Mindframe

Are you wired for success? And by “success”, I’m not necessarily talking about monetary reward. In her paper “The Mindset of a Champion”, psychology professor Carol Dweck discusses the almost-professional baseball career of Billy Beane. You might remember Billy Beane from Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball . Beane was the famous Oakland A’s general manager who enjoyed numerous successful seasons by combining competent scouting with a wonkish handle on baseball statistics. Beane as a player is another story.  In high school, he was a natural athlete who enjoyed interest from professional teams in baseball, basketball and football. He was considered to be the next big thing, and yet his chosen career in baseball came up short. After stints with several different teams, he eventually washed out of the major leagues. Was Billy wired for success as a big league player? Carol Dweck doesn’t think so. Dweck’s research focuses on the concept of mindset. The idea is that people’s brai...

Does your mind tend to wander? Most people believe that their minds wander about 10% of the time. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara put that figure at more like 30%.  When engaged in well-rehearsed tasks like driving a car on a wide-open highway, it’s estimated that mind wandering can be as high as 70%. In her book How to Get People to Do Stuff , behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk makes the important distinction between mind wandering and daydreaming. According to Weinschenk, daydreaming involves an aspect of fantasy, like imagining you’ve been asked to star in the next Hunger Games flick opposite Jennifer Lawrence, or you’ve just won the lottery. Mind wandering occurs when your subconscious brain is engaged in a habituated activity, like driving, and at the same time you’re thinking about some other task or wrestling with some other problem. Doing one thing while your brain focuses on something else might sound an awful lot like multi-tasking. However, the key to mu...

“What keeps a dyslexic agnostic up at night? Wondering if there really is a dog.” You can debate whether that’s funny or not, but either way, we’ll probably agree that the opening statement is a joke—or at least, an attempt at one. When many of us contemplate the concept of laughter, it goes hand-in-hand with jokes. Unless you happen to be Robert Provine. Robert Provine’s book Laughter: A Scientific Investigatio n attempts to understand what actually happens during spontaneous human laughter. Provine’s research team observed over 2000 cases in a wide variety of circumstances and situations. The study included men and women, and a range of ages. The verdict? Laughter resulted from jokes or funny stories only about 20% of the time. So if it’s not all about the punchline, what’s going on? Provine postulates that laughter has a deeper meaning. He sees it as an evolutionary advantage associated with group bonding and social communication.   Laughter shows up in infants a...

When we think of addiction, we might think of the heroin junkie lying on a dirty mattress with a needle in his arm, or a sweaty rockstar snorting a line of coke right after some mega concert. We are probably less likely to think about ourselves. But when it comes to hijacking the brain’s reward system, none of us are entirely clean. In an article from Experience Life entitled “This is Your Body on Soda: the effects of drinking one of America’s most cherished refreshments”, a 12 ounce can of soda takes on an ominous tone.  The average soft drink packs about 10 teaspoons of sugar per can. Stack this up against the American Heart Association’s daily guidelines: 6 teaspoons for women and 9 for men. The effects of pop on your system go something like this: about twenty minutes after you chugged that can, a blood-sugar spike overwhelms your liver’s ability to process the glucose load. What your liver can’t process is converted into fat. And as the article points out, “There’s p...