The Power of Habit - A Review

As I was processing some difficult news this morning, my eye noticed the cover of the latest book I've been reading, Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit.

The power of habit leads us to movement, progress, success, health even when facing unfortunate developments. Duhigg discusses the case of a woman who goes to a lab and over the course of two years manages to radically transform her life. She has not only successfully quit smoking, but also managed to run a marathon, and move up at work. It turns out, according to her neurologists, that her success was linked to a change in the patterns inside her brain.

The author postulates that the power of habit is so grand that without it, we would be lost. Much of good can be accomplished with relative ease due to it. While reading from it I got to thinking of my chess tutor when I was eleven. I had a hard time staying put, in a chair, and I always sought the easy way out. The easy check mate. "Muscle memory, Brikena, muscle memory. It needs to get exercised. While sitting down. Don't move your right leg. Don't tap on the table. Don't chew gum. Focus....." he used to say to me. I didn't like it when he'd say it as I'd rather check mate the other party quickly (or get check mated by it quickly) and run outside to my friends for a game of whatever.

It's amazing how we can get good at so me many things by relying on habits that at times appear to be clothed in antithesis. Consider bike riding and chess. The reason why I mention the former is because Duhrigg makes mention of it in his book as well and my experience is congruent with his explanation. He mentions bike riding as an example of practicing the "art of not thinking."

Biking like swimming are things I learned by myself. The same applied to chess in the beginning but once I displayed some understanding, I was given a tutor. I would watch my Dad and brother play and I'd mimetically get to a point of understanding. That's how I got to see how limited but dangerous the queen could be and how impulsive and manipulatable the knight is. But I digress.

When it came to swimming, it happened in the Adriatic. It was afternoon. I had a red bathing suit on. I had been in the water for hours and my lip was purple. My mom kept wanting me to come out of the water but I said "no!" "I need to learn this now!" I needed to do a frog style underwater. I just had to keep practicing. And so, after swallowing who knows how much salty water, I became, to quote Mom, fish-like. To this time, diving and swimming frog style under water is one of the most relaxing experiences in life. You learn it by doing. By not thinking, by simply allowing the body to enter in a dialog of understanding with water. The same applies to bike riding. I have a hard time with visual memory. I do, however, remember vividly when I first got to ride an adult's bike and swim long distances in the sea.

I loved riding bikes when I was a child. And I loved chess. I had two camps of friends. The popular ones who leaned more towards visibility and public games and the really smart but painfully shy group would come to my parents' guest quarters and practice the various theoretical chess openings. The chess nerds, or as my brother used to call them, the Kasparovs. Kena, dinner time. Are the Kasparovs gone yet? The art of thinking came in handy with the Kasparovs. And its sort of opposite is what I espoused when frolicking in the sun with the bike riders and swimmers.

The art of thinking and the art of non thinking are required in both activities. When it came to chess, I had to learn the hierarchy of strategy and how to better fight the opponent. When to attack the tower, or make the queen move so that the king would finally get nervous and eventually start moving nervously till he'd get check mated.

When it came to riding bikes or teaching my friends how to ride them, the advice was simple, and funnily in sync with Duhigg's premise: do, don't think. Duhigg makes the point that learning how to do different activities is going to require different modus operandi. For instance, the skills required to learning how to ride a bike are not easily explicable to the conscious mind. Chess is a bit of a different story.

Duhigg says that our conscious mind is not nearly fast enough or accurate enough to handle even what seems like a relatively simple task such as hitting a golf ball–which is why superior athletes must learn to practice “the art of not thinking,” in order to succeed.

In sum, The Power of Habit is a good read. It might make you revisit your past and the times when you first learned how to do things you're currently good at.

Adele, Appoggiatura, and Commonality of Heartbreak

Adele is all over the place now. She received six Grammy's. In addition, she's receiving a lot of play time on most radio stations worldwide. You can hear her at Starbucks, at the doctor's office, even at Costco. Adele's ubiquitous which is one of the better things to come out of pop culture.

She's even featured on the Wall Street Journal as an illustration of appoggiatura. The article entitled, "Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker" zeroes in on Adele's track "Someone Like You" and why it resonates with most people.



Personally, I don't care much for the track. I find the chord progression too simple and the lyrics vexingly clichéd. But, I like the video. No, correction, I am in deep like with the video. It reminds of my most favorite French film of all time, the spectacular Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais. Incidentally, if you do need to take a couple of hours to yourself and work something out in your mind, give this film a try. It will lead you to a kind of introspection few other things can. But that's another post. A trailer from the 1961 film is featured below:



The WSJ article stipulates that the reason why a track like "Someone Like You" has such wide appeal is because of appoggiatura which is an ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.

A bit from the article says: "Measuring listeners' responses, Dr. Zatorre's team found that the number of goose bumps observed correlated with the amount of dopamine released, even when the music was extremely sad. The results suggest that the more emotions a song provokes—whether depressing or uplifting—the more we crave the song."

You can read the rest of the article here.

Let Them Eat Hershey's

I kept thinking of this old Italian film I used to watch as a child. It took place in a classroom and Rossi, the best student, was beaten one day by anther student who scored better on a test. One test. When all the ridiculous underachievers found out that Rossi was not the 'best' anymore, they started chanting in a chorus of mediocrity:

"Tu non sei piu primo, tu non sei piu primo!"
[You're not the first (best) anymore, you're not the first....]

I always felt for Rossi. His whole life, well, from the age of 6-10 at least, poor Rossi had done everything to learn all he could and he was mostly resented for being successful. And the one time he slipped by one point, he gets faced with the horrible voices of those who never cared to self-improve and learn but rather emerged in a sea of triviality and boredom.

So, this Valentine's day, if you're going home to someone who likes you well, who makes you feel good, and who is at times responsible for taking you out of the sea of 'tu non sei piu primo' chanters, be equally good to them the way you were a day prior. If you're going home to an absence of that, embrace the idea that it can be had by anyone. It's not inorganic chemistry. Far from it. It's easy because it's instinctual. Find what makes you content for the moment and keep it moving. You won't gain any unnecessary weight or cellulite which, let's face it, will dramatically improve your chances of pairing up with someone who's not into group chanting and who's a better natural fit for you anyway.

And, for all of us, chocolate eaters and non-eaters alike, let's enjoy a bit of fun reading from the great W. Somerset Maugham and his novel, The Painted Veil.
When the doctor in the novel realizes that his marriage is coming to an end and he sees his wife, due to no fault of her own or her nature, for how she actually is: limited, he writes:

“I had no illusions about you. I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you.... I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew.”

Werner Herzog on Chickens

This, well, this you have to see and, most importantly, hear.

I've always been a bigger Herzog fan than I let on. I always privileged Wim Wenders, maybe a revisitation of his work is needed:

Werner Herzog on Chickens from Tom Streithorst on Vimeo.

On Eudaimonia and Coffee

On the drive back from half a day of snowboarding up North, I stopped to pick up a friend in the city. He informed me the night before that there is a new coffee place worth checking out in the city. Coffee places are like mushrooms after the rain in this city.

So, we go get coffee at this place where the baristas wear these sort of..., eh, why bother. As I keep explaining to my people, this city is where hipsters and scenesters come to retire. Sort of like Portland, but, you know, generally prettier. Sorry, Portlanders. Those of you who've been here sort of already concur.

I still had my slope hat on and my right leg was killing me thanks to a prior fall. Coffee tasted good, though. Apparently, after taking the first sip I had this look on my face that said, I'm so not here right now. I'm so somewhere else.
The other party asked me, "where did you go just now?"
He continues, "you have a look on your face right now that says, 'I'm so not here right now. I'm so somewhere else.'"
I get that look when I'm fully happy for the moment. I wonder why, in moments like that, I look disinterested in the present place and company, but I know that it happens. There's this utter detachment from the present moment. I suppose 'happy' looks different to different people.

I snap back into the present moment. I look around and I see a sea of iPhones and Apple gizmos, Ugg boots, and blah, blah, blah. "Eeek, I had to snap back to this," I think to myself. My friend opened up his messenger bag and he pulled out a book that looked beat up by time.

"Why do some translate 'eudaimonia' as 'happiness'", he asks.
I shrug my shoulders. Not because I don't have an answer. Alas, I sort of did. But because I was getting a bit of a sensorial overload from the new coffee place where the baristas have this 'cool' way of making..... ah, who cares.

"Can't really talk about eudaimonia right this very minute." In a nutshell, the eudaimonists concerned themselves with the maximizing of one's own practical goal to achieving happiness. They might call it happiness, I'm more inclined to calling it evasion of futility. Whichever is more important to one, I suppose. Just an hour ago my telos was staying on the board and not letting the right eye that kept itching bother me too much. "Let's get out of here. I'm worried about getting a ticket. It's been what...?"
"About 10 minutes," he says.
We leave. While driving on a street with too many lights I complain about traffic and then think to resume his initial topic of eudaimonism.
"So, what about them?"
He knew what I was referring to and promptly said,
"I wonder if some translate it as 'happiness' because it puts a stop to artistic pursuit. To go after art means, or should mean, to suffer."
I take a sip of my surprisingly unpretensious coffee and only manage to get two words out before I'm interrupted by a laughter. I say one function word and one content word and then a "HA" ensues.
"The telos...."
Ha, telos, I'm sorry, he says, you have that silly hat on with the two hanging straps and your board is in the backseat and The Killers are playing in your iPod and we're talking about eudaimonia.
I didn't think that the content word 'telos' was that humorous a choice but I suppose in the context we were in, it sort of, kind of was.
We left eudaimonia at that.
This morning as I was straightening my hair, I was thinking of the little exchange and got to thinking about it a bit more. I wondered why I never cared much for it. And then I wondered why I never cared much about Aristotle either. Just because I 'get' them, doesn't mean I ought to care, or even like, them. Philosophy, much like anything else, should serve a practical function, one that is of use to the person to be/get better. Aristotle was so adamant about the importance of philosophy and how it is good for the mind to be consumed by it. It turns out, it's not always so. It's better for the mind to be consumed with the practicality of the pursuit of happiness, however. Sometimes, most times actually, it's better for the mind to wander freely. And that's as close to being happy as some people can hope to get. I suppose this would make me a bit of a eudomonia-enamored person at this present moment. The purpose of life is to practically go after one's own happiness. Or something.

Assorted Links

1) I managed to catch Last Night this weekend. Someone told me it was akin to Patrick Marber's screenplay of Closer. The real reason why I PVR-ed it however was Guillaume Canet whom I'd never seen in an English-speaking role before and, as a result, was curious to see as I generally enjoy his work. The narrative is predictable but there are interesting achievements of form in this film. Cinematically, it does well, too. While the characters and plot, for the most part, are predictably forgettable, the form and soundtrack beg for some attention.




2) Portlandia stars interview each other.
My favorite episode of the first season had to be the pilot.


3) There is a new study on the familial linkage between neuropsychiatric conditions and intellectual interests. You can read the article in full here. A bit says:

"Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p = 8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p = 0.027), or substance abuse problems (p = 1.9×10−6). A combined PREdisposition for Subject MattEr (PRESUME) score based on these disorders was strongly predictive of subject matter interests (p = 9.6×10−8)."

4) Where was the web invented? Well, Al Gore might give one answer. Other sources have other answers. Tip of the hat to Tyler Cowen for the pointer.

A bit says:

"I’ll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders."

Doubt Is the Origin of Wisdom

Or as Descartes put it in his Meditations on First Philosophy, "Dubium sapientiae initium." The gift of doubt is something evolution rarely gets much public laud for. And doubt makes the most sense when seen in conjunction with others. Consider it in isolation, and little progress will be made.

Companionship is not always a matter of desire. It's, for most, and fundamentally, a matter of need. Of survival, really. We don't refer to it as such in public discourse because it becomes too heavy and who would want to tackle things of seriousness in broad daylight?!

Any discussion of the economics of companionship in the public forum is, at best, pushed to the side and given commercial-length attention. People have no choice when it comes to allying themselves with others. From an evolutionary perspective, there's power in numbers. Survival is found in numbers. Two or more people have a better chance when it comes to outsmarting and or vanquishing a hungry bear than one isolated person. In nuce, the bigger the pack, the better the chances of making it.

Enculturation brought with it more than just better stratagem so that better game could be caught, bigger cavernous spaces in which to prepare said game, draw such activities on the amorphous walls to record the culture of survival, and secure protection from the elements of the physical world. Enculturation brought to life the results of systematic sociality: spawn, a lot of spawn - in case bears and physical elements got to most of them - and a desire to create a narrative of living, one that is historical, that builds on previous accounts and doesn't stop at a dénouement. One that, phoenix-like, gives birth to yet another version of itself ad perpetua.

Survival, or efforts to survive, lead one to a better existence. Efforts to survive give one better tools of coping. I've long maintained this. Some humans are better at living because they're naturally good at surviving. Genetic makeup dictates many of the living choices we all irrespective of one another make. But so does sociality. While the former is devoid of choice, the latter is fully predicated on it.

From a Darwinian perspective, what makes one fitter to survive than others is their ability to decode their surroundings and make decisions that are congruent with nature. Which path to take to encounter the least amount of bears, what time of the year to go hunting, who has the kind of childbearing hips that can sustain the highest frequency of births, who to strike alliances with for the purpose of attaining the most game and the most fruitful childbearing hips, et al.

Descartes noted in his Principia philosophiae, Part I the following: "Ex nihilo nihil fit. Meaning: nothing comes out of nothing. Understanding that plurality counts, counts. A multitude of human resources will never be inconsequential to existence, good existence. It will be indispensable to good living. In sum, we don't choose to align ourselves with others out of fickleness. Most humans do so out of clean calculation. Nothing comes out of nothing. Much comes out of calculated sociality and sustained companionship.

So, next time when dinner is prepared in the kitchen, dry-cleaning is picked up, and one is accompanied to the doctor's office, think of sociality is its purely pragmatic, evolution-informed form: that it is commoditized and not the romanticized entity we're daily told it is. There's always a cui bono - i.e.: 'what's in it for me?' - attached to it. Even a simple peanut butter & jelly sandwich brings expectations with it.

Cogito ergo sum, Descartes? Also, I think, eat, engage physically, and pick up my dry-cleaning at times, therefore I am.

The picture below was taken at the airport on one of my summer trips while waiting to board the plane. The parental time spent made sense: when bored, do yoga publicly.

Egocentrism over Email

I just finished reading a study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the benefit of factoring in paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation and how without them it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over email.

Email communication is ubiquitous. Businesses rely almost solely on it. Interpersonal relationships can't seem to be without it. However, communication is multi-faceted and without paralinguistic feedback it can be quite lacking.

I had an experience with a work email the other day. As a trained close reader, tone matters to me. I pictured what the writer of the email meant by it if the same content were shared by way of the voice while being physically present. I still didn't quite feel I got to the core of the text.

I was in too tired a state of mind to place a phone call. Instead, I choose to give it a few hours, wrap up some last-minute things, tidy the desk, put things away, and then I compile the text. It was an exercise in economy of speech. And as most such exercises go, they take time.

Afterwards, a number of phone calls ensued for the purpose of getting to a full understanding of the content and what now feels like a waste of 60 minutes of my time. In the end, the original writer of the email concluded, incidentally by way of email, "so glad this is all sorted out. sorry :)" I wanted to email back the following, "it wouldn't have even been born had one of us verbally phrased the same thing." But I didn't. Because I was in no mood to waste yet another hour of my already packed existence.

A bit from the study says:

"Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

Social judgment is inherently egocentric. When people try to imagine the perspective, thoughts, or feelings of someone else, a growing body of evidence suggests that they use themselves as an
anchor or reference point. Although precisely why this occurs — whether the result of an overlearned and generally valid heuristic, the residual byproduct of an earlier stage of childhood egocentrism, or the inevitable consequence of an effortful cognitive process such as anchoring and adjustment—is a matter of some debate, the fact remains that the assessment of another’s perspectives is influenced, at least in part, by one’s own."



You can read the rest of the study here.

Claims re: the Alpha Male Myth et al.

I just read the following. The first one is a repudiation of the notion of alpha masculinity and how pop culture notions are utterly in the wrong when faced with fundamental evolutionary biology. An interesting read. A bit of the study says:

"If evolved human dominance behaviors have been decreasing over time, we would expect to see something else evolve to replace it. Because of the evolution of hominin brain size and cognition across the paleolithic, we might expect that whatever trait evolved via sexual selection related to these developments. Indeed, humor and intelligence appear to be more attractive to women than testosterone-related masculinity when it matters most — during female ovulation (Kaufman, et al. 2007)." More here.

Francesco Schettino is a worldwide known name now. The captain who abandoned ship to save himself has become the laughing stock of the reading world. The Guardian's Ian Jack, however, explores what his premature leaving of the ship might entail and how it relates to our collective attitudes about honor. A bit says:

"...[h]is transgression is enormous. The rule that a captain must be the last man (or woman) to leave a ship in difficulties is never written down, but everywhere understood. In the words of a former P&O captain: "At sea, you have a great sense of responsibility for the people who are beneath you – it's moral as well as legal. You need to stay as long as anyone else remains."

In this altruistic sense, the mystique of captaincy has survived into its third century. Sentiment, if not always practicality, will ensure it continues. For who can resist the gallantry of David Hart Dyke staying aboard the tilting hull of HMS Coventry, or Noel Coward and what remains of his crew clinging to their life-raft in In Which We Serve, and Coward commanding, as his destroyer finally goes down: "Three cheers for the ship!" More here.

Having Preferences Means Having Weaknesses.

Preferences allow us to carve a space for actualization. We cannot self-actualize without a set of personal preferences for they lead to pursuits. Pursuits, of any kind, are fueled by interests and interests or drive as some would say, are indispensable when it comes to accruing any sort of success. However, preferences reside in a space of exclusion. Having them means shutting doors to other things for preferring one particular thing presupposes a presence of preclusion.

I've been thinking a good deal about the role preferences play when pursuing anything. I've thought about the role choice plays in preference pursuing. Deny the self of a preference, and most pursuits become lukewarm. And achievement is rarely to be found in the lukewarm.

Just as I was thinking about the philosophical nuances of preferences, I had a desire to play a good game of chess. Funny that. I hadn't played in a few months. I call the one person in the city who usually gives me a good game of chess. He was surprised at my call as last time we got together for chess I told him that I wasn't all that interested in carrying on with our chess encounters for a while.

I'm the kind that needs time to warm up to something. I usually warm up to an idea, a person, or a general pursuit by thinking and reading about it. So, I start doing something exciting like reading up on chess news. It's exciting to me. Sort of like writing about 12-century egocentric heroes. We all have a kind of cake we like better than others. Choice has little say in preferences. If it did, impulse would play no role whatsoever in human pursuits. Think of the last thing you pursued with systematic interest and explore how big a role impulse played. I'd wager, a good deal. But I digress.

So I get on ChessBase.com to see what's up in the world of chess. While there I come upon an interview with the renowned chess player, Magnus Carlsen. Reading the interview got my juices flowing. I let out a few 'ha'-s and 'good one'-s as I was doing do. A bit from the interview says:

So you can’t call yourself a tactician or a strategist?
-I’d call myself an optimist! In actual fact I don’t have any clear preferences in chess. I do what I think circumstances require of me – I attack, defend or go into the endgame. Having preferences means having weaknesses.

Could you compare your impressions after a win in a subtle endgame or a whirlwind attack? Do they really not differ at all for you?!
-I really don’t know what I like more in chess! Among other things a game can stand out for the feeling you get when it’s over, when you realise you’ve created something truly worthwhile… But something like that happens very, very rarely. In any case, over the whole course of my life – only a few times.

Well, and if you’re just a spectator, which kind of game do you like more?
-I don’t know. I like the struggle in itself.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

I found it quite interesting that Carlsen would comment on what role preferences played in his activity of choice. In my opinion, however, whether it's chess or cheese-making, preferences matter. It's whether one's got a good poker face going in that truly counts when it comes to the end result. We all have preferences. It's how much/little we show them that matters.
And I'm all warmed up now.
I've removed all the specks of dust from my chess set and in about 5 minutes, my bell will ring. And so it does. My friend has a preference for punctuality. And he makes no fuss about obfuscating it. If he's this open when we play, I'm bound to win, aren't I?
We'll see.