The Guinea Pig Diaries (11 page)

Today, there’s an article about salmonella. Eight hundred people have gotten sick from salmonella, possibly from tainted tomatoes—which later will turn out not to be the case. I’m a
paranoid bastard, so I would normally purge our house of anything tomato related: the pint of cherry tomatoes, the ketchup bottles, the
Esquire
cover of Andy Warhol in tomato soup. Salmonella would climb onto my list of Top Ten Worries.

Instead I take my first countermeasures. I ask my wife for the newspaper, find a Sharpie, and scribble under the headline: “Meanwhile, millions of people ate tomatoes and did NOT get sick. But thousands did die from obesity.”

“That’s better,” I tell my wife, handing it back to her. There’s something validating about writing it out. I explain that every newspaper article should come with a reality-check box, like cigarettes and their surgeon general’s warnings. For now I’ll have to provide my own.

I go to the fridge and consider eating a cherry tomato to spite the media. But that’d be falling for the Reactance Bias, the unreasonable desire to do what others forbid you from doing.

UNIT BIAS

I do want to have breakfast, though. How to eat rationally? It’s a minefield. For starters, my list has something called “The Unit Bias.”

As humans, I’ve learned, we have an irrational urge to finish everything on our plates. No doubt this served our Paleolithic forefathers well when food was scarce and unreliable. But now it just makes us a bunch of fat-asses.

I recently read about a brilliant experiment at the University of Illinois a few years ago. They gave a group of test subjects bowls of soup. What they didn’t tell them was this: hidden tubes underneath the table were constantly refilling the bowls. Guess what? The subjects just kept on eating, long past when they were
full. If the scientists hadn’t dragged them from the table, they might have exploded.

I need to eat less. I pour my MultiGrain Cheerios into a bowl, then cover the bowl with a napkin. I’m not going to let my brain see what’s inside the bowl. That’d be too tempting. I’ll just eat till I feel full. It’s a time-consuming process trying to negotiate the spoon around the napkin. Which is probably a good thing, since it’s healthier to eat slowly.

And yet I feel I have miles to go before I can say I ate a rational meal. Like yours, my brain is packed with food-related biases. People often choose the medium size at a restaurant even if the small would suffice—we have a fear of the extremes, so we go with the middle option. We find it logical to eat cows but not other mammals such as dogs or mice. Studies have shown we find things tastier if we pay more for them. Or if we eat them out of fancier containers. Later in the day, I eat microwaved chili off our wedding plates. It’s delicious.

SOURCE AMNESIA

Here’s one thing I’m learning: my brain is full of crap. I need a mental colonic.

It’s the end of Day One, and I’m grappling with the startling number of myths, half-truths, and outright lies that clog my brain. It’s not that I believe in ghosts. Or numerology. Or that Barack Obama secretly belongs to a mosque. My misconceptions are less obvious but just as false.

This struck me as I was brushing my hair. It sounds reasonable, and I suppose, for the first few seconds I get my hair into place, it is.

Problem is, I keep on brushing for another thirty seconds. I
brush my hair till my scalp tingles. Why? Because someone—I think my mother—told me when I was about ten years old that you need to stimulate the scalp or you’ll go bald. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years.

As soon as I uncover the almost-unconscious belief, it smells rotten, and about three minutes of Googling confirms it: it’s a myth, about as effective as rubbing chicken manure on my head, another ancient remedy.

I call my mom to ask whether she was, in fact, the one who told me.

“That sounds like something I said,” she says.

“Well, it’s not true. It’s a myth.”

There’s a pause. “Sorry.”

“Well, I spent a lot of time brushing my hair because of that.” (More than three total days of hair brushing, to be precise.)

“I’m not sure what to tell you except sorry.”

Damn. Now I’m the bad guy in this scenario.

“Anyway,” she says. “Why were you taking advice from me about baldness? You should have talked to your dad.”

“I was ten!”

A huge chunk of my life has been wasted. Why? Because I’m the victim of two brain flaws. First, we place too much trust in authority. We follow the captain even if it’s clear he’s leading us right over Havasu Falls. It is hardwired into our brains. The second is just as insidious: Source Amnesia. We forget where we learned a fact. Facts are initially stored in a pinkie-shaped region called the hippocampus. But eventually the information shifts over to the cerebral cortex—where, as
Welcome to Your Brain
authors Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt put it, it is “separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know the capital of California is Sacramento, but you
probably don’t remember how you learned it.” A fact learned in the
Wall Street Journal
gains as much credulity as a “fact” learned from your cousin’s barber.

And it gets worse. Even if we are told—clearly warned— that something is false or unsubstantiated, we often remember it later as gospel.

I need to root out these untruths. With a little research, I refute some of my more dubious beliefs: Shaving your hair does not make it grow back thicker, turning lights on and off does not waste more energy, sugar does not make you hyperactive. Despite what Mom said, I don’t need to wear socks or slippers around the house for health reasons; you can’t get a cold from cold feet.

Yet when I try to go shoeless around the house, it causes me such low-grade angst, I give up and put my Merrells back on. They are stuck deep, these myths. And I know there are dozens, hundreds, of other undiscovered falsehoods lurking in my neurons and warping my choices. But how do I identify them?

THE HALO EFFECT

It’s Day Three and I’m pissed at the brain. It’s not just flawed; it’s superficial and cruel, like a cable TV pundit. This sunk in today when I was at Starbucks.

I bought a cappuccino and got back $1.35 in change. How much should I tip? Thirty-five cents or a dollar? I stuffed the dollar into the box and smiled at the barista.

As I poured my sugar, I realized I’d fallen for the Halo Effect. Terrible. One of the most evil biases on my little folded-up list. If a person is physically attractive, we unconsciously heap all sorts of wonderful, unrelated qualities onto them. Studies have shown we think attractive people are smarter than ugly
people. We tend to hire them more often and promote them faster. We think they’re more virtuous. Teachers treat attractive children better than their unfortunate-looking peers. In short, we judge a book by its cover.

And yes, the barista was really cute. A Maggie Gyllenhaal type with a moderate smattering of piercings. I know that was the reason I tipped her the buck. If she’d looked like Vladimir Putin, I would have gone with the thirty-five cents.

I unconsciously assumed she was a good person and deserved a dollar. I also, no doubt, unconsciously wanted to sleep with her and spread my DNA. (And assumed the sixty-five cents would help with that cause, naturally.)

The Halo Effect runs deep in our genes. It probably made sense to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. If someone had a misshapen face, there could be a greater chance he had an inherited disease. So you might want to avoid breeding with him. You want your offspring to have grade A genes.

I hate the Halo Effect. It’s like Nature said, Hey, let’s make life as unfair as possible. Let’s load up the misery on one side and give all the happiness to the pretty people.

I call Richard Thaler, one of the authors of
Nudge.
(He’s agreed to be my rationality guru.) “If you think about it,” he says, “it’s more rational to give the homely one a bigger tip. Some investment banker is going to propose to the pretty one soon and she won’t be working at Starbucks.”

The next day, before going to lunch with my wife at a local café, I take countermeasures. I put duct tape on the top half of each lens of my glasses. I’m blind from the horizon up. This way, I figure, I can still function, but I won’t be able to see the waitress’s face. I won’t be swayed by her hotness. My wife reminds me I’m lucky to be married to her.

My plan works—for a bit. I can’t see our waitress’s face. But
I spend a lot of time listening to her voice—a bit husky, breathy— to try to discern her hotness. Then I leave a big tip because I feel like a schmuck for never making eye contact.

I call Thaler for a debriefing. “That was a good example of what you don’t want to do,” he says. “You could have been hit by a truck, first of all. Here’s my advice: sit in the café, drink your coffee, stare at the barista, then give your dollar to the homely one.”

CONFIRMATION BIAS

For someone who once deemed himself relatively rational, I have
an astounding number of superstitions.
I suppose “obsessive-compulsive rituals” sounds a bit better than “superstitions.” Whatever they are, I’ve got so many, I can’t count them all.

After turning off the faucet, I touch it twice.

I never start or end a conversation with the word
you.

Whenever I swallow, I must swallow in pairs.

And on and on. They take up a lot of mental bandwidth.

Superstitions, I learn, stem from the Confirmation Bias. The faulty reasoning goes like this:

I’ve swallowed in pairs for fifteen years, and I’m alive and relatively okay.

If I stop swallowing in pairs, who knows what will happen?

So I better keep on swallowing in pairs.

Highly irrational. Today, I’ve vowed to snap the superstition chains. I will have a superstition-free day. Perhaps even life.

I fetch my son, plop down on the couch, and start reading him a story about a dangerously irresponsible zookeeper. Out of habit, I swallow—the first big test. I suppress the urge to swallow again. A solo swallow, for the first time in two decades.

It feels odd. Where’s the closure? Man, I want to swallow again. I feel like I sang “Happy birthday to—” and just stopped midsentence. I mentally tuck away the fact that I’ve swallowed a single time, so that when this experiment is over, I can swallow a second time to even things out. Not good.

A few minutes later, I walk by the hall mirror. Whenever I glance at my reflection, I start to contort my face into a yawnlike position, my lips obscuring my teeth. This yawning superstition started because I’m insecure about my overbite, so I hide it. The yawn makes me resemble an orangutan in estrus. I stop myself, relax my face. I’d forgotten about this quirk when I was making my list. These rituals are lurking everywhere.

The ritual-breaking has made me anxious. My heart rate has jumped. I’m hyperaware of everything going on, looking for any sign of catastrophe or disease.

“Everything okay?” I ask Julie.

“Uh, fine, thanks.”

“Nothing bad has happened to you this morning?”

She shakes her head.

A couple of hours later, I catch the digital clock in our bedroom change from minute 13 to 14. So what? I don’t need to stop and stare at the clock until it changes from 14 to 15 so that the 13 is washed out of my mind.

By the end of the day, I’m on a high. Why didn’t I do this twenty years ago? Think of the time I could have saved.

I wake up the next morning, ready for another day of freedom. An hour into the day, I spill coffee all over my MacBook keyboard. Yeah, well, it happens. A few minutes later, Julie asks me if I’ve seen her earring. She’s lost it somewhere. She looks upset—even more than lost-earring upset. Well, she says, a client of hers had just called and shouted some unreasonable demands. “She’s a bulldozer,” she says.

Then I get an angry e-mail about an essay I wrote. I’d committed a big mistake—I hadn’t made it clear that I disguised the identities of everyone in the essay—and it made me look like an insensitive tool.

I knew this would happen. What kind of an idiot am I to tempt fate? This experiment is over.

THE MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT

It’s a couple of days later. Maybe I’ve overreacted a bit. I’m sticking with my swallowing in pairs, but perhaps there’s other irrational behavior I can fix. Like my toothpaste preference.

I’ve brushed with Crest pretty much every day for the past thirty years. (The exception: one night last year, I brushed my teeth with Preparation H. The reasons were several: a poorly lit hotel bathroom, lack of sleep, a couple of Rolling Rocks, and two identically sized tubes in my Dopp kit.)

Why Crest? I can’t say for sure. No pro/con list was ever drawn up. Some friend of mine at Camp Powhatan in Maine used Crest. He was cool and had seemingly good dental hygiene. I started using Crest—and never stopped.

It’s scary once you start to scrutinize it. Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.

Psychologists call it the Mere Exposure Effect. The basic idea is, I like Crest because I’m accustomed to Crest.

That’s not good enough. I need a fully rational toothpaste. I need, first, to expand my dental hygiene horizons. I go to the drugstore and buy a sample platter of forty tubes of toothpaste. (The cashier doesn’t even bat an eye; I guess when your customers buy bungee cords and vats of K-Y Jelly in preparation for a Friday night, this isn’t a big deal.)

I go home and spend eighty minutes brushing. Pepsodent Smooth Mint. Colgate Luminous Crystal Clean Mint. Aquafresh Extreme Clean Whitening Mint Experience. I never realized how much I hate mint. What a tongue-stinging, foul taste. It brings back bad memories of the green goo that goes with lamb chops. What kind of stranglehold do the mint growers have on toothpaste makers? Bite me, mint lobby. The occasional cinnamon paste tastes a bit better, I guess.

But toothpaste No. 27—this is a revelation. Tom’s apricot toothpaste. It’s fresh and clean-tasting, but not heavy-handed, and with just a hint of licorice. It’s like something you’d eat at Chez Panisse. I might actually look forward to toothbrushing.