Jeff Wise

In 2008, Haile Gebrselassie made the run of his life. The weather for the Berlin marathon was perfect, a clear cool morning in late September. At the starting gun the 35-year-old Ethiopian set off at the front of the pack. By the halfway mark, he was running at a record-beating pace. But with Kenyan James Kwambai matching him stride for stride, the path to victory was still uncertain. An hour and a half into the race, however, Kwambai fell back, and from then on Gebrlassie might as well have been running solo. He passed under the Brandenburg Gate and crossed the finish line, breaking the world record by nearly half a minute.

The performance was a remarkable achievement by a human body continuously pushed to its limit. Or rather, that’s what it looked like to the untrained eye. But when South African research physiologist Timothy Noakes reviewed Gebrlassie’s performance he noticed something extraordinary: even though the runner had seemed to be going flat-out throughout the race, when he reached the last mile Gebrlassie began to run even faster. Somehow, he had harnessed a previously untapped reserve of energy to accelerate himself toward the finish line. Continue reading The Thing Inside You That’s Holding You Back

Recently that the German government moved to phase out nuclear energy in the country. The industry, it reckoned, poses an unacceptable risk to the health of the population, despite the fact that its atomic energy program is well regulated and has never resulted in an injury or death.

Coincidentally, around the same time an outbreak of E. coli spread by organic bean sprouts killed dozens of people in the country. Yet in the aftermath no one suggested that organic vegetables should be banned.

Clearly, what the general public perceives as dangerous is very different from mortality statistics alone would tell us. Are we simply irrational, or is there an underlying logic behind our intuitive perception of risk?

For answers, I turned to David Ropeik, a well-known risk management consultant, fellow Psychology Today blogger, and author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.

JW: Can you explain this disparity to me, between the reaction to atomic power and to the E. coli outbreak?

DR: Risk is subjective, a mix of the few facts we have at any given time, and how those facts feel. We have developed a set of instincts that help us gauge potentially risky situations, quickly, before all the facts are in. Which is pretty important for survival, though it may not make for the most fact-based, rational choices. In essence, risks have personality traits, psychological characteristics that make some feel scarier than others, the statistics and facts notwithstanding.

JW: So what’s the personality of nuclear power? Continue reading It’s Not the Scary Things that Kill You

As I post this, the world is supposed to be ending, according to a fervent group of Christian cultists. Despite the insignificant size of their membership, the group has attracted an enormous amount of press attention and internet buzz – mostly, I think, because of the remarkable self-confidence with which they peddle their lunatic project. How, we wonder, could someone believe something so baseless – and embrace it so fervently?

We should not be so smug. Erroneous theories aren’t just the province of the lunatic fringe. They’re part of everyone’s basic cognitive legacy. We are hardwired for a phenomenon I call “theory lock,” a predilection rooted in the fact that there’s one concept that the human brain finds almost impossible to grasp: “I don’t know.”

Our minds recoil from uncertainty. We are wired to find order in randomness and chaos. We look at clouds and see sheep. We look at stock price charts and detect patterns. We read our horoscope and think “yes, that totally applies to me!”

In evolutionary terms, this can be a useful feature. After all, when it comes to making decisions, we’re helpless without a theory, a way to make sense of the situation that we’re in. Powerlessness is a deeply upsetting and stressful condition. So when a theory, even a weak one, presents itself amid an explanatory vacuum, we instinctively seize hold and hang on for dear life.

Once we have a theory in our grasp, we begin to see everything through its lens. Information that otherwise seem ambiguous, or even contradictory to that theory, is understood within its framework. And so just by holding a belief we tend to gradually strengthen our conviction that it is true, a tendency that psychologists dub “confirmation bias.”

It’s hard to overstate the power of this effect. Continue reading Apocalypse Today: The Allure of Bad Theory

If you happen to be of the left-leaning persuasion, I imagine that you will find the results of this recent study quite satisfying. Researchers in the UK asked test subjects about their political leanings, and then scanned their brains. Guess what? They found that liberals tended to have more volume in an area of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), a region associated with, among other things, decision making. Conservatives, on the other hand, showed more heft in the amygdala, the region associated with emotional memory and in particular with the processing of fear. Writes Time magazine:

These structural differences, the authors suggest, support previous reports of differences in personality: liberals tend to be better at managing conflicting information, while conservatives are thought to be better at recognizing threats, researchers said. “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” said [lead researcher Ryota] Kanai in a press release. “Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure.”

If you wear Tevas and clothes made out of organically grown hemp, this will seem intuitively obvious. After all, liberals arrive at their views through logical reasoning, while conservatives operate on a purely emotion-driven level, like reptiles. Right?

 Not so fast. Continue reading Right Wingers and the Reptile Brain

A few days ago I was contacted by Mike Sielski, a Wall Street Journal reporter working on an article about New York Rangers hockey player Chris Drury. Drury hasn’t been having a very good season, but in the past he was legendary for his ability to pull of amazing feats of athleticism just when his team needed it — when the pressure was highest. Writes Sielski, in his piece which just went up today:

In Game 5 of the ’07 Eastern Conference semifinals, as a member of the Buffalo Sabres, Drury scored a tying goal with less than eight seconds left in regulation against the Rangers, lifting a rebound over goaltender Henrik Lundqvist. Buffalo won the game in overtime and the series in six games, and Lundqvist still remembers shattering his stick to pieces by slamming it against a wall after Drury’s goal.

Sielski had called me to ask how it might be possible, in psychological terms, to account for such phenomenal feats of skill. I pointed out to him that my book Extreme Fear is pretty much geared to answering that question — the book is framed around the mystery of how aerobatic pilot Neil Williams managed to figure out how to save his life when his plane’s wing started to fall off at low altitude. The conclusion I reached in writing the book, I told Sielski, is that a person who is highly skilled in a particular domain can tap the automatic part of their brain to an astonishing degree even when under the sort of life-or-death pressure that shuts down the conscious mind. As Sielski quotes me in the article:

In stressful situations, certain individuals with expertise in a given field—an elite ice hockey player, for example—”can make connections automatically and quickly and effortlessly in a way that might seem impossible,” Jeff Wise, author of the book “Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger,” said in a phone interview. “They’re seeing the opportunity, the chance. They’re able to play the odds in a way a less sophisticated person wouldn’t. There is a kind of athletic intelligence that can emerge most powerfully in a clutch moment.”

As a reporter myself, I fully understand the understand the necessity of keeping quotes short and to the point, so I never expected Sielski to include the caveats that I expressed over the phone Continue reading The Mystery of Clutch Performance