Alex Hutchinson
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And that's what we usually mean by addiction, not just that it's something that we like doing every day. It's like, I'm addicted to having breakfast. It's like, well, I need to have breakfast, but it's not like a problem in my life. And so with dopamine, it's like, yeah, there are people who are masturbating nine times a day, apparently. So I read in this book, and that's probably not good.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Most of us, I think it's more just like, we may get in these loops and these cycles where we're And I certainly know this feeling of like, oh, where did that hour go? I just sat here on social media and I had things I needed to do and that was not optimal. But I wouldn't say like I'm addicted to it or anything like that. It's just a suboptimal use of time.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I can be the science of endurance guy for the rest of my life. I can coast on, you know, I should start working on endure to, you know, revenge of the science of endurance. And there's a lot of reasons that that would have been a really smart thing to do. But I couldn't shake the feeling that it actually didn't sound that interesting to me. And I got interested in my lack of interest.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
That's interesting. I will confess that that's not a topic. The passage of time is a super interesting topic with effort. I know that the harder you run, for example, the more time slows down, and they've done careful studies on that. I would imagine dopamine might play a role in that, but I think there's also probably other neurotransmitters, but also just the psychological perception.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But yeah, there's definitely a time warp when you're sitting at the internet and all of a sudden you're like, what the hell? How did that happen?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
If we're trying to define exploring, there are a few elements. I think the first and foremost one is the outcome of what you're choosing to do has to be uncertain. Maybe you could also argue there needs to be struggle and some other elements like that, but the uncertainty is really at the core of what we're talking about. Not knowing what's going to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
It's not even just like, should I take the 50-50 bet or the 30-70 bet? It's like, I don't even know what the odds are. I don't know what's going to happen if I go in this direction. But the only way I'm going to find out is by taking the path to the right that I don't know where it leads. And you can argue...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
in a number of different ways, including with neuroscience, that we're wired to pursue uncertainty, to like uncertainty. There's data sets on how people order food from Deliveroo, the food delivery company. The Harvard scientists analyzed 1.6 million orders to figure out how do we decide what we want. And one of the insights was that
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
All else being equal, if the ratings are equal, if the price is equal, we tend to have a bias toward things we know less about, both in the sense that if I've never tried this before, I want to try it. But also, we look at two restaurants, they're the same. One has 100 ratings and the other has 10 ratings.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Even if they both are four-star restaurants, it's like, I'll go for the one that's only been rated 10 times because I know less about it. Yeah. Uncertainty is attractive to us in an intrinsic way. And the key point is that it's not that we love not knowing stuff. It's that we love knowing stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And by being attracted to uncertainty, it draws us to the best possible ways of learning about the world. Because if you stick with the stuff you know, you don't learn anything new.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Absolutely. And so in some of the papers, they call it the – I'm not even sure how to pronounce this. I'm going to go with the Wundt curve, although I think in Vienna, they would probably say the Wundt curve. There's a famous German psychologist, pioneering German psychologist in the 1800s named Wilhelm Wundt.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I wondered, why do I have this pull to do something new? And it connected with a lot of other areas of my life. Why, when I go on vacations, do I like to try and get as far off the beaten track as I can? Why am I always pulled to the unknown? And so I decided, actually, I'd kind of like to know the answers to those questions. Maybe I'll research that and turn that into my next book.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And he proposed this idea, this sort of stimulus response curve that's a very general phenomenon where it's like, for any given stimulus, if it's weak, we don't really find it very interesting. As it gets stronger, we find it more and more compelling. But if it gets too strong, understandably, we're like, yeah, we don't like that anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And so for uncertainty, there's a lot of evidence that this is the case, even with like, you can take like eight month old babies and show them like patterns of toys coming out of a box or whatever. And if it's super predictable, it's always the same toy. They're like, oh, boring. And you can track their gaze to see if they're interested in.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And if it's super unpredictable, it's like always something different. They find that boring. But if there's some sort of regularity, it's not predictable, but it's not crazy. And you sort of feel like you could figure out the pattern. That's what we tend to find interesting. That's what this avant-garde is about. It's like an upside-down you.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You want to be in that sweet spot where it's like, I don't know what's going to happen next, but it's not just gibberish. This applies to music, for example. They've done analyses. It's like, if music is super predictable, this is why after the age of 10, we don't find Mary Had a Little Lamb that interesting. If it's super predictable, we don't find it all that compelling.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But if it's just random tones... We don't find that compelling either. There's a sweet spot, but that sweet spot depends on our experience too. So if you spend a lot of time listening to music or playing music or studying music, you start to prefer more and more complex and less predictable music because you're getting better at predicting what comes next.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
No, I'm like, where is this going?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I'm trying to do it right now. I just feel like I look like an idiot.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And it's really interesting that this is something that kids can tune into because I think one of the themes in the research that I was looking at is Like, kids are really good explorers. And part of that is that they're able to follow their own instinct. I mean, they have no other guidance. They don't know what they're supposed to be interested in. So they look at what interests them.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
My editor was very reassuring to me. He kept telling me, second books are the hardest. Because this one was a struggle. This one was... it was a year late. Like I'll say that was, I missed the deadline by a year, which is not something that's usual for me. I'm usually a pretty good deadline hitter.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And so they are very sensitive. Kids seem to be very sensitive to this intermediate level of uncertainty. As I said, you know, eight months old or whatever. They're able to... tune into what is a fairly subtle difference in the, in the sort of predictability of patterns. And as we get older, a lot of things happen.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So I don't know whether it's like we lose that ability or we just get taught like, no, this is what you need to be doing between the hours of 10 and 12 on Tuesdays or whatever. And so we're, we're, we're following for reasons that are sometimes good. We're, we're, we're following, um,
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Patterns that are laid out for us by society, and we maybe get less good at understanding what's interesting to us intrinsically. And the problem is that what's interesting to us intrinsically is the best signal we have of that intermediate level of uncertainty, of this is where we can learn about the world. But so, you know, when I...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I have this general feeling that we should, quote-unquote, try to explore more like children. It's hard to articulate what that means, but part of it, I think, is trying to tap back into that innate sensation of understanding what you find interesting or curious or inexplicable. Like, huh, why did that happen? I'd like to know.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I'd like to follow that up, as opposed to just following someone else's curriculum or following what the algorithm is suggesting to you might be interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Uh, and I, I really, really struggled because it was, first of all, yeah, there's, I mean, there's expectations, there's living up to previous work, but also this topic is, is such a big one when you, so when I say I'm interested in exploration, it's like, Oh, you mean Christopher Columbus or whatever? And I'm like,
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I think this is one of the great tensions of modern life. And it's one of the processes of adulthood and growing older is that we become more and more efficient. We know what we like. We know what we don't like. We know what works. We know what doesn't work. And so we converge on this ever-narrowing set of options. And there's a big... or a big literature on habits and how to form better habits.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And there's a lot of good reasons for that. I'm a big habit guy myself. But the fact is, habits are the antithesis of exploration. And, you know, you mentioned commuting, and that's a great example. There was a two-day strike on the London Underground yesterday. I think it was 2014, and it was an optional strike.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So workers could show up or not show up, which meant that some stations were open and some weren't, depending on how many people showed up at a given station. So for two days, people had to kind of – they could still take the tube, but they had to adapt and say, oh, my station isn't open or my destination station isn't open. I have to find a different route or get off at a different place.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So this is taking, as you said, the epitome of an optimized habit. You follow this commuting pattern twice a day, every day of your working life. You know how to get to work.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But what they found, they analyzed the Oyster card data, and they found that of the most hyper-regular commuters, the people who always took the same route every workday, after the two-day strike, about 5% of them adopted a completely different commuting pattern. And basically, they'd realized, oh, actually, if I get off one stop earlier, I can do it.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
It's a five-minute walk instead of a 10-minute bus ride.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah. Or it's a beautiful, I could take the boat along the canal and it's lovely. And so the point is that even repetition, repetition doesn't guarantee that you find the best, the optimal solution. And that even doesn't account for the fact that, hey, maybe it's nice to just change up your routine sometimes. But it's like, even if you're an optimizer, even if you're like, I want the best.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Uh, habit doesn't always get you there. Sometimes you need, you need, you don't want to explore every morning. Like you don't want to wake up for work and say, all right, I'm going to invent a new way of tying my shoes. And then I'm going to decide which parts of my body to cover with clothing.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And then I'm going to try and figure out a completely different way to get to work because you're going to be late for work every morning. But having some exploration, not getting totally calcified into your routines, I think, um, Again, going back to this theme, it's both fun and it can lead to better outcomes.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
yes, and, and, you know, when you go to a restaurant, do you order the same thing or do you try something new? And on your career path and in your dating life and all these other things. So I suddenly realized that I was basically writing about the world. And so I could have, you know, I could have, the topic, the more threads I pulled, the bigger the topic got.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, so this is the downside of exploring. This might seem like the downside of exploring, is that it is hard. Let's say you decide that you want to find a new way to work. The most likely scenario is that you're going to get lost or you're going to take longer. It's going to suck. I mean, there's a reason you're taking the route you have been taking.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And that's true, I think, in general of any exploratory choice. Going back to what we said before, it's by definition, the outcome is uncertain. And in most cases, on average, it's actually going to be worse than what you already know. So ordering in a restaurant, if you know what dish you like in that such and such a restaurant, and then you decide, maybe I should try the meatloaf or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
chances are it's going to be worse than what you already know you like. And so that seems like exploring sucks. It just brings you negative outcomes. Now, in the long term, by exploring, you can discover things that work out to be better.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But there's another angle, which is that actually doing things that are challenging, that involve some struggle, getting lost now and then, can actually be extremely satisfying. And so... There's this idea of the effort paradox in psychology, which is that sometimes the harder we have to work at something, the more we like it.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And whether that's running a marathon or whatever, people don't run a marathon because it's easy. They run it because it's hard. Sometimes you may start, I want to get in shape, so I'm going to start running. But people who run more than one marathon, they're attracted to the difficulty of it. And you can extend that to buying furniture at Ikea.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
you can probably get a similar piece of furniture pre-assembled.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But people have done studies of what's called the IKEA effect, that if you've had to struggle with those pictographic instructions and figure out how that Allen key works and all that stuff, you put the coffee table together, you end up valuing that coffee table more highly than if you'd got the exact same coffee table just delivered to your door pre-assembled.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So there's something in us that values effort. What that is is... It's hard to pin down, but there are a few studies that have been emerging in the last couple of years suggesting that putting in effort is a source of meaning. People can't define the meaning of life, but they can tell you when something feels meaningful. And doing hard things tends to feel meaningful.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Oh man, that's an interesting proposition, or the stormy relationships where it seems like you're having to work at it at all times. I mean, I think there's probably a little bit there that relationships that are too easy tend to get...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I don't want to tar and paper people's negative about relationships, but if it's just totally without strife, without any tension, then it maybe feels a little boring.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And eventually, bless my editor, I was like, yeah, I think I can get you something by April. And he's like, no, I'm going to need it by February 15th. I was like, oh, thank God he gave me a deadline.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing to, to, to recognize is to just to recognize that just because something is hard, doesn't mean it should be shied away from. And in fact, some, you know, it's like, with a hat tip to Michael Easter, whose email list is called 2%, because that's the percent of people who take the stairs when there's both the stairs and an escalator available.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
It's like, you look at the stairs and you look at the escalator, it seems obvious that going up the stairs or going up the escalator is going to be a more pleasant and better experience. But when you take the stairs, I, you know, I don't think it's just me. It's much more satisfying to have put in a little effort.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And recognizing that putting in effort is going to lead you to feel good, it doesn't make the effort go away, but it helps you reframe it as something that's positive, not negative. This is an opportunity for me to put in effort, which is going to make me feel good, as opposed to I'm obliged to take on something hard.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I mean, I think it's almost a precondition that if you're trying to push yourself, if you're trying to handle difficult times— If you view every negative feeling as a sort of disaster or as something that is as a negative, then it's just a miserable experience and you're going to be inclined to quit earlier.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And if you can reframe that and just... And it's in the same way that one of the things I talked about in Endure is the power of your inner monologue, right? Like... if you're running a marathon and you're telling yourself, this is so hard, there's no way I can do this. I better, I'm going to drop out.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because your ability to continue depends in part on, on what your brain believes about your ability to continue. And if you can turn that around to, um, I can do this. This is that, you know, I've trained for this. It's, I know it's hard. It's supposed to be hard. Everybody else around me is feeling it the same way. This is part of the experience.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Well, there's two ways we can answer that question. One reason is we explore because it leads to good things.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Then that becomes a, uh, uh, performance enhancing, uh, frame of mind. And I, so I think recognizing that effort can be, it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't make it easy. It doesn't change how hard it is, but recognizing that it's not a symbol, a signal that you're doing something wrong and that it actually can be something good. I think that that helps you endure it for longer.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You're less likely to quit on things. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, you've touched on one of the big dilemmas and something that I really struggled with and that evolved as I was writing this book in my mind. When I started thinking about exploring, I thought, I'm going to write a book and the subtitle is going to be something along the lines of, you know, the case for why we should explore more or the case for more exploring.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
If you're not just staying in the same sphere, if you're branching out, looking, trying to figure out what's over the horizon, you will eventually discover better things and you will have better restaurant meals and a better career and you will find a better place to live and blah, blah, blah. So a very sort of utilitarian exploring leads to good things.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But as I got into it, I started to have the thoughts that you've just expressed of like, oh, wait. Think of listening to music, for example. It's like most people tend to... You find the music you love when you're young, when you're in your teens and 20s. And then most people tend to listen to less and less new music as time goes on.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And it's not totally irrational because you've spent some time exploring. Now you know what you like. But you might say, that's a shame. We should explore more. I'm not going to fall victim to this narrowing of my taste. I'm going to keep exploring new music. And I think that's great. But if you were to take that to an extreme and say...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
In fact, I'm never going to listen to the same song twice because exploring is what it's about. We can see that's absurd on the face of it, right? But that's the perspective of always keep exploring, always keep looking to the future and never stop. I'm like, I really love this song. I'm going to listen to it 17 times in a row on repeat, even if my wife kills me.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So you do have to stop and enjoy it. I think that's a really... So in a sense... There's this idea in decision science called the explore-exploit dilemma. And it is a dilemma. It's not like explore-exploit, you should always explore. Whenever you come to a fork in the road, take the road less traveled.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You've got to think about maybe now's the time to exploit, to take the music that I just discovered and sit down and listen to it or to figure out what I – Or maybe it's not. Maybe this is a good time to explore. But it's a lot less obvious than I thought it was for precisely the reasons you said. If you never stop and enjoy what you got, then I'm not sure that the exploring is super satisfying.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah. So I went down a big rabbit hole on this. I was like, I come from a physics background. I'm a quantitative guy. I want the formula that will tell me when to explore or exploit. And, you know, I guess I apologize for chapter five in my book, which kind of follows that, tries to follow that rabbit hole. Because there is a ton of like... attempts to produce a formula.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
The other way of answering it is exploring feels good. It's like, it's exciting to go somewhere new to discover something you haven't encountered before. And those two things go together, right? Like the reason exploring feels good is because on an evolutionary level, it led to good things. So it's in the same way that sugar is sweet and it leads us to seek calories.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And it turns out in any real-world context, the math is ridiculous and becomes very hard to follow. But there are some big principles that come out of the math, but that also are practical in a day-to-day scenario. So One concept is the idea of an uncertainty bonus. We kind of do this intuitively, but I think it helps to think of it in terms of it consciously. When you're considering a decision,
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
you don't automatically opt for the one you know less about or the unexplored road. But the less you know about an option, you give a bonus that's proportional to how little you know about it. So you say, all else being equal, I'm going to take the one that I know less about.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So that kind of helps to make sure you're not getting too calcified into that sort of set of habits that you're talking about. It's not the only factor you consider, but it's like... I'm going to add a bonus if it's going to teach me something new or take me down a fresh path. And then the one other... kind of heuristic that I think is useful.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
This is a sort of approximate way of solving this explore-exploit dilemma. It's something called the upper confidence bound algorithm, and that's the math version. And the way they translate that into regular language is optimism in the face of uncertainty, that you should be optimistic about the choices you make. And what that means in practice is
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
is that if you're choosing between options, you should take the scenario with the best case, or the best realistic upside, or the best realistic, best case scenario. So, Realistic isn't in there because it's like, I'm not saying buy a lottery ticket because its best case scenario is you're a millionaire because that's unlikely to happen.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But for scenarios that are realistic, it pays to be optimistic. So an example, I guess, would be you're considering different job possibilities. One has a higher starting salary and is stable, and so that's a real positive. The other, maybe less money, a little less stable, but it has a pathway towards your dream job. It has a pathway to what you actually really want to be doing in the long term.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
All else being equal, it's probably worth taking a shot on that because that's the optimism in the face of uncertainty that I don't know how things are going to turn out, But being optimistic, if things do turn out, that's the one that'll make me happiest. And what the math shows is if you... Individual decisions, all bets are off. It might turn out well, it might turn out poorly.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But in the long term, if you're optimistic in the face of uncertainty, this will minimize your regret. This will minimize you looking back and saying, I wish I had done that. And I think that makes intuitive sense as well as mathematical sense. It's like, you don't look back and say...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
you're more likely to look back and say, I wish I had asked that person to dance than I really regret asking that person to dance and they said no.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, I mean, exactly back at you. I've been thinking a lot in the days leading up to this interview of like, wow, you know, 2018, things were very different for both of us. And the conversation I had with you in 2018 was such a pleasant surprise. And I'm glad to see that other people thought that your interview abilities were as good as I did.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Exploring feels good and that leads us to expand our world and discover better ways of doing things. Those two things kind of in the same way that just because sugar is sweet doesn't mean we should always pursue the taste of sugar, doesn't mean that we should always pursue novelty now. That scrolling through social media doesn't necessarily, it taps into that.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, I wasn't sure how mathematical to get. Regret in the mathematical sense is, it's the difference between What outcome you got and the best you could have gotten if you'd magically made all the right choices. Nobody has a crystal ball, so nobody can make all the right choices all the time. But regret is like... Often, you can think of these sort of decision trees as gambling games.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
In reality, we may be talking about careers or dating decisions, but it's like, I bet $5 on this, I bet $10 on that. Which machine should I bet on? And maybe the best you could have done in a series of 10 bets is getting $100. And if you made a series of bets and ended up with $70, your regret is $30. Right. So that's the mathematical way of thinking about it.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And because nobody is perfect, nobody has clairvoyance, regret always increases, which is kind of a depressing thing to say. But there's no way of going through life without accumulating some regrets of thinking, I kind of wish I had asked her to dance, not the other one. Yeah. We accumulate regret. But so the goal is not to eliminate regret because that's impossible, but to minimize regret.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And the math shows that this kind of optimism in the face of uncertainty is one way of guaranteeing that over the long term, your regret will increase as slowly as is realistically possible unless you find the magic genie with the three wishes.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Which I'm looking for.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah. So, you know, when I initially started on this topic, I was like, I'm interested in exploring. I think it's more than just about like the way I take my vacations or whatever. I think it's also about ideas, but it's like an, it's an analogy, it's a metaphor. And what I was really surprised to discover is that actually, no, in your brains, it's like the same thing.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
When you're wandering through a town that you've never been to before, you are mapping it in your hippocampus. You're forming cognitive maps. Literally, there are individual neurons that will light up when you go to a specific point on that map. There are other neurons that will keep track of what direction you're facing and how close you are to the borders of that town.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You're building maps in your brain. There's a famous study about London cab drivers. that their hippocampuses are enlarged. That's why, because they are mapping a very complicated city. So their hippocampuses actually have to get physically bigger. So it turns out that the hippocampus isn't just a place for mapping landscapes. It's a place for mapping ideas too. And we keep track of ideas.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And so ideas that are close to each other or far away from each other, this is physically manifested in the brain. And so one example is we keep track of our social networks in the hippocampus. And so you can think of like, we know people, we have some sense of like hierarchy. Are they more powerful than us than less power or less powerful than us? And how well do we know them?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
circuitry, that desire for new things, it maybe doesn't teach us about the world. But ultimately, exploring is good because it teaches us about the world and it's very satisfying. It's a route to meaning, I think.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Like, are they close to us? And so that's a two dimensional map and people literally map their social networks in this, in their hippocampus in this two dimensional way. So all of this is to say that when we talk about different ways of exploring, exploring and exploiting, um, This is intimately tied to creativity and coming up with new ideas, expanding our cognitive maps of ideas.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
There are a bunch of interesting findings that fall out of that about how we should mix exploring and exploiting to come up with better ideas.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Curiosity is a name for the drive that compels us to explore, I would say. I'm not a dictionary guy, but that's how I would classify them. And so I think curiosity... Yeah, a lot of the same discussion applies and exploration is what you actually end up doing once because of curiosity.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, so there's a well-known effect called the Flynn effect, and it's been like a century now. IQ scores keep going up gradually, and so they have to keep rebalancing the scores every few years. There's a lot of debate about why this is. Probably just that the modern world requires a lot more abstract thinking than it did to be a hunter-gatherer a long time ago, or even a farmer.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
That's one effect. What's less well-known is that there are similar tests that assess creativity. There's a set of tests called the Torrance tests for creative thinking. And they also have to renormalize those scores periodically. But that's because the scores keep dropping. Kids are getting less creative. And so between about 1990 and 2008, there was a significant drop.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And from 2008 to 2017, which was the next renormalization, there was a much steeper drop. And it's tempting to say, oh, what happened between 2008 and 2017? Let's see, when did I get my first smartphone and when did social media rise? All of that is speculative, but the fact is there's evidence that creative thinking, the ability to just come up with totally new ideas is maybe going down.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And I should say that it's not just these tests of kids. There's been big analyses of patents and of scientific papers, finding that the number of breakthroughs or disruptive papers that really take a field in a different direction seems to be dropping.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Actually, it's good timing. I wrote about that recently because there was a big skeptical study. People like me, I'm a health and fitness journalist, so I'm always like, the best thing you can do for your mental health is exercise. It'll cure your depression. It'll grow your hair back. It'll do all these great things. I try not to be a booster, but it's hard not to.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I guess I'm a strong believer in the power of exercise. There was a big review recently that said, hang on, how good is the evidence really that Exercise promotes mental health. And the overall conclusion is the exercise is pretty good, but it's really hard to tease out what.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So, for example, there's a lot of studies that find that exercise can be as powerful as, for depression, can be as powerful as cognitive behavioral therapy or of antidepressants. It depends on the population a little bit, but exercise really has powerful effects.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But the question is, is it because there's more blood pumping to your brain or there's more, you know, BDNF or other sort of brain chemicals being produced that promote the formation of good connections in between your neurons? Or is it because if you get in an exercise habit... you have a feeling of self-efficacy. You feel like, Hey, I, I, I set this goal for myself and I'm, I'm doing it.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I'm, I'm really doing something good for myself. And actually I'm meeting my friends there three times a week and I'm having some social interaction. And so there's a lot of things that go along with taking up exercise. And so it's not entirely clear, um, which of these are the, are the key ones and what's doing what. So I think it's, it's a very, it's very strong evidence that, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
exercise both maintains and promotes and can actually sort of cure, quote unquote, not cure, but ameliorate mental health. But we don't know exactly why or whether you could get the same thing out of joining a bridge club or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
That's exactly right. Genetics is called this frequency-dependent selection. And it's like, if you look at human height, we've all kind of converged to a pretty similar range. There's a good height to be for a human. But if you look at things like introversion and extroversion or aggressiveness and things like that, it's actually good to have a big mix of characteristics.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
This is another topic I looked at recently where You look at it and you can find this. I can find studies that make me feel really good. It's like exercise is going to make your brain super healthy for, you know, no matter how old you get. But you can also find studies that don't find a strong effect or that say, oh, it seems to maintain the size of this region of the brain, but not that one.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And those sorts of findings always give you pause because then it's like, ah, there's no reason it should be selectively effective. So I, excuse me, if I were summing up, my impression of the evidence is that exercise has actual positive structural effects on the brain, which will in turn help ward off cognitive decline delay or, you know, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
maybe even prevent depending on how long you can delay it or at the very least slow down cognitive decline. So I think that's, you know, when I'm getting out of bed on a cold winter morning, that's one of the most powerful motivators for me. The truth is the evidence is not like bulletproof at this point, but I find it convincing enough to get me out of bed, put it that way.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, I'm hopelessly biased here. Like, look, I was a former columnist for Runner's World magazine, and I've been a runner since I was 15. I think aerobic exercise, that's it. Doing my best to put aside my biases, I think aerobic exercise... probably packs the biggest punch for brain health.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
We're talking for physical brain health and not necessarily for the mental health aspects where I don't think it's clear which is better. I certainly try and do both resistance exercise and aerobic exercise regularly. And I also like playing games that involve team orientation, which I think is also another aspect of brain health. It's like, are you using your brain during exercise?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You need some people with some characteristics and others with others. So exploring is absolutely one of those. And you can see this, and there's really neat data in... For example, in hunter-gatherers, where the more exploratory people, they thrive when they're hunting and gathering.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And there's a little bit of evidence that doing things like coordination games, like juggling or playing football or basketball, that that's even better for your brain because you're using your neurons at the same time that all these growth-promoting things are happening. So...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I would go with running, but with such a small margin that the bigger factor I would say is whatever exercise you enjoy and are willing to do, you're likely going to get a benefit. So it's not like other forms of exercise don't have the benefits.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
There will be more fads and they will be interesting. Actually, Zone 2 and VO2 Max are actually... If you were using modern buzzwords to describe the training of champion endurance athletes, you would say, eh, about 80% Zone 2 and 20% VO2 max. That's kind of what they do.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I would say, so in terms of the Zone 2 stuff, I think it's true that it's a very effective way of both getting fit for performance and also for metabolic health, maybe more importantly. Yeah. My main quibble with it would be I think it's been sometimes prescribed in an overly specific way. It's not like zone 2 is magic and zone 2.1 is nothing and zone 1.9 is you might as well not get out of bed.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
In fact, there's a new paper that just came out from a panel of experts in the last week or two. that among other things makes this point that they're saying that their consensus is like zone 2.5, zone 3.5, it's a continuum. And so you don't need to stress about it. I actually, I wrote about zone two for the New York times.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I don't know, last month, maybe I'm trying to make this point that it's like, yeah, it's good, but don't, don't, you know, you don't have to like be pricking your fingers to test lactate every two minutes to make sure you don't accidentally get out of zone two. Now I was thinking like, I was a little worried that I'd created a straw man.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I was like, do people really believe that you have to be this precise? And I got an email afterwards from someone who was saying, thank God you wrote this. This morning I was out for my run and I was sprinting down a hill because I wanted to keep my heart rate high enough to stay at the magical zone too. And I tripped. And I fell.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And as I was walking home bleeding, my watch kept beeping at me, telling me that I was outside of zone two. And I was thinking to myself, there has to be a better way. And I was like, okay, it wasn't this drawn in. There are people who have taken this very literally that you have to be exactly at the magical zone two. And I don't think that's correct.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But the idea of, I think this is like a great misunderstanding is that
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
endurance athletes train hard all the time and in fact it's like 80 of the time out there conversational pace having a having a laugh and and uh maybe not enjoy enjoying it in the way that the effort paradox allows us to enjoy it which is that we're doing a challenge we're doing something somewhat difficult but not killing ourselves then 20 of the time you go out and you try and find god by pushing yourself really hard but uh but not all the time zone two is still king
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And the more sort of, I'm going to stay back and I'm going to consolidate what we know, they do well for agriculture. They tend to be better nurses. So it's like in any one society, you need people who are pushing the boundaries, but you also need people who are keeping the fires burning at home.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Zone 2, yeah, but it's the largest component, or somewhere near it, is the largest component of the trading.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
That's right. If you can see it with your binoculars, you're doing okay.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So there's the vague big picture things, but I'll give you a concrete practical thing, which is that I do my best not to turn on the turn-by-turn directions in my car when I'm going out or even on my phone when I'm going for a walk. This is for a couple of reasons. One is that it's like, okay, like...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I'd like to be a little more present in my environment and be looking out the window instead of looking at my screen. But actually, in the book, I spoke to some neuroscientists who are actually concerned about this, who are actually concerned that just as London cab drivers have enlarged hippocampus because they've learned so much about their environment, people who
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
use what's known as stimulus response navigation, that is, who just follow, like, turn left here, turn right there, turn left. And we can do that with or without GPS. Their hippocampus is, they're not using their hippocampus. They're using a different part of the brain called the caudate nucleus. And that actually translates into difference.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Your hippocampus gets smaller and your caudate nucleus gets bigger. And this over life, when we're kids, we're all hippocampus. We don't know our way around the world. So we're cognitive mapping everywhere we go, trying to figure out where we are. As we get older, we learn to use this stimulus response approach because it's faster. It's more efficient. It's less prone to errors, right?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But the problem is, as the world gets more and more optimized, as I can get into my car and just press a button and I never even have to know my own neighborhood, then we're not using our hippocampuses as much. And that leads them to being smaller. And there is research. And it's a chain of logic that isn't... Nobody has shown that turning on your GPS is going to make you get dementia.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But there is a chain of logic that... People who rely most on stimulus response navigation have smaller hippocampus. People who have smaller hippocampuses, that is a known risk factor of conditions like Alzheimer's, PTSD, depression. So I don't want to oversell that, but I would say even with caveats, my takeaway has been I figure out where I'm going.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I look at the directions I try and figure out, understand where I'm going. And then I turn it off until I need it. So I don't use the turn button directions. And that means I get lost sometimes. And that means I have my kids chirping me from the backseat saying like, mommy uses Waze. Mommy wouldn't have missed that turn. Why don't you use Waze?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And I'm like, kids, we're going to be 90 seconds later than we would have. Like, simmer down.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Won't somebody think of the hippocampi? Yeah. That's a concrete thing.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Well, I think a good example of that would be something like ADHD, which maybe this is something we'll get into, but there's a gene that's linked to the desire to explore, which is also linked to ADHD. And so we might say, that gene was awesome. 50,000 years ago when we were hunter-gatherers and the world was unexplored and we were trying to figure out how things worked and where we could go.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Well, if this was at a cocktail party, I would say, that's great. You're fine. You do you. But if they were open to gentle nudging, the question I would ask them, I think, is, are you doing anything in your life where you don't already know the outcome? Is there anything you do...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
this today or this week or this month or this year that isn't the same as what you were doing a year ago or five years ago? Because if not, then when you think about it that way, you might think, huh, there was a time in my life when every day I went to school or whatever and learned something new or did something different or learned a skill or tried a game.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And that actually can be really rewarding. So I would say, you don't have to go to the South Pole to be exploring. But if there's not some area of your life where you're pushing into territory where you don't know how it's going to turn out, whether it's exploring new music or taking up a new hobby or wandering through your neighborhood by a different route than you normally do.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
These are all steps on a very broad scale, and you can be anywhere on that scale. Your want curve is different from everybody else's want curve, and it will change throughout life.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
But if you're way on that left side of the want curve where everything is predictable, everything is the same, you've optimized everything to the point of total predictability, consider that you might enjoy a surprise now and then.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, there's a definite yin and yang. And I'm like you, I'm actually, I would describe myself as like a recreational optimizer. It's like, no, seriously, I know how we should load the dishwasher. Like if you put that plate there, then we're not going to get as much water on that. And then we'll be like, I've thought this through, I've gamed it out. I've performed the experiments.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So don't load the dishwasher this other way. And yeah, There's a fun in the optimization, but it is in tension with my simultaneous desire to have adventure. So I think of this in the context of going on vacations. My wife and I, or my family and I, we do some fun backpacking. I do some canoeing. The goal is to get out and to have an adventure. And yet...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
The instinct is also, let's Google and see if we can find trip blogs from anybody else who's done this trip. We'll find pictures of everything we're going to see there. We'll know exactly what to expect. We'll know whether we need to bring crampons. We'll know whether we need this or that. And we'll be fully prepared for this.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And then you go on the trip and it's like, all right, it's exactly what I expected. So hang on, why did I come here if I already did all that research? So these... These impulses are constantly at war and always will be, I think. Sometimes you just need to give a push. It was interesting. Last summer, my family, we did a hiking trip in the Pyrenees.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
My wife and I were both super busy leading up to it. We got there and we were like, holy crap, we actually didn't do our usual obsessive level of research on this hiking route. It was awesome. So each day we were like, well, let's figure out what's coming next because we don't know. We didn't research it.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
That gene is a pain in the neck if you're a nine-year-old boy sitting in school being told, please sit still for the next 10 hours. So there are certainly ways that in the modern world, being a born explorer is like being a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. There's still lots of scope, I would argue.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And then that's a lesson that I'm trying to keep in mind that it's like, yeah, control and optimization are great, but sometimes it's nice to just like, who the hell knows? Let's see what happens.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I'm now at Outside Magazine. So I write about once a week for Outside Magazine on new research in fitness, endurance, that kind of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
yeah everyone needs to follow you on twitter at sweat science it's you know if you like evidence-based exercise stuff you're awesome and uh new book why should people go and get it well they should explore the topic of exploring i i hope it'll you know there's no magic formula but i hope it'll encourage people to to find spaces in their life to uh to be surprised sick alex i appreciate you thanks so much chris
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
One of the conclusions that I came away with that makes me feel good is that actually there's still lots of scope for exploration in the world. Even though there's no continents to discover, there's a lot of ways that we can explore. So I think it's a matter of finding a way to harness your inclination, whether that's to be really exploratory or maybe less so.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, so... Genetics is obviously, it's a fraught topic, right?
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#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Nobody's going to hear this except you and me, right? So this is okay.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah. So about 50,000 years ago, Humans started to spread out across the globe. So there are various humans and human ancestors and various species that had come and gone and bounced around in Africa, Europe, Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. But about 50,000 years ago, things got serious. And all of a sudden, humans started to spread to every habitable spot on the globe, literally.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So they're making it to Easter Island. They're making it to the southern tip of South America. They're making it to the Arctic.
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#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Another thing that happened about 50,000 years ago is that there was a random genetic mutation to a dopamine receptor in our brains, a receptor called DRD4, that basically, for the people who got this mutation, it amped up their sensitivity to dopamine such that they got a bigger kick out of discovering something new or unexpected, finding novelty.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And what's very interesting, one of the nuggets of science that got me interested in this topic that told me there's something more to say other than just like, hey, it's nice to discover new things.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
is that if you look at populations around the world and you trace how far they've had to migrate, they had to migrate to get to their current location over the tens of thousands of years since they left Africa, The farther that population had to migrate, the higher the proportion of the explorer's version of this DRD4 gene, the one that makes people seek and like novelty.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And so at the southern tip of South America, you've got populations that have 80% of them have this explorer's gene. And in parts of Europe, you've got places where people have 10% or 20% have the explorer's version of the gene. So this doesn't mean that everybody in South America explores and nobody in Europe does. But it's a sign that this behavior is...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
wired into us somehow because we all have the drd4 gene so we all have the same reward circuitry that makes us sensitive or attracted to novelty it's just some people have a higher a bigger helping of it than others
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Interesting. So dopamine is super complicated, right? It affects our lives in many, many different ways. But you can think of novelty and drugs, for example. One way of thinking about dopamine is that you don't get a hit of dopamine when something is good. You get a hit when something is better than expected, right?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So that's part of the reason why it drives us to explore, because if you go in a place where you don't know what to expect, that's a great way to find something that exceeds your expectations. But it also, it's the same kind of thing that drives actually addictive behavior. You take a drug for the first time, it's, whoa, it's better than you expected. You want to do that again.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, I mean, what's not interesting about explorers? Yeah, so where did this book start? I mean... Since I was like five years old, I loved the idea of pretending that I was an explorer in the woods discovering things. But really, I think this book started actually around the time we spoke, after my last book came out.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You take it for the 10th time, you know exactly what to expect. So there's no more prediction error. You don't get the dopamine hit. The only way to do that is to amp up the dose to get more because then you can surprise yourself. So there's a connection between a lot of risk-seeking behaviors and a lot of addictive behaviors, gambling behaviors. So exploring is great, but it's a... This...
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
this drive can be harnessed in productive ways. It can also lead us down some, some, uh, less productive ways.
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#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I think the biggest, um, The misconception, let's say, about dopamine is that it's like the pleasure chemical, that it's what you get when you feel good. In fact, this has been known for 20 or 30 years that it's actually – you don't get a hit of dopamine, again, when something is good. You get something when it's better than expected. So it's about expectation.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You had to do 900 more people before you were ready for me again.
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#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So it's about wanting something more than having it. The pleasure of having something, that's like endogenous morphine, basically, endorphins. The pleasure of wanting something, dopamine is related to that. But the brain repurposes the same channels for different communication.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I'll be honest, I had hoped to have the definitive theory of dopamine like, people, I'm going to tell you what dopamine does. Here it is. Here's the truth. Here's the myth. And my impression after spending an awful lot of time talking to scientists and reading the papers is that even scientists aren't entirely sure the full story of dopamine right now.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
So the message I would hope people would take away is it's not just a pleasure chemical and that the dopamine fasting idea, you know, the idea that, oh, we get too much dopamine in society today. It's one of those things where I think the scientific underpinnings of that are not solid.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
It doesn't mean I think the advice is bad to actually try and maybe not always be the rat pressing the button saying, give me more, give me more, give me more. But dopamine is a lot harder to pin down than that.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Yeah, which is always a good plan. I think... I would go back to that distinction I made before between exploring can lead you to learn about the world and exploring can make you feel good. And I would say the dopamine part, like I think when we talk about dopamine, we're using it as a shorthand for saying, let's do the things that give us a rush that feel good.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
And often that's mediated by dopamine. I think it's worth being thoughtful about is this good feeling, does it align with also teaching me about the world or teaching me about myself, taking me in somewhere that's worth going? Or is this just empty calories? Is this the equivalent of just tearing open sugar packets and pouring them down my throat?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I wrote a book about endurance in 2018, and this is not intended as a gratuitous plug for that book, but the book did well, and it was the culmination of about... 10 years, let's say of really focusing in on the science of endurance, really narrowing and narrowing on an ever decreasing specialty. Um, and it did well enough that I was like, Hey, cool.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Or am I eating an apple, which is giving me some nice sugar, but it's also giving me a bunch of other things that are useful? So I know it's easy to beat up on, you know, like,
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
tiktok or whatever um and say oh we're just wasting our lives with or even technology in general right of the last 20 years we can say oh modern technology is is rotting our brains and i don't think that's that's true or fair but i think there are times when i sit scrolling the internet where i really am just sitting there like the rat pressing the button saying give me something else that surprises me give me something else that's interesting that's give me something else that outrages me
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
When I do that, I'm tapping into my exploring circuitry. I'm tapping into my dopamine circuitry. I don't finish and I'm like, wow, I'm a better person than I was six hours ago when I sat down in the chair. There are other ways of exploring, be it reading a book or even on the internet, seeking out deliberately something where you're like, I'm going to learn something.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I'm going to tune into Chris's show and I'm going to hear a great conversation with that nice Alex guy. I'm joking here, but It's not that we don't want to get those hits. It's just that it's great if they also are leading us in a way that is worthwhile, too.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
You know, there's a really interesting book by Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation, which really gets into the addictive elements of dopamine. And I... It's a little embarrassing when I'm thinking of like, what are the examples I remember from the books? There were a lot of examples of people who were like addicted to masturbating. And I just remember being like, whoa, that's a rough road to travel.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
I mean, how uncomfortable is that going to be after a while? So yeah, I think you can. And I think at least Annalenki makes a pretty compelling case that this is really a case of being addicted to dopamine. I think addiction is... It's a word that carries a lot of weight and sometimes gets like, so look, I'm a runner, right? And so there's a lot of discussions about, is running addictive?
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
Do people get addicted to running? Do those people who have to get up every morning and go for the run, are they addicted to the endorphins or the endocannabinoids or whatever it is? And it's like, well, do they feel worse if they don't go for a run? Yeah, they feel worse if they don't go for a run. So in some neurochemical sense, you could say they're addicted to it.
Modern Wisdom
#936 - Alex Hutchinson - How To Rewire Your Brain To Take More Risks
If you talk to psychologists about the definition of addiction, there's other criteria like, is it interfering with their life? Are they neglecting their family? Are their kids sitting at home saying, I wish I could have breakfast, but mommy had to go for a three-hour run? If that's the case, then it's an addiction that's having a negative effect.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
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Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
This idea of an explore-exploit dilemma, it comes from a Stanford University management professor named James March, who wrote about it back in the 90s. And he was talking about it in a corporate context. Should companies invest in R&D, or should they invest their money in marketing their current product line?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And his main contention was that companies tend to systematically underinvest in exploration in R&D because the returns are – it's a long time before you know whether you've made a successful gamble. So if you invest in marketing, you can see a sales bump, and right away you're like, that was a good thing to do. I'll do more of it.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
If you invest in R&D, three years later, you're still not sure whether the product's going to pan out. You don't know whether it's going to be success or failure. So the feedback is less direct. And I think that applies in personal lives, too, that taking a chance, we don't always know as clearly. We don't see the effects right away.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Whereas sticking with what you know, you know what you're going to get, and you get this positive feedback. So that leads us maybe to... to not learn as well as we should about those times when we took a chance and it paid off. So I think it requires sort of being aware of that and stopping and thinking, okay, what are the things that were meaningful in my life?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
What are the decisions I made that I'm really happy I did? If you ask me to list the five best decisions I made, do I look back and say, I'm really glad I just stuck with the tried and true and didn't try out this other thing? I think for most people, that's not the case.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
You know, there's an area that I found really interesting in psychology called the effort paradox. Because when we talk about exploring, we often end up telling these tales of, you know, explorers who crossed the ocean or whatever, and three quarters of them died of starvation, and it's very hard.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And even in our own conversation right today, we've been talking about exploration, but we've been talking about taking a risk and the possibility of failure.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And so there's a tendency, I think, to think about exploration or about the challenges we might face as a price you have to pay for the occasional, for the payoff that, yeah, it's going to be hard if I try and do this thing, but, you know, there's a chance it's going to lead to something good. So it's worth putting up with the difficulty.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And what the effort paradox says is that's the wrong way to think about it. That in fact, if something is hard, if running a marathon or climbing a mountain is hard and That's actually part of the attraction. We do it because it's challenging, because the feeling of doing something challenging makes it feel meaningful to us.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And so that is a different way of thinking about the challenge, that we shouldn't run away from things that are hard, but we should realize that whether it's running a marathon or whether it's having kids or whether it's buying furniture from Ikea, sometimes doing things that are hard actually is kind of the point and is what makes it feel good.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
I think we can answer that on a few different levels. And I think if we go deep enough, what we're really saying is that Being curious about the unknown, always wanting to know what's around the next corner or what's over the horizon has been good for us as a species, that it's helped us to survive. It's helped us to find new resources and figure out better ways of doing things.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
So we explore fundamentally because it helps us learn about the world. Now, when I'm on vacation, I'm not necessarily like, I really need to know what's around that corner so I can learn about the world and propagate the species. I... over time we've evolved so that exploring feels good.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
It feels fun to resolve, to find an area that I don't know something about, to find an area of uncertainty and to resolve that uncertainty, to learn about the world. So I think in the modern sense, in the proximate sense, we're driven by curiosity because it's fun, because it feels good, because we enjoy it.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
But the underlying reason is because that's a good thing for a species to have is the desire to learn about the world.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
I think so. And I think, you know, When I talked to one of the psychologists who works on the effort paradox about this, we got into talking about the meaning in life, which is a heavy topic, right? And so I was like, I don't know what meaning is. What does it mean to say that something is meaningful?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And he said, well, when you ask people whether an activity like having kids or going on a trip or something... They can't articulate what they mean by meaningful, but they can answer whether something was meaningful or not. And I think meaning is, it's a big word, it's a heavy word, and it's a very imprecise and hard to define word.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
It's something that we get from undertaking adventures and explorations and opportunities to discover new things that we don't get necessarily from sitting on the sofa and watching a documentary about someone else going and having an adventure.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Yeah, it's, you know, the topic or the debate that has launched a thousand arguments in, you know, philosophy departments around the world. And I certainly can't answer what meaning is. But yeah, I can think back in my life and say, wow, that was a really, I'm glad I did that for reasons that I can't articulate. It felt really meaningful.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Yeah, those are two very different things, aren't they? And, you know, obviously meaning is about more than exploring. And so you can add in factors like purpose.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And, you know, I think people in the military feel a powerful sense of purpose too, but they're doing something hard and they know that it's not something that's, you know, it's not necessarily something fun, but it's something that is meaningful.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
If I was to generalize, I would say no, I don't think people think about this a lot. Even when I started to dig into this literature and the science and ask people about it, There are some scientists in the world who are thinking very carefully about it, but most people, they say they're not analyzing their decisions.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
People, especially as we get into adulthood, and we're all busy and we're all trying to pay the bills and take care of the family and all that. In a sense, we're trying to minimize decision fatigue. It takes some energy to stop and think about, why am I making this decision? Is this the right decision?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Am I considering what could be if I did something different, or am I just trying to get through the day? It's understandable, but I think a little more introspection on how and why we make our decisions is probably a good thing.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
You know, I think there's a bunch of research on how exploring changes across the lifespan. And we naturally explore less as we get older, and that makes sense, because we know more about the world, so we don't need to explore as much, and we... have less time left to enjoy it, to be brutally frank about it.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
There's less value in discovering something new at my age than there was when I was eight years old and would have had an extra four decades to enjoy whatever that thing is. So there's a tendency to kind of accept this slide of this gradual decrease of exploration that makes sense. One of the researchers I spoke to, I asked a lot of researchers, like, should we be trying to explore more?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And he said, you know, this decline in exploration is natural. But what you have to remember is that unlike a million years ago when we were evolving, if you're 60 years old, you've probably got a good, you know, and if you're lucky enough to be healthy, you've got a good two or three decades more of living and enjoying things.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
So you need to still be exploring because we live a long time now and we have the opportunity to keep discovering new things. So that's a message that really struck home for me.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
If we want to think in terms of minimizing regret, which, believe it or not, mathematicians have the definition of regret, which is the difference between basically what you got and what you could have got if you had a crystal ball and had been able to make perfect decisions. To minimize regret, you do best if you choose optimistically, if you're more willing to take a chance.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
A hundred percent. And that's, I think, one of the realizations I've come to after spending three or four years digging into the research about how we decide when to explore. I kind of thought that exploring is so cool. We should always explore more. How do I explore more? But I've come to a different position, which is...
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
It's about knowing when to explore and when to exploit, if you think of that as the opposite of explore. And if you did nothing but explore, think of it in the context of music. If you're always searching for new music, that's great because you're finding new things.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
But if you were to never listen to the same album twice because you're so dedicated to always finding something new, that would be kind of sad too. You'd never actually be enjoying. So it's absolutely important to...
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
I think that's a tension that exists in all of us, maybe in different contexts and different respects. Thinking of the food example again, one of the interesting things, so you can do huge big data analyses of millions of orders from food delivery companies to try and get a sense, rather than just talking in the abstract of, do we like trying new dishes or do we like going back to old favorites?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
We can see what people do and how they rate those meals. And when people try something new, on average, like if they order from a restaurant they've never ordered from before, on average, they tend to rate that meal lower. So by exploring, they've actually taken a hit. They've got, on average, a meal that's worse.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
But over time, they have a mix of good and bad meals, and they drop the duds, and they add the good new one into the rotation. And so as a result, their ratings creep up over time. So exploring...
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
pays off in the long term but we kind of know we kind of have the realization that it comes with a risk and it means that sometimes we're going to get worse results so you may you may decide to go somewhere new on vacation and you realize that by taking a chance that you may end up with a crummy vacation so it's natural to feel that um that that worry or that that resistance to exploring.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And I think, you know, one solution is to try and zoom out at rather than thinking about how am I going to enjoy this week? It's like, will I be glad in a year or, you know, in a year from now that I took a chance and maybe discovered something that will make my future vacations even better.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
I think we have an intuition about that, right? You look back and you say, boy, I wish I'd asked her to dance more likely than you are to be worrying about, oh, I can't believe I asked her to dance and she said no. The things we did that didn't turn out don't generally stick with us as much as the things that might have been.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
The scientists who study decision theory and who try to understand what is the optimal way of making decisions They have an approach. It's called the upper confidence bound algorithm, which is a complicated name. But the basic advice that they come up with based on the mathematics is that you should make decisions based on what has the best realistic upside.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
What has the chance of turning out really well? If you're choosing between a job that's stable but kind of boring and not what you're interested in, Versus the job that maybe is a little more uncertain, maybe has a lower starting salary, but has a pathway towards your dream job. Their advice is, you know, all else being equal, take a chance on the job that has the bigger upside. Because...
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Again, to your point, when you're sitting on your deathbed, or even a year or five years from now, you're going to look back and say, boy, I'm glad I took a chance on something that had a great possibility of paying off, even if it didn't work out, compared to never knowing whether it might have worked out.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
That's the human condition. We can't split ourselves in two and know how both options would have turned out. So I think the advice is to choose optimistically, to go for the thing that you think will be best, recognizing that A, it might not turn out, and B, you'll never know if you had chosen the other path. Maybe it would have turned out to be great, but this is the human condition.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
If we want to think in terms of minimizing regret, which believe it or not, mathematicians have a definition of regret, which is the difference between basically what you got and what you could have got if you had a crystal ball and have been able to make perfect decisions. To minimize regret, you do best if you choose optimistically, if you're more willing to take a chance.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Not a reckless chance, not a, oh, if I invest all my money in lottery tickets, there's a chance I might be a billionaire. That's not a good decision. But when there's a realistic chance of a good upside, if you're in a position that you can make that gamble without exposing yourself to terrible problems, it's probably a good idea to give it a shot.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Yeah, and we will always have those regrets. It would be impossible to live a life with none of those regrets. But boy, if you can try out some of those things after all, I think in general, you're happy you did, even if it puts you through a little bit of awkwardness or some uncertainty in the moment.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
Yeah, I mean, this goes back in part to what we were talking about earlier with the idea of an explorer's gene, that some people really are wired to enjoy uncertainty and novelty more than others. And there's also, I think, we have to recognize that even within a given individual. I'm very exploratory in some aspects, and I like my routines in other parts of my life.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And so there are times, depending on the context, where I might be more exploratory. And the example that springs to mind for me is, There's all this research on when should you take a parking spot versus... This is part of the exploring research. When should you grab the parking spot you see versus keep driving towards your destination and hope you get a parking spot that's closer to you?
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
And you can do all these sophisticated calculations about, well, how many... What is the rate of empty parking spots? How far are you from the destination? But for me... I hate parallel parking under pressure with cars behind me, and I don't mind walking.
Something You Should Know
When to Take a Risk or Play it Safe & Why You Need More Muscle
So if I see a parking spot that's really wide and I can go in front ways rather than backing into it, I take it, and I don't care what the math says. And to your point, that's my anxiety about parallel parking that makes it worth taking what I've got rather than gambling that there'll be something better down the road.