If you could get a kiss from your favorite celebrity, how long would you want to wait before getting it? Why do things seem less meaningful or joyful over time than they were at the beginning. And what does this have to do with Netflix releasing all the episodes of a new show at once so you can binge, Or why companies always feel compelled to come out with new and improved products every year, Or why French revolutionaries wanted to make a week equal to five days instead of seven.
Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about why familiar things can sometimes lose their sparkle and what we can do about that. So let's start with the fact that when your brain sees something new and then sees it again and again, it becomes more efficient at processing it and it burns less energy
on it. So imagine the first time you hear a really cool new song playing at the coffee shop. You've never heard this before, and your brain is screaming with activity processing the tune and the rhythm and the lyrics. Why this is because in large part, your brain is a prediction machine, and this is a new song, and so it is unpredictable. You don't know where the lyrics are going or the tune and so on. The song is cool and interesting and it holds your attention and
you can't wait to hear it again. So you jump on your cell phone and figure out the name, and you play the song from the beginning, and you love it. Now you listen again. Okay, it's still good. Are you going to listen fourth time? Maybe tenth time? It's not clear you're getting the same enjoyment out of it at this point. So this is what economists refer to as diminishing returns. You're not getting as much out of it
as you were at first. And in neuroscience we can measure this directly in brain activity, and what we see is less and less activity in the brain each time the song plays. So the first time your brain is on fire with activity, and then the second time we measure slightly less. And as you listen to the same song again and again, you have lower and lower activity. This is called repetition suppression, which is to say that
repeating something increasingly suppresses the brain's response. Why, well, it's because we devote attention to things that are surprising. Because the brain's job is to make an internal model of the world, and the way that you optimize learning that model is by ignoring the stuff that you already know
and just paying attention to surprises. So in the case of the song at the coffee shop, you're not enjoying it less because the music is any different, but because you're different, your brain has become more and more efficient at recognizing and processing the song, and that frees up its cognitive resources for other tasks. Or just think about the first time you walked into your living room when
you were first shopping for a place to live. The first time you entered, you were keenly attending to the layout and the colors of the pain and the lighting and the smell and the sounds. But now that you are an expert on your living room, you don't notice any of this. All your brain cares about consciously is novelty. In this case, is there anything out of place in your living room? Did the couch get shifted over? Or is there a stain on the ceiling, or is there
a candy wrapper on the floor. This is how the brain constantly optimizes its function by paying attention to new things and not.
Responding to the familiar.
Now, this is at the heart of what drives brain plasticity, how your brain constantly is reconfiguring its circuitry. And in fact, in my book Live Wired, I proposed a new framework called infotropism, which is how the brain constantly seeks to extract the richest information from the world, which always comes
from the new things, the things that it didn't already predict. So, just like plants do phototropism where they move towards the light, so brains grow their circuitry toward the highest new information. Now that's what's happening under the hood. But what I want to explore today is the consequence of this, how that influences our daily lives, Like the fact that familiar things like songs and living rooms and relationships and jobs and so on lose their color with time, and what
we might do about that. So for that I called up my colleague Tolly share It. She's a neuroscientist and professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and at MIT. And she's recently co authored a book with Cass Sunstein, the author and legal scholar at Harvard, and this book is called Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. So here is my interview with Tlly. Kelly tell us what is habituation.
So, habituation is our tendency to respond less and less to things that are repeated or that are constant. So let's take a really easy example. You enter into your room. It's full of smoke. At first, the smell of smoke, maybe it's cigarette smoke, is quite overwhelming. But after twenty minutes, studies show you can't even detect the smell. You habituated to it. And just that you habituate to smells or even to a cold you know, you jump into a pool.
It's really cool at the beginning. After a few minutes you kind of get used to it. We also habituate two kind of more complex things in our life, both good and bad, and so we have less of an emotional reaction to them. Right, So maybe it's a romance that was exciting at first and you habituated to it over time. Maybe it's a new house that is really brings you joy, but while you kind of stop noticing
it as much. As a consequence, those things that really should bring us more joy on a daily basis do so less because of habituation. And on the other side, you also habituate to the bad things. So there might be a lot of you know, bad things, even some terrible things around us. But if they're constant, if they're
there all the time, we stop noticing them. Sexism, racism, cracks in our personal relationship, inefficiencies at the workplace, and if we stop noticing them, that means that we also less driven to change them.
Now, why do you brains habituate? Is it critical for survival?
Yeah, so there's a few reasons. I mean, first of all, it's important to say that every animal habituates. It's not just humans, right, every single animal and I would say probably every neuron in our brain shows this habituation. Right. They fire less and less when things are constant. When you see something that is, you know, in a range of species, that's just there's probably a good reason for it. There's probably an adaptive reason for this. So a simple
one is it means that you can save resources. Right, So if your Neuren's keep responding to things around you, but those things don't change. You're kind of like using resources that you should probably save for the next thing that is coming your way. Right, So it's a way to save resources. That makes sense. If something doesn't kill you, probably you can stop responding to it, and you might need to, you know, respond to something else that's coming your way. But on a higher level as well, it
does motivate us. So if you imagine your first entry level job, you were probably really excited about your first entry level job, but if you were as excited about your entry level job ten years later, you wouldn't be motivated to go, you know, and get that next thing, get that promotion. Right, So it's a way to keep us motivated, and that's good, which means that it kind of dries us to progress, to try new things, to evolve.
And then the third reason is that it is on average also good for our mental health, mostly because we tend to habituate to the bad things in life, which means we could bounce back. You know, there are things that happen, perhaps a breakup romantic relationship, a loss of a job, or you just didn't get a project that you were wanting to get. If you just continue feeling bad about this and dwelling in it over and over and over, then you won't be able to just go,
you know, progress and move ahead. So in fact, we see that individuals who habituate slower to the negative things in their life, they tend to have more symptoms of depression and in general. In fact, we see that problems in habituation, different problems of different kinds, are associated with a whole host of different mental health disorders and psychopathologies.
Got it, okay, So that's habituation.
We get used to things, our brains establish a model of the world, and once they have that model, then it doesn't have to use much energy to represent it. So what is this concept that you've introduced about dishabituation?
Right, So, disabituation means that you suddenly notice something that you've habituated to, so you're stunnenly starting to respond to it again. And we have an example. It's a visual example which I think kind of makes a point in the book. When you open it in the inside cover,
it's blobs of different colors. You have green, yellow, pink, blue, with a little fixation in the middle and if you just fixate on this fixation in the middle and don't move your eyes for about thirty second or so, what will happen is that those colors will suddenly become great. You won't be able to see the colors, and if you're really good at it, the gray eventually becomes white. That is habituation, and that happens because the same neurons are getting the same input of color, and so they
stop responding. Now the moment you move your eyes, then you experience dishabituation. The moment you move your eyes, you can see color again. So now different neurons are getting different input and now you can perceive the color again. So that's disabituation, being able to feel and notice things that perhaps you had stopped noticing because they were there all the time and you habituated to them in the past.
So what are some real life examples of disabituation.
So let's take kind of like a simple example. We habituate to our environment. Right, I'm sitting in my office. I'm not noticing all the things around me because I'm used to them. Right, I'm sitting here many hours many days. But if I leave my office or even let's say I leave my home for a certain amount of time, perhaps it's a weekend, perhaps it's a week away on business. When I come back, I will experience, at least for
a short amount of time, dishabituation. So suddenly I will start noticing things again and I will appreciate the good. So maybe there's nice views out the windows that you know, now I can see green outside my window, but it's not really bringing me as much joy because I'm habituated to it. But if I'm kind of going away and then I'm coming back, now I start noticing things again,
even the small things. You know. It could also be family members you take it's you know, you take them for granted they're there, but being away for a week, you come back and you're kind of like, oh, you know, you feel the joy again. There's a wonderful quote from Jodi Foster, which actually we saw after the book was already written, so it's not in the book. And the book we have something else also interesting by Julia Robinson.
But this this.
Quote from Jodie Foster. She talks about how she left her home in La for I think it's six months or so. She went on site to film and then she says, what happens when she came back? So she says, I came back from somewhere that is amazing and beautiful, but you know, you long for really dumb things that you've just used to that six months ago, I'm sure I was bored by. But right now I'm like, my god, avocados are amazing. Or I'm so glad I get to
get to go to the gym again. So things that six months ago were sort of what I was trying to escape from. Now everything is amazing. Right, So what she's describing is dishabituation. Right, she comes back and now she's disabituated to avocados, she's disabituated to working out in the gym, and now those things become, you know, something that brings hers joy. Of course, this is not going to last very long, probably just a few weeks. But that's that's disabituation.
So what does this have to do with companies putting out new and improved products every year, or car manufacturers, you know, changing tweaking the model even though the model is perfectly great last year. What does all this have to do with that?
Right? So we habituate to material things, right, So when you buy that new phone you may be excited at first, or the new car or the TV. But if they're there all the time, you use them every day, the joy goes down over time.
Right.
And then when you know they come out with oh new and exciting, that won't makes you want to get that new things to get the kind of like joy, right, the little boost of joy from this new thing, which of course you will habituate too after a while. Again, so it does drive consumption, and in fact it probably drives over consumption.
Interestingly, in the book, you talk about disabituation entrepreneurs as people who see things that have become normal to everyone else and they try to make changes. And one example that I've always loved is during the French Revolution, there were people who said, look now that we're building a new society here, let's change the week from seven days where you work five days and have a weekend to a five day week where you work for three days
and then you have two days off. And I remember that striking me when I was a high school student and learned about that, because I was so used to the idea of a week being seven days, and it never struck me that you could do something different, So tell us about dishabituation entrepreneurs.
Right.
So the idea is it's an interesting example that you're mentioning. So the examples that we have in our book is mostly about how we kind of get used to discrimination in our society or inequality. And the idea is that if discrimination or inequality or other kind of not so great things that our society are around us all the time, we stop seeing them. In order to see them again. One thing is we could have someone to kind of like say, well, this is what's happening, which is hard
to do, right, how do you do that? How do you make people notice these things that are just the norms have been in society for such a long time. And maybe i'll just before I tell you how one can do that, let me give you an example of why we will actually not be able to see discrimination and in quality if it's been around all the time. So the main reason is that our brain is a
statistical machine. So we have experiences in our life, and based on these experiences, our brain makes assumption about what is a norm, right, what is to be expected? And if what you encounter is what you expected, there's no surprise signal in the brain, you don't notice it. So let's take a simple example. You walk into a plane and you look at the cockpit and the pilot is
a man. And your experience is that in most cases when you walk on a plane into a plane, you look at the cockpit, most times it is a man, and so your brain has made these predictions and the experience fits your prediction. So now there's no surprise signal, right, nothing to think about. So we don't notice that. Not only does a brain makes predictions based on the experiences that we've had, but it also makes assumptions about why
we see these things. Right, So maybe the assumption that you would make is that males are better at handling large equipment. And now those assumptions may actually influence your actions and decisions. So maybe it will influence who do you decide to hire, who do decide to promote, And
that is the problem that we're facing. What you want is a surprise signal, right, What you want is actually to go on a plane, and when you see that ninety percent of the pilots are man, you want actually to have a surprise signal to be well, that's unusual. Why is that the case? So with disapituation entrepreneurs. You want them to induce a surprise signal.
Okay, So let's get back to this issue about how we disabituate in our lives and what we can do about it. So you quote the economist T. Boor Satowski who says pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires.
So unpack that for.
Us, yes, okay. So the idea is that pleasure will reduce when we are encountering things, even if they're super great, if we're encountering again and again and again, the pleasure will be reduced, right. And what we want is we want to create breaks from those pleasurable things in order to experience a pleasure again. And let me give you first an example of just how pleasure goes down over time. So I was working with a big travel agency a few years ago, and they wanted to know what makes
people happiest on vacations. So we went to resorts and we ask people questions to figure out what makes them happy and when are they the happiest. And what we found was that people were happiest forty three hours into a vacation. So forty three hours in that's when like pleasure was peeking, right, And after that the amount of pleasure went down and down and down and down over time. You know, day eight they were still happy, but they weren't happy as they were at day two, forty three
hours in Why is that? Well, forty three hours give them some time to unpack, you know, and start focusing on fun. But from that time on, pleasure just reduces because of habituation. So the things around them are less noticeable, so brings less joy. And the other interesting finding here that when we ask people what was the most fun part of the vacation that brought you most joy, the word that they used more than any other word was
the word first. They said, the first view of the ocean, the first cocktail I had, the first suncastle that I built. Now the second view of the ocean that was still great, and the second cocktail for the fifth cop that was still good, but not as good as a first. And that is because the first are the new experiences.
Right.
So if you think about, okay, so how can I make a vacation more joyful? It suggests that one way to do it is perhaps to have more frequent vacations but shorter ones, and of course sometimes this is not possible if you're flying to the other side of the world, that that will be difficult. But perhaps you can have vacations that are closer to home, but just have more of them. So have more of those firsts, more of those forty three hours in. Okay, So that's that's talking
about vacations. But let's think about things that are that are simple, even more you know, simple than a vacation. So there's a really surprising experiment that looked into when and why does music bring us joy? So they had people listen to a song that they liked, and before they listened to the song, they said, Hey, would you like to listen to this song from beginning to end no internal options? Or would you like to listen to this song with small interruptions every twenty seconds? I'll stop
the song for ten seconds. What would you prefer, David, If you had that, it certainly.
Seems like I want to listen to the continuous version, right.
So ninety nine percent of the people said no breaks for me, please, right. It is the most intuitive thing. Surprisingly, however, when they actually did the test, so they had one group listened at beginning to end, and the other group, they had breaks in between. What they found that, in fact, overall, people enjoyed the song more with breaks, and they were willing to pay double to hear this song in concerts.
So why is that, Well, if you're listening to the song from beginning to end right no interruption, you're really enjoying at the beginning, and then perhaps you're enjoying it less over time because of habituation. Again, you're enjoying it throughout, but less versus I break it after twenty seconds, and now when I start again, so you disabituate. So now I'm starting again, the joy pops up again, right, and
then you started habituating. I break it, there's a dishabituation, so joy goes up again, and so on and so forth. And they did that with other things like a massage. They asked, hey, do you want a massage beginning to end no interruptions or would you like interruptions in your massage? Everyone said, of course, I don't want interruptions in my massage. But again, when they did the experiment, people enjoyed a massage more when there were interruptions, because you know, they
habituated to the massage. There was a break they started again, Joy pops up and so on and so forth. So that suggests that we want to break things up right instead of binging on that Netflix show in one night, you know, take it a little bit at a time.
So Netflix recently started a new model where they'll release an entire season all at once that people can binge. But it sounds like your advice would be different.
Yes, And in fact, I've heard a lot of discussion about this. Not only do I think you will enjoy it more right if you have to one half of a week or whatever, wait a week, Not only will you enjoy the experience at the time, what you're also gaining is a joy of anticipation. There is I told you about vacations and how forty three hours in is the most joy. In fact, the most most joy tends to be before you even left your house to go
on vacation. So in fact, when they looked at people for a whole week before they went on vacation, they found that people were actually happiest the day before the vacation, so the day before they even were, you know, going on the plane. And the reason was that the day before they were excited, the anticipation of what was about to come, right, because in their mind the vacation was so wonderful, And when they went a vacation, it was good, but it wasn't quite good as it was in their
mind the day before. So anticipation, I mean, there's wonderful studies showing that anticipation brings us joy, and often it brings us more joy than the actual experience, and that people are actually willing to pay to get this anticipation. So another wonderful study by George Lowenstein, he had a group of people come in and he said, pick a celebrity. So pick a celebrity, David in your mind. And then he said okay, and all all the listeners he said, okay,
imagine getting a kiss from the celebrity. So I hope you chose a good one. And then he said, how much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from the celebrity if the kiss was to be delivered immediately, in one hour, one day, three days, a year, ten years, and so on. And he found that people were willing to pay the most to get a kiss from a celebrity, not if the kiss was to be delivered now, but if the case was to be delivered in free days, because that gave people free days of like imagining it,
where is going to happen? How is it going to happen? And that anticipation gave them gave them joy. So back to our Netflix shows, not only will you enjoy it more while you're seeing it because there's less habituation, but
you will also gain the anticipation. There's also, i mean, specifically related to Netflix and shows, there's also this sense that some shows have this kind of cultural buzz around them, right, So you're you're making that longer as well, allowing people to experience things more at the same time and to discuss it, you know, you go to work talk about it.
This is I think something that happens less today than it did when we were younger, when there was less of these you know streaming, there was just a few channels with a few shows where a show was kind of a big thing. You know, everyone may have talked about it, but still it still happens even today.
Am I remembering correctly that way back in the day, movies used to have intermissions halfway through they would just stop and then you'd go out and.
Get popcorn and whatever.
Yeah, I wonder I wonder if that ended up being you know, gaining slightly higher ratings as a result of that. But what about watching a movie on TV that is broken up by commercials that seems really annoying? We don't enjoy that more, do we?
So this is something that Daniel Gilbert told me, and I haven't actually seen the article itself, but the words of Daniel Gilbert, he says that there is a study that shows that overall people enjoy show more with commercials. I have to go and find this. He said. This is by Hal Harshfeldt, so we should be able to find it. But yeah, so that's apparently also a counterintuitive finding.
So tell us about ways that we can really implement this in our lives. In the book, you mentioned when you got COVID and you got exiled to the basement of your house and you actually you know, enjoyed the new bedroom and the you know, seeing things from a different point of view. How can we inject this into our lives?
Right?
Okay, So there's two things, and one is going back to this idea of breaks, so inducing breaks into your life. So yes, you can go away for a weekend or a week or so, but something you're not always able to do that, and so perhaps you can take a break from your life while you're still you know, in your house. And so this is indeed a story that I tell in the book where I had COVID so I had to go down to the basement so the rest of my family won't get it. And surprisingly it
was it was sort of an interesting experience. It wasn't that bad. It was a bit like going camping. And then I was there for maybe three days. When I when I came back out to the ground floor to the world, everything seems like they it was resparkling, right, My life was resparkling, because now I saw it, I was disabituating, right. I went from the basement up to my regular home and things just seemed a little bit better. So that's it, you know, you might have a little
vacation in your basement. But there's another way, which this one we actually heard Lori Stantis talk about, and she said, close your eyes and imagine your life without your family, without your home, without your job, right, try to like really imagine it with vividness and detail. And that really scares people, right obviously, and when you open your eyes. Then again that can cause some kind of resparkling and
dishabituation just by using your imagination. And now the other way to induce more disabituation less habituation is diversifying your life life right, inducing more variety into it. And variety can take many forms. It could be maybe living in different places, but it could be more simple like trying to interact with different type of people if possible at
work working on different projects. Many companies have these rotations where employees can go actually work in different divisions, right, And that can cause this a situation and induce variety. And in fact, when you ask people about what they actually want out of life, there are free things that people usually say. First of all, they say two things
that they usually say and another for surprising ones. So the first thing that they usually say is happiness, right, we all want to be happy, we want to feel joy, we don't want to be sad. The second thing that people say is meaning. They want the life to have purpose. That makes sense as well. However, things that bring you happiness and things that bring you per usually do so less over time because of habituation. So even if you're working in a very meaningful job, like let's say you're
a cancer cancer researcher. Over time, it may feel less purposeful and less meaningful that it did at the very beginning. But then there's this third thing which is overlooked and which really contributes to a psychological rich life, which is variety. If you're trying different things and doing different things, you are inducing this habituation, which means that those things that make you happy are going to make you more happy, and those things that have a feeling of purposeful and
meaningful will do so more because of this variety. And what variety also does, it puts you in a state of learning. Because if you're changing, you're changing your environment, you're changing the people you're talking to, you're changing what you're working on. You need to learn. You need to kind of figure out the hierarchy perhaps in the new environment, how things work. And it turns out that learning induces
joy even more than material goods. So there are quite a few studies on this wonderful study by Rutledge and the Blaine shows that when they had participants do a task and they gave them money for performing well, they were happy when they got money for performing well, but in fact they were happiest when they learned something new
about the task. So by having variety, and variety can be like you can take a new course about something that is outside of your field, learning new skill, and that has been shown to induce joy because people like to see themselves progress. When you really feel down is when you feel that you are in a status quo. You can even be quite let's say professionally, you can be really up high, but if you're not moving upwards, that can actually induce low mood and even to some extent depression.
You know, this is very interesting because I always recommend people pursuing new challenges that are between the levels of frustrating but achievable. And I'm telling this from the point of view of cognitive fitness, of you know, making new roadways in the brain and keeping fit that way. But your point adds to that beautifully, which is it also brings joy.
You know.
I just want to mention something that you said a moment ago about this idea of closing your eyes and
imagining that things are gone. I received fortune cookie many years ago that said, if you want to love something, imagine it is lost, and I thought that was so beautiful and powerful because it's exactly the same thing that you said, which is, Okay, I'm going to induce variety in my life by taking all these things that I've totally habituated to, and I'm just going to imagine that they're gone, either they died or I never met these
people in my life or whatever the situation is. And then yes, when you when you come back to reality, there's more, there's more appreciation there.
Okay, So how do.
We implement this kind of knowledge in our lives, let's say, with relationships.
Yeah. So, in fact, we were listening to Esther Perrell. What she recommends seems really consistent with this whole idea. So she says that when she asked people, she surveyed people, and she asked them when are you most attracted to your partner. The answers tended to be of two types. One was when I'm away from my partner and then I'm coming back, right, So this is exactly the break, right, So that's when they are very attracted to the partner. And the second one was when I see my partner
in a new situation. Perhaps they're talking to strangers at a party, perhaps they're on stage, which I've never seen them like that. So this is the idea of variety, right, and novelty. And she talks a lot about how novelty and I don't know if she says that exact word, but that a little bit of distance and novelty can actually induce fire, and too much familiarity can actually reduce it.
So on one hand, we want shared experiences, of course, but on the other hand, suddenly seeing your partner in a different light that you've never had before, according to her research, actually increases attraction. So in terms of how do we do that, how would we implement that in our relationships? I think two things. One is taking a break and I don't mean like breaking up for a while, I mean like, you know, a night away on your own, right,
just an evening or a weekend. And the second is shaking things up by trying different things right, instead of doing the same thing over and over. We have routines that those are good too, right to have with your tradition, but trying things that are different.
Yeah.
And what's interesting is across the animal kingdom there's this exploitation exploration trade off, which just means animals spend about eighty percent of their time exploiting the things that they have learned that they know, and twenty percent of their time exploring new things. And they have to do this because the world changes and you can't ever be certain that the knowledge you have is going to carry you distantly into the future. So they spend some percentage of
their time trying out new things. And it sounds like this is exactly what we need to make sure we implement purposefully in our lives, because it's so easy to land in a routine and keep that up with our careers, with our relationships, everything, it's important to seek that variety.
What other pieces of advice would you.
Have along those lines for not all relationships, but our careers, our lives.
Yeah, so, actually, let me just pick up what you were saying about exploration and exploitation. In fact, in the book we talk.
A little bit about explorers and exploiters in the sense of relationships as well, because so you said, you know, on average, perhaps eighty percent of the time we're exploiting, meaning we're trying, we're doing the same thing over and over.
In twenty percent we're exploring. But of course there's a lot of individual differences, so there are people who are explorers. They're like they want to try new things, whether it is travel to different places, trying new restaurants, right. And then there are more people who are more exploiters. They like to do the thing that they know, go to the same restaurant, have a stay staycation, you know, when
you stay at home. And what this is not based on, you know, real data, but what me and my co ofer, Cass Sunstein, have noticed in our own lives and the people around us. We've noticed that within couples there tend to be an explorer and exploiter, right, And that would make sense that that would be a good, good union because the real optimal point is probably somewhere in the middle. You don't want to just explore all the time because
then you won't be exploiting the good things. And you don't want to just exploit because then you're kind of what's known is you're going to be stuck in the local maxima, which means you think you're in a good place here, but there's all of these other good, you know, better places around you. And if you are in that kind of relationship, you're pushing each other exactly perhaps towards
the optimal point. So in Cassa's situation, he thinks of his self as exploiter and his wife and as an explorer. In my relationship it's the opposite, meaning I'm the explorer. My husband is more of an exploiter. And sometimes it could especially I think at the beginning of a relationship, it might cause a little bit of friction. You know, you want to do all these things and the other
person just wants to do the same thing. But if it's really a successful relationship, it pushes both people perhaps towards a better place.
In terms of careers. What advice do you have for people?
Again, there are individual differences, and there are preferences, and in fact, there's also individual differences in how fast you habituate. So there are people who habituate way faster than others, and that will lead to these preferences because I think if you're habituating faster, then perhaps you feel like you
want more of an exploration. So if you are in a situation where you are not feeling like you're moving and learning and progressing, which tends to happen a lot in middle life, and we can talk about why that is in a second. So that is perhaps a time to push a little bit more into the exploration, right, try new things. It could be simple things like take a new route to work if you're always driving, try
to bike. It could be simple things like that, or could be like, let's try a different projects, let's try to gain a new skill. The impact of these things are huge. Oh, back to midlife, Yeah, does it happen to mid life? So there's this really interesting phenomena which is the U shape of happiness, which is happiness tends to be relatively high in kids and teenagers, and then it goes down, down, down, down, down, reaches rock bottom
in your midlife on average. Right, there's lots of variations on average, and then it actually starts going up again, and it continues going up on average until the last couple of years of life. But that midlife, that's really the downpoint for a good number of people. And again there's variations. I'm sure you have listeners who are no, midlife is my happiest time. But that's when you look at you know, thousands and thousands of thousands of individuals.
And we think that there's many reasons for this, but one is that midlife is really the time where you have the most amount of sameness. For most people, you've been in the same relationship for quite a while. On average, you may have been in the same job quite a while. Average, perhaps you're at the top of your career, but you've been there for a while. And partially people you know they have kids and that act that also limits the amount of exploration that you could do. If you think
about it, when you're younger, each day is new. I mean you're learning something new every single day when you're growing up. When you're young and even in your twenties, you need to figure out who am I going to be with. You're exploring all the different options, you're studying, you're learning new things, and it's midlife when it's kind of the sameness. And counterintuitively, later in life is when you start you need to learn again because that's the
kids are leaving the house, perhaps you're retiring. What are you going to do with your life? And it's really scary, but it jaws people into this new situation, new environment, and they need to figure it out, so it enhances learning and often people will try new things. So if you're stuck in midlife, then you need to start thinking about you know, how can I induce variety? What can I change? And change is difficult because it requires effort. The easiest thing you can do is stick with the
status quo. That's easy, you know how to do it. It is certain, right If you make a change that's uncertain, you don't know if it's going to be good or bad. You're going to put in the effort and you don't know what you're going to get. If I do the same thing over and over, I know what I'm going to get, so at least I'm not anxious and uncertain about it. I might be unhappy about it, but it
requires less effort, so it changes a little bit. Is hard, but there are studies showing that all ills being equal, change does induce well being and happiness. A great study by Stephen Levite. He asked people. They went online and he asked them, is there something that you want to change? And it could be something small like the color of my hair, or it could be something bigger, like entering, exiting a relationship, starting a new job, taking, you know,
learning a new skill. And they wrote down the change, and then he asked them to flip a virtual coin and he said if the coin lands at head, go ahead and make the change. If it lands on tails, stick with the status quill. And he got back to them two weeks later and six months later. The first thing he found is that those people who got heads, which means make a change, they were twenty five percent
more likely to make a change. So something simple as a coin flipped induced people to go ahead and make the change. And the second most important thing he found that on average, over these thousands and thousands of individuals, those that made the change were in fact happier in their life. And so I think there's two reasons why
that is. One is, if you're thinking about a change, there's probably a reason to it, meaning you're probably considering it because something is not satisfactory or not optimal, and so a change is probably needed. It doesn't mean what kind of change, but a change is probably needed. And the second reason is you're making a change inducing variety means this habituation means more learning, aorll things that tend to increase people's well being tell.
Us about creativity and dis habituation.
As I mentioned, there's individual differences in how fast people habituate, and it turns out that people who habituate slower on average tend to be more creative. So there's a study that was conducted where it was shown that people who are creative, and specifically these are people who either had wrote a book or have a patent under their name, or had an exhibition of art, they tended to habituate slower. And the way that they measured it they actually just
had like a sound. So when you hear a sound over and over and over, you get your body response to it less, and you can measure that by looking at for examples kings conducts response and so that is a finding. The question is why why does slow habituation is why is that related to creativity? And perhaps one reason is that if you habituate slower to the things around you, they you're perhaps processing them for a longer
amount of time. So these random pieces of information visuals, sounds, they stay in your mind for longer, and so these different pieces of information that usually don't come together are more likely to kind of collide, right to collide in your brain, to create connections because they are in your head in a sort of like soup, in a sort of mix. And we know that often the most creative
ideas come from unconventional connections. So you can take a piece of information that's so super like mundane in one domain, and another piece of information super mundane in another domain. You put them together and suddenly you have this creative solution. You see that a lot in technology, where people take rules from biology and they use them in the you know, to create some kind of technology. So these these combinations,
and that's probably one of the reasons. And it could, I mean, it could be quite confusing to have all these pieces of information in your mind, right. It can be something that can cause a difficulty to focus and concentrate, but it also enhances creativity. And so how can we actually use that knowledge to be more creative ourselves. Well, there's a study showing that one way to do that is to induce this habituation by going and changing your environment.
So turns out that if you are sitting in your office and you are just you know, thinking about a problem, but then you go out and you take a little walk and then you come back, or vice versa. If you're thinking about a problem while you're walking and then you're coming back to the office, any kind of change or even you're in the office and you're going to sit in a cafe or you're going to your kitchen.
Turns out that any change in your environment enhances creative ideas significantly, so although it only does that for about six minutes. So if you're changing your environment, then that will create disabituation and that will enhance creativity for about six minutes. After that, you're kind of like habituation again
to your environment. So that is one way to enhance creativity by just changing the environment and therefore making your brain more likely to be attentive to all this bits of information that are around you.
So that was my interview with Tolly Sherratt about her new book co author with Cast Sunstein, called Look Again, which is all about how we habituate to things and how we can try to dishabituate. And I just want
to add a couple of thoughts. So the first one is, perhaps because I'm in Silicon Valley, I see lots of startup companies doing their things, and I compare these to the big established companies, and the big companies have a difficult time innovating because they're too stuck in their methods and hypotheses and ways of doing things and So what the clever big companies do is they give birth to spin offs. And these spin offs are young and nimble, and this, of course is analogous to what humans do.
Humans drop into the world full of vim and vigor and nimbleness, just like a young startup. But after a while they accrue these giant rule books, these ways of doing things. Humans get stuck in their methods and hypotheses and ways of doing things, and so what they do is they spawn babies to go out and take on the next generation. Babies have these clean minds that are not already stuck in habit The magic of children is that they are not as totally habituated as we are,
so they can see things in a fresh light. Everything is new to them, and so they notice things.
That we have become blind to.
And in this way, our daily endeavor to disabituate is to become like.
A child again.
And the second thing I want to mention is that I think good science is often about disabituation. Not always, but many of the biggest moves in science happen from saying, Okay, I grew up with this textbook, and the textbook has all the answers, and yet I can't escape the feeling that there may be a different way to look at this whole thing. In other words, we've all gotten used to a particular story, but there may be a more powerful one available. So good scientists are always looking to
shake off assumptions. In my postdoctoral fellowship, I got to spend a lot of time with Francis Krik, who was the co discoverer of the structure of DNA, and what I learned from him is that he just assumed that about a quarter of the scientific literature he was reading was wrong, either because of mistakes or fraud or misinterpretation or whatever. He just assumed that when the community of scientists believe in something, it might be true, but it
might not. That was a very powerful lens through which to view the world, because it was essentially a constant lens of dishabituation, of allowing everything to be questioned, of encouraging everything to be questioned.
That is what's needed to do good.
Science, and presumably that's what's needed to live a maximally enjoyable life, because one of the most important things the brain does is to seek novelty, finding new angles on things. This is what builds new roadways in your brain. So that sounds easy, but we always have to fight habitua, growing used to things. Habituation constantly makes us forget the colors of the world that we're in. But it just
takes attention to reverse this. It's one of the simplest things you can do to better enjoy your daily life, and it's one of the most important things for brain health. And one of the things we learned today is that you can seek novelty, not by flying across the globe and jumping out of planes and fighting bulls, but simply by paying fresh attention to the things around you, simply by looking again.
Go to Eagleman dot com.
Slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at egleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.