Something You Should Know - How the Human Mind Learns New Things & Finding Hope in the Coronavirus Crisis

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

While it’s natural to brag a little about your kids or your job or anything else you are proud of., you really have to be careful. A little bragging goes a long way and too much can be a turn off. This episode begins with a discussion on how much is too much. https://www.readersdigest.ca/health/relationships/things-need-stop-bragging/ Ever wonder why some things are really easy for you to learn and other things are hard? And what is the best way to learn something that doesn’t come naturally to you? Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who studies learning and memory and he is author of the book Why Don’t Students Like School (https://amzn.to/2x8uc6l). Listen and you will hear some surprising insights into how humans learn – or don’t learn and you will hear some wonderful strategies to help you learn anything better.  There has likely been a time in your life when you or someone you were with forgot their toothbrush. Consequently, you probably wondered if it was okay to share a toothbrush - just once. Find out in this episode. http://www.rd.com/health/healthcare/sharing-a-toothbrush/ Life has changed dramatically due to the coronavirus. As a result, there is a sense of sadness or even hopelessness in the air. To inject some hope and optimism into the situation is Dr. Shane Lopez who was one of the leading experts on hope. I interviewed him a few years ago and sadly, he died shortly after that interview. Dr. Lopez authored a great book on the subject called Making Hope Happen (http://amzn.to/2j7su8N) and after you listen I think you will feel much more hopeful about your life and the future of mankind. This Week’s Sponsors -AirMedCare Network.Go to www.AirMedCareNetwork.com/something and get up to a $50 gift card when you use the promo code: something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 was 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. 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. Today on Something You Should Know, it's natural to brag a bit about your accomplishments. But less is more, and I'll explain why. Then, if you really need to learn something, it's important to know which strategies are the most powerful. Testing yourself is actually more effective than studying.

So study a little bit to get a toehold, and then literally create flashcards because that's a really good way to really cement the memory so that it stays in there permanently. Also, is it ever okay to share a toothbrush in a pinch? And in these difficult times, hope can be a powerful prescription for everyone. Hope is the belief that the future will be better than the present,

coupled with the belief that you have the power to make it so. Humans are the only creatures on the planet that can think complex thoughts about the future and be hopeful. All this today on Something You Should Know. 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. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person

Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared 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. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. And thank God for podcasts. Since most of us are stuck spending a lot more time at home than we ever imagined, you need something to do, and podcasts turn out to be a great way to pass the time. I know I've been catching up on some of my favorites, and I want to remind you that we have 300 episodes in our archives that you can listen to if you haven't heard them already. In fact, I'll recommend one since so many of us are stuck at home.

Episode 242. It was released last January 2019. It is one of the most listened to episodes of all of our episodes. And one of the segments in there is called How the House You Live In Affects Who You Are. And you might find it interesting as you sit in your house a lot. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts, but if you have trouble searching for it, it's really easy to find on our website. The website has a really good search engine. And you just go to somethingyoushouldknow.net, not.com,.net, somethingyoushouldknow.net, and just search for how the house you live in, just those words, how the house you live in,

and episode 242 will come up right at the top of the search. First up today, I'm sure you know people who like to brag. And I guess bragging is somewhat natural and normal because we want to look good in other people's eyes. So it is natural to brag about things that you're proud of. But much of the time, people don't care anywhere near as much as you'd like to think. So be careful and think first before you brag about things like your job. Now, if you're a police officer or a firefighter, maybe, because those jobs have good stories, but most likely your job will never sound as interesting to me as it does to you.

Bragging about your favorite sports team often falls flat. It's probably okay to brag about the big win for a day or two, but otherwise, people don't care. Your vices. Just because you can drink a lot isn't necessarily that impressive to an awful lot of people. I know a lot of guys will brag about their really cool expensive car, but bragging about your car just screams midlife crisis. And everyone knows that you probably got it on a lease,

which means you really didn't pay that much anyway. And travel photos. When it comes to travel photos, less is more, because we weren't there and the pictures don't mean as much to us as they do to you by a long shot. And that is something you should know. With a lot of us parents having to more or less homeschool our kids now because schools are closed, we're seeing firsthand how our kids learn or don't learn. And it has to make you think about how we all learn, even as adults, and how we could learn better. Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist who studies learning and memory, and he's author of the book, Why Don't Students Like School? Hey, Daniel, welcome. Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. I've always been interested

in how people learn and why they learn certain things easier than other things and how we can learn things better and what techniques really work to help you learn better. So let's start with the title of your book and I suspect an interesting conversation about learning will flow from there. So, your book is called Why Don't Students Like School? So, why don't students like school? Yeah, it's surprising, isn't it? And I mean, in truth, the title of that, the book that I wrote is a little unfair. I mean, people like school or don't like school for a variety of reasons. But what I was pointing to was one really systematic difficulty that teachers face, which is that curiosity varies from child to child. And a lot of what drives curiosity is what you already know about a topic.

And then how new information is sort of tuned or poorly tuned to what you already know. So, curiosity blossoms in individuals when they think there's a whole lot to learn in the environment. People frequently think it's about subject matter, like I'm interested in cars or I'm interested in psychology. But that's not quite accurate because, I mean, just personally, I've been to lots of talks on psychology that, frankly, were not very interesting. And the reason is curiosity is driven by my judgment that there's something new in the environment for me to learn. So if you're talking in a whole lot of detail about something, even if it's a topic that I think I'm interested in, if I can't connect it to anything that I already know about, that's not going to be very interesting for me. And then it's sort of self-evident that if you're talking about stuff that I already know

a whole lot about, that's not very interesting for me. What you're saying then is, is you might be interested in cars, but if someone's talking about things about cars that you have no knowledge of and can't connect a little bit to it, it doesn't matter that it's about cars. It's still not going to be very interesting. That's exactly it, yeah. And so if you're talking, if you're the one who's doing the explaining, and you've got 30 to 500 people in the room listening, you can't ask them, you know, so where are you in this? Exactly.

So then what do you do? Exactly. Well, this is what makes it so hard, right? And this is why so often when we're at a conference and there are 500 other people in the room, like the speaker has enormous difficulty. And the people who are really, really good at this are really good at anticipating what their audience already knows. When you've heard the injunction for both writers and speakers, know your audience. This is what it's really all about. It really means know what they already know, and then lead them by the hand from that point. But if you go to a conference or a convention,

let's say, I go to the podcasting convention every year, and they have talks all day for several days. And in every one of those talks, there are people who are just starting out as podcasters, and then there are people who have been doing it for several years. And so how in the world do you talk to that group when the levels of knowledge are all over the place? And this is why if you're setting up a conference, the merciful thing to do is to be very clear with your audience and try and or with your conference goers and try and steer them into sessions that are appropriate to their level of expertise. Again, the difficulty is people frequently think in terms of subject matter. I'm interested in this subject. And that's part of it, but it's not the whole thing.

I mean, we've all been there. Someone talks you into watching a documentary on a topic that you thought you were not interested in at all, you know, guitar making or something. And then you find yourself absolutely fascinated. And that's because, again, the documentary maker has been very skillful in anticipating what the average person knows about guitar making, which is next to nothing. And then just giving them a little bit of information so that your brain thinks, oh, there's really important information for me to acquire here. Why is it that for pretty much everyone, some subjects are just easier to learn, and I guess perhaps more interesting to learn because just personal preference. My boys, for example, they know so much about video games, and it's very easy for them to acquire that knowledge because they like playing video games,

whereas school subjects, although they both do very well in school, but it comes to them more, it's harder. Video games are easier. Yeah, I mean, well, there's a couple of pieces to it. With your boys, it's video games. And then with someone else, they're a NASCAR enthusiast. And someone else, it's their own personal interest. What sticks in memory is actually, the principle is actually really straightforward and intuitive when you think about it we remember the things that we think about this is actually one of the

most fascinating findings for me from memory research and it's actually what when i first heard this this is what prompted me to want to become a memory researcher, intention to learn, wanting to remember something literally counts for nothing for whether or not you're going to remember it. And when you first hear that, to me anyway, that was really startling. But with a little bit of reflection, it makes sense that evolution would leave us with a memory system that works that way. We can't necessarily anticipate what we're going to want to remember later. And especially in times of crisis, you know, you're getting chased by the tiger, like who would have the presence of mind at that time to think, you know what, I better not go back there again, because this is really a bad situation I

got into with this tiger. You're just terrified. So, a good memory system is one that is going to make things that are important in the moment stick with you. And so, you'll remember them later. And the things that are important are things that you think about a lot. So, your boys think about video games a lot. They relate the video games to their personal situation and their circumstance. It's also not irrelevant that emotion is connected with it. And so, that's the kind of thing that sticks with them. Now, thinking about school subjects or, you know, you're at the office and you're trying to learn a new conference system, a conferencing video system or something like that. It's not engaging.

You're not thinking about it very differently. We were just talking about why things would be engaging or not. So if you're not thinking about it carefully, it's just not going to stick with you. There is a common belief, I think, that kids learn better and faster than adults do, or at least learn some things better, that technology is something that kids are better at learning than adults. As somebody who studies learning, is that true? Studies show that's actually not the case. They are, in many cases, better with certain types of technology. And the types of technology are, just as you were suggesting, the ones that all of their friends use, because they feel some peer pressure to learn, you know, how to use Instagram filters effectively. And they also

have a lot of opportunity to learn that because all of their friends know how to learn it. So, it's easy to get access to information. But there's nothing about their brains that make them especially good at learning these new technologies and older folks less good at it. Nevertheless, there are things we have to learn for our jobs, for school that we may not know much about, may not have any interest in, may be completely foreign to us, but you still got to know them. So how do you learn the things that don't interest you? The way to do it is to try to treat it the way that you would treat something that is interesting. So the main way, so I said before, think about it carefully, like your sons think about video games carefully. What carefully really means in this context is think about what things mean. Think about how to relate them to other aspects

of your life. That's the way it's most likely to be successful. The tricks that you read in a lot of memory books, it's actually interesting. They're good for particular types of memory problems. A lot of times these books are written by people who literally are memory books, it's actually interesting. They're good for particular types of memory problems. A lot of times these books are written by people who literally are memory champions. In case your listeners aren't aware of this, there are competitions for who can remember things the best. And the way those memory competitions work is they purposefully give people non-meaningful content to memorize, exactly because they're trying to level the playing field. Because what if they gave you a series of mountain ranges to memorize and you already knew a lot about mountain ranges, that wouldn't be fair, right? So, they'll give you a deck of cards

that are shuffled and they'll ask you to memorize the order of them. So, the people who are very, very good at memorizing random material have a set of tricks that are good for memorizing random material. They're not very good or they're not the most effective for memorizing meaningful material. That's what your brain is really set up to do. So, you want to capitalize on that. The other thing that I can recommend is testing yourself is actually more effective than studying. So study a little bit to get a toehold and then literally create flash cards or in some other way test yourself because that's a really good way for a memory that's sort of partially in there to really cement the memory so that it stays in there permanently.

We're talking about learning, how we learn and better ways to learn. And my guest is Daniel Willingham. He is a cognitive science and author of the book, Why Don't Students Like School? Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned travelling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God

and we are not its favoured children. The heresies of Redolph Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available. are not its favored children. The Heresies of Redolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. 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. So Daniel, I've always wondered, and

I don't think I've ever gotten a really good answer to this question. Kids are told from the time they start school, okay, you study this. And I've never gotten a good definition of study. Does that mean read it? Does that mean read it five times? Does that mean read it backwards? What does study it mean? That's a great question. And I think it does mean different things in different contexts. And so people use it differently. I mean, I think a general purpose definition of study would probably be do whatever it takes so that you can fulfill this goal that I have for you, but I'm not telling you. So some people mean, you know, I'm giving you this complicated text, study it. And what they really mean is work with this text until you've squeezed a lot of meaning

out of it and haven't just, you know, you've gotten past the surface. And other people mean commit this to memory. I think that's probably the most common definition is commit this content to memory. So, yeah, I think the reason it's confusing about exactly what you're supposed to do to study is that people have different goals depending on the setting for what they want you to end up being able to do. I've always wondered why no one ever explains that in school. No one ever explains. And what I mean by study is this. They don't. They just say study it. And I've always assumed it meant, you know, read it till you know it. Or if it's math, you know, do it enough times where it makes sense. But you're

kind of always left to figure out your own definition of study. And sometimes you're right, sometimes you're not so right. And you said that doing that isn't as effective necessarily as testing yourself. That's right. I mean, and I would consider that a study strategy specifically for the, you know, if you're studying for the purpose of committing something to memory, then testing yourself is actually one of the best ways to go. But Mikey, I want to elaborate on what you just said, because I think it's so important in a school context. When you think about it, the extent to which, or better put, our expectations for very young children, kids in kindergarten,

to know what it means to study or more broadly to sort of contribute to their own learning. Our expectations are very low. We don't expect kindergartners to contribute to their own learning. That's the teacher's job. But by the time they finish the 12th grade, our expectations are very high for what kids can contribute to their own learning. We expect them to know how to commit things to memory. That's why we tell them there's going to be a test on Thursday. We expect them to be resourceful if they read a complicated textbook chapter and can't figure it out. They're supposed to know, you know, have some strategies up their sleeve to get better meaning out of that text.

And so, part of the reason that you're sort of noticing no one ever told me what it meant to study, I think that experience is very common. We have these increasing expectations from kindergarten through 12th grade for what students are going to be able to bring to the table when it comes to contributing to their own education. But there's not a curriculum for that. And it's not obviously anybody's job. You know, if you're in grade 10, and you're struggling in math, I know who to talk to, I go to your math teacher. But if you've, if you're struggling with study strategies, it's not obviously anybody's responsibility, and it's these responsibilities that grow across the years. And that's, I think, sort of a low-hanging fruit that is there to be plucked in American schooling.

Right now, we're doing very, very little in telling children how to study in different strategies, and that's something that we could put in place in schools fairly easily. What about this idea that people learn differently, that we all have different learning styles? Yes or no? That's an idea that's very popular in studies show, there are surveys show that about 90% of Americans think that different individuals have different learning styles. There's actually no scientific backing for that idea. There's absolutely no doubt some people have greater ability with words or with numbers or whatever. So, that's not controversial. Styles is supposed to mean something different. By analogy with athletics, you could say that you could have two players of equal ability, but they vary in their style on the court. Basketball players, for example,

they might be of equivalent ability, and one has a very aggressive playing style, and one has a much more conservative playing style. So, it's not the same as ability, it's more the way that you like to do things. And this is a very persistent idea, and we were talking about ways in which people vary and why they might benefit from one instructor or another. Learning styles is not a scientifically supported way to think about those differences. And what about time spent that, you know, sitting and trying something for two hours seems like diminishing returns after a while, but, but if that's true, where is a while? Yeah, that's a, that's a great point. And so there, there are actually two aspects to this. One is that time spent is going to do literally nothing if you're not doing this sort of deep thinking. So, if you just ask someone to memorize a list of words, I'm going to say some

words aloud and I want you to memorize them. And I start and I say, ball, hat, balloon. A lot of people will respond this way. They'll start saying to themselves, ball hat, balloon, ball hat, balloon, ball hat, balloon. So, this is what we would call very shallow rehearsal processing. You're just saying the words to yourself. You're not thinking about meaning at all. You could repeat that to yourself over and over again. We're talking about time spent. You could spend lots and lots of time on that very sort of mindless activity, and the memory is just not going to stick with you at all. So that's one thing you need to think about when you think about time spent. It's not just the amount of time. It's spending the time well.

Another way to think about this is sometimes get out a piece of paper and try to draw the face of a U.S. penny. Most people are astonished by how terrible they are at this. And when you think about how many repetitions, how many times you've seen a penny, it's amazing that you can't reproduce it flawlessly. But all of those repetitions have been really shallow. You haven't really been thinking about which way Lincoln is facing and where the date is and all that sort of thing. So, time spent has to be time well spent. of meaning-based processing that I'm talking about, for a couple of reasons, you want to space out your study. One is that you just want to take breaks, which is quite intuitive that at some point you just get mentally exhausted. And the second is having some time elapse between study

sessions is another thing that benefits memory. And the reasons for that are sort of technical. If you can do it, the ideal thing to do is to have bouts of sleep in between study sessions. Sleep is actually really good for memory. So, if you're going to spend two hours studying something, ideally, you wouldn't do two hours all at one go. You do a half an hour on each of four successive days. And lastly, because I want to be able to tell my son the answer to this. Often parents will hear their kids say, you know, I study better when I'm listening to music or if the TV is on. True or false? For the TV, definitely false. There are no studies indicating that having television on, even in the background, because the researchers

who do this really try to be faithful to the way people study. And so, you know, kids say like, I just have it on the background. It's background noise. I'm not even paying attention to it. So researchers will let kids choose what is on the TV and they interact with it the way they want to. And all of the studies for television show that there's a decrement. For music, it's much more of a mixed bag. If the music is music that you don't like, there's always a decrement. And in a way, that sounds weird, like why would there be music you don't like? But the truth is, sometimes people choose to study in coffee shops, for example, where you're not controlling what you're listening to.

For everything else, when it's music you like, there are two contrasting effects, one that helps and one that hurts. So, music is distracting, but then counter to that, music is also arousing. So, this is why people like to have music on when they exercise, gets the heart rate up and the autonomic nervous system becomes active. So, whether music helps or hurts does depend a little bit on who the individual student is, the content of what it is they're going to study and their attitude towards it, and then probably how easy or difficult that work is, because that matters for how much distraction is going to cost them. What I generally tell parents is, initially, let them try it the way they want to do it,

and you, the parent, should watch them and exercise your judgment about whether or not you think it's really, in the end, helping or hurting. Well, I like this because so much about learning, at least to me, has always been very vague. You know, how do you learn? Well, you just learn. Learning is learning. And you've explained it in a way that puts some tactics and strategies and some real science behind it. Daniel Willingham has been my guest. He is a cognitive scientist and author of the book, Why Don't Students Like School?

And you will find a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Daniel. Thanks for being here. It was a pleasure talking with you. 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 Lister 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. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing

we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Things sure are different today than they were just a few short weeks ago. The coronavirus has changed everything. And I think for many people, there is a, I guess, a sadness or a sense of hopelessness that hangs in the air. So I'd like to address that because hopelessness isn't helpful or particularly productive, and it can be contagious. So let's see if we can put some hope back in the picture. To that end, I'd like to share with you an interview I did a few years ago with Dr. Shane Lopez.

Dr. Lopez spent much of his life researching hope and the power it has for people. Unfortunately, Dr. Lopez died not too long after we did this interview. I know he fought some medical battles in his life, but during his lifetime, he was highly regarded in medical and research circles as a leading expert on the subject of hope. And he was author of a book called Making Hope Happen. If you could use a little hope right now, I think you'll enjoy what he has to say. And my first question to him was to define hope. Hope is the belief that the future will be better than the present, coupled with the

belief that you have the power to make it so. Those are the two things that really come together to define hope. And are humans unique in their ability to have hope, or do other creatures have hope somehow? Yeah, I think other creatures, you know, they have maybe expectations in a sense, and we kind of train them to do so. Our nature has trained them to be thinking about the future in a non-complex way, in a simple way. But humans are the only creatures on the planet that can think complex thoughts about the future and be hopeful. And sometimes be hopeless.

And be hopeless, absolutely. We have all the hardware we need. We have the brain structure and specifically that frontal lobe that helps us be hopeful. We have the language. We can tell great stories about the future that we edit over time that help us be hopeful. Those stories really kind of feed hope back to us. But if we start telling these hopeless stories, then we can kind of light up those pathways as well and find a lot of struggle in our lives. By default, are we kind of wired to be hopeful?

Yeah, by age two, if you think about the last two-year-old you hung out with, they're saying, I can, I can, I will. So you're already your own superhero when you're age two, and you're setting up these contingencies, you start to understand that there if thens in life in a very rudimentary kind of way. And then you couple that with more complex language as you grow older, and then success experiences as you accumulate them. And those are the basic building blocks of hope. That thinking about the future and then telling a story about the future in a way that it pulls you through everyday life, we have that probably in place when we're five or six years old. And then what happens? Well, then what happens,

gosh, then again, we accumulate some success experiences. We start narrating the story of our lives in a certain way. We have people who care about us or who don't care about us. And it kind of refines our sense of the future, refines our sense of self. And about half of the people wind up being hopeful creatures and the other half end up struggling with life in general. And often because they don't understand that connection between if-then, between now and then, and those two things, those struggles and understanding contingencies and how today's behavior is associated with future behavior, those things really get people in trouble. Because, in a sense, is being hopeful sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy? The more hopeful you are, the better things actually do turn out? Well, you know, that's interesting. So that notion of self-fulfilling

prophecy, it has some merit, certainly. When you're hopeful, you actually start generating positive emotions. When you generate positive emotions, your mind kind of opens up to unique opportunities in life and more opportunities in life. So then you start to generate more pathways to the goals that you're interested in. So you can kind of reframe that self-fulfilling prophecy by understanding the cognitions and emotions of hope. And you just work a little differently, a little more efficiently, a little harder, and you're able to get from point A to point B a little quicker. But it's a little bit more than self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's way more than wishing.

Yeah, and you make the big distinction in the book about the difference between hope and wishing. Sure, sure. Bobby Knight has a book out right now called The Power of Negative Thinking, and he's really down on hope. So he's a famous former basketball coach and he's really down on hope. But the way he casts it, it's wishing. It's believing that the future will be better than the present. And I just have to kick back and wait for it. That's wishing. And wishing actually, when you think the future will be great and you don't anticipate the obstacles that pop up and you don't get ready to work hard, then you're wishing and that actually undermines your momentum for the future. Hoping involves not only that belief that the future will be better than the present, but this understanding that you've got to put a lot of tools and resources together to make it so.

So hoping is really, it's a lot of hard work, you know, it really is. And wishing is quite passive and quite easy and quite detrimental to most people. Well, I mean, that's kind of like buying a lottery ticket and then you wish you win, but chances are you're not. Yeah, Mike, you're absolutely right. So if that's your retirement plan, buying lottery tickets every Friday, you're a wishful creature. So the odds are against you, and you have no real investment in the future other than the five bucks, let's say, you just spent on lottery tickets. And you know what? We've really confused the issue in our daily language when people say, I'm hoping it'll all work out. I'm hopeful my lottery ticket will win. Well, we're quite wishful. We're wishing that it will work out, but we've

substituted the word hoping in such a way that we've really watered down the meaning. So part of what I try to do is I help children and adults just be pretty mindful about when they're hoping and when they're wishing. And they kind of catch themselves and say, oh boy, I'm really being passive about this. If I wish you good luck, that's all I mean. I'm like, goodbye, buddy. I wish you good luck. But if I'm hopeful that you'll have a great outcome, you know, at a sporting event, let's say, that means I'm going to be there cheering you on. I'm going to give you any kind of help you might need. I might even be your coach, you know, and tutor you and help you in some way. To hope, you got to get

your hands dirty, whether it's in your own life or if you're trying to help someone else. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. And we're often hopeful about our future and we do things, but then, you know, we end up procrastinating or get off course. And you talk, I know, in the book about setting yourself up for some automatic ways to make things happen. Yeah, Mike, if we can put more hope on autopilot, we're really helping ourselves out in daily life. There's some simple ways to do it. One is to create a win-wear plan for every assignment you're given or every assignment you give yourself. An assignment is often kind of wrapped around a goal. So your boss may say, we need you to do this by such and such a date,

or you may give yourself an assignment to get something done around the house. Well, that occupies some mental resources, some psychological resources, that assignment. So if you can put a basic win-wear plan around that goal, then you set this action trigger in your brain. So, for example, tax season is coming up and no one really wants to get ready for tax season. But, you know, if you could say to yourself, okay, on Monday, I will set aside some time, 9 o'clock after I visit my child's school, I'll bring my tax paperwork with me, I'll go to a coffee shop,

and I'll start getting it organized. Well, come Monday morning, that little alarm goes off in your head. And as you're getting your child ready for school, you're saying to yourself, okay, I gotta grab the tax papers, I'm going to the coffee shop, I'm taking the morning off of work,

I gotta get this done. So the more we can set these action triggers in our daily lives, and in other cases, borrow hope from other people, the better off we are because we'll certainly kind of burn out. We'll get tired. We don't want to do all the things we have to do, but we have to figure out ways to make good things happen in our lives. That almost sounds too simple. They just, if, when, it just seems so simple. Yeah, well, it's a simple strategy that works. It certainly is. And it's kind of age old and time tested, but it's also scientifically proven.

So Peter Goldwitzer has done a ton of research on this if-then contingency thinking, which I've kind of translated into these when-where plans. 94 different studies were recently analyzed, and sure enough, they work. They work. And it is incredibly simple, but it's an elegant solution to kind of that modern problem of not having enough time and energy to get things done. Does everyone is becoming hopeless and feeling despair, and is that normal, or is that usually the mental illness? Yeah, Mike, I think we all go through those periods in life where we're running on fumes. So our hope reserves may be pretty low.

Interestingly, hopeful people in general are able to buffer themselves really well from the stress in life and from those things that might tire out someone else. But what I find is that oftentimes people, my wife and I have this term that we bounce around the house a little bit. It's called depletion depression. So it's not really depression. We haven't had a major episode of depression in the household at all, but it's something that we're just so worn out from pursuing too many goals that one time. On the flip side, someone who loses touch with their future self, someone who loses the relationship with their future self can spiral quickly into a real depression. If you don't see the best years as being ahead of you, if you don't see the future as being better than the present, and that's kind of this chronic belief, then that can kickstart a real depression that can be quite enduring and quite

challenging to overcome. Yeah, well, and I imagine there are people who try things and fail and try things and fail and get to that point where they think, you know, no matter what I do, nothing works, and their future does look dim because they can't figure it out. Yeah. And I, you know, as a psychotherapist, I've worked with many of these folks and that's kind of my expertise is treating people with this chronic low-level depression, referred to as dysthymia. And what I found is that if I can get them excited about one thing in the future, just one small thing, we can jumpstart their psychology again. And it's incredibly challenging, and it can take weeks or months to find that one small thing. But it is part and parcel of helping people move from depression into well-being. So often when we work with people who are struggling,

we stop when they stop feeling sad. And in fact, what we need to do is we need to keep helping others until they get to that point where they're truly experiencing some well-being and some happiness, because then they can turn that into a spiral and kind of keep life moving in the right direction. Is this idea of hope and people suffering because they don't have it, is this a growing problem, or is it a pretty static, you know,

there are always those people who are hopeful and those who aren't? It's a great question. It's an age-old problem. You know, when folks, you know, throughout history have written about feeling like an empty vessel, having no meaning, hope and meaning go hand in hand, having no meaning or purpose in life, feeling kind of blank and gray. It's an indicator that there's nothing that excites them about the future. And I don't want this to sound like, hey, go get excited about the future and become a cheerleader. I'm talking about genuine excitement about something in the future. When we lose that, we have an extremely hard time being hopeful and functioning at a high level.

And can we go through periods in, let's say, America or another country where we, in fact, lose that as a culture? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think there are times that are very dark, whether it's in a city, a family, in a school, in a country where, you know, depression and hopelessness kind of sweeps through. But the most hopeful of the bunch are able to buffer themselves against that and hopefully kind of on the other side of things, be the ones that spread hope to others and help people move in the

right direction. Because hope is contagious? Hope is indeed contagious. And that's been one of the more delightful discoveries. And what we find is that enthusiastic leaders, and you can say enthusiastic teachers, parents, preachers, enthusiastic leaders make other people hopeful. So they kind of, again, through the power of positive emotions, you kind of open your mind and heart to what's possible. And then with the support of other people, you start working on what's possible. And then with the support of other people, you start working on what's possible. And then you start really gaining some momentum towards these things that excite you, these goals

that excite you. So through that channel, hope is contagious, but also just being someone who really takes care of the business of day-to-day life. And then other people kind of see you do that. You can learn from other people in their hopeful pursuits. You know, I'm always kind of blown away by some of my friends who are very competitive when it comes to running. And the only way I'll be competitive when it comes to running is if I'm competing with a wild animal. I'm just not interested in running. But watching them pursue these goals that they're passionate about inspires me to pursue other goals I'm passionate about. Passionate about not necessarily running,

but other things in my life that excite me. You know, Dr. Lopez, I've had my bouts with that kind of low-level depression where it's really hard to pull yourself up out of it. And my experience is, and I've heard from other people too, that if you can find something to do, some activity, that that can really help pull you up. Oh, certainly, certainly. If, you know, that inertia is hard to overcome. So once you have kind of slipped into that state of inaction,

as you described it, it's very hard to overcome. So you're constantly kind of stealing yourself against that possibility. But if you do slip into that again, if you're working with someone or if you have a close friend who can help you connect up to something that you're excited about in the future, for example, things I'm excited about, my child has spring break from school here in the near future. I'm just so excited to spend time with him and my wife on a car trip. I am just so jazzed about that, that the snowstorm that I'm anticipating right now and some of the other problems at work, they just seem so small when I start thinking about this exciting trip with my family.

So that trip two weeks from now just kind of pulls me through kind of the hassles of everyday life. So when those hassles become so great that we're stuck, getting excited about the future, getting some support helps you really start moving slowly and then a little faster and then a little faster until you have some momentum in life. Yeah. Well, I remember interviewing someone some years ago and I've always remembered this because it really rang true for me that, that like people in old folks homes that, that, you know, don't have many visitors or people who feel guilty because they don't visit grandma in the, in the nursing home enough that it's not so much the visit as the anticipation

of the visit that gets grandma all excited. And so if you can tell her in two weeks, you'll be there, that may be as good as visiting her three times. Yes, absolutely. And my good friend, Tom Rath, he just actually walked by my door moments ago. I've interviewed him many times. Wonderful man. He wrote a book on well-being. And certainly this is where our work overlaps, where we talk about the anticipation of something exciting, the experience of something exciting, and then the recollection of something that was exciting.

So having the anticipation of a trip can really generate positive emotions that can feed into this hope cycle. The experience itself can build psychological resources. And then the memory and the capitalizing on that experience with someone dear to you can kind of keep that alive. So we really, gosh, Mike, we really waste a lot of psychological capital by not using what you just referred to as that anticipatory excitement to our advantage. Yeah, well, I guess life is pretty dull if you don't have something to look forward to. Absolutely. It's not only dull, it can really be slow moving and somewhat sad. So having, again, that one thing. And what scares me is that, you know, when I talk to young people, especially, most of them have that one

thing in the future, but if they don't, they feel like they'll be stuck forever. So that's why we have to kind of wrap around the young people in our community and make sure that we're finding what they do best and figuring out a way to get them excited about that so that they can aim their lives at something meaningful. When you look back at people who have maybe not a strong sense of hope in their life, but do things typically turn out okay? Or do people really, should they be worried because things are hopeless? You know, that's a tough question. You know, so we have, again, half of the people in our lives are high hope. About the remaining half, they're kind of split between people who are just a little bit stuck

and who could move towards being hopeful, and then the folks who are really in despair. And those folks who are in despair need to reach out to the care and resources that they have in their community and whatever works for them. So it could be a psychotherapist, it could be a teacher, it could be a preacher, but somehow they have to get some love and support to overcome the obstacles of everyday life. Once they do that, then they have that glimmer of hope that they can then hang on to for a little bit as they kind of move through the slow paces of recovery. One thing I don't want people to get out of this book is that we should all be happy, happy, hopeful, hopeful. You know, we are all

going to kind of get knocked down by life. But if we can put the right people and thoughts and feelings together at the right time, then we can create that momentum we need to get where we want to be in the world. That is my interview with Dr. Shane Lopez from a few years ago, but it certainly is applicable today. I know I find solace in what he says, and it kind of empowers you to hear his words and realize that hope is something we can all create. The name of his book is Making Hope Happen. It's by Dr. Shane Lopez, and you will find a link to that book in the show notes.

So I'm almost positive that at some point in your life you've been in that situation where the thought occurred to you because you forgot your toothbrush or somebody else forgot their toothbrush that maybe you could share a toothbrush. Just this once. Can't be that bad, is it? Yeah, it actually is. Your mouth is home to more than 700 species of bacteria. And while not all 700 of these bacteria are harmful, some, like staph and E. coli, can lead to infection and illness.

Sharing a toothbrush means that whatever was in your friend's mouth is now in your mouth, or vice versa. And if the person whose toothbrush you borrowed didn't rinse and clean it properly, it's likely that day-old food particles stuck on the toothbrush will end up in your mouth. And admittedly, that's not especially dangerous, but it's just so gross. So don't share a toothbrush. Instead, use your finger or a washcloth or get in the car and go buy a toothbrush. And that is something you should know.

That's the podcast today. And especially since this episode has that interview with Shane Lopez in it, if you know someone who's not adapting well to our current situation with the coronavirus, share this episode with them and perhaps give them some hope. I'm Mike Carruthers. 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,

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