Brain Trust (26 page)

Evans’s work shows that stem cells
continually spit out new neurons in two areas of the brain: the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. Once you’re an adult, many of these new neurons are born and then immediately die, but some are woven into the architecture of the brain. New neurons in the olfactory bulb may allow you to smell better in later life (as it were), while tests with mice show that new neurons in the hippocampus may allow you continue coding new memories and learning new things. Evans found that both physical and mental exercise boost the rate at which neural stem cells spit out new neurons.

Researchers at McMaster University showed
that lifting light weights to exhaustion builds as much muscle as lifting heavy weights. The key, they found, is muscle fatigue—and while lifting heavy weights might be a shortcut to this fatigue, the same addition of muscle was created by lifting lighter weights at higher reps.

Changing your body shape is time-consuming and effortful, requiring things like exercising and eating less (unless you read this book carefully). But adopting a sexy voice? With the help of University of Albany evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup, you can do it today.

Gallup had undergrads count to ten in a tape recorder and then played back these recordings to their peers. Even without flirtatious or smoldering content, there was strong agreement on which voices were sexy and which were not. And Gallup showed that these sexy voices were strong predictors of sexy bodies—sexy-voiced men had higher shoulder-to-hip ratios, and sexy-voiced women had lower waist-to-hip ratios. These sexy voices also predicted an earlier age of first sexual experience and higher total number of sex partners. In short, a sexy voice actually is a good predictor of sexiness.

So what were the characteristics of these sexy voices?

If you’ve seen any of the
Toy Story
movies, you know what makes a sexy male voice—Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear is sexier than Tom Hanks as Woody. There’s very clear and definite evidence that a low male voice is sexier, and Gallup points out that this low voice may be the product of the same hit of testosterone during puberty that creates desirable shoulder-to-hip ratios.

But the female sexy voice is trickier and independent of high or low pitch. Instead, the strongest factor in the sexy female voice is breathiness. We have two vocal cords, with a slight gap between them—women tend to have a bigger gap than men, and this is what creates breathiness. The bigger the gap, the more breathiness, and perhaps the more estrogen during puberty.

But here’s the important part: Vocal attractiveness creates the
perception of physical attractiveness. If a date hears your sexy voice, he or she expects a sexy person, and these expectations mean that when you meet, your date will, in fact, rate your physical attractiveness higher than if you’d had a mediocre voice. Why bother with a month’s crash diet and agro iron-pumping when you can get a bump in beauty simply by talking sexy?

“During a kiss there’s a rich, complicated
exchange of information, that we think may activate hardwired systems to assess health, vitality, and thus genetic fitness of potential mates,” says Gordon Gallup.

But if you’re measuring success by number of progeny, men and women have very different goals—a man does best when he eats shoots and leaves (as it were), “whereas for women, having sex is just the start,” says Gallup, “after which is weeks, months, and years of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and child care.”

Gallup found that these different evolutionary goals lead to gender-specific uses of kissing. “Males are much more likely to attempt to initiate with an open mouth and much more likely to kiss with the tongue,” says Gallup. This is sexual kissing and men use it as a tick on the preflight checklist. Whereas, “Females kiss not only during courtship and mate assessment, but to monitor the status of a committed relationship,” says Gallup. For women, kissing is a way to get information that’s otherwise hard to get.

It’s the end of what seemed like a good first date. You ask if he’ll call and he says “…  Yes!” But will he really?

“Slow means ‘no,’ ” says Colin Camerer, economist and neuroscientist at Caltech. He explains that in consumer surveys, political polling, and many other situations in which the person questioned knows what the questioner wants to hear, people are likely to please during the conversation but fail to follow through. Would you buy this awesome product the nice person on the phone just spent two minutes explaining? [Pause] Yes. Would you vote for the political candidate the caller’s stumping for? [Pause] Yes. Should you expect to hear from your date again soon? [Pause] Yes, of course!

This is known as the yes bias, and it’s vexed pollsters from time immemorial.

But imagine we weren’t dependent on the notoriously inaccurate words that come from people’s mouths. Suppose, instead, we could look in consumers’ or voters’ or daters’ brains for their opinions.

Camerer did just that. “What we found,” he says, “is that hypothetical choices are a fifth of a second faster than real choices.” People decide if they would (hypothetically) vote or buy or call very quickly. And so to a hypothetical question, a quick response is a true response. If there’s a fifth of a second lag, it’s likely due to the time it takes politeness the overrule the honest impulse—spackling the veneer that will please the questioner over the true answer that wouldn’t. Lying takes longer.

But when making real decisions, an extra area of the brain is activated—the cingulate cortex. “It’s like a second level of
checking,” says Camerer. For example, when you ask the very real question (with real consequences) of whether your date would like to kiss, it takes a fifth of a second to double-check the impulse. In real choices there should be a short delay, and you should trust the answer.

So spotting sincerity first requires recognizing the type of question you’re asking—if it’s a real question, you should expect a slight delay, followed by the true answer; but when you ask a yes/no question about any hypothetical future action—will he call?—the answer should be fast. Watch for a delay. If “yes” spits slowly, it may be politeness and the desire to please overriding the real answer: no.

In that fifth of a second, you can see the brain’s true intent.

Cornell psychologist David Dunning asked how many students would buy daffodils in an upcoming fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society. A full 80 percent of these saintly students said they would certainly purchase a flower, though they were less rosy in their predictions of peers’ willingness to buy, opining that only 50 percent overall would pony up for the cause. You might have guessed the punch line: After the fund-raiser, only 43 percent of students actually bought flowers.

Similarly, he asked how many students would vote in the then upcoming November elections. Eighty-four percent said they’d vote, and they expected 67 percent of their peers to vote. The tale of the tape was 68 percent turnout.

“People are pretty accurate in their judgments of others,” says Dunning. “But terrible in their judgments of themselves.” This is why the vast majority of drivers and 94 percent of the college
professors Dunning surveyed consider themselves “above average.” It doesn’t take a Fields Medal to see that’s mathematically impossible.

And so across the board we overestimate our goodness while pretty much nailing predictions of others’ actions.

But something cool happens when you go from concrete predictions of yes/no type behaviors to evaluations of others in which there’s wiggle room. How intelligent or how good of a leader is someone? These evaluations are much more subjective than asking how many peers will buy a daffodil. To see if we’re as accurate with subjective evaluations, Dunning brought college sophomores (“my species,” he says) into the lab.

What he found is that we have very specific templates that we use to measure others. Simply, the template is the person doing the measuring. Is someone intelligent? Is someone a good leader? Well, if they’re like us, then yes in both cases. And, “If you put someone’s self-esteem under pressure by making them fail a task or something similar, then people even more strongly positively judge others who are like them,” says Dunning. When you’re down, you boost similar others as a way to get back your own lost sense of self. (Is this why blue-collar America cited the “just like me” quality when voting for Bush II?)

“If you step outside the lab, people show the same behaviors,” says Dunning. For example, he asked nontenured professors how many published papers should be expected in order to gain tenure. It was a relatively low number compared to the number of papers that tenured professors thought should be required. Similarly, he asked college sophomores if others with certain math SAT scores were “mathematically gifted.” Generally, students saw anyone who scored above their own SAT result as gifted.

We are the bar we set for others.

What’s also cool is that the strength of this effect depends on how much we care about the topic. In the context of a test that’s
supposedly a gateway into a certain career, students who were premed, prelaw, or prebusiness set much more self-centered targets for others if the test was relevant to their specific career choice.

Reverse engineering this allows you to test how strongly a person feels about any topic. Are your friends quick to judge and likely to set the mark very close to their own behaviors when evaluating others’ parenting? Or coolness? Or fashion sense? Or attention to detail? Or musical taste? Or … anything, really? By noticing these self-centered judgments, you can discover how strongly people care.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes people
who are blind to their own stupidity. Classically, people who scored in the lowest 12 percent in Dunning’s tests of humor, logic, and grammar estimated they had scored in the top 62 percent. People who scored higher were much more accurate in their estimates.

Other researchers at Cornell had students
come up with movie ideas and then pitch them to other students. In written form, narcissists’ pitches were no more convincing than those of their peers. But when narcissists pitched their movie ideas in person, they were a full 50 percent more well received than their peers’. The conclusion is this: The narcissist in your group shouldn’t be allowed to sculpt the product, but should be encouraged to present it.