David DiSalvo Archives - Farther to Go!

In his second book, Brain Changer (which you don’t need to read), David DiSalvo, who also wrote What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (which you should read), says:

Humans are mind-synced in ways we never realized.

Yes, this is true. It is also true, contradictory though it may be, that we believe we are far more mind-synced than we actually are. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that because we intuit some things about others correctly, we assume that most or all of the rest of our intuitions about them are also correct. As far as this second part goes, we are bound to be wrong—often surprisingly and significantly wrong. (And, no, predicting what someone else might do in a particular circumstance isn’t the same thing as understanding why they’re doing it.)

Theory of mind refers to the ability or tendency to attribute mental states to ourselves and others. It’s pretty straightforward. (1) We attempt to determine our own beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and motivations. (2) We do the same for others. (3) And we distinguish ours from theirs.

Clueless

One of the six actual needs we humans have is other people. So it makes sense that we would have a capacity to understand others. But after my numerous decades of life on this planet—observing myself and others, mostly with dismay—one thing I have learned is that we are relatively clueless about our own beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and motivations.

That makes determining what others are feeling or where they are coming from clueless squared. At a minimum. And although we are pretty good at distinguishing our own selves from other selves, we suck at imagining that other people might legitimately have completely different perspectives and reactions than ours. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be so easily confounded by their actions and reactions.

The conscious part of the brain prefers to avoid expending mental effort and energy on critical thinking. So it leaves most of the driving, and the heavy lifting, to the unconscious part, which excels at generalizing and extrapolating from personal and/or incomplete information.

What’s So for Everyone

Of course there are things that do apply to all of us.

We all have the same functional brain networks.
We are all motivated by the brain’s reward system.
We all view and experience the world through a mental model of it.
We are all at the effect of various cognitive biases.

These facts tell us something about who we are, but they don’t help us understand each other as much as the specifics—or the differences—do.

What’s So for You (vs. Me)

For example:

We don’t access the functional brain networks exactly the same way or to the same extent.
We don’t have identical neural pathways or find the same things rewarding.
Our mental models differ based on our temperament, experiences, beliefs, etc.
We are more prone to some cognitive biases than to others.

So What?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach or explanation when it comes to the specifics (what’s so for you vs. what’s so for me). That’s why when social psychologists claim that “situations” determine behavior more than personality does, I call b.s. And that’s why when systems thinkers claim that one person will react pretty much like any other person within a given system, I also call b.s. (It isn’t that situations and systems have no effect on behavior, but you and I are unlikely to be affected identically because we are not identical to begin with.)

More importantly, that’s why we need to become less clueless about how we operate, so that we can then become more intentional in our own lives and less clueless about how other people operate. At least, that is, if we’d like to make some progress in upping our own game or finding solutions to any of the significant global problems we face. As long as we continue operating under the assumption that we have more clues than we do about ourselves and others, we’re likely to continue getting the results we’re getting now.

What keeps us from achieving the things we want or even set out to achieve? Science writer David DiSalvo (What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite) seems to like why questions—which I’m on record as opposing. He wrote an article for Forbes titled “The 10 Reasons Why We Fail,” which he describes as reflections on falling short—more precisely, why we fail despite ourselves.

Two of his reasons—the first and last, as it happens—really resonate for me based on my own experience and the experiences of friends and acquaintances.

You Don’t Believe You Can Do It

Luke: I can’t believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.

The crucial part of Yoda’s dialogue with Luke is “believe.” The human brain is a powerful problem-solving and prediction making machine, and it operates via a multitude of feedback loops. What matters most in the feedback loop dynamic is input—what goes into the loop that begins the analysis-evaluation-action process, which ultimately results in an outcome. Here’s the kicker: if your input shuttle for achieving a goal lacks the critical, emotionally relevant component of belief, then the feedback loop is drained of octane from the start. Another way to say that is—why would you expect a convincingly successful outcome when you haven’t convinced yourself that it’s possible?

Believing you can do something is a precursor to intentionally changing or initiating a habit. If you start out believing you can’t do it, you will more than likely fulfill that prophecy.

You’re Confused about What to Do

Of all of these 10 ideas, this one is to me the most difficult because it plagues me almost constantly. Gearing up the cerebral feedback loop for achievement is one thing, but without a sense of focus and direction, all of that energy isn’t going to yield very much in the end. My experience has been that sometimes you have to let the energy flow for a while without too firm a sense of direction and see if focus emerges organically. Once it does, you can then nurture it into a more structured method for getting where you want to go.

Confusion abounds, especially when people think they ought to know what to do and where to go, but don’t. There are several ways to prime the pump to gain some clarity about what to do next. Often, however, we and our brains are so frantically busy going in whatever direction we’re going that we can’t slow down enough to realize we don’t actually know what the heck we’re doing.

Theory of Mind:
Less than Meets the Eye