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Stop Anxiety by Adjusting Expectations
Emotion and repetition
To make sense of the world, our brain makes neural pathways from its past experience. These pathways allow us to become efficient and not doubt every move we make.
However, when we need to update our expectations to a new reality, our brain has to create new pathways. One tool is to use emotion, but it's limiting. The other is repetition. If you repeat a new behavior for 45 days, you will build a new expectation.
To rewire yourself to focus on the good you want instead of disappointed expectations, use both emotion and repetition.
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Key Ideas
The ghost ball trick
A magician sat at a table in front of a group of schoolchildren. He threw a ball up in the air a few times, but before his last throw, he secretly let the ball fall into his lap. Then he continued ...
The role that social cues play during magic tricks
In the vanishing ball illusion, a study found that when the magician pretends to throw the ball in the air, and his gaze follows the imaginary trajectory of the ball, almost two-thirds of the participants will be convinced that they had seen the ball move up. If his gaze did not follow the imaginary ball, the illusion was far less effective.
This illustrates that the illusion is mostly driven by expectations. Our eyes find it difficult to track fast-moving objects. Looking at the ball is only possible when we can predict where it will be in the future.
Perception does not take place in the eyes
Although most participants experience an illusory effect during magic tricks, the eyes are not tricked. The conscious perception has been fooled by the illusion, but your eyes have not.
Lots of neural calculations are required before we can experience the world. Neural signals start in the retina, then it passes through different neural centers to the visual cortex and higher cortical areas, and eventually build a mental representation of the outside world. It takes about a tenth of a second for the light registered by the retina to become a visual perception. The neural delay means we perceive things at least a tenth of a second after they happened.
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Key Ideas
Boost Learning Speed
- Learners proficient in fast-paced games are significantly faster at performing new cognitive tasks.
- By pretending you are teaching something to someone using simple language, you understand it better.
- Bilingual people may have a leg up when it comes to understanding new things and processing information, regardless of the learned language.
- Learning new material right before sleeping provides a significant retention advantage.
- Establishing as many connections as possible is an effective way to learn, and the best way to do that is to relate new information to known information.
- The brain processes visual information faster than text. Include relevant visuals (charts, symbols, diagrams…) with learning materials to improve retention.
Perceptual Learning
Is the idea that we learn unconsciously through our senses in a self-regulated way, without requiring external reinforcement.
More simply, you can learn to intuitively identify different situations or images through directly experiencing them in a fast-paced manner.