What vegetarians and vegans have going for them

From Jonah Lehrer:

Basically, viral videos tap into emotions, not facts.

It’s one of the most popular online videos ever produced, having been viewed 355 million times on YouTube. At first glance, it’s hard to understand why the clip is so famous, since nothing much happens. Two little boys, Charlie and Harry, are sitting in a chair when Charlie, the younger brother, mischievously bites Harry’s finger. There’s a shriek and then a laugh. The clip is called “Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!”

Why has this footage gone viral? The answer, according to a new study by Jonah Berger, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has to do with the visceral emotions it arouses in viewers.
Here’s the thing about Harry and Charlie—they are incredibly expressive kids. In the span of 56 seconds, we see their faces go from anticipation to agony to laughter. Just when we’re worried that Harry might actually be hurt, he breaks out in a wide smile. The relief is palpable, the delight infectious. (Harry’s adorable British accent doesn’t hurt, either.)

Mr. Berger argues that the popularity of such videos is rooted in the way they excite the body, inducing a spectrum of physiological changes. When we watch Harry and Charlie, we briefly enter into a state of “high arousal,” as the autonomic nervous system mirrors the flurry of feelings on-screen. Our heart rate increases and sweat glands open; the body prepares for action. These are the same physical changes that occur when we encounter any strongly emotional content, from a scary movie to a sappy love poem.

In his study, Mr. Berger demonstrates that such states of arousal make people far more likely to share information. For instance, when he had subjects jog in place for 60 seconds—Mr. Berger wanted to trigger the symptoms of arousal directly—the number of people who emailed a news article to their friends more than doubled. He also boosted levels of “social transmission” by showing his subjects frightening and funny videos first. “Levels of arousal spill over,” Mr. Berger says. “When people are aroused, they are much more likely to pass on information.”

This builds on previous work by Mr. Berger in which he analyzed 7,500 articles that appeared on the most-emailed list of the New York Times between August 2008 and February 2009. While Mr. Berger initially assumed that people would share articles with practical implications—he imagined lots of pieces on diets and gadgets—he discovered instead that the most popular stories were those that triggered the most arousing emotions, such as awe and anger. We don’t want to share facts—we want to share feelings.

This is what vegetarians and vegans have going for them. Emotions are very handy when you want to convert people to the cause.

The Paleo people think they have the facts on their side. But the most effective Paleo marketers tend to play on people's emotions, not on facts and information. Sometimes this comes at the expense of accuracy ("humans haven't evolved much in 10,000 years, and that's why the Paleo diet is best") or rigorous thinking.

I'd love to have both: facts and emotions. But it's important to know when to use one and then the other.

What I despise about the vegetarians and vegans is that they have the emotions down pat ("I don't feel good about killing an animal just so I can enjoy bacon") but they don't have the info ("Red meat causes cancer and it's so much more efficient to feed grains to animals than it is to humans").

How your gut bacteria keep you healthy (or sick)

This is entirely fascinating, from the always excellent Emily Deans. 

Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species are known to produce GABA.  Escherichia, Bacillus, and Saccharomyces produce norepinephrine.  Candida, Streptococcus, Escherichia, and Enterococcus produce  serotonin.  Bacillus and Serratia produce dopamine, and Lactobacillus species produce acetylcholine.  That's pretty much the entire hit parade of major neurotransmitters (there's histamine and glutamate and a few others - and histamine is known to be produced by some bacteria that infect shellfish, for example, causing food poisoning).   

What's clear is that gut bacteria affect our brain and vice versa. It's also clear that there are millions of other species of bacteria whose functions are entirely unknown to us. That's a scary thought.

Whenever someone talked about depression or other mental health issues as the result of "chemical imbalances" it used to make me cringe, since that sounds so appealingly pseudoscientific. But it's actually true.

Depression is largely unheard of in "primitive" cultures, and diet (as it affects gut bacteria) is one major pathway by which depression is modulated. Of course, having a great community, lots of sunshine exposure, etc. etc. etc. all helps, too.

One minute to a better you!!1!!111

From another column by the Heath brothers:

In One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Dr. Robert Maurer of UCLA's School of Medicine writes about his patient Julie, a divorced mother of two, who was 30 pounds overweight, depressed, and fatigued. He knew that the solution to her problems was exercise. He also knew that talking about thrice-weekly aerobics was likely to get him slapped. So he gave her a challenge: "How about if you just march in place in front of the television, each day, for one minute?"

That was the kick start she needed. One minute of low-intensity exercise did nothing to improve her health but everything to improve her attitude. When she came back for her next visit, she asked, "What else can I do with a minute a day?" Within a few months, as Dr. Maurer slowly stepped up Julie's challenges, her resistance to a serious exercise program disappeared.

The value of small, definable, too-easily-reached (?) goals.

Of course, I find it objectionable to say that the solution to her problems was exercise, much less aerobics classes... but let that go.

Commitment devices

Currently reading articles from the Heath Brothers and finding lots of good ideas in every column. This one is about commitment devices. E.g.,

A piggy bank is an example of a "commitment device" -- a way to lock yourself into an option you might otherwise dodge, like saving money, because you think it'll be good for you. One graduating Stanford business-school student used a commitment device to lock down his own career choice. As reported by Jim Collins in a Harvard Business Reviewarticle, the student wanted to start a company, but first he needed to pay down some debt. So he took a job at a big company, promising himself that he'd exit after five years and live his entrepreneurial dream. But he also worried about being seduced by the benefits-and-bagels comfort of corporate America. So he wrote a resignation letter, dated for five years into the future, and distributed signed copies to several people he trusted. His instructions: If I don't resign in five years, put this letter in the mail and do it for me.

In the gym, commitment devices are most often used by locking in the client to a certain set of behaviors or goals:

• If I don't lose 30 pounds by June 1, I will donate $1,000 to the Republican party (or whichever party you dislike the most).
• I will do 10 minutes of stretching every day for the next 30 days. If I fail, I will do something humiliating (like wear a funny outfit and do a workout in public).
• One of my favorites, from Dan John, I believe. The Aldo diet: I will lose/gain 20 pounds in six months. If I fail, I will eat a can of dog food. Highly motivating!

The Heath brothers suggest a couple of novel ideas that are based off of comparing shoulds and wants. The idea comes from a study on Netflix that showed that people put lots of highbrow movies in their queues (documentaries, foreign films) but they usually end up watching lowbrow movies (Die Hard, Transformers, Twilight) more often and moving them to the head of the queue.

Hence their idea for gyms:

For instance, exercising is a should, so what if your gym offered to receive your magazine subscriptions? That way, to read the new Vanity Fair (a want), you'd have to drop by the gym. ... It's a compelling idea: Might the future of business lie in encouraging shoulds rather than indulging wants? Could corporations help us bring out our better selves?

Also, here's an idea applicable to the business/administration side of things:

Norm Brodsky, an entrepreneur and a writer for Inc. magazine, runs a document-storage-and-retrieval business. He committed to taking four weeks of vacation a year, forcing himself to create systems that would allow his operation to run smoothly without him. He was successful, and since then, he has announced an even tougher commitment device: Now he'll take four months of vacation per year. This would appear to commit him to becoming French.

I can really see myself failing to plan for time off and making myself an indispensable part of the gym machinery, so I find very appealing the idea of forcing myself to design systems that run well in my absence.

Bad design: move-in day edition

Overheard in the hallway, tour guide talking to incoming freshmen and parents in a dorm:

"Our official move-in is Wednesday, but you can move in as early as Sunday. There's a $30 charge for each night, so that would be $30, $60, or $90. But I HIGHLY recommend moving in early. We love it when people move in early. It makes our jobs easier...."

It's almost like people don't understand what incentives are.

Knowledge does not change behavior

For my fifth year of college, I won a scholarship based on an essay I wrote about my passion for education and how education is vitally important for creating long-term, permanent change. I tried to avoid the clichés of teaching a man to fish, blah blah, but I did touch on how poverty is a vicious cycle that can't be broken without education.

Now, I'm not so sure that education is all that important. From an excellent article about combating malnutrition in Vietnam:
  

"Knowledge does not change behavior.... We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors."

Encapsulates perfectly the problems of educating clients. It's not enough to get them to understand. Actually, in some cases, making them understand is counterproductive. You have to get them to behave differently: behavioral economics + evolutionary psychology.

So what Sternin did was not lecture and educate, but organize and practice. He gathered the women with malnourished children and had them wash their hands and cook nutritious foods together.

The main point of the article is to demonstrate that the most effective way of solving problems is not to think about them academically and come up with a logical solution, but rather to see what works in the real world and copy/scale/adapt those pre-existing, grass-roots, organically discovered solutions. Sternin didn't know what to do until he went and visited all the households whose kids weren't malnourished (despite being just as poor as everybody else). He saw what they did, copied it, and had the additional genius to realize that education was not the answer.

How do you recognize a good coach?

You can't. Or at least, most people can't. They wouldn't really know the difference between, say, Cressey vs. me vs. the average globo-gym trainer. Most people's impressions of their trainers are predicated mostly on the trainer's personality and professionalism and looks, not their skills and knowledge.

But it's easy to recognize a bad trainer, even for the uninitiated.

Warnings signs (not necessarily 100% indicative of a bad coach):

• Doesn't regularly program squats, deadlifts, presses or pull (or some variation thereof) for most clients.
• Makes most clients very sore, very often. 
• Doesn't make clients sore, ever.
• Your program is predominantly on machines.
• Has a CrossFit Level 1 "certification" but no other qualifications, and has never coached anybody before getting their L1.
• Programs lots of crunches, but no planks or bird dogs.
• Does lots of curls on Bosu balls.
• Does lots of curls.
• Doesn't know most of these names: Cressey, Robertson, Hartman, McGill, Boyle, Dan John, Simmons, Tate, Wendler.
• None of the men can deadlift 2xBW despite training for >1 year. 
• None of the women can do pull-ups despite training for >1 year.

Note: most of these (although not all!) have applied to me at one point in time.

Actually, there is one rule of thumb for good trainers, but it's not really useful because the list is so small:

Anybody who's ever been excommunicated from CrossFit HQ is probably a good trainer.