A plainclothes cop walks into a diner and finds no less than five gun-wielding criminals holding up the crowded joint. “We’re not just going to let you walk out of here,” the cop says. “Who’s we, sucka?” says one of the criminals. “Smith and Wesson and me,” says the cop. He draws his Smith & Wesson and – in a crowded diner – shoots four of the criminals and advances on the last gunman, who’s holding a pistol to a hostage’s head. One itchy trigger finger and the hostage could be dead. The cop glares at the criminal. “Go ahead, make my day.” The cop is “Dirty Harry” Callahan, but really he could be any Hollywood hero. The movie is Sudden Impact, but really it could be any movie or book or manifestation of Western culture.
With a few modern updates, Western culture has been re-creating the same story over and over again since Homer collected The Odyssey more than two and a half thousand years ago. Since the Greeks, the ideal of the unique and strong individual has become so prevalent in Western culture that we have stopped realizing that it is even part of our culture. Often we mistake our perceptions of the world for how the world really is.
Psychologists have long known that North Americans overestimate their own distinctiveness, especially in comparison with East Asians. When asked to describe themselves, Americans and Canadians tend to talk about their individual personality and personal outlook more than Japanese do. North Americans tend to settle arguments in terms of right and wrong, whereas East Asians tend to seek compromises. Dirty Harry is an extreme and violent example, but he is emblematic of Western culture and he sums up our single-minded, goal-oriented behavior with aplomb. “When I see an adult male chasing a female with the intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That’s my policy.”
New research shows that culture even affects our cognition. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claims that Americans and Japanese intuit the emotions of others differently based on cultural training. “North Americans try to identify the single important thing that is key to making a decision,” explains Dr. Takahiko Masuda, the study’s author, over the phone from his office at the University of Alberta. “In East Asia they really care about the context.” He studied the eye movement of Americans and Japanese when analyzing a picture of a group of cartoon people. When asked to interpret the emotion of the person in the center, the Japanese looked at the person for about one second before moving on to the people in the background. They needed to know how the group was feeling before understanding the emotion of the individual. The Americans (and Canadians in subsequent studies) focused 95% of their attention on the person in the center. Only 5% of their attention was focused on the background, and this, Dr. Masuda points out, didn’t influence their interpretation of the central figure’s emotion. For North Americans the foreground is all-important.
Dr. Masuda is quick to point out that Americans and Japanese are physiologically the same. The difference in eye movement is tied to the roots of our respective cultures. When trying to explain the natural world, the Ancient Greeks – the founders of Western civilization – tended to focus on central objects and sought to explain their rules of behavior. Funnily enough, Aristotle thought a rock had the property of “gravity.” It didn’t occur to him that a system was working its powers on the rock. The Chinese on the other hand took a more holistic approach. They believed that everything occurred within a context, or a field of forces, and thus they unraveled the relationship between the moon and the tides.
These differences in philosophy can be explained, at least in part, by the environments that spawned them. “We are surrounded by socially created information, which affects our perception,” Masuda explains. And perception affects our culture. Research shows that North American cities are less cluttered than East Asian cities, which means that North Americans can spend more time considering salient objects. When Americans or Canadians visit East Asia, they are often overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to process. I have experienced this phenomenon personally. The first time I bused from Incheon Airport into Seoul, South Korea, I was dumbfounded by the number of buildings, advertisements, lights, cars and people and had to turn away from the window to stop my head from spinning. Dr. Masuda first arrived in North America when he was 26. Compared to Japan, which was crowded with people and objects and “complex pieces of information,” he felt North American cities to be lonely places.
Masuda stresses that no way of perceiving the world is better than another and refuses to interpret his studies too broadly. He has yet to conduct his tests in Africa or South America. But it seems to me that Masuda’s study is important: It reminds us that there is more than one way of seeing the world.
North Americans have a tendency toward isolating singular goals and working doggedly towards them. And we have achieved some remarkable accomplishments. We put a man on the moon, invented the telephone and the airplane and achieved a thousand more seemingly impossible tasks. We congratulate ourselves on our individualism in our movies, our art, our personal relationships and, of course, our politics. But as we do so, we perpetuate this trait – perception informs culture, culture informs perception – until we mistake the way we see the world for the only way to see the world.
As alluring as the Dirty Harry approach may be, is it time to put away our Smith & Wesson and start considering the other customers in the diner? The problems we face today – the environmental degradation of our planet, global recession, religious fundamentalism – don’t fit inside borders or simple categories. Context is unavoidable. We need to start looking for it.
We know what you’re thinking: You’re far too cynical to fall for the ads you fast forward through on your DVR or the little tricks employed by marketers and politicians to push your subconscious buttons. But are you sure? Because science has found …
#5. The Color of a Pill Can Trick You into Thinking It’s Working
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Remember when Neo got to choose between the red pill and the blue pill? The blue pill would have put him back to sleep in the fake world of cubicles and steaks in the Matrix, where the red pill would wake him up to the real world and its industrial womb factory. You probably just chalked that scene up to another case of Hollywood turning a complicated situation into a simplistic metaphor, but what you probably didn’t realize is that you’re living out your own little Matrix scenario every time you go to the pharmacy.
“I really hope being swallowed by a mirror is covered by my insurance.”
What? How?
Did you notice how the red pill would let Neo “wake up” to the real world, but the blue pill would let him stay “asleep” in the dream world? Now go to your pharmacy. What color are all of the sleeping pills?
Blue, blue and blue — if not the package, then the pill itself. That’s not coincidence; researchers have found that the color of a pill makes a difference in how it works. In one study, every patient was given the exact same sedative, but some patients received it in a blue pill and others in an orange pill. The blue pill takers reported falling asleep 30 minutes faster, and sleeping 30 minutes longer, than the orange pill takers.
What the hell? It’s yet another weird manifestation of the placebo effect. You probably already know that you can give a guy with a headache a Tic Tac and tell him it’s medicine, and there’s a good chance it will fix his headache just like an aspirin would, for reasons science doesn’t completely understand. Well, it turns out that that already illogical and somewhat insane phenomenon is also affected by the color of the pill. The reason is that how you perceive effectiveness affects effectiveness — and when it comes to stuff you consume, color matters.
So, in a different experiment, subjects were told they were going to get a sedative or a stimulant, when in fact they were getting neither — all of the pills were placebos. Yet 66 percent of the subjects who took blue pills reported feeling less alert, compared to only 26 percent of those who took pink pills. That’s because we’ve been trained to think that blue = sleep.
Also blue = drowning, and certain types of poisonous reptiles. Sweet dreams!
In a different study, when researchers put various fake medicine packages in front of subjects, the subjects picked certain colors of boxes over others. Warm colors like brown and red were perceived as more potent, especially if the shades were darker. Green and yellow, on the other hand, might as well have been 7Up-flavored Tic Tacs as far as the subjects were concerned. And this is why heart medicines are often red and brown, while skin medicines are yellow and sleeping pills are often blue or green. Painkillers, on the other hand, are often white … maybe to remind us of opium? We’re not sure.
Getty All we remember is consuming ghosts whole, and then the long silence.
Wait, it gets even stupider. Color associations are also cultural. Maybe in America blue is a calming, peaceful color, but in Italy it’s associated with the national soccer team. So researchers found that, rather than making him drowsy, a blue pill would send an Italian man screaming and singing and rioting into the night.
#4. “Priming” Can Play Us Like Puppets
Quick: When’s the last time you bought flowers at a grocery store? Never? Yet when you walk through the door at most grocery chains, what’s the first thing you see? Here’s what’s right inside the door at Whole Foods:
What the hell? These are grocery stores, people are there to buy food. Why would they lead off with a fringe product that 99 percent of the shoppers probably won’t even look at? It has to do with the subtle science of mind control known as priming.
Getty “It’s goddamn tangerines and muesli again. That van guy is the worst.”
What? How?
The idea behind the flowers is that, as we’ve touched on elsewhere, hitting you with a product that is highly perishable yet fresh will “prime” you into thinking of freshness, and that you will carry that “freshness” mindset with you all the way back to the discount meat case. It sounds like bullshit — humans don’t connect completely unrelated ideas like that, right? Yet it’s confirmed pretty much every time they test it.
Sometimes “priming” is as simple as finding that people will keep a room cleaner if it smells like disinfectant — that subtle reminder is enough to make people think, “This is a clean room, I should keep it clean.” But when you see how far they can take this, it gets weird.
Getty “Can we try to keep the murder room confined to one area, please?”
In one study, scientists instructed volunteers to form sentences using words associated with old people, under the guise that it was a language proficiency test. So, one sentence could have been “The Depends were too elderly (in Florida.)” That’s just an example we made up. So these hip, presumably liberal young college students were pumped with terms associated with the elderly, and guess what happened next?
No, they didn’t hike up their pants to their nipples and start watching Jay Leno. But as they left the study, they walked slower than the students who were given neutral words earlier. The students primed to think of elderly stereotypes took on characteristics they associated with the elderly. Seriously, this happened. And you can get the same result in infinite ways; in another experiment, those who were primed with words conveying rudeness (like “aggressively,” “bold,” “rude,” “bother,” “disturb” and “intrude”) interrupted the experimenter more frequently during a conversation after the tests.
Getty They also found a clipboard embedded in their foreheads later on, but that was probably just a coincidence.
Wait, it gets stupider than that. In yet another study, researchers set up a devious experiment where students accidentally bumped into a klutz on the way to the session. Their bump partner held either a hot or a cold drink, which he or she asked the unknowing patsy to hold for a second while they collected their shit. When the students actually got to the study, they were asked to rate a hypothetical person’s personality. The subjects who had held an iced tea earlier were more likely to call the fake persona “cold” or “selfish” than the students who held a cup of hot coffee. Some base association with cold and warmth at the subconscious level was enough to affect their conscious judgment.
Getty “Hmm. I’d say the person was fuzzy and likely to consume their young.”
#3. Our Views on a Subject Depend on How It’s Phrased
You’re probably already aware that minor changes to the wording of a survey can alter people’s opinions. During the health care debate, for example, four separate organizations conducted polls to see what percentage of Americans supported a so-called “public option.” Their results ranged from a measly 44 percent to 66 percent support, due in large part to differences in wording. Calling it a “government administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get” garnered 66 percent support. And calling it “a government-run health insurance plan” plummeted support to 44 percent. Calling it “Just what Mussolini would have wanted” reduced the number to 2 percent.
You might think that it’s just a matter of people not actually understanding how the system works (“I said I wanted Medicare, not GOVERNMENT!”), but it really is all about how the brain can be manipulated with very subtle differences in wording, regardless of your knowledge level.
What? How?
In this study, social psychologists sent out surveys to several hundred registered voters before an election. Half the recipients were asked if it was “important to vote.” The other half were asked if it was “important to be a voter.” With this one difference, the people who read the word “voter” were nearly 14 percent more likely to actually vote on Election Day. The researchers suspected that using the word “voter” caused people to identify themselves with the word. Since these people considered themselves to be voters, they were more likely to get out and vote.
Getty “I was called a motherfucker, too, but that’s on everyone’s manifesto.”
On the other hand, using the word “vote” implied that the survey was asking the people to perform a task. Even if they answered “yes” to the question, they felt no association with the word (i.e., they weren’t voters, they were just being told to vote), so they were less likely to follow through. One was about a simple action, the other was about being a type of person.
So what happens if someone implies that you’re a “gamer” or a “runner” or a “hooker”? You do the math.
Getty If you’re a “mather.”
#2. You Emotionally Bond With People You Sing With
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There’s not very much we know about the people of North Korea, but we do know they love to do things in unison. Watch a few minutes of this footage from the North Korean Mass Games to see what we mean:
It’s nice how Kim Jong Il can’t be bothered to give much of a damn during the whole thing. Can you even imagine the months it took to put together that monstrosity? And for what? To put on a show for a guy who glibly flips through a magazine halfway through? Except, oh wait. There’s a lot more to these exercises than impressing the dear leader. And whatever it is the participants are getting out of their involvement with this performance, you’ve probably experienced it as well.
Getty Oh God, it’s the same expression that our fathers had when we explained what we did for a living.
What? How?
Ever been to a sporting event in America? A football game, baseball game, an anything in a stadium? What did you do first, once you found your seats and got your drinks and settled in for the game? You stood back up and sang the national anthem with everyone else. Guess what? Scientists have discovered that when we perform synchronized activities such as singing songs, reciting chants or even as simple an act as walking together, we end up feeling more connected to the people we’re performing these activities with.
Getty “We share everything but synchronized boners.”
Because it turns out it’s not what you’re saying or singing or chanting that matters. It’s just the fact that you’re performing these activities in unison with other people. Researchers at Stanford University found that when volunteers were instructed to walk around campus together, the simple difference between letting them walk normally versus instructing them to walk in step with each other increased the volunteers’ willingness to cooperate with each other afterward.
Even more surprisingly, how harmonious the participants felt had nothing to do with any positive emotions created by the synchronized activities themselves. Whether or not they enjoyed performing the activities, they simply became more cooperative with each other. The researchers concluded that “synchrony rituals” may therefore have evolved as a way for societies to get individuals to work together and be willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the group.
Getty “Put your right hand over your … eh, you’re good, buddy.”
Hell, why else would every country have a national anthem? Why would every military make their troops march and chant in unison?
#1. Cars Have Facial Expressions, and We Buy Accordingly
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The human mind loves to see human faces in everything; tortillas, clouds, cat butts, the moon, other faces, everything. The phenomenon even has a name: pareidolia. Knowing this, would you want to live in the Hitler house?
When making faces out of things, we don’t just say, “Hey, that cloud looks like Abraham Lincoln” or “That scab looks like Al Roker.” We give the face emotions, presumably based on which way its eyebrows and mouth are going. And researchers at the University of Vienna found that we therefore subconsciously tack on those emotions to, say, cars. In other words, we did half of Pixar’s work for them in 2006.
We had to, because they clearly couldn’t give a shit whether these guys were relatable.
What? How?
It’s easy to see it — every car has two headlights (eyes), a grill (mouth) and maybe something that looks like a nose. So, knowing we assign emotions to objects, you’d think that most of us would pick the happiest-looking cars we could find. Like we’d all be clamoring for vintage Volkswagen Beetles.
superbeetles After cleaning Lindsay Lohan’s vomit off the back seats.
You’d be wrong. When we drive, we’re not out there to make friends, unless you’re a hippie, and then shouldn’t you be on a bike or a donkey or something? Nope, what we want to convey is toughness, speed, aggression. So we want our cars to have the face of a monster. Or at least a mean dude. Researchers found that lower, wider cars with a wide air intake and angled or slit-like headlights give a picture of power. Not sleepiness, as you’d expect, but power. And that’s what drivers are looking for when picking out new vehicles. At least, when picking out certain kinds of vehicles.
The folks at Your Logical Fallacy Is have compiled a list of 24 common ways that you and I are often mistaken in the way we think. I have to say that looking through their site is perhaps the most fun I’ve ever had being told how wrong I am. And not just wrong in a certain instance, but consistently and fundamentally flawed in the very way I think.
Fun, right? I thought so.
Included at the site is a free, very high-res poster for those of you who may have a reason to hang these as a reminder on the wall. Here are 11 (out of 24) of the logical fallacies from the poster…
If you’ve ever been part of a discussion on ethics, in school or elsewhere, chances are you didn’t spend much time talking about your feelings. It’s believed that to live ethically, we must engage our reason, which reins in the whims and follies of emotion. Ethics, then, is heavy on Spock and light on Sally Struthers. But what if unethical behavior is actually spurred, rather than prevented, by reason?
Consider a provocative series of experiments conducted by Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto. He put test subjects into interactions with an anonymous partner where they had two options: to treat their partners fairly or to lie to them. If they decided to lie, they would gain at the expense of their partners.
Before making the decision to cheat or be fair, the test subjects were given some guidance. Some were encouraged to think rationally about the situation and to ignore their emotions. Equipped with this advice, the great majority (69%) analyzed the situation and con-cluded that they should screw their partners. Others were primed to “make decisions based on gut feelings.” Their guts were pretty trustworthy: Only 27% lied.
There’s a twist: Even though the study shows that we would be treated better by people who trust their feelings, we’re leery of them. When people were given a choice to interact with a rational decision-making partner or a gut-trusting one, 75% chose the rational partner.
Zhong concluded that “deliberative processes can license morally questionable behaviors by focusing on tangible monetary outcomes and reducing emotional influence.” If only such behavior were limited to the lab.
In reality, it seems to have played a role in the Great Economic Kidney Punch we all just suffered. Mike Francis worked at Morgan Stanley before the economic collapse. He bought up scads of questionable mortgages, including some of the NINA (no income, no asset) variety, meaning that the bank giving the loan would not verify the customer’s income or assets. The customer applying for the loan knew his answers wouldn’t be checked, so he didn’t face much risk in declaring, say, a $300,000 salary as a Taco Bell night manager. (What can I say? The people love my gorditas.)
As reported on This American Life‘s must-listen episode, “The Giant Pool of Money,” Francis said that, with the NINA loans, the banks were “setting you up to lie. Something about that feels very wrong. It felt wrong way back then, and I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately, what happened … we did it because everyone else was doing it.”
When you’re getting rich, it’s pretty easy to soothe the ol’ gut. If you need a rationalization, your mind will provide one. For instance, many bankers clung to their analytical models, which “proved” that their investments would be okay even if default rates reached historically high levels. Unfortunately, because it had never occurred to the bankers of yesteryear to give $500,000 loans to minimum-wage workers, the historical models weren’t all that accurate. You’ve got to love the logic, though: Historically, the most weight I’ve ever gained in a year was 2 pounds, so I might as well start eating a quart of Ben & Jerry’s every day for breakfast.
Looking back on the subprime-mortgage debacle, it seems the only accurate information in the whole ecosystem was Francis’s bad feeling. And one suspects other people had it, too. What if a few dozen others in the chain had listened to that feeling?
A different industry provides a lesson in the value of heeding your gut about ethical choices. In 1987, Paul O’Neill took over as CEO of Alcoa, the world’s largest producer of aluminum. On his first day, he announced that no one who worked at Alcoa should ever be hurt at work. The acceptable rate of accidents was no accidents. This raised a lot of eye-brows. Working with aluminum is a dangerous business, and there are plenty of ways to get injured. And Alcoa already had a good safety record, in the top third of companies. O’Neill recalls the skeptical hallway conversations among senior managers: “When the next tough economic time comes, he’ll shut up about this.”
He didn’t. O’Neill walled off the topic of safety from the “deliberative processes” that Zhong warned about. “If anyone ever calculates how much money we’re saving by being safe, they’re fired,” he told his team. Safety wasn’t a priority; it was a precondition. He told people, “From now on, don’t budget for safety.” O’Neill’s resolve paid off. Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world, despite the aluminum industry’s inherent risks.
Guts aren’t perfect. For instance, we tend to feel so much empathy for individuals that it can doom our efforts to be impartial and consistent. But in the business world, we’ve tipped too far toward pure rationality. We need an emotional counterweight — and we already have it. When you’re in an ethically loaded situation and your gut talks, listen to it.
Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Want to share a Made to Stick column with your team? Go to fastcompany.com/madetostick.
A version of this article appears in the July/August 2009 issue of Fast Company.
In the late 20th Century, John B. Calhoun decided to make Utopia; it started with rats. In 1947 he began to watch a colony of Norway rats, over 28 months he noticed something, in that time the population could have increased to 50,000 rats, but instead it never rose above 200. Then he noticed that the colony split into smaller groups of 12 at most. He continued to study rats up until 1954. Then in 1958, he made his first lab.
He bought the second floor of a barn, and there he made his office and lab. For four years he had Universe 1, a large room hosting rats and mice alike. It was split into four spacious pens connected by ramps, each filled with rats. The thronging mass of rodents produced an odour so strong that unaccustomed visitors took several minutes until they could breathe normally. In 1963 he produced his most famous creation, Universe 1. The worlds first mouse mortality-inhibiting-environment.
2.7 metres square with 1.4m high walls. The ‘Universe’ was surrounded by 16 tunnels leading to food, water and burrows. No predators, no scarcity, the mice would have to be blind to not see the utopia around them. At least it began as Utopia. Four breeding pairs of mice were introduced into Universe 1. After 104 days they adjusted to the new world and the population began to grow, doubling every 55 days. By day 315 the population reached 620. The population then grew much more slowly as the mice came against the limit of space, their only limiting frontier.
Society broke. Young were expelled before they had been properly weaned and were arbitrarily attacked by excessive aggressive male mice. Females became more aggressive, non-dominant males became passive, not retaliating to attacks. The last healthy birth came on the 600th day. Then there were no new mice. Then there were none.
The outside of Universe 25
The purpose of the experiment for Calhoun was to examine a pressing problem, overpopulation. In the post-war 1940′s the world population was rising extremely quickly and in the 1970′s this continued. The question was, what happens next? So he tested it, and tested again. Just 9 years later, in 1972, he produced Universe 25, similar in design but so precise as to keep the temperature at a constant 20 degrees. No matter how he adjusted the ‘Universe’ the results were consistent, the mice moved from perfect to appalling.
After day 600, the male mice just stopped defending their territory, listless mice congregated in the centres of the Universe. These gangs would burst into pointless and sporadic violence. Females stopped reproducing and even started attacking their own young. Mortality rose phenomenally. Roaming mice either attacked or attempted to mount others, irrespective of relation or gender, cannibalism and other acts of depravity consumed them. These were the feral ones. Then there were the ‘beautiful ones.’
The ‘beautiful ones’ withdrew themselves ever so quietly, removing themselves from the sick society. Solitary pursuits began to define them; eating, drinking and grooming among others. No scars on their back or hairs out-of-place, these mice behaved like a separate race. They saw the world through their narrow scopes, as they tossed, turned and tried to cope.
In the end the population sank, even when it was back down to a tolerable level none of the mice changed back. The change was irreversible, the mice were different now. The secluded females could still bear offspring and the beautiful ones had the capacity to help produce them yet it never came. This tipping over into irreversible societal collapse came to be known as ‘The Behavioral Sink.’ John Calhoun called it the first death. Death of the mind and soul, leading eventually to the second death, of the physical form. What he meant was that after the first death, the mice were no longer mice and could never be so again.
Poster for dystopian film Soylent Green
In a time where people worried about the dangers of people gathering in cities it confirmed their worst fears. The paper, when published, was a massive hit as papers go, it fed into the public consciousness and seemed to match up with the worst of the worries. In 1973, the same year in which the paper was published, the film Soylent Green was released. It depicted a future, an overcrowded world where the population could only survive on Soylent Green, a food handout from the government. The source it turns out, was the more than plentiful supply of human corpses. This change, this innovation was reflected in his experiments. From the cannibalism to the behaviour in desperate mice, John Calhoun noticed that some mice, feral though they were, had to innovate to survive, they became creative.
This purpose of the experiments was not to portend some imminent doom for humanity, in fact Calhoun was trying to be positive. He wanted to change cities, his remedy to the behavioural sink was creativity. By changing society and changing how we designed our cities we could avoid becoming mired, stagnant, and eventually, dead as a dormouse. Over 100 Universes were designed after he published the paper in 1973, these ones designed with the aim of promoting creativity and reducing stagnation.
The fact that nearly everyone who read his research used it to draw out doom caused John Calhoun to become distraught. They missed his point, but still he pressed on. Regardless of what was said, there was science to do. He and others promoted space colonies as a way of advancing human societies and he convinced others to change the way they thought of cities. Bringing in the idea that the places in which people lived could affect their lives in the way they were designed.
For the first time in history, over 50% of the world population exists within cities, and they are safer than ever before, due in part to the ideas drawn from John B. Calhoun and his pungent rodents. His 1973 paper has been classed as one of the 40 most influential psychology papers of all time, and with good reason, it may have indirectly saved thousands of lives.
Time is relative. Remember how each day in grade school (especially summer days) seemed to last for an eternity? Ever notice how it seems to take forever to travel a new route on your bike, while the return trip along the same path is done in the blink of an eye?
Turns out, both of those things are connected and they have important implications for the nature of memory. There’s a great summary of the science on this up at The Irish Times. It’s written by William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork.
The key issue, according to Reville, is that the amount of information your brain can store during a given time period isn’t really dependent on the length of that time period. You could store up a lot of new information during 10 minutes of a really interesting lecture. You might store only a little new information during 10 minutes of walking your dog along a path you know very well.
The higher the intensity, the longer the duration seems to be. In a classic experiment, participants were asked to memorise either a simple [a circle] or complex figure . Although the clock-time allocated to each task was identical, participants later estimated the duration of memorising the complex shape to be significantly longer than for the simple shape.
… [H]ere is a “guaranteed” way to lengthen your life. Childhood holidays seem to last forever, but as you grow older time seems to accelerate. “Time” is related to how much information you are taking in – information stretches time. A child’s day from 9am to 3.30pm is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children experience many new things every day and time passes slowly, but as people get older they have fewer new experiences and time is less stretched by information. So, you can “lengthen” your life by minimising routine and making sure your life is full of new active experiences – travel to new places, take on new interests, and spend more time living in the present.
I think this also has some implications for my exercise routine. I am well aware that my ability to run any distance at all is heavily dependent on psychological factors. I am not one of those people who likes to go running in new places, along unfamiliar trails, because it has always made me feel like the distance was much, much longer — and, consequently, leads me to stop running and start walking sooner than I actually have to. I’ve had a lot more luck running on tracks and elliptical machines—situations where it seems to be easier for me to get into a zone and lose track of time. When I run that way, it’s my physical limitations that matter, not my psychological ones.
Of course, I know a lot of people who feel exactly the opposite. Maybe, for those people, running in a routine situation, like a track, makes them start to think more about their day or what’s going on around them, and processing all that information makes the workout seem longer. I’m not sure. But this is awfully interesting.
![Psychology of Color [Infographic]](http://nowsourcing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/psychology-of-color.png)
