Mindframe

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2500 BC. Its individual stone blocks weigh up to 50 tons, and its base contains roughly 2,300,000 blocks, measuring 592,000 square feet. This combined with its height, 481 feet, would be enough to earn the pyramid a spot on the Seventh Wonders of the World, but it's even more impressive at second glance. The ancient Egyptians installed the pyramid's cornerstones in a special ball and socket configuration, allowing it to flex slightly in case of an earthquake. Indeed, the structure survived just such a quake in the 14th century, although the tremors loosened its smooth outer covering, which is mostly no longer with us. (Some believe the local population took advantage of the freed stones, carting them away for a variety of purposes. Who wouldn't want a pyramid souvenir?) When that limestone facade was intact and polished to a full shine, it would have been so bright that some have theorized it would be visible as a twinkly do...

In last week’s post , we learned how Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow test demonstrated that preschoolers with a willpower strategy fared much better later in life across a wide spectrum of circumstances than their counterparts who “ate the marshmallow.” So are the marshmallow eaters among us doomed to a life of constantly giving into our temptations? Not necessarily, says Mischel. Willpower, or more accurately, a strategy for maintaining one’s willpower, is a skill that can be developed and practiced at virtually any age. The clues to building your own willpower system can be found in Stanford’s Bing Nursery preschoolers, who tested and proved many methods during the original marshmallow experiment. The next time you need to reach for some self-control, you might consider using one of the following as a template. Out of sight, out of mind Among the marshmallow resistors, pushing the marshmallow to the far end of the table and/or closing their eyes was a po...

Although he didn’t realize it then, when Walter Mischel and his team turned their attention to preschoolers at the Bing Nursery School on the campus of Stanford University in the 1960’s, he unleashed a tidal wave in cognitive science, which is still being felt today. The experiment was pretty straightforward. A preschooler was seated at a table and presented with a single treat of some kind—a cookie, a piece of candy, or—most famously—a marshmallow. The child was told that the supervisor would soon be leaving the room. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow until the supervisor came back, they would get a second marshmallow. If they instead ate the marshmallow, there would be no opportunity for another.  Mischel was conducting a basic test in postponement gratification, and whether five year olds were able to demonstrate any kind of strategy for self-restraint, the willpower necessary not to gobble up that first tempting marshmallow. As you might imagine, ...

“Oh, the thigh bone’s connected to the leg bone and the leg bone’s connected to the…” You probably learned some version of this  classic spiritual “Dry Bones” in grade school. It’s a clever way to teach basic skeletal anatomy. Author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson was actually referring to the prophesy in Ezekiel 37:1-14, but for our secular purposes, the point is that all of your bones connect to create a structure that serves as the functional foundation for everything you do. Chiropractors build their entire livelihood on this vary concept. You throw your back out of joint and it effects your lifting power in a dramatic way. It’s amazing how the simple act of reaching for a bag of groceries in your trunk can compromise your skeletal system and jeopardize your ability to live a normal life for weeks afterwards. Like the skeletal system, we tend to think about diet, exercise and sleep as three separate systems, each vital to the success of the body. But there is an...

Let’s suppose that you’ve got a habit you want to break. You’ve followed the following five habit-breaking rules: 1. Tell a friend you’re going to break a habit to help put pressure on yourself to actually follow through 2. Be persistent; whether making or breaking a habit, it’s generally believed you need about 60 days of reinforced behavior to cement a change 3. Enlist a friend for moral support when you find your will weakening 4. Plan out a meaningful reward to give yourself once the habit is eradicated 5. Keep track of your daily progress towards breaking the habit to reinforce positive habit-breaking behavior Everything’s going smoothly, and then just when you think you've rewired your brain, you’re blindsided by a sneak attack from within. Once you understand that your rational brain is up against an internal conspirator, you might not be surprised to discover the nemesis is your emotional brain, sometimes known as your reptilian brain, which has some habit main...

When you contemplate your life, wondering what it means to be alive, it’s unlikely the first thing that came to mind was ‘office work.’ And yet arguably the life you lead at your desk inhabits a great deal of mental real estate. The sheer number of hours typically spent at work guarantees that the office and all it entails is fundamental in understanding and explaining the big picture of your life. Work may or not bring out the best of us, depending on our tasks and whether we are able to get into flow as defined by Csikszentmihalyi. But observation suggests there is one constant in human behavior you can expect to see wherever you find a shantytown of office cubicles. The idea was coined by Allie Brosh, of Hyperbole and a Half fame. In a recent interview with Terry Gross, Brosh explained how she started her now-famous internet comic when she was supposed to be studying for finals: “I'm laterally productive. I will do productive things, but never the thing that I'm s...

If you run up a long steep incline, it doesn’t take very long before you burn through the energy stored in your muscles and find your legs turning to rubber.  We learn this at a relatively early age, and as a result, some of us make it a habit to avoid running up steep inclines. What you might not realize is that this exhaustion, this depletion of fuel, happens in the exact same way when you exert yourself mentally. Your brain, like your muscles, runs on glucose. Give your brain a mental workout and your ability to focus, or demonstrate what we call ‘will power’, is spent as well. This was proven out in a well-known experiment done by psychology Professor Roy Baumeister and his team at Florida State University. They conducted a test where people where randomly assigned to eat either radishes or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. The radish eaters were instructed to resist eating the cookies. In this case, the noble radish eaters were able to exert enough will power to a...

When is the last time you ran into an angel? Not "angle"--we're talking harp, robes, and halo. Well, it turns out you don't have to actually encounter an angel to get the headwear. Neuroscientists coined the term 'halo effect' to describe the irrational behavior that follows when we grant one positive detail too much sway. According to Kelly McGonigal in The Willpower Instinct,  the halo effect is a "form of moral licensing which allows us to say 'yes' to temptation.  For example, we feel so good about ordering something healthy, our next indulgence doesn't feel sinful at all. Researchers have found if you pair a cheeseburger with a green salad, diners estimate that the meal has fewer calories than the same cheeseburger served by itself." It's as if there's a bad angel sitting on our shoulder, waiting to balance the virtuous salad you had for lunch against a Quarter Pounder with cheddar. The heavenly light  reflecting from ...