Our biology affects our thinking more than our thinking affects our biology.
Grandpa
Grandpa always liked to tell you about his glory days, as a schoolboy and when he was a young buck in the Navy.
“I was so rowdy as a youngster. The dumb things us boys would feud about… mostly girls,” he says, winking.
He leans back in his chair and continues. “We’d puff our chests out, talking big and acting tough, and at least a couple of us would always go home with a fat lip or missing tooth. I feel dumb just thinking about it. We were so young and stupid. Take it from me: don’t act so foolish! Learn from Grandpa’s hard-won wisdom!”
Grandpa thinks he doesn’t do those things anymore because he’s gotten wiser.
I say Grandpa isn’t really wiser, he just has less testosterone. After all, why doesn’t Grandma have a bunch of stories of her getting into bar fights? Because Grandma was built different.
“I have a genetic condition. People like me are prone to violent fantasy and jealous rage; we are over 10 times more likely to commit murder and over 40 times more likely to commit sexual assault. Most prisoners suffer from my condition, and almost everyone on death row has it. Relative to other people, we have an abundance of testosterone, which is associated with dominance and aggression, and a deficit in oxytocin, associated with compassion. My sons share my condition, and so does my father.” –Paul Bloom
https://qz.com/582720/americas-most-prolific-wall-punchers-charted/
“Males and females play quite different roles in reproduction. It would be a striking coincidence if the distribution of abilities and behavioral patterns that was optimal for one sex turned out to also be optimal for the other, rather like two entirely different math problems just happening to have the same answer.” – David Friedman
Chris
Mary and Chris had been happily married for twenty-five years. They had three beautiful kids. Mary loved watching Chris play catch with the kids or seeing him teach them about one topic or another. Their friends felt envious of their close and loving relationship.
But, one day, Mary realized Chris had been acting differently. He hardly paid attention to her or the kids. He started acting erratically, making impulsive decisions, and spending recklessly. She wondered if he was having an affair or if it was something like a midlife crisis.
She tried talking to him. He agreed to go to a couples therapist. The sessions seemed to go well enough but there wasn’t any real change from them.
The sessions would go something like:
“Mary, it sounds like Chris was more frugal before and although you’re okay with some spending, you feel he’s going overboard. Chris, what do you think?”
“Life’s short, Doc. After all, what’s money for?”
One morning, Chris slammed into the trash cans as he was backing the car out of the driveway.
Mary came running out. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Where’d they come from?” said Chris. “I didn’t even see them!”
“Maybe we should make an appointment with the optometrist,” said Mary.
“Okay.”
A week later, Chris sat down in the optometrist’s chair. The optometrist said, “Cover your right eye, look at this picture of a barn, and tell me what you can see on the barn.”
“What barn?” said Chris. “I can’t see a barn at all. What are you talking about?”
“Hmm, that’s not good,” the optometrist said.
He ended up referring Chris to a doctor who had Chris get an MRI.
As he lay down in the giant magnet, Chris felt lucky he wasn’t claustrophobic like Mary. The hum of the machine was almost relaxing.
The imaging of his brain came back and showed a pattern that looked almost like a butterfly. It was a glioblastoma, a brain tumor.
“This explains the sudden behavioral changes,” the doctor told Mary.
Chris didn’t watch an inspirational talk on life being too short that imparted wisdom and caused his impulsive and erratic behavior. A brain tumor caused those changes.
Jane
The move from sunny California to not-so-sunny Minnesota was stressful but Jane made the best of it. She always did.
She felt lonely at first but luckily Jane was someone who tackled problems head-on. Soon she had signed up for most of the local meetups. The people were nice enough but Jane still felt down. A few months in and things hadn’t improved. In fact, they had gotten worse. She felt downright depressed. Her mood seemed to match the gloomy weather.
By chance, a coworker talked about how the bright lights he had gotten had cured his problem – something called seasonal affective disorder – and he finally felt happier than he had in years. She was skeptical lights were what caused such a big change, but he kept going on and on about it so she decided to try it.
She ordered the lights he recommended and set them up. They were so bright! She felt like a lizard in a terrarium. But then she noticed something. She had more energy! Her mood was like night and day compared to before.
Jane didn’t need positive thinking to fix her mood. She needed light therapy.
Summary
It’s easy to fall into these types of narratives about getting wiser. After all, they make sense right? The longer you live, the more knowledge and experience you accumulate, which naturally leads to becoming wiser, right?
Yes, people can grow wiser over time, and thoughts can cause physical and behavioral changes, but it is too easy to fall under the illusion that we’re more affected by wisdom than we actually are.
People like to talk about “hard work” as copium. Sure, someone may have incredible “natural talent” but they would be outperformed by someone who keeps putting in the work. So the myth goes. What people miss is that industriousness and related things like perseverance and grit are innate too. They would be better placed in the “natural talent” bucket.
This is why watching an inspirational video with a Navy Seal talking about perseverance, or a motivational speaker who still has a bright and bubbly attitude despite being severely disabled, won’t make the viewers watching it suddenly develop “grit” or lower their innate neuroticism.
Better evidence for an intervention is that it had *lasting* change on someone who didn’t already have those traits.
What should we do about this?
Now that we’re all a bit wiser 😉 after reading this, what should we do?
I’m glad you asked.
Let me tell you one of the biggest misconceptions people have when it comes to irrational thoughts and poor mood.
Ready?
Most people think they have irrational thoughts and then feel bad, when in actuality they are feeling bad and then having irrational thoughts.
Read that again.
Most people think they have irrational thoughts and then feel bad, when in actuality they are feeling bad and then having irrational thoughts.
They have the causal direction backward.
In the same way that researchers are wasting time focusing on curing Alzheimer’s or cancer rather than fixing the upstream problem of aging, we tend to focus on issues too far downstream.
So what should we be doing differently knowing that?
Focus on upstream interventions.
In other words, less Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts, and more morning walks for exercise and sun exposure.
Those about to reply with the “Why not both?” GIF, if CBT-type exercises are effective for you, then by all means please keep at them.
Yes, if your executive function is broken it can be hard to work on anything, but experimenting with physical interventions often takes less work. If you greatly improve your sleep by taking melatonin at the right time, or fix your energy levels by supplementing vitamin B12, you’ve vastly improved your life without grappling with your executive function.
Plus, the energy and mood increases from easier interventions can give you more fuel to tackle harder improvements.
Also, it’s good to just try things and experiment. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/try-things
Some examples:
Find the path of least resistance to exercising. Exercising doesn’t have to suck. We evolved to be active. Put effort into finding movement that feels fun.
Keep it simple and just go for a walk outside. Play whatever music gets you most pumped. Watch inspirational videos or just workout videos on YouTube. Try different sports. Do a boxing workout one day and a yoga workout the other. Did you like one better than the other?
Experiment with Supplements/Nootropics
Melatonin for Sleep
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
https://www.gwern.net/Melatonin
Vitamin D in the morning
Caffeine + L-Theanine
https://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics/wiki/beginners
Modafinil
https://www.reddit.com/r/modareviewsnotbought/
Etc. etc.
Other links of interest:
Autistic redditor has massive behavioral and experiential changes after taking oxytocin (take with big grain of salt): https://twitter.com/punished3liza/status/1485750408643432448
Come up with ways to deal with the most violent members of society (young males) until they grow out of it (not necessarily the military):
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1207791050766471170
Conclusion
While this can be pretty blackpill, focusing on upstream interventions is a better way to focus our efforts.
What situations have you encountered where people aren’t attributing something to biology that they should?
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