Category: Mind

  • Atomic Habits

    James Clear

    Given that I read The Power of Habit a while back, and have been a subscriber to James Clear’s newsletter for a while, I should have read this a long time ago. But better late than never. 

    He begins by explaining how small changes can make a big difference over a period of time. Positively and negatively. ‘Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.‘ Hence the word atomic – small, part of a larger system, and the building blocks of great results. 

    I think one of the best insights of the book is the three layers of behaviour change framework – outcomes, processes, identity. While most people focus on outcomes, systems (processes) are a better way. ‘ You do not rise to the level of your goals, You fall to the level of your systems.‘ But the best way is to focus on the ‘identity’ – the person you want to become. The first stop is to figure out one’s habits, which tend to be quite a few over a period of time. As per research, apparently 40-50% of our daily actions are habits. And many of them are not even consciously-created ones. A habit, as Clear brings up right at the beginning, is a routine or behaviour that is performed regularly – and in many cases, automatically. From an evolutionary perspective, ‘Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment‘. And that means, nature has its own way of creating things that reduce our cognitive load. 

    He then proceeds to breaking down the process. The process of building a new habit (or getting rid of one) has four steps – cue, craving, response, and reward. Correspondingly, to create a good habit, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying (and their inversion to get rid of a habit). These make up the Four Laws of Behaviour Change. The remaining chapters are all about bringing this to life. From managing one’s environment to the role of friends and family, fixing procrastination, using commitment devices and motivation rituals, reducing friction, how to stick to good habits, and even automate them when possible. By the time you read the end of this part, you have a fantastic table that can be quite easily applied. 

    I liked the last 50-odd pages the most because of my own interest in the topics. The perspectives on the role of nature and nurture – ‘genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine‘, and how to determine the game where your odds of success are higher. Habits are easier when they align to one’s natural abilities. ‘Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can’t control whether you are a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play where it’s better to be hard or soft.’ 

    He also brings up the downsides of even good habits, the importance of reviews and realignment, and how one can break the beliefs that are holding one back. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to periodically edit your beliefs and worldview, and expand your identity. 
    Some of the frameworks have been inspired by others (and Clear makes sure he mentions those) but through framing, easily relatable examples, and ways to implement them in daily lives, he makes application very easy. This is a must-read book, especially if you’re in your 20s and 30s. From experience, compounding is probably the most underrated phenomenon. The earlier you start, the better. ‘The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.’

  • Behave : The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

    Robert M. Sapolsky

    I remember Don Draper’s words from Mad Men – “When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere, just ask him. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there.” Robert Sapolsky asks this to our behaviour, and tries to answer it using multiple disciplines of science. 

    At any given point in time, we are behaving in one way or another. What influences that? To understand that, he travels back in time. From the seconds before that behaviour, and the possible neurobiological explanation, to the genes we have inherited, to the early days of our non-human ancestors and the environment that shaped many of their behaviours. Hormones, environment, culture, and events from millennia ago, all offer but clues to understanding how we are today. 

    From a narrative point of view, you’re first thrown into the deep end of the pool. I found the first few chapters reasonably tough to get through, simply because between the names of neurotransmitters and hormones and their little quirks, I had to repeatedly go back and check if I had understood right (even if it’s a remote understanding!) It doesn’t help that there are footnotes on practically every page. I stopped reading them after a while. It also doesn’t help that each chapter is a rabbithole with multiple little sections.

    And finally, I know the author means well and is probably trying to keep the prose conversational, but repeated “see what I did there?” are also a bit painful. As an exception, I did find the part on genes interesting, especially how it doesn’t act in isolation and interacts with the environment. ‘Genes aren’t about inevitabilities; they’re about potentials and vulnerabilities.’

    Having said all that, once we have gotten out of the body, and moved into environment, culture, decision-making etc, the text is a lot more accessible and at least to me, supremely interesting. Behaviour and what goes into it indeed becomes fascinating as we start to see the behaviour of other species and how similar we are in some aspects. It is also awe-inspiring to behold the species we have become. And much of it purely by chance. Also mind-bending how biology affects our tendency to violence, our sense of justice and many other things whose behind-the scenes we don’t really look at. 
    I think I’ll need at least one more read to assimilate everything in the book.

    But it is indeed fascinating to know that ‘we are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.’ ‘Our worst behaviours, once we condemn and punish are the products of our biology. The same applies to our best behaviours.’

    It’s not the easiest read, but if you persist, a lot of insights await you.

  • Metaphors we live by

    George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

    In “How Emotions are Made“, Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote how concepts, goals, words all help the brain frame any new stimulus it receives and that by reframing concepts and looking at them more objectively, we can reshape what emotions are surfaced, and thus exercise free will. But how does one go about that? In the vast scope of “Metaphors we live by”, we get an answer to that too. 

    Metaphorical concepts are so ubiquitous in our thoughts and deeds that we don’t even realise they exist, let alone their effect on how we think about everything from business and ethics to marriage and poetry. Conceptual metaphors allow us to use the inferences in domains we can sense (space, objects etc) on other domains of subjective judgment. In a way, this is how we are able to transmit ideas and create a shared understanding. We often ascribe this to language, but it actually begins with metaphorical concepts.

    The light bulb goes off in the first few pages, when the authors use “Argument is war” as an example. It’s because war is the metaphor we have used at a concept level, that the words we used to describe it are about winning/losing it, or “your claims are indefensible” or ‘He demolished my arguments” or “I attacked his weak points” and so on. Another example to think of is “time is money” – you use spend/save/run out of/invest to describe time. 

    In addition to the structural metaphors above, there are oriental metaphors, which provide a spatial orientation, and are based on our physical and cultural experiences. For instance, happy (spirits rose), consciousness (woke up), control (top of the situation), more (numbers went up), future events (what’s up), good things (looking up), virtue (high standards) are all “up”, while their opposites are down. 

    A thing to note is that a concept can have multiple metaphors e.g. Ideas are food (half- baked), people (father of modern physics), plants (fertile imagination) and many more. Another interesting part is the grounding of concepts. For instance, how we conceptualise the non-physical in terms of the physical. Harry is in the kitchen (which is spatial), in the army (social), in love (emotional). 

    The book further talks about the structuring of our experiences – experiential gestalts, as well as coherence of metaphors (including overlaps of metaphors, how they affect form, and how they can ultimately create realities. It also gets into very interesting territories – the nature of truth, objectivism and subjectivism. It points out how both miss the part that we understand the world through our interactions with it, and proposes an Experientialist alternative. 

    Since I started reading the book, I have been watching the words I use (” I am running late”, “I don’t think we should spend more time on this”) and imagining different metaphors. Because by changing the metaphors we live by, we can change our everyday life, and our future. This is far from an easy read, but even (more than) 40 years after it was first published, it is still pathbreaking.

  • The Mind is Flat

    Nick Chater

    I think the name of the book is a meta play, because the book convinces you of just that -“the mind is flat”. It is also the most convincing case I have read against AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), even while showing why we have had successes in narrow AI. Before you think it’s an AI book, it’s not, it’s about the human mind. We think of our mind having depths that we cannot fathom at this point, consisting of inner motives, beliefs and desires, many of which are unfathomable to us, and that behaviour is just a superficial aspect of it. This book argues that no such depths exist. The mind is flat.

    But what the mind is, is an excellent and immediate improvisor of actions, and beliefs and desires to explain the actions. My mental (re)action was “no way”, even though a part of this was familiar to me thanks to “How Emotions are made”. The author divides his case into two parts – the first part dismantles the perceptions created by classic psychology about beliefs, desires, hopes, and aims to prove that there is no “inner world”, and the second part provides an alternate theory – memory traces of previous momentary thoughts and experiences. 

    What really works is the accessibility of the narrative and how it is structured. It’s never a “believe me because I told you so”. Instead, we are led through a series of visual and thought exercises that question our understanding of reality. Slowly, a shallow world of improvisations are revealed to us. The mind works on “precedents, not principles”, and our emotions are creative acts made by a superb interpreter – our mind. With multiple examples, he shows our capacity to create “meaning” from nothing. Our inventiveness is brought out by the metaphors we live by, which are not always bound by “cold logic”. And that’s why we are able to create AI in areas where solutions are precisely defined. A general AI would require imaginative interpretations, something humans are very good at, but not really able to explain how!

    This does lead to my favourite “free will vs determinism” debate, and once again, the answer is that at any point, despite the determinism that has happened because nature and nurture, we have the freedom to change our mind. But then again, if it is flat, what’s there to change? Or does it contain a coda of traditions and precedents in the form of genes? While we create meaning from nothing, our quest for the depths of the mind is also perhaps a need to find “meaning”. I’ll leave it at that.

  • Indistractable

    Nir Eyal

    Towards the end of the book, the author cites a survey which found that “almost a third of Americans would rather give up sex for a year than part with their mobile phone for that long”. Sex has been hardwired in us by evolution, and it’s a testament to technology that it has managed to hack even that! But then again, there was a time when even the printing press was called the biggest source of distraction. So this isn’t a new story. But we do live in a world in which the attention economy has optimised its notifications and nudges to ensure that it is heard/seen/felt. All the time. Whether we need it or not. It has us hooked and sometimes we don’t even know how much!

    This is the challenge that Nir Eyal writes about in Indistractable. He approaches it with a simple framework of internal and external triggers and distraction and traction (some nifty wordplay, that). The first thing to focus on, he says, is our own motivations – internal triggers. Not just the proximal reasons that are making us distracted, but the root cause. Our distractions are more often than not a way of escaping something we do not want to confront. He also believes we never run out of willpower and warns us against labelling ourselves as “easily distracted” or “addictive personality”. An opinion that I am not sure I agree with.

    The rest of the book is a step by step guide on how to get to an “indistractable” state – from making time for traction (things we value) to taking control of external triggers by various means in personal and professional lives, and in social settings as well as when you’re by yourself. The suggestions are practical and quite doable once you decide that they need to be done. Ironically, the section that I found most interesting was how to inculcate this quality in children. Ironic, because I don’t have any. What made it interesting was the logical approach, one that seemed quite feasible.

    The book keeps it simple, and is a good guide if you find yourself distracted more often than you’d like to be. I have been doing my own wrestling with “staying in the moment” for a while now and found most of the things mentioned a validation of what I try to practice.