Something You Should Know - How Language Affects How You Think & The Fascinating Way Emotions Determine Your Success

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

Not drinking enough water is a big problem. And while being a little dehydrated won’t kill you, dehydration does have a lot of significant and negative effects on your physical and mental wellness. This episode starts with a look at some surprising findings. http://www.shape.com/lifestyle/mind-and-body/5-signs-dehydration-besides-color-your-pee Language controls what you think and how you think it. Imagine how differently you would think if you didn’t have words like “left” or “right”? Or what if your language had no specific numbers? Well it turns out there are languages like that. And the differences in languages, including English, frame the way you think according to Lera Boroditsky who is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego. She has a fascinating TED talk on this subject which led me to her. Here is the link: https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think You’ve surely been told the importance of maintaining good eye contact with people when you speak with them. But sometimes you shouldn’t. In fact sometimes you can’t maintain eye contact – it’s virtually impossible. Listen to hear the reason why. http://www.livescience.com/7155-helps-concentration.html While you may not spend a lot of time thinking about it, your emotions play a huge role in your personal and professional success. Psychiatrist Dr. Norman Rosenthal, author of the book The Emotional Revolution https://amzn.to/2KxxlSd joins me to reveal things about how your emotions work, how you can control them and the purpose they serve.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, you're probably at least a little dehydrated right now and the effects can be significant. Plus, the language you speak actually shapes the way you think in fascinating ways. For example… There are some languages that don't have exact numbers. They don't have words like seven. And when I first learned about languages like this, I said, is that really possible? Like, some of these people have seven children. How do they keep track of their children? And when I first learned about languages like this, I said, is that really possible?

Like some of these people have seven children. How do they keep track of their children? Also, maintaining good eye contact is important, but sometimes it's impossible. And are you happy or miserable? Your emotions have so much to do with your success. So the happier you are, the more goodies come your way. And the more miserable you are, the more goodies come your way, and the more miserable you are, the more people avoid you, and then you feel, well, I've got reason to be miserable.

So there's this dynamic interaction between what you're putting out there and what's coming back from the world. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks.

Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know,

I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. get TED Talks daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Something I'm trying to do this summer is be more conscious of how much water I drink.

Because I always think I'm not drinking enough and that everyone else is. But it turns out a lot of people don't drink enough water. Researchers at Harvard found that over half of 4,000 kids they studied were not drinking enough water. With 25% of those kids saying they didn't drink any water at all during the day. Another study found that up to 75% of adults could be chronically dehydrated. 75%. While being a little low on water isn't going to kill you, it can decrease muscle strength and physical ability, as well as cause poor mental performance, headaches, and make you feel sluggish. In fact, you know that afternoon slump that a lot

of people have? Well, that could be your body crying out for water as much as anything else. When given a test, people who were dehydrated had lower test, and felt more like giving up on the test than people who were hydrated. Dehydration gives you bad breath. You produce less saliva when you don't drink water, and that allows bacteria to grow in your mouth, and that makes your breath smell. It makes you grouchy. Scientists found that women who were just 1% dehydrated, 1%,

felt more angry, frustrated, depressed, and annoyed compared to women who were hydrated. While it doesn't have to be plain water, getting enough fluids into your body is something a lot of us need to pay more attention to. And that is something you should know. I saw this TED Talk online not too long ago. Somebody posted it on Facebook, and I watched it, and it was really fascinating. It was about how language affects our thinking. That, in essence, how we think is dictated to us by the language we speak.

And people who speak other languages actually think differently than we do. What's so interesting is that you'd like to think that when you think, that you just think. You think clearly and logically and objectively. But actually, when you think, you're thinking through this filter of language. Anyway, the person who gave the TED Talk was Lira Boroditsky. Lira is a cognitive scientist in the field of language and cognition, and she is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego.

And I tracked her down, and she joins me now. Hi, Lira. Thanks for having me. So the idea that language shapes our thinking is so interesting to me because after watching your TED Talk, it's so clearly the case, and yet nobody ever talks about this. Nobody ever thinks about this. Yeah, language is like the air we breathe. We hardly notice it. We just think that it's perfectly reflecting and channeling our thoughts. We tend to think that the set of words we have in English, for example, is the set of things that there are in the world.

So dive in with some specific examples of just how language affects thinking. Let me start with an example on how we organize space. Some languages, like English, rely on words like left and right to divide up space, but other languages don't. So I had a chance to work with an Aboriginal language in Australia called Kuuk Thaer. And the Kuuk Thaer language doesn't use words like left and right to divide up space. And instead, everything is north, south, east, west, cardinal directions. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. Like you might say, there's a little chocolate on your southwest cheek.

And to speak a language like this, of course, you have to stay oriented. So in Kuuk Thaay, the way you say hello is, which way are you going? And the answer should be something like, south, southwest, in the far distance, how about you? Of course, if you think about yourself navigating your normal day, all the people you say hi to, if you really had to report your heading direction every time you said hi to someone, you'd get oriented really quickly. And in fact, people who speak languages like this

stay oriented remarkably well, much better than we used to think humans could. And it would seem exhausting to me to have to do that. And when they do that, like you say, there's no left and right. So depending on how they're standing, is their left arm sometimes their southwest arm, and sometimes their left arm is their northeast arm? Well, maybe you would argue they don't have a left arm. Well, I know.

I'm trying to translate from English to that language. Yeah, so if you imagine doing the hokey pokey in this language, it would be a lot more challenging because your left arm doesn't stay your left arm. If you move your southwest arm in, then it's no longer your southwest arm. Most likely it's going to be maybe the northeast arm. So if people are sitting in a circle, and somebody wants the group to all raise their left hand,

how would you do that in that language? I mean, I know what I mean by everybody raise their left hand, but how would you ever convey that, or can you not convey that in that language? You know, there are lots and lots of things that you can convey in lots and lots of languages. So the question would be, for me, is what would be the goal of doing that? So what would be the reason that you would want to do it? If you really wanted to convey something like this, you could imagine a long phrase or a long explanation that would say, you see the arm that is my south arm. Now, take the arm that's on the

side of the body that in a unit, you could just keep going and provide this really long explanation. And maybe you could get everyone to get what you were doing. But what would be the purpose of doing that? We often imagine reasons for why it's necessary to have something just because we have it. We have it in our language and we think, well, how could you ever survive without it? But actually, it's really easy to survive without it in lots of other language communities. Let me give you another example that I had the same experience with. There are some languages that don't have exact numbers. So they don't have words like seven or 13 in their language. And when I first learned about languages like this, I said, wow, is that really possible?

Some of these people have seven children. How do they keep track of their children? And I was very quickly informed that that's actually not how you keep track of children. You actually know your children as individual human beings. You don't just arbitrarily, abstractly count them. But then it put me in a position to think, okay, in what context do we actually need to count and have exact number? And in most contexts in the natural

world, you don't need to have exact numbers. So if you have seven fish, for example, well, those don't equal seven tomatoes in any important way. And seven fish don't even equal seven fish because fish are all different sizes and freshnesses and qualities. And so that abstract sevenness doesn't actually have that much use in the natural world. It's only once you start having trade and other cultural systems laid on top of it that something like seven can take on a specific significance. And listening to you say that is frustrating, because of course seven is you. If there's 14 kids on a field trip, and you're going to take seven, and I'm going to take seven,

and we don't have the number seven to discuss, how are we ever going to come to that agreement? Well, ideally, you would come back with not just any seven kids, but the seven that you took, right? So you would come back with Billy and Timmy and Susie and Katie, the set of children that you are actually responsible for. So you could discuss it that way. Those are some pretty extreme examples, I suspect. There are probably some more subtle examples of how language affects how we think. Sure. Let me give you a very close-to-home example. A lot of European languages have grammatical gender.

So all nouns are assigned a gender like masculine or feminine. And the question becomes, do these grammatical genders matter? So does it matter if in your language the moon is masculine or the sun is feminine? Now, the grammatical genders that different nouns have across languages differ a whole lot. So if the moon is feminine in Spanish, it's masculine in German, and the reverse is true for the sun. And what we find is people actually take these genders as meaningful. So if you ask even little kids, for example, learning these languages, hey, we're making an animated movie, we're going to have a sun character or a moon

character, what kind of voice should it have? Kids learning these languages will say that it should have a boy voice if it's a grammatically masculine noun, and it should have a girl voice if it's a grammatically feminine noun and people will give different descriptions of the same object depending on whether something is masculine or feminine in their language. What's most fascinating to me is that people actually believe these genders to be reflecting reality, right? So it seems so silly if you speak a language without grammatical gender. It seems so silly to think, oh, that a chair is somehow fundamentally, truly masculine or feminine. But if you ask monolinguals of a language that have grammatical gender, why is this word

masculine in your language? They'll say, well, it's reflecting something really true about the chair or the moon. And if you ask bilinguals who've learned two languages that have grammatical gender, then they say, oh, well, it's just a formal property of the language. It's not really true of the world. So if we're not exposed to information outside of our language, we tend to believe that the structures in our language are really reality, even these very seemingly silly quirks. I'm speaking with Lyra Boroditsky. She is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego, and she has a great TED Talk on the subject that we are speaking about,

which is how language affects how you think. People who listen to something you should know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more.

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that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Rudolf Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. So, Lyra, as you were talking, I was remembering back, you know, I took French in high school, and I remember thinking, because French, all the nouns in French are either masculine or feminine, and I remember thinking, it seems so arbitrary and pointless, but I assume that people who are French-only speakers look at English and see the fact that we don't have genders for our nouns as being equally arbitrary and pointless. Sure.

There are some old French philosophers that used to argue that French was the perfect language because it had intuited in its grammatical structure the true genders of objects in the world. So people feel very proud of the structures of their language. But also having masculine and feminine is not the only option. There are some languages that have 16 grammatical genders, 16 noun classes that one might be for tools or weapons. Another one might be for shiny things. There's a famous grammatical gender in an Aboriginal Australian language that includes women, fire, and dangerous things. Those are all things that go together in one grammatical category. What are they? Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Those are all things that go together in one grammatical category. What are they?

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things? Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. There's a book by George Lakoff under that name, and one thing I always notice, people always remember the name of that book as Women, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things. But actually, it's just Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Well, that other makes a big difference.

That's pretty funny. And when a language is similar in the way that I think of French and Spanish as being similar, is it easier for someone whose only language is French to learn Spanish because it's similar, or does that make it more difficult because it's similar but it's still different enough that it's a different language? It definitely makes it easier, but you will hear people complain. So if, for example, you speak Spanish and you're trying to learn Italian, people will say, oh, I get so confused, it's so much harder to learn Italian because I speak Spanish, and the two are getting confused. And that is their experience, but if you measure the speed of learning from someone who already

speaks Spanish, as opposed to someone who doesn't speak any Romance languages, of course they're going to do a lot better. When a language is seemingly, you know, and it's always from your own perspective, but seemingly more complicated, like Chinese, for example. If you speak Chinese, is a language that is seemingly more simple, like English, easy to learn because it is simple, or it's just hard to learn a different language? You know, what makes a language easier or hard really depends on what other languages you already know. So exactly as you as the caveat that you gave. So depending on what languages you already know, some languages may seem a lot easier or harder.

And I wouldn't classify Chinese or English as either easier or harder in absolute terms. There are some languages that take a longer time for kids to acquire as their native language. So that may be an index of how complex and idiosyncratic the set of structures that you have to learn are. So, for example, most European languages kids will acquire with relative ease, but then there's some languages that kids might take until they're 12 or 13 before adults in that language will say, oh yes, you've really mastered the language. What languages take till you're 12 years old to learn?

Some Slavic languages, some Ojibwe languages like Navajo and Native American languages. We don't have this data for almost all languages in the world, so I'm giving you just examples where we have things that we know about, but there's a lot more for us to learn. So you mentioned, you know, the left and right and north, south, east, west, and that some languages don't have numbers the way we have numbers. But any other things like that that really separate out and illustrate how what we say affects how we think? You know, you don't have to look across languages to find examples of how language shapes the way that we think, right? So within English, you can think about the way we

frame information and how it affects our decisions. Let's take the original wardrobe malfunction when Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson performed at the Super Bowl in 2004. That was a really famous accident. And in fact, the term wardrobe malfunction came from that accident from Justin Timberlake's apology. If we describe what happened as he ripped the costume, does that make people judge him more harshly than if we say in the final dance move, the costume ripped? What we find in studies like that is people not only blame Timberlake more if you describe it as if he did it, but they also want to charge him 57% more in fines. And that's true even though everyone can see the video, right? So we kindly show them the video again, though we know they've also seen it before many times. And I give you this example because we have this idea in our culture that

when we see things with our own eyes, we're perceiving reality. We even have phrases like, well, let's go to the tape, because if we go to the tape, we can see what things really are. And in this example, you can go to the tape, you can watch the event over and over again, but still the description that's offered is going to very importantly sway what you think happened and how harshly or leniently you're going to judge the people involved. So we see the effect of language not just when you look across languages, but really whenever you choose what you say, whenever you choose to describe an event, whenever you choose what noun you're

going to use, you're taking a perspective, a frame of reference on that particular situation. And that frame of reference is shaping the way you think about it, and it's shaping the way your conversation partner thinks about it. And so you're jointly creating a particular perspective. And is that true in every language? Does every language have that big ability to sway, or are they more precise? Well, certainly we don't know the answer for every language, because only a tiny proportion of languages have been tested, but in general, you would expect that to be true because language is always a very sparse code of what's really out there. Whenever you utter a sentence, you're describing only a tiny proportion of what you could have included in your description. And so every description is

going to sway you to pay attention to some things at the expense of others. Now, the things that we pay attention to in language are the things that thousands of years of humans before us found useful or interesting, right? So languages ended up the way that they did because all of these generations of humans have changed and refined languages to suit their needs. So we're inheriting this incredible guidebook from our ancestors

saying, pay attention to this, think about it in this way, compact these ideas like this. So we're inheriting this incredible library of human work when we're acquiring a language. So it's not a randomly selected set of things that we're paying attention to, but every language will contain that particular guidebook that was refined by thousands of generations of humans speaking that language or working on that language. So fascinating, because you think of language as being somewhat objective, that when you describe something, you are describing the reality of something. And as you just point out, the words you choose to use and the order

you put them in has the ability to sway people drastically. There's only so much that we as humans can pay attention to in any given moment. Let me give you an example. I was recently in Switzerland and I went to rent a boat so I could drive around the lake. And the owner of the boat asked me if I wanted one with a sunshade. And it was very overcast that day. And I said, no, of course, I don't need one with a sunshade. And half an hour later, it started to rain. And so I was out on the lake soaking wet. And only then did it occur to me that a sunshade, of course, also can protect you from the rain. And, you know, here I am, this supposed expert on language and thought. And, of course,

I thought about that object of the sunshade as a protector from the sun, and I failed to see all of the other uses that it could have. And this is a very classic phenomenon psychologists call this functional fixedness, that for any object, we tend to see only one of the many uses that it can have, and language can invite you to see it as one thing or another. And I was very strongly channeled into thinking about it as protection from the sun, when in fact, I would have been a lot drier if I had thought about it more flexibly. Well, listening to you gives me a real appreciation for what language does and does not do and what it can and cannot do. So thanks for sharing that. Lyra Boroditsky has been my guest.

She is a cognitive scientist in language and cognition, and she's a professor of cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego. I found her from watching a TED Talk, and I will put the link to her TED Talk in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Lyra. Thanks so much. This was really fun. Bye. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know,

you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker.

Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice.

Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. While you deal with them all the time, you probably don't sit around much thinking about your emotions and why do you have them and what do they do for you. They just are there.

And sometimes they're great and other times your emotions get in the way, and other times, by definition, they feel horrible. But when you understand a little bit about what emotions are and how they work and how you can work with them, it can be a lot easier to maneuver through life. And that is why Dr. Norman Rosenthal is here. Dr. Rosenthal is a psychiatrist and author of the book, The Emotional Revolution. Hi, doctor. So talk about your approach to this

topic. How do you look at emotions? As for me, I'm a psychiatrist. So that's something I deal with on a daily basis with my patients, as well as, as of course my own emotions and those of my friends and my family and the second thing is I'm a researcher and what what occurred to me is that we continually see some new discovery in the area of emotions coming across our desk either from some major publication or some book on the topic and it seemed to me it was timely to put it all together and say to the public at large, you know, what is an emotion? What is its value? When is it working? When is it not working?

That's really where my interest came from. And what is an emotion? How do you define that? Where do they come from? You know, there are special circuits in the brain that are dedicated really to emotional processing. And I would say that an emotion is a state of mind that makes you more susceptible to certain kinds of behaviors, certain kinds of observations. What do I mean by that? Let's say I'm in love. Okay, I am more susceptible to courtship behaviors, to reaching out to my loved one, to being

sweet, to being nice, to be engaging. It's a whole state of being that dictates a set of communications and a set of behaviors. If you want to think of it in computer terms, it's a mode. You could imagine a computer going into different modes, love mode, anger mode, happiness mode, sadness mode, all of which has some value and some communication value. And I think we tend to think of emotions as things that happen to us, that, you know, I feel sad or I feel happy, that these are things that just happen to us. But is it?

Well, that's a great question, and I think to some extent it is. To some extent, things that happen in our lives cause certain emotions, but to some extent we make our emotions as well. Because if we, for example, gamble away our money and lose a great deal of money as a consequence, we're going to be pretty unhappy about that. But that isn't something that happened to us. That's something we actually made happen. And I think a lot of people don't get that distinction clear. Yeah, that's a really interesting point,

because I think we all, to some extent, have a responsibility for why we feel the way we feel, and what we do with those feelings, and what caused those feelings. We have a role to play and a responsibility, but I think a lot of people believe that feelings just happen to them, that they don't have much control. What do you think? I think it's variable. I think education has a lot to do with it.

I think how a child is raised. I remember when I would say at home when I was growing up, the glass broke. You know, my father would say, you know, glasses don't break, people break the glass. And so I think that some idea of responsibility and agency is inculcated very early in people by their parents and their culture. Well, and your father was right. I mean, glasses don't break themselves. People break them.

So he's right. He was a lawyer, and he said that he would get a client who had maybe been married four times. Maybe this was a man who'd been married four times. And the man would say, and one wife was worse than the next. They were four of the most awful women you could ever meet. And my father would kind of smile at it to say, now, you know, didn't he have any responsibility in the choice? So I think we have to teach people agency for their behaviors and responsibility. But with all that having been said,

there are lots of things that do happen that we have no control over. And the other thing that we don't have control over is our temperament, that some people are just set. It's called a set point, as it were, of happiness. Some people just have a much happier happiness set point than others. And that's a factor that I think has to be acknowledged. And what sets the set point? You know, I think to some degree it is biology, heredity. Also maybe it's early experiences. But I'm sure you know people who are just Pollyannas and they get out of the bed whistling and that's how they feel all day long. And other people are Jeremiahs and they're always

thinking the worst and predicting the worst. And of course, the first person, everybody's going to love having him around. And the second person, you know, everybody who wants to hear somebody who's complaining all the time. So your temperament then works over onto the people who are in your network. So the happier you are, the more goodies come your way. And the more miserable you are, the more people avoid you. And then you feel, well, I've got reason to be miserable. So there again, there's this kind of dynamic interaction between what you're putting out there and what's coming back from the world. But if you're having a bad day, not because any one or two things were horrible, it's just that, you know, those days where nothing

really goes right, and it's just a frustrating day, and it seems hard, but it's not that it's a catastrophe, it's just tough. Should we then, do you think, try to force our emotions away from that or we're having a bad day, live the bad day, accept the bad day, accept the emotions that come with it and, you know, things will get better tomorrow? Well, that's a great question. You could do a little bit of either. Let's say your computer broke down. You would start doing diagnostics to try and brainstorm what was the matter, were all the connections right? Did you turn it on?

Did you put the password in? Did you do all these things that you need to do to make a machine work? Well, I think it's the same with our emotions. If you're feeling lousy, let's say the middle of the afternoon and you're feeling lousy, that is information that's coming to you from the emotional part of your brain that is saying something's going wrong here what is it what could it be and of course could be a lot of things it could be something that somebody just said to you at lunchtime maybe they put you down or maybe your boss said something that made you worry that your job wasn't secure or that

maybe you wouldn't get the raise you've been hoping for it didn't actually come out and say it but he hinted at. Or you were excluded from some meeting that you thought you ought to be in, and that maybe that means that you're not valued in your organization. Lots of things can happen that could put your mood down. But it may not even be something, you know, that somebody did or said. For example, one group of people that I have dealt extensively with are people who are very susceptible to the amount of light in the environment. So a cloudy day can bring people's spirits down. And somebody who hasn't established that connection might think, you know, what is it about?

I'm feeling down and I can't really figure this out. So, you know, what I'm really saying is it's giving you information that something is wrong. And if you can trace what it is, oftentimes that makes you feel much better. Sometimes just taking a little time out will help you to figure things out and get some clarity. And then, of course, there are things that you can do to make yourself feel better. Well, that's interesting because I don't think I'm all that unique, but using your example of the computer breaking down, I'm much more likely to want to really sit down and drill down and really figure this out and fix the computer before I do anything else. I know full well that if I just got up and walked away from it for a while, I'd probably solve it faster and I'd probably not get so wrapped up in it and upset about it. But that's just my nature. I think that's a great example because when you walk away and let go of it, what is happening

is that your unconscious mind works on the problem. And the problem sometimes just pops into your mind. Sometimes when you put your eyes right up against the problem, it's like you can't see the forest for the problem. It's like you can't see the forest for the trees. So some distance often enables you to get clarity on a problem, and I think it's a great idea. Yeah, well, I think if anybody stopped and thought about a time when they were really deep in trying to solve a problem, that there is something to be said for getting away from it

and then coming back to it. It seems like that's the way the human brain works. Exercise is also excellent. Gets your juices going. People say endorphins may or it may not be endorphins, but whatever it is, it seems to really boost mood in a very favorable way. And so what is it that you think is happening there? What was psychologically, since you're a psychiatrist, that taking that break or exercising, what is it doing in your brain that may make it easier to come back and solve the problem?

I think that it's moving into a different form of problem solving. I think it's letting a different part of your mind kick in. So, you know, sometimes when you let go of a problem or sometimes when you put yourself in a more relaxed state, I'm a great believer in meditation, for example, as a way to just calm yourself down and get clarity. You know how sometimes when you get very anxious about something, that's not your best mode for brainstorming and troubleshooting?

And so I think that the idea of getting a little distance from the problem, if it's not urgent, obviously if somebody's lying there bleeding on the carpet, you can't go take a walk until you figure it out. You've got to go into emergency mode. But most of our problems don't fall into that category. Most of our problems allow a little time out to think what's best to do over here. Since, doctor, since you're a researcher, tell me something interesting that you've seen in the research that maybe I might not know or that people haven't heard before that you think is really fascinating. Let me give you an example of what I think is very

interesting and this really comes from some experiments done by a man named Dan Ariely and in his book, Predictable Irrationality. And what he talks about is hot and cold states. You know, if you're a salesperson, you want to get somebody into a hot state, you want to excite them about something, and then they're more likely to make an impulse buy, as opposed to saying, go home and think about it and give me a call, which is going to put them into a cool, calculated mood. And people in hot states, where they're very, very excited, are likely to make impulse choices and make worse choices. For example, if you go to a supermarket hungry,

you're much more likely to choose the wrong kinds of foods because you just want it right now, you know? His set of experiments actually was undergraduates. I think they were at Harvard, and they were asked to make decisions about what kind of sex they would be willing to have while either aroused or non-aroused. And when they were aroused, they made many more variety of choices and things that they would not normally do in a cool state of mind. And you know, in today's age where there are a lot of STDs out there, and unwanted pregnancies are, by definition, unwanted.

It's better not to kind of make those kinds of judgments in the heat of the moment. So I guess that some of these things we knew for a long time, but there's new experimental evidence to back it up. That's an example. Well, I think one of the big questions people have about their emotions is how much control do we have over them? I mean, we often say, we feel, sorry, I'm feeling really depressed right now. There's nothing I can do. Well, is there really nothing you can do? Do we have control over these emotions or do in many ways they control us? I think we have much more control over them than we think we do. The tricky part is that the control doesn't always come by saying, get a handle on it, you know.

Mind over matter, willpower. Sometimes the control comes by telling a friend or a counselor or somebody about your feelings and saying, what do you think? And sometimes that can put the thing in a very different perspective. Sometimes, as we said, it comes from taking a little distance from it, whether it's going for a run or a walk or having a meditation. Reflecting, writing it down can sometimes be very, very helpful because when you're writing, you're analyzing, you're thinking,

you're using usually the left side of your brain. Much of the emotions are housed on the right side of the brain. And so you're connecting different parts of the brain together when you're writing down your feelings. And there's an exercise known as written self-disclosure where people write down their deepest thoughts and feelings, and it's been shown to have huge effects both on mood and on decision-making and on physical health as well.

And when you say your deepest, darkest thoughts, you mean like things you wouldn't tell anybody else? Could be. It could be. Yeah, feelings that really matter. For example, there was this great study done with Texas instrument workers who happened to be laid off very suddenly and unceremoniously. They were told they had to leave their offices. And half of them were put into this condition where they were encouraged to write down their thoughts and feelings, and the other half were given some control treatment. And the ones that wrote down their thoughts and feelings

were rehired at a significantly more rapid rate than the other group. The question then arose, you know, what is happening when you write down these thoughts and feelings? And one of the ideas is that these people were very, very angry. And when they wrote down their thoughts and feelings, somehow that enabled them to process their anger. Because when the language was analyzed in their written self-disclosure, what was found was that words like, I recognized, I understood, I realized, were very potent predictors of people who did best with this exercise. In other words, when you can connect your feelings with your thoughts,

you harness the power of both of these important domains of brain functioning. Well, certainly understanding and dealing and coping with emotions is part of every day of everybody's life, so I appreciate you coming on to shed some light on it. Dr. Norman Rosenthal is my guest. He's a psychiatrist, and his book is The Emotional Revolution. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Doctor.

Maintaining eye contact with someone when you speak with them has always been good advice, but sometimes it's almost impossible to do. When someone asks you a difficult question, it's very hard to keep looking at them in the eye, and there's a reason for it. Not looking at someone can actually help you come up with a better answer to their question. It's called gaze aversion, and adults do it 85% of the time. Children only do it about 40% of the

time. So in a study, a group of children were trained to look away when contemplating the answer to a question, while others were not told to do anything, and then they were asked a series of questions. The students instructed to look away answered 72% of the questions accurately, while the untrained group succeeded in answering only 55% of the questions accurately. The difference between the groups was especially evident on the more difficult questions. The theory is that the human face is just too distracting. It's hard to look at someone in the eye and also come up with an answer. So perhaps we shouldn't even try. And perhaps teachers need to understand that an averted gaze may just mean, I'm thinking.

And that is something you should know. The best way to support this podcast is to do business with the advertisers you hear. As I have mentioned in the past, I speak to virtually every single one before their commercials start to run. I personally review and use the products myself in many cases, and I can vouch for them. So please, if what they sell sounds interesting to you, I hope you will support them. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run

deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.

Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called the search for the silver lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for the search for the silver lining on Spotify, Apple,

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