idea of religion, uh,
the religion buffet where you go through, and of course
(36:45):
you end up making a lot of choices in this.
It's kind of like say, here, here we go. We're
at the buffet line again. Yeah, where you go through
and you're like, I like this from this religion, this
from that religion, or I like these ideas from this
given UM view on the world, and I'm going to
adopt these and leave this UM. But yeah, on one hand,
you're making a lot of decisions In this you're so
(37:05):
you're taxing your decision making ability and uh indeed, it's
kind of like we were talking about. UH. But by
choosing I can avoid the hillo the Halopenias that maybe
I don't want. But what if I really need Halopinians
and I don't realize it? What if there's something? What
if in picking and choosing from different uh faiths and philosophies,
(37:26):
what if I'm neglecting to get the things my body
actually needs. What if I'm like the kid who refuses
to put vegetables on his sandwich just because he doesn't
like them, when really that scurvy kid needs vegetables like
nobody's business. Well, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about
it and the Great Spaghetti Monster. Maybe I need some
garlic bread with my spaghetti monster. There you go with Basically,
(37:49):
it's like a made up deity, Yes, yes, as opposed
to all the other deities which are not made up.
Well there, yes, yes it was recently in the news,
but that's for another time. I suppose. So, hey, if
you have anything that you want to share with us
that you've been putting off sharing with us, um and
that order that you can't quite decide on sharing with us,
then get in touch with us. We are on Twitter
(38:12):
and Facebook. You'll find us as blow the Mind on
both of those, so you know, go on at us
as your friend, follow us. We'll keep you updated on
what we're podcasting about, what we're thinking about podcasting about,
and you can help you decide that's right. And you
can always send us an email at blow the Mind
at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
(38:33):
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
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