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How to increase your willpower

USA Today has a dilemma.  Tell the people what they want to hear, or report the truth.

On one hand, telling people what they want to hear sells more newspapers.  But if they report falsehoods, they lose credibility.

To their credit, USA Today is transparent about their crass motives.  In a recent article, they acknowledge that most people (71%) "think willpower is something they can learn," so they cravenly devote most of the article to reinforcing this (false) popular notion by publishing the discredited theories of a crackpot psychologist who advocates that people "work on ways to delay instant gratification" and "practice self-control".

Again, to their credit, USA Today seeks to retain a modicum of credibility, by quoting one of the country's foremost experts (executive director of the American Psychological Association), who throws cold water on most of the article's content.  "Studies show that some people are better at resisting temptation than others, he says.  'They seem to innately have more self-control'."  (In other words, willpower is not learnable.)

It's a neat trick, popularized by such noted charlatans as Dr. Phil.  Tell the majority what they want to hear, and hope they miss the few sentences that you devote to the truth.

PBS endorses the innateness of leadership skills

The biography “Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency” recently aired on public television (PBS).  Jackson, it is told, grew up fatherless during the Revolutionary War, under “constant threat of violence”.  His mother and brother died of disease, and Jackson himself was “angry and frustrated” and “made a reputation for himself getting into trouble”.

The program devotes merely one sentence to Jackson’s early rise: “After apprenticing with a lawyer, Jackson became a lawyer himself”. What? How could someone who lost both parents and grew up in the Carolinas where fighting was the “most vicious” of the entire Revolutionary War… become a lawyer?  Wasn’t he traumatized?  Doesn’t growing up in such conditions cause poverty and despair?  That's the usual PBS explanation.

There's more. Despite his experience, Jackson thrived and “had passion, fire, determination and a refusal to be crushed”. He didn’t let “social convention” stop him from stealing another man’s wife (who was granted Kentucky's first-ever divorce).

How does PBS explain this contradiction, a man who rises above his experience? Does nature trump nurture? In a word, yes. Jackson is described as a man with the “determination, vision, and charisma of a born leader”.

That's right, born leader. This is not the liberal public television I remember!  Leadership is innate, they say now.  That’s why Jackson had such qualities, despite his appalling environment.  Nature does trump nurture.  Thanks, PBS, for making my case for me!

Jackson is described as “ambitious” and “interested in politics”.  With PBS’s blessing, we can now deconstruct what this really means.  What sort of genes lead to brain development than manifests an “interest in politics”?  How does DNA encode ambition, and moreover, what gene variants do ambitious people possess, that the rest of us don’t?  Is it fair that some have it, and some don't?

Jackson's leadership didn't arise from the cruel experience of his youth, and certainly not from being fatherless, since many others who suffered the same experiences were spiritually crushed.  Experience does not create character, according to PBS.  Genes do.

Book review: The Genius in Some of Us

Ted Williams wasn’t born swinging a bat.  Through practice, practice, and more practice, he re-wired his brain to perform expertly in the moment.  This is not unlike a doctor who studies for years to make a complex diagnosis in the blink of an eye.

David Shenk, in his new book, thinks that anyone can be talented if they practice something hard enough.  Shenk certainly establishes his PC cred, but in the process he attacks freedom of choice and defends the entrenched meritocracy.

The real question should be: Why did Ted Williams succeed when other kids in his neighborhood didn’t?  The answer is, he had greater resilience, drive, motivation, and determination to stick with his practice routine.  He used charm to enlist other kids to help him practice, and he boldly approached other baseball greats for advice.

So where do charm, resilience, drive and motivation come from?  Following Descartes' example, I'll examine my own mind first.  I don't want to play baseball.  I'm not interested, and certainly not obsessed with it.  Yet if you don't want something (desire it, crave it, obsess about it) then you won't practice it, and you won't develop that talent.  You can't separate the middle brain's desires from the higher brain's ability to learn through practice.  They are one system.

Surely swinging a club was a valuable skill in the State of Nature, but not everyone is interested in developing that skill – then or now – because "interest" itself is what's innate.  To paraphrase Schopenhauer, you can do what you want, but you can't choose your wants themselves. 

I agree that the higher brain (the neo-cortex) is a general purpose learning engine that can absorb the results of practice by fine-tuning its neural connections.  Most of us have the capacity to learn what we practice.  But talent is not just about neo-cortical learning through practice.  It’s about our choices, desires, passions that emanate from what I call the inner eye, which includes the more primitive regions of our brain like the amygdala, thalamus, and basal ganglia.  Different desires and drives and motivations and passions lead to different practice routines, which lead to different skills.

Genes construct the inner eye.  (Yes, it's complex development over time, but nobody would argue that other time-delayed development, such as female breast development, is not innate.)  From the inner eye comes desire, motivation, interest, and passion, which lead us toward some situations and stimuli over others.  We practice what interests us, and practice leads to talent.  Resilience and risk-taking are also innate.    Since we all differ genetically, it follows that we each possess different inner eyes, and thus different talents.

It’s easiest to understand if you explore the outliers and "make the natural seem strange," as William James suggests, to reduce your intuitive bias.  Consider the case of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was fascinated by killing and mutilation.  (To be fascinated by something, you first need the innate circuitry to recognize it and then react to it, at least abstractly, the same way my son is innately attracted to trains for their orderliness and mechanical nature.)  I can’t imagine having the same interests, desires and passions as Jeffrey Dahmer – he repulses me.  But I also can’t imagine being excited by playing baseball or the violin, so I will never practice them.

Genes are special physical objects in that they manifest millions of years of past experience into the present.  So genes embody the environment in which they evolved.  They develop brain structures that can recognize aspects of the environment and respond to them.  Our neo-cortex is subservient to the inner eye, to allow our instincts more subtlety in their action.  Passions, desires, interests... these are all akin to instincts.

Are genes deterministic? Yes and no. Identical twins have the same genes but don’t necessarily end up identical, for the same reason that two elevators with identical designs are not summonded to the same floor.  Human brains and elevators have an internal state, or memory, and genes themselves have semi-persistent epigenetic on/off switches. Yet elevators are designed to be triggered by the environment (i.e. human fingers pressing on the call button), and these stimuli are fully anticipated in the design itself.  The human brain is less strictly specified, but nonetheless, a vague impulse every day adds up to a very specific motivation over time.

In any case, David Shenk describes an imaginary world of actualized potential and one has to ask why it doesn’t yet exist.  The answer is: If I don’t want to become, say, President – if I don’t find it interesting or exciting – then I literally can’t become President.  Since our interests come from our genes (i.e. gene variants that differentially develop the inner eye), it’s the same thing as saying that I can’t become President because of my genes.  Genes are not something you have; genes are something you are.

The Genius in Some of Us

David Shenk’s new book “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong” won’t be released until March 9, and I wasn’t given a pre-release copy.  So I’ll mostly withhold judgment until I’ve read it.  [UPDATE: I've now read it and posted a review here]

Here’s the description from Amazon.com:

Integrating cutting-edge research from a wide swath of disciplines—cognitive science, genetics, biology, child development—Shenk offers a highly optimistic new view of human potential. The problem isn't our inadequate genetic assets, but our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have. IQ testing and widespread acceptance of “innate” abilities have created an unnecessarily pessimistic view of humanity—and fostered much misdirected public policy, especially in education.

The truth is much more exciting. Genes are not a “blueprint” that bless some with greatness and doom most of us to mediocrity or worse. Rather our individual destinies are a product of the complex interplay between genes and outside stimuli-a dynamic that we, as people and as parents, can influence.

Sure, our individual destiny is a product of "the complex interplay between genes and outside stimuli." But what are genes if not a product of evolution?  Genes transport millions of years of evolutionary experience into the present via the physical form of the body. So it's not nature vs. nurture; it's evolutionary experience vs. current experience.

The real question should be: how do genetic differences among us lead to fundamental motivational and behavioral differences?

We can't choose which stimuli we find motivating. We're born with certain interests, likes and dislikes, that are hazy and unformed at first. For example, Peyton Manning is a genius quarterback by the happy co-incidence of what innately motivates him (complex, choreographed war games) and the opportunity he found in his environment (playing football).  He obsessively sought more of that environment, after the initial exposure, and obsession leads to "time on task", which leads to genius.

It's folly to assume that "our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have" is the issue. The real issue is that some people are born motivated by the "right things" that lead them to a great career, great wealth, and great power.  Motivation is what's genetic, which is to say: differences in motivation (i.e. desire, ambition, energy, passion, interests) among us are due to genetic differences. You still have to work hard to develop your talent (you're not born with skills or expertise), but if you've got the innate motivation (obsessive desire) to stick with something doggedly and relentlessly until you've developed the talent, how is that different from saying "talent is innate"?

Everyone wants an optimistic and exciting message. Most people crave the myth, especially when someone in authority does the telling. That’s why Dr. Phil and Martin Seligman (author of “Authentic Happiness”) are so popular.  My guess is that David Shenk wants part of that action – and if he has to engage in shameless Malcolm Gladwell-style pandering, so be it. 

Monet isn't everything

The philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between the "experience of beauty" and mere "agreeable sensations".  The appreciation of art falls in the former category, whereas having a good meal falls into the latter category.

But for an evolutionary psychologist like Denis Dutton, it all comes from our evolved brain.  He quotes Randy Thornhill that "Pleasure, like all experiences, is the product of brain mechanisms, and brain mechanisms are the products of evolution...by selection"

Certainly, it seems less romantic to analyze our appreciation of art this way.  Many people would claim, as Pierre Bourdieu did, that a spontaneous connection with art ("punctum"), and aesthetic experiences generally, are social in nature, and cannot transcend the social conditions in which they are made.

Of course, humans evolved in a social context, so our genetic form was designed by millions of years of evolutionary experience (in a social context).  Our brain was designed to be triggered by social cues.  Our folk explanations of our own feelings and experiences are not strictly true, but instead are also the product of the built-in reasoning of our genetic brain.

Yes, but he got more opportunities than me!

Would Bill Clinton have become a successful politician if he were born in China, a country with a different culture, history and standards for success?  Yes, I believe he would.  Even if he were born to lower-class parents in China, I still think he would have been given good opportunities, and eventually found success.  (Although his sexual promiscuity would have ended his political career in China, it would not have been widely known - since the press is not free - unless a political enemy gave them permission to report it, of course!)

Ask yourself – why is someone successful?  Because he climbs higher and higher over time, in steps.  When a “gifted” child is young, he may be seen as extremely articulate, self-confident, and charismatic.  Every once in a while, an older and more powerful “mentor” notices him.  What happens then?  The mentor sees a promising pupil to further his own power and influence.  He then adopts the pupil and teaches him, and introduces him to other influential power brokers.

So what comes first, the “promising student” or the “mentoring opportunity”?  Clearly, mentors are attracted to those with natural (innate) talent for selfish reasons.  Mentors want to find subordinates who will follow them, support them, and think like them to promote their own agenda.  Mentees benefit from being “found” and trained and given opportunities.

So if Bill Clinton were transplanted to China as a young boy, the same dynamic would be at work.  Powerful men would spot him (or be told about this young prodigy) and would help train him out of their own self-interest. When we say someone had “opportunities” in life, we’re really saying that a mentor spotted an innately promising pupil and decided to train him. 

Once someone has learned all they can from the mentor, and still shows talent and self-confidence (i.e. leadership ability), another more powerful mentor inevitably finds him and steals him away, again through self-interest.  For a while, the pupil will make his mentor look good.  Until he surpasses him.

Get happy, and you'll live longer

It's always safe to tell lies about human nature.  It makes us feel good to hear, for example, that happiness is a learned skill.  Magazines and self-help books constantly repeat this lie, because it's the lie we wish to hear.  What is the alternative?  If happiness were genetic and innate, that would just be too depressing!

A recent article in US News & World Report magazine (among many other sad examples) concludes that:

While some people may be born with sunny dispositions, happiness isn't necessarily based on genes or luck.  Psychologists now believe it's a learned skill, almost like knitting.

Really?  Can we force ourselves to be happy, by willing ourselves (as Martin Seligman suggests) to be absorbed in our work, goals and leisure activities, and by thinking happy thoughts?  Sure, it's true that happier people live longer.  But you can't simply become happy by changing your thoughts and habits.  You can't teach an emotion or motivation.  It has to come from within (read: genetic predisposition) to have any lasting effect.

Self-help books or magazine articles are just trying to separate us from our money, by preying on our fervent desire for happiness and self-fulfillment... but in reality, it's all just a bunch of confabulations by greedy hucksters like Martin Seligman who just want to make a buck.

Paris Hilton's "famous" genes

The New York Times recently made a startling revelation that "30 percent of adults report regularly daydreaming about being famous", just as Paris Hilton undoubtably does.

The words "genetic" or "inborn" never appeared in the article, of course, as if the past 30 years of scientific evidence didn't occur.  Instead, the need for fame is attributed to rational motives (like the "need to make meaning out of our lives" or "to feel like we are more than just material animals" or, worse, "due to a sense of abandonment").  Even Freud, that crutch of novelists, actors, writers and musicians who are oblivious to his discredited status, is mentioned.

So why are the other 70% of us not motivated to seek fame?  Why don't we feel the same visceral excitement at the thought of other people looking at us, and talking about us?  Why don't we respond to the same rational arguments that "we need to make meaning of our lives through fame"?

Because, once again, motivation cannot be trained.  It's innate.  Different people have different gene variants. and thus different personality traits. I'm waiting for scientists to identify the specific genetic variant that explains the behavior, so the rest of us have something else to talk about.  (Of course, most of us probably have the alternative celebrity idolizing gene, instead!)

Our brains are not designed for truth

People use words in many different ways, but let's consider these three:

1. To convey facts
2. To rationalize what we see or do
3. To elicit a social outcome or effect

I would argue that #1 is the least frequent way we use words.  Usually, we use our words for their effect on other people, or to justify our actions after the fact.

Humans generally offer confabulations (false explanations) for our experiences because this is the way our brains are hard-wired.  We are not built for rationality, especially in our understanding of our own motives and those of other human beings.

Our words are often designed to elicit specific social ends, not convey objective truth.  For example, if a leader says “I owe it all to my subordinates”, he or she is really making a display ("I am self-confident, I speak for you"), to which the subordinates are programmed to respond (greater identification with the leader, greater affection and trust).  Words in this case are used to reinforce the social hierarchy, not convey truth.

Humans are so hard-wired to make up explanations (any explanation) to rationalize our actions, that we refuse to consider evidence to the contrary.  For example, even if a scientist is able to prove that a parent's behavior doesn't really have any lasting influence on his or her children’s basic personality and intelligence, that scientist will be chastised (or worse), because we are hardwired to (falsely) believe that parents do have an important influence. 

(Of course, the effect of (falsely) believing they have an influence on their children's personality keeps the parents around to provide food and shelter.  So false beliefs can have beneficial outcomes for society.)

Scientists are people, too, and most scientists are hardwired to feel stress when acting in an "anti- social" way.  So if society thinks you're crazy for proposing something (even if it can be easily and scientifically proven), most scientists shy away from it, and try instead to adhere to (false) social beliefs and norms.  Only those scientists who have the genetic variation (that allows their minds to stubbornly operate without the need for social approval) can perform accurate research in this area.

Since our brains are wired in this fashion, we cannot truly understand ourselves.  We bring certain innate biases to our self-understanding and motives, which seem so commonsensical, that anyone who questions our beliefs is ignored. We cannot study ourselves objectively, because our own hardwired categories of understanding don’t allow it.

No Two Alike: aspiring biographers, please read!

Perhaps Judith Rich Harris' new book -- No Two Alike -- will finally teach biographers how to write accurately on human nature.  But don't count on it.  My guess is that biographers will happily go on writing meaningless, feel-good pablum, attributing personality traits to environmental causes and "how we were raised" instead of the true causes, and we'll all be happily fooling ourselves once more.

Most people are unwilling to accept new evidence about human nature, or they simply shut it out of their thinking.  So I predict that the current "folk" paradigm will stay around for perhaps for another 10-20 years, despite all the evidence to the contrary in front of our eyes.  We'll continue to read biographies and newspaper articles written in the style of the current (false) paradigm, written by otherwise intelligent, well-meaning and thoughtful people. 

Those people who will read Judith Rich Harris' new book are the "early adopters" who have already moved on to the new paradigm of human nature.  We'll just have to wait for the mainstream to catch up.

Blind Ambition

Time magazine asks why some people are ambitious and some are not. Is it innate?  Every once in a while, Time runs stories like this (about nature vs nurture), and they keep making a mess of it.

First, the article points out that identical twins aren't exactly alike in their ambition, even though they have the same genes.  I've discussed why this is misleading -- two elevators with identical designs can be sent to different floors.  Although they receive different "environments" (their buttons are pushed in different ways), it doesn't change the fact that they are designed to respond to certain types of environments (finger presses), and not to others (e.g. screams or smells).  It's true that our innate traits are triggered by certain situations, but the triggers themselves are set up by the genes!  If an elevator was summoned to the first floor or the third, would you say it's a product of its environment?

Second, although the article correctly lists a person's persistence (dedication to completing a task) and energy-level as prime factors in ambition, they draw the wrong conclusion, that it's "impossible to say whether innate differences ... were driving the ambitious behavior or whether learned behavior" was the cause. This is ridiculous!  Why do we learn anything?  Because we're motivated to do so.  I've discussed at length why motivation is innate.

Third, every discussion of innate differences in the article is always watered down, so as not to offend Time magazine's readers.  For example, women aren't less ambitious than men, they are "more selective about when they engage in competition".  Well, that's still an innate difference, right?

Fourth, the article makes a false distinction between what's in our genes and how we develop. The reality is, our genes guide our development over time.  The genes can recognize aspects of the environment, and use those aspects to guide our development and behavior.  Also, our genes can recognize many scenarios, and react accordingly by branching to a different development scenario.  But this is still 100% innate.

Common Sense and Bias

According to Judith Rich Harris, researchers tend to seek out evidence that confirms their biases, and downplay (or attack) any evidence to the contrary.  Furthermore, according to Christopher Chabris "people often react most defensively when challenged not on their firmly held beliefs but on beliefs they wish were true but suspect at some level to be false." 

For example, psychologists often assert that a child’s personality can be guided and shaped by his or her parents.  This implies that well-adjusted children must have had good parents, and fearful children must have been overprotected by their (bad) parents.

This common sense view completely overlooks the possibility that children who are born with a genetic predisposition to be anxious or fearful are more likely to be reared by anxious, fearful parents, because children get their gene variants from their parents as well as their environment.

When asked to consider this, researchers have backtracked, and now claim it’s not parental over-protectiveness that makes all children fearful, it’s the child’s "high-reactive" temperament.  So overprotecting some children makes them fearful, and overprotecting other children does not... Which begs the question -- how can you predict who reacts which way?

Another example of bad research shows that “mothers who improved in their child-rearing methods (through interventions) are more likely to have children who behave well in school”.  Due to their biases, researchers overlooked the fact that “compliance depends on certain personality traits that may also be associated with the outcome event”. 

In other words, “people who comply with interventions are likely to differ in personality and intelligence from those who do not comply. Because these characteristics are heritable [innate], parents who respond well to the demands of an intervention are more likely to have children who respond well to the demands of school.”  Again, children share their parents' gene variants, not just their environment.

The Math Myth?

Time Magazine recently published an article on "The Math Myth", asking whether "men are better equipped for scientific genius" than women.  But I think the question is misleading for the following reasons:

Geniuses are a breed apart.  They are like an irrepressible force of nature.  They will work obsessively on problem-solving from morning to night.  They don't need additional motivation.  They don't care what society says.  They don't need approval or validation or recognition.  A genius needs to maintain such a level of focus, to discover something entirely new for mankind, especially in the face of criticism and ridicule by luddites.  In my experience, this type of anti-social behavior is much more common in men. 

Even if women and men have the same raw talent for math and science, they may have other competing motivations, such as a feeling of obligation toward others like parents and children.  Many women speak of things like "society tells us to do XYZ" and "women are not encouraged to do XYZ".  But why care about what society thinks, unless you are motivated (from within) to listen to those words.  From an early age, boys (such as my son) are clearly more interested in physical objects than in "doing what society encourages".

According to Time, "Boys and men are still on average better at rotating 3-D objects in their minds".  Women's spatial reasoning improves "after spending a couple of hours a week...playing Tetris".  So the real key to gender difference may not lay in the part of the brain that controls spatial reasoning -- it's in the part of the brain that makes boys obsessed with certain behaviors like playing Tetris!  (That indirect link doesn't make it any less innate, though).

If you have the talent to be a genius, but you don't feel like applying it (for whatever reason) it has the same effect as if you didn't have the talent to begin with. The outcome is the same.

I worked hard to get where I am today

If you tell a leader that their leadership skills are innate, they will bristle with indignation and mutter "I worked hard to get where I am today".  And indeed they did work hard, because they were motivated, and motivations are innate.

The degree to which we bounce back from setbacks, seek novelty, and take risks is dictated in part by variations in our genes.

So which came first, the leadership skills or having the specific gene variant?  Leaders are typically blind to their own instincts and innate motivations, and so assume anyone can be like them, if only they work hard.  So books on learning how to be a leader will continue to sell well, and do little for those without the leader's gene variants.

I was discouraged from going to college

Have you ever heard someone complain that "I was discouraged from going to college" as the reason for them not attending?

Some people listen to discouraging voices, from their parents or "society", yet other people ignore those voices.  Some people obey, and some people stubbornly refuse.  What accounts for the difference?

Elisabeth Kubler Ross was strongly discouraged from going to college, and yet she stubbornly persisted.  What personality type(s) would allow her to do this?  Stubbornness, lack of a need for social approval, ability to defer gratification... all of these have been shown to be innate.

Therefore, an equally plausible explanation for someone not going to college is that they lacked the genetic threshold to overcome the resistence, and they had an innate need for the approval from their parents or society, so had to abide by their wishes.  It's not hard to think of a list of people (Napolean, etc) who didn't need social approval, and persisted in their goals despite enormous odds.