place to point out that separating emotions and reason is totally artificial. The two are merged. Brain scans affirm that the limbic system, a part of the lower brain that plays a major role in emotions, lights up when people think they are making rational decisions. This is inescapable because the circuitry of the brain is entirely interconnected. Studies have shown that when people feel good, they are willing to pay unreasonable prices for things. (Pay three hundred dollars for jogging shoes? Why not, I feel great today!) But they are also willing to pay more when they feel depressed. (Six dollars for a chocolate chip cookie? Why not, it will cheer me up.) The point is that we make decisions against an emotional background, even if we rationalize that we don’t.
Part of adaptability is to be aware of the emotional component instead of denying it. Otherwise, you run the risk that your brain will start using you. The economist Martin Shubik devised an unusualauction, in which the object put up for sale was a dollar bill. You might assume that the winning bid was $1, but it wasn’t, because in this auction, the winner got the dollar bill, but whoever made the second-highest bid had to pay that amount to the auctioneer. Thus if I win by bidding $2 and you lose by bidding $1.50, you must hand over that amount, with nothing to show for it.
When this experiment was run, the bidding went well above a dollar. Typically, two male students were the last bidders standing. They felt competitive; each wanted to punish the other; neither wanted to be the loser who got punished. Whatever their motives, irrational factors sent the bidding higher and higher. (One wonders why it didn’t skyrocket, ending only when one bidder ran out of money.)
Just as interesting is the fact that when experimenters try to eliminate the emotional side of decision making, they fail. No one has yet run a study where the subjects made purely rational decisions. We pay a high premium for stubbornly sticking to our opinions, backed by stuck emotions, habits, memories, and beliefs.
Bottom line: If you want to achieve success in any field, become like Einstein. Maximize your brain’s ability to adapt.
YOU ARE BECOMING MORE ADAPTABLE WHEN
You can laugh at yourself.
You see that there’s more to the situation than you realize.
Other people no longer look like antagonists simply because they disagree with you.
Negotiating starts to work, and you genuinely participate in it.
Compromise becomes a positive word.
You can hang loose in a state of relaxed alertness.
You see things in a way you didn’t before, and this delights you.
HERO #2
A NEWBORN BABY
FOR INTEGRATION
Our next hero isn’t famous or a genius or even gifted. It’s every newborn baby. Babies are paragons of health and well-being. Every cell in their bodies is vibrantly alive. They see the world as a place of endless discovery. Each day, if not each minute, is like a new world. What makes for their state of robust well-being isn’t that they are born in a good mood. Rather, their brains are constantly on the move, reshaping themselves as the world expands. Today is a new world, whether you are a baby or not, if it expands on what you experienced yesterday.
Babies have not shut themselves down or become stuck in old, outworn conditioning. Whatever their brains absorbed yesterday remains in place while new horizons keep opening up: walking, talking, learning how to relate and feel. When we grow up, we become nostalgic about the innocence of childhood. We sense a loss. What have we lost that babies have in abundance?
The key is integration .
Among all living things, human beings absorb every possible input and integrate it—that is, we make a whole picture. At this very minute, just like a newborn baby, you are sifting through billions of bits of raw data to form a coherent world. Here, sift is a technical term proposed by psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. It stands
Part of adaptability is to be aware of the emotional component instead of denying it. Otherwise, you run the risk that your brain will start using you. The economist Martin Shubik devised an unusualauction, in which the object put up for sale was a dollar bill. You might assume that the winning bid was $1, but it wasn’t, because in this auction, the winner got the dollar bill, but whoever made the second-highest bid had to pay that amount to the auctioneer. Thus if I win by bidding $2 and you lose by bidding $1.50, you must hand over that amount, with nothing to show for it.
When this experiment was run, the bidding went well above a dollar. Typically, two male students were the last bidders standing. They felt competitive; each wanted to punish the other; neither wanted to be the loser who got punished. Whatever their motives, irrational factors sent the bidding higher and higher. (One wonders why it didn’t skyrocket, ending only when one bidder ran out of money.)
Just as interesting is the fact that when experimenters try to eliminate the emotional side of decision making, they fail. No one has yet run a study where the subjects made purely rational decisions. We pay a high premium for stubbornly sticking to our opinions, backed by stuck emotions, habits, memories, and beliefs.
Bottom line: If you want to achieve success in any field, become like Einstein. Maximize your brain’s ability to adapt.
YOU ARE BECOMING MORE ADAPTABLE WHEN
You can laugh at yourself.
You see that there’s more to the situation than you realize.
Other people no longer look like antagonists simply because they disagree with you.
Negotiating starts to work, and you genuinely participate in it.
Compromise becomes a positive word.
You can hang loose in a state of relaxed alertness.
You see things in a way you didn’t before, and this delights you.
HERO #2
A NEWBORN BABY
FOR INTEGRATION
Our next hero isn’t famous or a genius or even gifted. It’s every newborn baby. Babies are paragons of health and well-being. Every cell in their bodies is vibrantly alive. They see the world as a place of endless discovery. Each day, if not each minute, is like a new world. What makes for their state of robust well-being isn’t that they are born in a good mood. Rather, their brains are constantly on the move, reshaping themselves as the world expands. Today is a new world, whether you are a baby or not, if it expands on what you experienced yesterday.
Babies have not shut themselves down or become stuck in old, outworn conditioning. Whatever their brains absorbed yesterday remains in place while new horizons keep opening up: walking, talking, learning how to relate and feel. When we grow up, we become nostalgic about the innocence of childhood. We sense a loss. What have we lost that babies have in abundance?
The key is integration .
Among all living things, human beings absorb every possible input and integrate it—that is, we make a whole picture. At this very minute, just like a newborn baby, you are sifting through billions of bits of raw data to form a coherent world. Here, sift is a technical term proposed by psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. It stands
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