Highlights: Tali Sharot | Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There | Talks at Google

[Music] we all have some good things in our life perhaps it's a loving relationship um an interesting job or a comfortable home but those things seem to have relatively limited impact on our daily happiness and on the same end there are some horrible things around us perhaps sexism racism cracks in our personal relationships inefficiencies at the workplace um but over time we just get used to those things we stop noticing them and if we stop noticing them we don't try to change so today I'm going to share with you what we've learned about why this

happens and what can we do to regain sensitivity both to the good things in life so we can feel the joy again but also to the bad things so we could notice and change so habituation is our tendency to respond less and less and less to things that are constant or that are frequent or change very very gradually so we have a diminishing physiological and emotional response to frequently repeated or constant uh stimuli we just stop responding to those so the question is is this habituation a good thing or is it a bad thing and

the answer is yes so on the positive side habituation ensures that we are motivated right if you think back to your first entry level job you probably were quite excited and happy about this entrylevel job but what would happen if you continue being as excited and as happy about this entry-level job 10 years in you wouldn't be motivated to go after the next job right to go after that promotion so habituation ensures that we progress that we want to move forward it is also important for our survival we stop responding to things that are constant

around us so we can have more resources to respond to new things that are coming our way that may need some response some action and finally we know that problems in habituation are related to a whole range of mental health problems however on the other hand habituation also means that we don't feel the joy of the good things around us because they've always been there and we don't feel the Gratitude and on the other hand we stop noticing the suboptimal things around us which we could perhaps change so the challenge really is how do we

regain sensitivity both to the good bad the good things and to the bad things how can we dishabituate and really the key here is this wonderful quote by The Economist tyers kovski he says pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires so we might want to think about breaking up the good things into bits however if we need to complete um an unpleasant task like household chores or admin work we actually want to do them in one go not have breaks because if we have them in one go then the habituation to the negative

will actually help us motor FR so we want to swallow uh the bad hole but break up the good things into bits in order to enhance pleasure but of course pleasure is not the only thing that is important for life and so let's spend a few minutes to think about what makes up a good life so when you ask people what makes up a good life the most common question is happiness we want to be happy we want to feel Joy we don't want to be sad but that's not everything people also say they want

a meaningful life they want their work to have purpose but things that elicit both happiness and a sense of purpose tend to do so less and less over time because of habituation people who have Diversified their lives for example they may have lived in different places worked on different project interact with the diverse uh um in individuals they tend to experience a more psychologically rich life because what variety does is it puts us in a state of learning we have to learn about our new environment we have to learn about the hierarchy about the different

people that we're interacting with and studies show that people find pleasure in seeing themselves as learning as progressing as moving forward so there is a sense that we get used to negative things around us whether it's misinformation online or rudeness online um whether it is frauds we get used to these things and though and so we may not try to change them so if you think back to something that you did that was quite scary perhaps when you were a child and you had to jump into the pool for the very first time and you

felt really scared but finally you jump in and what happens is the next time you jump you're not as scared right so you jump maybe faster maybe stronger and then after a while you're jumping head first what we found is those individuals whose emotional habituation is quicker they tend to take more risk in in real life and the risk escalates faster we're not necessarily aware of how our brain works we're not necessarily aware of how fast we habituate and what the consequences are but if we are become aware then we can take actions uh to

both enhance our well-being and also to um perhaps notice and change the less great things around us that we would like to do so and often when I tell people about this kind of work they ask well now that I'm aware of habituation does that mean that it will go away and the answer is no it will not go away um but we can take actions right to reduce it if you habituate slower you keep more information in your mind right these sounds and smells and images and bits of information and knowledge are in your

mind for longer it could be very distracting on one hand but it also means that these unexpected combinations will happen in your mind right little bits of information that usually don't come together will suddenly Collide and create this new idea um and so the question uh I guess for for everyone is and will how do we induce dishabituation meaning slower habituation or dishabituation in order to enhance creativity and I think the answer is what I talked about before is changing your environment because by changing your environment even simple things going out of your office um

you are dishabituating right you're creating a dishabituation so you're able to things are just like different around you and I I find this in my own um experience if I think about um the all the times that I got the ideas that then would lead to really important um routes in my career or like a solution that I found in every in every case it was not in front of my computer trying to figure out the solution it was actually I left my office or I did something else social media is a little bit like

this AC in the background where you kind of suspect that something is not so good for you or something is causing you a little bit of anxiety but you don't really know for sure and you can't detect it because it's always on the background so you know how there's an AC and then someone turns it off and then you're like that feels so much better because the noise it was bothering me but I didn't realize until someone turned it off um and I think social media is a little bit like that where it can cause

some some anxiety but we don't know it until we shut it down we do talk a little bit about age and habitu dist situation in the book in terms of trying to explain the midlife crisis so there's the well-known phenomena which is happiness over life uh follows a u- shape so happiness is quite high in teenagers and kids and then it goes down down down reaches Rock Bottom in your midlife um so that's between like 40 50 60 but the good news it actually goes back up then um and actually continues to climb back up

until the last couple years of life and so in trying to explain why there's this dip and happiness in midlife I think one speculation that we had is that is the time of Le change right that is a time where family life usually is kind of the same um you perhaps are the top the peak of your professional life but it is stable there is a minimum perhaps on average amount of learning right there's a lot of learning and change going on beforehand and counterintuitively there is learning and change going later when you retire when

your kids leave the house and so on and it could be daunting but it means that you have to try to figure out out your new life right and it's that midlife part where things are just the same we are looking at um boredom and frustration in terms of the idea that we're usually bored because there is a minimal amount to learn and we're not getting new information right that's usually boredom we're just doing the same thing there's no information no learning and we also on the other hand get frustrated when things are so complex

that we can't learn there's too much information right and it is that middle ground and this is is actually a known phenomena where you are most engaged and you are less most happy in that middle ground where there is information there is learning but it is in in the extent that is doable right so you're not on the edge so I think boredom is one part of the scale and then frustration is the other part of the scale it's not that um habits are a bad thing right habits are very very very important and I'm

sure um that you know the people who study habits also would not suggest that you should do the same thing over and over and over always so in in any of these kind of like psychological insights we always have to remember that there's our our mind and our brain is kind of the product of many complex rules and codes right if you think about like all the code that goes behind Google right it's it's think about that there's a lot of different rules a lot of different things so it's the same with our mind there's

a lot of different rules and different um uh processes that go on so it's not a one uh thing that is always true in all circumstances for all it the question is like what is your goal what is the context we are habituating to negative things and people do habituate to negative things and even if you look back you know to uh World War II um and um you know the habituation of uh people on both sides both the victims but both um the people for example Nazis um there is a lot of documentation of

um people actually talking about how things change really slowly it changed so so so gradually that they couldn't even see it anymore right there's just wonderful quotes about people saying it's kind of like you're in a field and you suddenly um the corn is so high right you you didn't see it growing um and there isn't an easy solution the part of the things that we talk about is um what Steward mail calls experiments in living which means that we can't really know what is good for our life or or for for society if we

are just trying the same things if we're just doing the same things over and over without trying things differently um and nowadays it is easier both to experiment in our own life you could do easy things like for example travel to different countries see how things are in totally different type of government totally different culture back in the day if you look you know a long time ago it wouldn't have been that easy because we used to live in relatively small environments where everyone spoke the same language had the same habits and culture and so

on so it would it wouldn't be that easy but nowadays we could do that we could do that online we can do it with interacting with different people so what we suggest that some of that is helpful um I think a lot of people comments to that article they actually said yes I had the experience of for example leave living in Sweden and how in Sweden the whole government is set up completely different and that opened their eyes about how things are back here in in the US right so I think that's helpful and you

can do it by physically experimenting in different types of living but also from taking other po people's point of view whether it is reading books films Arts um and yeah so so that that is um the kind of things that that we talk about it's not like a a pill that's going to solve everything thank you all so much for attending and please be sure to pick up a copy of T's new book look again thank you so much for coming everyone thank you so much thank you [Music]