Brain Trust (2 page)

CREATE A KICK-ASS TRIBE, ANY TRIBE
David Logan
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

GOVERNMENT, GOD, OR SELF: WHERE DO YOU GET CONTROL?
Aaron Kay
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, DUKE UNIVERSITY

HOW TO STOP A PENALTY KICK
Gabriel Diaz
COGNITIVE SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS-AUSTIN

WORLD-RECORD PAPER AIRPLANE
Ken Blackburn
AERONAUTICAL ENGINEERING, UNITED STATES AIR FORCE

SUCCEED, YOU SLACKER!
Dolores Albarracin
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS–URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

THE SCIENCE OF SMOOTH OPERATING
Eastwick and Finkel
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, TEXAS A&M, NORTHWESTERN

WASH AWAY YOUR SINS
Norbert Schwarz
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN–ANN ARBOR

GET MORE PLEASURE FOR LESS PRICE
Paul Bloom
PSYCHOLOGY, YALE UNIVERSITY

PUZZLE ANSWERS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

When you open the passenger-side door of my car,
one of the following things tends to fall out: a kid’s shoe, a water bottle, or a once-coveted stick, pinecone, acorn, large leaf, pill bug, or rock. On special occasions it’ll be an In-N-Out french fry. Once it was a favorite running sock I’d been missing for months.

I had ample opportunity to note these ejaculations every morning as I jumped into the passenger seat with my laptop and cell phone to do the interviews for this book.

You see, the car’s messy, but the garage is also the quietest place in my house. In the background of the first interviews I did, before stumbling onto the soundproof powers of Subaru, you can hear my “extremely fierce” Labrador protecting the house from things like early-rising birds and people in hats jogging past (joggers with bare heads are fine—who can know the mind of a Labrador?). Or you can hear me saying to my four-year-old, “Hey, good morning, buddy! Go jump in bed with Mom.” I’ve put some of the recordings online at
garthsundem.com
—they’re worth a chuckle.

I can’t tell if talking to Nobel Laureates, MacArthur geniuses, National Medal of Science winners, and the like while hiding in the garage is empowering, embarrassing, or just odd in the
manner of the proverbial mom with her hair in rollers pretending to be a nymph while talking dirty for a 1-900 service.

Anyway.

This book is what happens when science hits life. It gets messy.

And when you get off the script that some of these top-notch scientists have perfected over years of keynotes, classes, invited lectures, and interviews with people sitting at actual desks, you find that scientists are messy too. You hear the story of psychologist Stephen Greenspan’s initiation into the science of gullibility when his mother duped him into marrying his then girlfriend. Or about mathematician Ian Stewart’s wife trying to use rotational mechanics to teach their malfunctioning cat to land on its feet. You get to listen to statistician Wayne Winston yelling at USA basketball while on the phone because his model predicted a wider point spread. You hear about how MIT prosthetics researcher Hugh Herr replaced his lost legs with DIY feet to climb some of the most difficult rock faces in the world, or how physicist Charles Edmondson used the geometry of roadways to chase down a turbo Porsche with a lowly Dodge Neon.

It turns out that the root of today’s best science is the passenger seat of scientists’ messy cars. In other words, the science in this book comes from the very real experiences and problems of scientists’ own lives.

And rather than ice-eyed intellectuals perched in ivory towers (as their precisely worded papers might imply), it turns out that scientists are passionate, excited, and bubbly about their specialties to the point of schoolgirls with Justin Bieber infatuations. (You should hear the utterly awesome Steve Strogatz talk about crickets, bridges, and his high school calculus teacher.) Get a scientist talking about her search for discovery and it starts to sound like a page-turning adventure book, which is exactly what I hope this book has turned out to be.

That said, don’t let the glib delivery lull you into thinking this
is puff pastry. This book is supposed to be fun and practical, but it’s also one of the most info-dense entities in the known universe (I = mc
²
).

OK, maybe that’s a tiny bit of an exaggeration. But if you slow down, maybe hang your head out the window like the aforementioned Labrador, you’ll find that the one hundred–some bite-sized bugs of how-to science stuck in your teeth in fact represent whole fields of cutting-edge research.

I loved writing this book—who gets to wear boxer shorts and drink Sumatra blend in the passenger seat of a parked Outback while chatting with Steven Pinker about how to bribe a cop? But the truth is, talking to sometimes three or four Nobel, MacArthur, and National Medal of Science winners in a morning nearly drove me batty.

You see, in addition to being overwhelmingly brilliant and passionate, it’s a fair stereotype to note that each scientific field tends to either attract or create people with its own brand of quirks. For example, computer science professors respond to e-mails immediately or not at all. Physicists almost always have a serious side interest in basketball or race cars or sailing or card tricks or the like. (Thank you, Richard Feynman?) Social psychologists are happy to talk off the cuff, but are very concerned about being misquoted. Mathematicians tended to seem a bit surprised I would get in touch, were likely to tentatively dip a toe into the conversation, but then if I understood anything at all in the first five minutes, would ramble happily and fascinatingly for hours. Economists were sure to point out that their theoretical work is borne out in the real world, and biologists and anthropologists were sure to point out that their field observations are replicable in the lab.

Amid 130-ish interviews, it was hard to avoid jumping on the quirk train myself. For example, after a week spent mining a particularly deep vein of behavioral economists and applied
mathematicians, I found myself charting my car’s passenger-door ejections from one day to the next, hoping to glean some sort of great statistically predictive insight. When might the great oracle my family has affectionately nicknamed Zippy the Wonder Tank return my other running sock?

In fact, with my brain now addled by ricocheting thoughts born of that special leading edge where science meets fiction, I can’t seem to stop mishmashing together my messy life with the work of these scientists.

I wonder about the pigeons that splinter off from the flock that circles the street by my house every night at sunset. I wonder if Cliff Lee should still throw heat to a batter who specializes in hitting fastballs. I wonder how I should best list ride-on-top toys on eBay to encourage rabid bidding. I wonder why the Ping-Pong balls my kids race in gutters on rainy days tend to stick together like Cheerios in a bowl. I start charting the detritus that falls out of my car.…

Yes, this book will teach you how to improve your life with science. You’ll learn tricks for dieting better, dating better, driving better, and betting better. You’ll learn how to get better odds from the lottery, you’ll learn how to learn, and avoid car theft, and win poker, and get away with crimes in broad daylight. But I hope by the end, rather than having all your questions answered, you find yourself wandering around as totally wonder-struck as I am: With a bike and a bus pass, what’s the most efficient way to visit every bakery in this city? Am I more likely to get hit with pigeon poop or find a twenty-dollar bill? Should I wait or circle to find a parking spot in this busy lot? What in the small space between my Labrador’s ears makes him distrust people in hats?

Life is messy, and starting to pick it apart with science shows you just how brilliant and wild and interconnected and fascinating it is.

It’s a good messy.

“Imagine you’ve been pulled over by a police officer,” says Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, prolific author, and one of Britannica’s
100 Most Influential Scientists of All Time
. In this case, you’d like to know if the relationship is adversarial or conspiratorial: In other words, you’d like to know if you can bribe the cop. But you can’t just come out and say it. “Instead, you start by talking about the weather,” says Pinker, “and then you mention that it must be difficult to get by on an officer’s salary.” You start with extremely indirect speech and with every step become slightly more direct. “And after each step, the police officer has the opportunity to accept or rebuff the overture,” says Pinker. If the police officer isn’t open to being bribed, he or she should cut you off at the weather, before you’ve incriminated yourself.

Pinker explains this in terms of game theory, with payoffs shown here:

It’s like trying to sleep with a coworker.

“The mistake of Clarence Thomas was to jump steps in this continuum,” says Pinker. Thomas brought up the subject of porn videos when he should’ve prepped that level of directness, perhaps by “asking Anita Hill to call him by his first name, or by adopting a less formal style of speech.” Thomas went straight to the equivalent of handing the cop a fifty-dollar bill, dooming himself to a scandal and the closest Senate confirmation in a century.

So language must match the relationship. “This is what we call ‘tact,’ ” says Pinker. And when it doesn’t, it creates uncomfortable friction—it’s what drives the awkward comedy in a sketch posted to YouTube in which Irish comedian Dave Allen uses the terms “buddy,” “chum,” “friend,” and “mate” with strangers and thus comes off as tactlessly aggressive. This would be like me trying to speak Cockney rhyming slang in a London pub, or walking into a group of local surfers and saying, “Yo brahs—where you shreddin’ the swell today?” Language that oversteps the bounds of a relationship is in every way the equivalent of trying to hold hands with a stranger on the subway.

But what’s even cooler is this: “Not only does language reflect a relationship, but it can serve to create or change it,” says Pinker. And so if you can avoid overstepping in your slow evolution of indirect to direct language with a police officer or attractive coworker, not only can you discover the nature of the relationship, but you can pull the relationship along with it.

So make a script. Start with nearly innocuous comments that are almost certain to be taken as such (“It was nice to see you in the meeting today”). Then move ever so slowly toward the midground (“Wow, that’s a sexy haircut!”). Then move glacially toward the thinly veiled overture you’re trying to make (Pinker writes, “Would you like to come over sometime and see my etchings?”). Done tactfully and without overstepping, this language of closeness can create closeness.

Note that this entry doesn’t necessarily recommend bribing cops or sleeping with coworkers, mirroring a common ethical dilemma in science: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

“If you overlay the CDC diabetes map with the NASA nighttime satellite map, there’s an almost perfect match,” says Satchin Panda, regulatory biology specialist at the Salk Institute. The more light in a region at night, the higher the incidence of diabetes. According to Panda, this is because your liver needs sleep. Actually, it’s not the sleep per se that your liver needs, but a defined period of fasting each day, which throughout humanity’s evolutionary history was the hours of darkness when you couldn’t really do much but snooze.

“We started out as diurnal,” says Panda, “but learning to control fire allowed us to get away from diurnal needs and into nocturnal space.” All of a sudden, we could spend all day hunting and still
cook and eat the catch once the sun went down. Then with electricity and the industrial revolution, we went a step further—why make widgets during only twelve hours of daylight when you can flip on the lights and run the assembly line for twenty-four hours a day? Thus was shift work born.