Your Daily Tao

In a similar fashion, we can choose to reappraise debilitating “stress” as productive “coping.” A 2010 study carried out with Boston-area undergraduates looked at what happens when people facing a stressful experience are informed about the positive effects of stress on our thinking—that is, the way it can make us more alert and more motivated. Before taking the GRE, the admissions exam for graduate school, one group of students was given the following message to read: “People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” A second group received no such message before taking the exam. Three months later, when the students’ GRE scores were released, the students who had been encouraged to reappraise their feelings of stress scored an average of 65 points higher. Reappraisal research has begun to elucidate the mechanisms by which this technique exerts its effects. In the GRE study, saliva samples were collected from all the participants and analyzed for the presence of a hormone associated with nervous system arousal. Among the students who engaged in reappraisal, the level of this hormone was elevated—suggesting that their bodies had identified the presence of a challenge and were mounting an effective response, enhancing their alertness and sharpening their attention. Another study explored the neural effects of the reappraisal technique on students who struggle with math anxiety. Their brains were scanned twice as they completed a set of math problems inside an fMRI machine. Before the first round, participants were told to use whatever strategies they usually employed. Before the second round, participants were given instructions on how to engage in reappraisal. When employing the reappraisal approach, the students answered more of the math questions correctly, and the scans showed why: brain areas involved in executing arithmetic were more active under the reappraisal condition. The increased activity in these areas suggests that the act of reappraisal allowed students to redirect the mental resources that previously were consumed by anxiety, applying them to the math problems instead.

Reframing your mindset when feeling nervous can help you tap into your natural capabilities and perform at your best. Our brains have a primitive response to stress, similar to how our ancestors reacted to danger. But by viewing stress as a challenge rather than a threat, we can turn it into a powerful tool that enhances our concentration and alertness. So, next time you’re feeling anxious, reframe your mindset and let your natural response take over.

Coates and his new colleagues examined a group of financial traders working on a London trading floor, asking each one to identify the successive moments when he felt his heart beat—a measure of the individual’s sensitivity to bodily signals. The traders, they found, were much better at this task than were an age- and gender-matched group of controls who did not work in finance. What’s more, among the traders themselves, those who were the most accurate in detecting the timing of their heartbeats made more money, and tended to have longer tenures in what was a notably volatile line of work. “Our results suggest that signals from the body—the gut feelings of financial lore—contribute to success in the markets,” the team concluded. Confirming Coates’s informal observations, those who thrived in this milieu were not necessarily people with greater education or intellect, but rather “people with greater sensitivity to interoceptive signals.” Interoception is, simply stated, an awareness of the inner state of the body. Just as we have sensors that take in information from the outside world (retinas, cochleas, taste buds, olfactory bulbs), we have sensors inside our bodies that send our brains a constant flow of data from within. These sensations are generated in places all over the body—in our internal organs, in our muscles, even in our bones—and then travel via multiple pathways to a structure in the brain called the insula. Such internal reports are merged with several other streams of information—our active thoughts and memories, sensory inputs gathered from the external world—and integrated into a single snapshot of our present condition, a sense of “how I feel” in the moment, as well as a sense of the actions we must take to maintain a state of internal balance.

Introducing the concept of Interoception, which is the awareness of the inner state of the body, and how it is integrated with other streams of information such as thoughts and memories. Interoception is something that can be pretty overlooked, as its not really measurable or visible and dosen’t seem to have an obvious effect on results. However, when required to make quick and accurate decisions, as in the case of trader, it turns out having a good sense of self-awareness about one’s emotional state actually complements your cognitive abilities in making good decisions.

Petrovsky and his team uploaded all the genetic sequences for ACE2 from potential animal hosts including bats, cats, dogs, pangolins, mice, civets, monkeys, hamsters, ferrets, horses, tigers, cattle and snakes, as well as humans, to the supercomputer. Petrovsky says it’s best to think of the ACE2 receptor as the lock in a door, and the spike protein as the key that opens the door. “We were trying to find which species of lock the Covid-19 key was best designed to unlock,” he said. Using the supercomputer, “you can try and fit the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein structure shape into all of the ACE2 structures from different animals to see which one fits best, just like solving a jigsaw,” Petrovsky explains. By March 2020, the supercomputer was operational and they were running simulations using the spike protein and ACE2 models. Very quickly, he had a result – and it was a result that caused him a great deal of angst. “Strangely, humans came out at the very top of the list.” Petrovsky pauses. “That was not what we were expecting, as the animal host from which the virus had been transmitted should have been at the top of the list. This presented a puzzle as the data suggested the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein had uniquely evolved to bind and infect cells expressing human ACE2. Normally with a new pandemic virus, whatever species that virus originally came from would be the best fit and the virus would initially only half fit the human lock but then mutate over time to try and become a better fit. A virus should not be able to evolve to be a perfect fit for a lock it has never seen, and yet this is what the data was telling us. The virus spike protein looked like it couldn’t have been better designed to fit the human ACE2. Go figure.” Petrovsky’s research partner at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, Professor David Winkler, was equally flummoxed when he later learnt the result. “We both expressed surprise that the human ACE2 came out on top,” he said. When Petrovsky thought more closely about this, he rapidly grasped the finding’s potential ramifications, as unpalatable as they might be. If the Covid-19 virus is perfectly adapted to humans, there was a possibility it had been worked on in some capacity in a laboratory to provide it with the opportunity to learn about and adapt to the human lock. Given the scientific consensus globally seemed to be that the virus had a natural origin, despite no evidence for this, sharing this contrary result that suggested the virus may be man-made could have major negative implications for his scientific career, never mind the fact that the result had been unequivocally generated from a supercomputer. A supercomputer cannot possibly have political leanings.

An interesting book that delves deep into the origins of Covid-19 and the in its early stages. Many anecdotes also show how politics gets in the way of science.

But, from trying to divide our attention more, to having the potential for misinformation to come from virtually anyone, to putting less effort into remembering facts because we can just Google them later, there is also a far more problematic side to social media memory. Having intrusive social media prompts and notifications constantly reminding you of certain events and thrusting more and more information at you also has the potential to severely distort your reality. This is in part related to the retrieval-induced forgetting effect we discussed in Chapter 3. Every time we remember something, the network of cells that make up that memory becomes active, and that network has the potential to change and lose the details about which we do not directly reminisce. For example, say you are reminded on Facebook of a vacation. The prompt may be a single photo of the event with a caption. As you remember the particular moment in which the photo was taken, it is possible, even likely, that you are forgetting related and unmentioned information of other things that happened during the day. Of course, it’s not just social media that can have this memory-altering effect. Rehashing memories in any situation has the potential to distort them. What is different about social media is that the prompts are being selected from your online persona so they already represent a distorted, social-media appropriate, version of your life. This amounts to a double-distortion – distorting the memory in your brain with a previously distorted memory from your online persona. By having social media dictate which experiences count as the most meaningful in our lives, it is potentially culling the memories that are considered less shareable. Simultaneously it is reinforcing the memories collectively chosen as the most likeable, potentially making some memories seem more meaningful and memorable than they originally were. Both of these are problematic processes that can distort our personal reality. How do you know whether you are recalling your experienced reality or your online, crafted, reality? You probably can’t tell the difference, as social processes of remembering become magnified and have the potential to infiltrate in ways that were previously not possible. Social media and our ability to connect with others is introducing a fascinating new set of challenges and benefits that memory researchers are only just beginning to explore. It’s a brave new world, and we can all look forward to exciting developments in how we remember together.

What happens when the memories we retain are the ones that are the “instagrammable” ones? The very best ones that we’ve chosen to share, that distort the actual reality of the experiencea back then. While my instinctive reaction is that this isn’t good, I wonder what are the tangible negative impacts of living in a distorted reality where your memories were defined by what was deemed publicly acceptable.

Pronin and her team found that participants believed that their own quintessential qualities, including their intimate thoughts and feelings, were mostly kept internal but that those of others were more likely to be observable. They were more submerged icebergs, while other people were more visible icebergs. This makes sense from a memory perspective because we have direct access to our own thoughts and feelings and so appreciate that they can be complicated and nuanced – which makes them difficult for other people to understand. On the other hand, it can be difficult or even impossible to appreciate the complexity of the thoughts and feelings of others in anything other than a basic ‘surface’ way – we tend towards assuming that is all that there is to understand. Our general outlook is ‘I’m a riddle, but my friend is an open book.’ This bias turns out to be really important for our decision-making and arguing skills. In their final study, Pronin and her team asked 80 participants to complete a background questionnaire on a number of politically relevant topics, including such items as whether they identified as liberal or conservative, or whether they were pro-life or pro-choice. Then, several weeks later, they asked questions about how well the participants thought their in-group knew their out-group, and vice versa. So, for example, they asked self-identified conservatives how much conservatives as a whole know about liberals, and they asked them how much they thought liberals knew about conservatives. They found that liberals and conservatives both claimed to know the other side better than the other side knew them, as did those on either side of the abortion debate. Asymmetric insight helps explain why in arguments and debates we may believe that the other side will never understand our point of view. We may also think we perfectly understand their point of view, perhaps also bolstered by the superiority illusion that we are smarter and more informed than our opponents. As Pronin suggests at the end of her paper, we can begin to think ‘I know everything about the other party, and I know they are wrong. They don’t even try to understand my arguments. If only they knew more about it, they would be on my side.’ It is an easy trap to fall into, and one that is a staple of political shouting matches. So, overconfidence has far-reaching implications, from bias in our everyday internal dialogue when evaluating relationship fairness, to our inability to give our failures equal weight and acknowledgement to our successes, and our problematic assumptions about the knowledge other people have of us and we of them. It touches every aspect of our lives. Even if we wish to be humble and take pains to avoid overconfidence illusions, we may not be able to – they are largely the by-product of selective memory processes we cannot control.

Why do we tend to assume that we know more about issues and problems as compared to those on the opposite side? Well this passage gives us a very pretty simple answer to that. We have the full perspective of our own depth of thought, but we only witness the surface of the thought processes of others.

Ever feel like people never take you seriously or do not put enough weight on what you say? That probably boils down to how much (or little) you communicate. Many times, we don’t do too great a job in communicating the full depth of our thoughts, and eventually fall into the trap of shouting matches and conflicts.

In 1990, Shirley Pearce and her colleagues at University College London12 demonstrated this in two extremely interesting experiments. The first involved giving both chronic-pain patients and non-patients who were not suffering any pain a list of words to remember. They found that those who reported suffering chronic pain were much better at remembering words associated with pain than any other kinds of words. This is in line with the idea that ‘mood congruency’ matters; that we are better at encoding and retrieving information that fits with our mood. But this is not enough, as the exact state we are in can change, so Pearce and her team wanted to know whether a temporary state can also influence our memory. To do this they inflicted pain on some of their participants by asking them to submerge their hands in ice water, while others got pleasantly warm water. If you have never held your hand in ice water for any length of time, this is a surprisingly terrible experience. Right after this water bath experience, the participants were given a list of words to remember. They were then either given another painful ice-water bath, or were asked to put their hands in warm water, before being tested on their memory of the list. The researchers found that when participants experienced the same state at the time of learning as at recall, they performed significantly better. So those who experienced pain right before they learned the word list performed better if they experienced pain again right before they needed to recall the information. Similarly, those who experienced nice warm water before learning did better at the memory test if they had just placed their hands in warm water again. If we follow this through, it means that if we know we learned or experienced something during a particular type of arousal, by recreating that state we should be able to remember it better. Torturous ice-water baths not your thing? Here’s a more pleasant example: if you always drink a cup of coffee right before you study, your memory should be better if you drink a cup of coffee right before your exams. All this research clearly shows that our stress and arousal levels matter for what we are able to store as memories, and how we are able to retrieve them later on. So our memories can be affected not only by uncontrollable parts of our external environment, but also by largely uncontrollable elements of our internal environment.

Interesting anecdote and shows how much of our memory is affected by subconscious variables or external stimuli that we have no control over. Also, a good tip to create the same environment or stimuli when you study and then take your exams.

One of the first experiments which demonstrated that we can fiddle with our memories of childhood was conducted by memory scientists Ira Hyman and Joel Pentland at Western Washington University in 1995. Their 65 adult participants were told that they were taking part in an experiment investigating how well people could remember early childhood experiences. They were told they would be questioned about a number of events which they had experienced before the age of six, details of which had already been provided by their parents through a questionnaire. Finally, they were told that accuracy of recall was paramount. But of course this was no regular childhood memory study. The researchers did not just want to see how well the participants remembered true events – they wanted to see how well they remembered events that had never actually happened. Among the true accounts obtained from the participant’s parents they had hidden a false account they had made up themselves: ‘When you were five you were at the wedding reception of some friends of the family and you were running around with some other kids, when you bumped into the table holding the punchbowl and spilled the punchbowl on the parents of the bride.’ Appropriately, the study is frequently known simply as the ‘spilling the punchbowl’ experiment. It is easy to picture this event – it’s both emotional and plausible. We all know what weddings look like in our particular cultures and countries. We all know what a punchbowl looks like, or at least what it might look like. We all know that weddings are generally formal events, so we likely picture the parents of the bride as an older couple dressed up for the occasion. It is easy to picture ourselves running around in this situation at the age of five. And, as it turns out, it is even easier to picture all this if we imagine the event happening for a few minutes. Each participant was asked first about two true events which the researchers had learned about from the participants’ parents, and then they were asked about the fake punchbowl incident. After giving participants basic information for each memory, the researchers asked them to try to form a vivid mental image of the event in order to access the memory. They asked them to close their eyes and imagine the event, including trying to picture what the objects, people and locations looked like. The researchers had the participants come back three times, each visit a week apart, and repeat the process. What they found will astonish you. Just by repeatedly imagining the event happening, and saying out loud what they were picturing, 25 per cent of participants ended up being classified as having clear false memories of the event. A further 12.5 per cent could elaborate on the information that the experimenters provided, but claimed that they could not remember actually spilling the punch, and were therefore classified as partial rememberers. This means that a large number of people who pictured the event happening thought that it actually did happen after just three short imagination exercises, and that they could remember exactly how it happened. This demonstrates that we can misattribute the source of our childhood memories, thinking that something we imagined actually happened, internalising information that someone suggested to us and spinning it into a part of our personal past. It is an extreme form of confabulation that can be induced by someone else by engaging your imagination.

The key tenet of this book, that our memories are unreliable and prone to manipulation. Just like how it is possible to implant fake memories through hypnosis, this experiment shows how easy it is to get people to alter or create “new” memories with just their imagination.

If our memories are considered unreliable, it also leads to a whole new set of implications for things such as the legal system. Can we really rely on witness testimonies for the truth? Many times, we choose what we want to believe and some people are able to even alter their memories to build the narrative they want for themselves. After all, repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth.

What the author wants to promote is to shed some light on the malleability of our memories and by doing so, to hopefully promote ways of doing things that do not suggest or promote the creation of false memories. This book also covers certain ways to improve the reliability of what we remember. Also, just because we misremember things early on in our childhood also does not mean that they do not have a long lasting impact on our physical and mental development. Our early years are the ones that have the most impact on our brain, personality and cognitive development.

The racial wealth gap spills into entrepreneurial inequality. More than a third of US small businesses rely at some point on a gift from family members or friends. Because of the large racial wealth gap, African American entrepreneurs are significantly less likely to receive this kind of support. Runway Social Finance, based in San Francisco, California, aims to address this problem. They provide funding to small businesses, including to those owned by African Americans, under the sole condition that they have a strong business plan. The general lack of business investment support for African Americans illustrates how resilience inequality can exacerbate economic inequality. If African American entrepreneurs are less resilient due to smaller buffers, a temporary recession can cause permanent scarring effects among minority communities. The lack of resilience might inhibit risk-taking, which leads to less innovation. Despite the disproportionate hardships faced by minority communities during the pandemic, the evidence so far suggests that money from US fiscal relief measures was not particularly aimed at reaching them. The main program (PPP) targeted businesses, and it was administered by banks. However, minority entrepreneurs disproportionately use financial technologies (fintech) to manage and access their finances. Thus, many were left out of the PPP distributions. Counties with the highest shares of Black business owners did not receive equal PPP funds. To make matters worse, African American businesses had weaker balance sheets with higher leverage before the Covid-19 crisis started. A common cause of these inequities is systemic racism. Lisa Cook finds that the lack of African American engagement in the innovation process has resulted in the US losing 4.4 percent of GDP each year. These losses exceed the 2.7 percent annual loss caused by the discrimination of women. Beyond the economic losses, the longstanding racial achievement gaps raise the question of whether we as a society can be really free if there is no equal opportunity.

Probably almost everyone would agree that we would need more entrepreneurship and new businesses to have a more resilient society. But what if it is the case that only a selected group of people are more likely to even engage in starting their own businesses, especially with an even higher chance of success? That disparity actually leads to further inequality and might make it  harder to unify different groups of people in your society.

While most people like to push for the typical narrative of the “do or die” founder that lived on instant noodles and slept on couches, one of the biggest factors for success is actually being able to access funds through a solid family background or friends network. Perpetual scarcity don’t usually lend towards the best decision making, so having a safety net helps people get started and plan their business for the long term.

This also reminds me how general subsidies to promote “entrepreneurship” might not really help to solve inequality. After all, the people whom are best able to access these subsidies or cash are the ones whom are already more savvy or well connected. In my opinion, to have better entrepreneurial equality, whats important is raising the floor and making sure that people can think about more than just working for basic survival. This way, the ones whom always have wanted to start a business will have more headspace and opportunities to do so.

Feedback, Trap Externalities, and Tipping Points Resilience, or the lack thereof, is often about how people react or are able to react to shocks. “Trap externalities” rob people of their resilience—their ability to bounce back after a shock. For example, if an employer fires a worker who subsequently cannot afford to send her children to school, her children’s potential will be severely compromised. The children will have almost no way to react to the shock. Such outcomes resemble the oak tree in Lafontaine’s fable. Once the oak tree has been uprooted by a storm, it dies. The reaction of someone who has been exposed to an externality can lead to destabilizing feedback loops and to weaker overall resilience. In other words, people might cumulatively inflict externalities onto each other and therefore cause a deterioration in the society’s equilibrium and resilience. We call those situations “feedback externalities.” A classic example is a bank run. If many bank customers withdraw their money on one day, they destabilize the bank and cause a negative externality. It the actions of those people incentivize others to withdraw money as well, more “feedback externalities” would ensue. Ultimately, this process could result in a full-blown bank run, which would force the bank to suspend withdrawals because banks typically would not have sufficient deposits. From an abstract perspective, the hoarding of face masks is like a bank run. A store might have enough face masks to supply one for each potential customer, but hoarding would cause the store to become illiquid in relation to face masks. Both types of runs illustrate the large effects of feedback externalities. The few individuals who cause a bank run or hoard masks can induce negative externalities on many other people. Economists attribute these types of feedbacks to so-called “strategic complementarities.” Hoarding behavior is illustrated graphically in figure 2-2. Suppose that some people, including person A, purchase more toilet paper than typically needed. As a result, there will be less toilet paper available for others, including person B in the figure below. Person B suffers from a negative externality. Observing this, others might infer that toilet paper is scarce, so they also purchase more toilet paper. Now person A suffers from an externality that he or she caused. As toilet paper becomes quite scarce, person A will hoard more and person B, in reaction, might also acquire more toilet paper. At some point, when all toilet paper has been purchased, the loop stops. Externalities combined with feedback loops are the real “resilience killers.”

This book honestly wasn’t the most exciting read, but I wanted to pick up some books that detailed more about Covid and its implications now that we are kinda in the post-Covid phase. This was one of the serendipitous ones I guess. This book generally is about applying a resilient framework, set in the backdrop of Covid and using it as a study to understand how societies can be more resilient in the face of crises, technological shifts and so on. For me, it wasn’t the most thrilling read because I find that books that try promoting and justifying a framework generally tend to be less interesting in general, but maybe its just personal preference and my lack of patience.

This is one of the more interesting passages though. Feedback loops and tipping point might kinda sound like basic shit, but its something that we tend to easily forget when considering our day to day actions. It also explains why things can get out of order pretty quickly, especially in the context of crises. Hence, why we could easily run out of things like toilet paper and it also tends to explain why most leaders choose to always promulgate calming and reassuring messages, sometimes overtly so. Like how governments initially stated that there were no need for face-masks at the onset of Covid. Reducing the negative feedback loop from a panicked public and minimising negative externalities was probably one of the biggest factors for the initial statements.

When we pursue happiness, we often start by changing our surroundings. We expect to find bliss in a warmer climate or a friendlier dorm, but any joy that those choices bring about is typically temporary. In a series of studies, students who changed their environments by adjusting their living arrangements or course schedules quickly returned to their baseline levels of happiness. As Ernest Hemingway wrote, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” Meanwhile, students who changed their actions by joining a new club, adjusting their study habits, or starting a new project experienced lasting gains in happiness. Our happiness often depends more on what we do than where we are. It’s our actions—not our surroundings—that bring us meaning and belonging. My student decided not to transfer. Instead of rethinking where she went to school, she would rethink how she spent her time. She might not be able to change the culture of an entire institution, but she could create a new subculture. She started doing weekly coffee chats with classmates and invited the ones who shared her interests and values over for weekly tea. A few months later, she reported that she had formed several close friendships and was thrilled with her decision to stay. The impact didn’t stop there: her tea gatherings became a tradition for welcoming students who felt out of place. Instead of transferring to a new community, they built their own microcommunity. They weren’t focusing on happiness—they were looking for contribution and connection.

In a book that that ultimately talks about rethinking, changing your beliefs and adapting, I think the most valuable point is also knowing the balance between leaving a possibly toxic environment or when to make a difference through your actions instead. I’ve seen people who repeat patterns of unhappiness even when they have repeatedly changed jobs and tried finding new less “toxic” environments. On the other hand, I’ve also seen people who have change jobs but turn out to be in a much better place mentally.

I think the biggest difference is learning to find that sense of control to exercise your own autonomy in changing things. If one constantly falls for the “way out” of just constantly finding new environments without taking individual action to improve their well-being, any temporary boost to well being is kinda short term and fades away over time. I find what really gets people down is also the feeling of helplessness. Most of the times, that helplessness probably is more a function of our own mental limits than purely down to the environment.