… And How It Helps Me To Think

I usually don’t take anything to read when going for a ride on the subway.  And I don’t listen to books on tape while driving or running in the park. Typically I defend myself to friends who think I’m wasting time by claiming, “I need the time to worry.”

New research, however, gives me a better excuse.  When the mind is wandering, the brain’s “default network” takes over, according to Eric Klinger at the University of Minnesota, and “this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind.”  That’s an evolutionary advantage, he suggests, “increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.”  (See, “Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind.”)

But the report on mind wandering in The New York Times, suggests there is also reason to believe that it encourages the creative process.  According to Dr. Jonathan Schooler, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “it may help if you go jogging, take a walk, do some knitting or just sit around doodling, because relatively undemanding tasks seem to free your mind to wander productively.”

“For creativity you need your mind to wander,” Dr. Schooler says, “but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it.”  Waking up from day dreams and reflecting on where your mind went when it wandered is essential for making use of this process.

It’s good to have to have scientific evidence for the value of mind wandering, but it is something many of us who work with our minds have intuitively understood.  When I say I need time to “worry,” I don’t mean I want to ruminate obsessively.  I want to find out what’s on my mind, not so different from asking a psychotherapy patient to tell me “What comes to mind?” or “Where did your mind go just then?”

The mind is always working.  We can often benefit from just letting it go about its business, and then looking in on it when we need a little extra help.

Economic Power Too

Economists have recently confirmed something most of us have known since the third grade, the power of beauty to influence our judgment.  Not a real surprise.  But it is interesting how easily we seem to forget how our third-grade minds persist into adulthood, and how much they still control our reactions.

Newsweek notes: “Handsome men earn, on average, 5 percent more than their less-attractive counterparts (good-looking women earn 4 percent more); pretty people get more attention from teachers, bosses, and mentors; even babies stare longer at good-looking faces (and we stare longer at good-looking babies).”

It’s good to have the exact numbers, but, I recall all too well how much attractiveness had to do with who was popular in school, who got elected class president, who got more dates, etc.  It was painful, then, for those of us banking on the less compelling virtues of intelligence and hard work to get ahead.  And, clearly, many of us are still uncomfortable with that reality.  We would like to think that our assessment of a person’s intelligence and skill will trump appearance.  But, according to economist Daniel Hamermesh:  “over his career, a good-looking man will make some $250,000 more than his least-attractive counterpart.”  (See, “The Beauty Advantage.”)

Newsweek surveyed 202 corporate hiring managers, as well as 964 members of the public: “from hiring to office politics to promotions, looking good is no longer something we can dismiss as frivolous or vain.”

“Fifty-seven percent of hiring managers [said] unattractive candidates are likely to have a harder time landing a job, while more than half advised spending as much time and money on ‘making sure they look attractive’ as on perfecting a résumé. When it comes to women, apparently, flaunting our assets works: 61 percent of managers (the majority of them men) said it would be an advantage for a woman to wear clothing showing off her figure at work.”

So why is this bias so true throughout our lives?  The answer has to do with the fact that consciousness tends to dispose of information threatening to our self-esteem.  We couldn’t escape certain painful truths growing up, but we could forget them.  And we can still forget them or dismiss those truths as adults, even as we continue to be biased in favor of beauty.

In other words, it’s not that we don’t know that we are attracted to beautiful people or, even, that we are predisposed to favor them when it comes to hiring or other choices we make.  What most of us dispose of is the awareness that we allow our bias to trump our better judgment.

Worse, we don’t usually include ourselves in that favored group.  That’s the really painful part.

Ignoring the Dangers – and the Lessons

Psychologists have started to comment on the emotional impact of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  They note its uncanny, nightmarish qualities as well as its resonance with other vital issues we are facing.

The images haunt us:  a huge rig toppling in flames, oil gushing from a broken pipe, pushing up inexorably from deep beneath the surface.  The black gold is toxic to wildlife, to our fragile ecology as well as thousands of livelihoods.  And, until last week, we were powerless to stop it.  As The New York Times put it on Sunday:  “the imagery insinuated itself into our collective consciousness — gnawing evidence that something enormous and confounding was still operative, despite the labors of our brightest engineers and our most expensive machinery.”  We are not in control.

It evokes other problems as well, noted The Times:  “The deepest damage of the spill may be the loss of confidence in institutions. . . .  Combine that with public exhaustion over two wars, economic insecurity and disgust over the return of bonuses on Wall Street.”

I would add to that list our experience of the disastrous credit bubble, despite sophisticated “risk management” systems designed to prevent such things from happening, and the failure of regulatory agencies to manage it effectively.  Moreover, unemployment is not responding well to government efforts to contain it.

“All of these things work together.  The national psyche is very depressed” said Nadine Kaslow, a psychologist at Emory University.  “The spill has been going on for so long and there have been so many attempted fixes that people become less trusting that things will really improve. So this becomes a little less front-page news, if this really works, but there’s some sense that some other disaster will take its place.”  (See, “A Spill Into the Psyche, and a Respite.”)

Conventional wisdom suggests that we should discount such emotional parallels.  Yes, they may work together in the national psyche, but we are trained to think each problem should be dealt with on its own.

The danger, though, is that our emotional unconscious may well be detecting real connections.  If we discount the parallels and neglect what we know but don’t know we know, we will under-react.  And there are real links among these issues:  Overconfidence in technology, inadequate controls for risk, and Groupthink that suppresses dissident or non-conforming point of view – particularly under the pressure of corporate competition and the drive for profits.

Maybe people are right to be skeptical about the solutions that are proposed and to have nightmarish thoughts.  As we aggressively assert our control over nature though technology, like Dr. Frankenstein, we neglect our own limitations and latent desires – and all too easily create the lethal messes it will take us years to recover from.

Debating Creation

Intriguing new Apps for the iPhone help people debate the existence of God.  What’s that about?

A recent article in The New York Times noted:  “In a dozen new phone applications, whether faith-based or faith-bashing, the prospective debater is given a primer on the basic rules of engagement — how to parry the circular argument, the false dichotomy, the ad hominem attack, the straw man — and then coached on all the likely flashpoints of contention.”  (See, “You Say God Is Dead? There’s an App for That.”)

There is general agreement now among those who study such issues that, after centuries of efforts to prove god exists, or does not, we have settled into an uneasy truce.  Agnostics have the better arguments, though they may not have the numbers.  Some school boards may still get hot and bothered about teaching Darwin, or they may want to see some version of “creationism” in the curriculum.  But fewer and fewer people really seem to care.  It’s become a matter of opinion – and politics.

The appearance of the Apps seems to trivialize the issue.  Scoring points, vanquishing opponents – what does this have to do with real faith?  It’s clear that no one will be converted into a believer or a skeptic as the result of a quick jab or a clever riposte.

Moreover, polarizing the issue leaves out some of the more nuanced ideas one could entertain.  What is God’s relationship to the human race?  Is he a man? A woman? A hermaphrodite?  A group?  Is he still around?  What’s really at stake with these portable debating points?

But the appearance of the phone Apps is probably more about neutralizing the issue even further.  If the existence of God is in the category of a debate topic, then it is a set of disagreements we have come to accept.  Heresy no longer bothers us.  It doesn’t even exist in the sense that society is not outraged and mobilized to protest.  Apostates no longer alarm us. You take your choice. We can live with it.

Those who wait for the Second Coming are indulging their private interests and passions.  Important, yes, but only to them.  It is not longer a matter of public significance.

Like a sports match.  People take sides, feelings get inflamed, but no lives are likely to be lost as a result.  As in all forms of play, one wants to win, to be sure.  In a sense, so long as one is playing by the rules, it’s the effort and skill that matter.

Spectators and players like to say, “Let the best man win.”  When the match is over, the participants start planning the next match, hoping to win next time.  Most important of all is being a good sport.

Or Financial Superstition?

Investor gurus constantly seek to be heard, building up their reputations, sometimes also seeking customers. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, newletters and journals are full of their financial advice. Who to believe?

According to one advisor who writes for The New York Times, take them all with a grain of salt:  It can be “dangerous” to take “what’s meant to be general financial information and acting on it, without first taking the time to figure out if it applies to your particular situation.”

He points out that many of them are reasonably well informed about how the stock market is likely to perform, or the bond market, or the price of gold.  But they are not informed about your situation or your particular needs.  They provide generic advice, information, even useful tips at times.  “As good as many of them are at providing a filter for information, and even providing general rules of thumb, you are the only one who can figure out how it applies to your life.” (See “Ignore Generic Financial Advice (Except This Post).”)

Then, of course, there is the problem of figuring out which gurus really do have their fingers on the pulse of the market?  Even if we had good information available to us about their track records, there is no way we can tell if they are right this time.

Worse, we are likely to be swayed into believing them because they express what we suspect is true.  They agree with what we think.  As a result, their power to influence comes less from the fact that they are experts but from how they echo or amplify or own half-formed convictions or fears.

Essentially it boils down to a form of superstition, not much different from the horoscopes one can also find in the daily paper.  Horoscopes, too, can be useful.   They can get one to think about potential scenarios for the day ahead.  They can provoke a reflective process, but they are not to be trusted as reliable guides.

There is no substitute for being mindful and for having conversations with others.  That helps you become aware of how your situation is different from others.  It adds to the store of ideas about potential trends, so you have a variety of perspectives.  And it leaves you with your own decision to make.

That may make us anxious and uncertain, but the fact of the matter is that we really are taking risks.  Anxiety reminds us that we are in uncharted territory, always at the edge of the unknown.