Trying Not to Try: the Power of Spontaneity | Edward Slingerland | TEDxMaastricht

so my favorite exhibit at my local Science Museum is actually a game it's called mine ball and the setups very simple deceptively simple you've got two people at either end of a long table with a small metal ball between them and the goal is just to push the ball to the other end of the table and you win the trick there's always a trick is that you can't use your hands you have to push the ball with your mind so what I'm resting my head against there is an EEG monitor and this is picking up brain activity alpha and theta waves this is a signature that your brain kicks off when you're relaxed when the brain is not trying we don't have any particular thoughts the way the game is set up is the more alpha and theta waves you produce the more force you exert on the ball so paradoxically the way to win at mind ball is to not try to win you have to out relax your opponent this is actually incredibly difficult very seems simple it's not simple first time I played I had my eyes were closed I could hear the ball moving back and forth and I couldn't resist it I opened my eyes and I was winning the ball was almost all the way to the other end of the table and I thought to myself oh I'm winning and as soon as I thought that the ball stopped it's like it heard me and started rolling back toward me and I closed my eyes again I was roxrite I panicked it didn't once you lose your cool it's it's over I lost very badly that day what I love about this game is it compresses into the smallest possible space this paradox of how you can try not to try how can you consciously force yourself to relax when you know that relaxation is the key to success now there are some sub communities in our culture who are very aware of this tension so professional athletes musicians actors they all know that they're at their best when they're in the zone when they're not thinking when they're just relaxed and what they're doing and they all live in constant fear of that feeling I had when that Mel ball was rolling toward me the choking right start you start to think too much you start to worry too much and you lose it you lose it entirely and once you lose it it's almost impossible to get it back so this is front and center for athletes performers but it's also pervades the rest of our lives so it's not as widely recognized as this paradigm the mind ball paradox is something we experience all the time ourselves so if you think about insomnia you have an important meeting the next day your body's exhausted you know you can fall asleep if you just relax but your mind is racing how do you stop your mind from thinking how do you shut down your mind this is this is the same problem as the mind ball problem or if you think about a social situation so an important interview a first-date speaking to a thousand people write you the advice people are going to give you is relax be yourself but how do you relax in a situation that's just objectively not relaxing how do you be yourself if you're not feeling very much like yourself so this is a pervasive problem there are millions of situations where we face this paradox and yet we don't have good language for it we don't talk about it very much and I think this is because we live in a society that's really focused on working and striving and trying so we think that the way to achieve our goals is through effort and we start very young so we put four year olds in cram classes so they can get into the best kindergartens so I can get the best high schools and grow into students who pop ritalin to stay up all night and get good grades and get good test scores so they can get into the best college so they can turn into us these relentless multitaskers 24/7 stream of information never stopping even bed is no longer an escape most of us fall asleep tightly gripping our smartphones getting off that last tweak or Facebook like before we collapse into sleep so we were constantly trying we're constantly striving this would be okay if it always worked so if it were the case that the only way to achieve goals that we care about is through striving maybe this is just our lot in life it's a tragic condition of being human but I'm going to argue that that's not the case so often striving is in fact counterproductive it doesn't help us and there are many goals and life very valuable goals that can't be achieved through direct striving so for instance charisma if you're trying to be double-oh-seven you are not double-oh-seven artistic creativity writing breakthroughs these have to come you can't force a breakthrough it has to come to you unbidden love of learning or really love of any kind we have a sense that this has to grow naturally out of a situation you can't force someone to love something and goals like happiness or fun having fun are notoriously resistant to direct pursuit the harder you try to have fun the less fun you're going to have these are things that again have to come to you in this kind of spontaneous way so if it is the case that that trying that making effort is often counterproductive why don't we realize is more often and I think this is the result of a kind of philosophical hangover that we're still suffering from it's caused by people like Immanuel Kant and Descartes who propagated what I'm going to call the disembodied myth so the business disembodied myth argues that human excellence so achieving your goals getting to where you want to be is always the result of rationality so you're using rationality to figure out where you want to go and how you're going to get there you then engage in self control you control your emotions control your body you force yourself to pursue that goal and this whole process is accompanied by constant effort you've got to be making constant effort to make this work so this is a it's a myth and the reason I call it a myth is because our best current understanding of human cognition suggests that in fact our thinking is deeply embodied so we think in terms of metaphors and images we they're not just turns of phrase we actually think in terms of metaphors we think with our body a huge bulk of our cognition is tacit it's implicit we do we know how to do things with our body that our conscious mind could never do and we're built this whole body brain system that we are is built for doing not for thinking we're designed evolutionarily to move efficiently through the world not to represent it in some abstract way so we are embodied we are this kind of integrated mind-body unit so where did the disembodied myth come from and why does it still appeal there's still a kind of appeal to the concept of mind-body dualism and there's still a feeling that we have of sometimes being split so we often experience ourselves as being split in a way that seems to map very well under mind-body dualism so we say things like I had to drag myself out of bed in the morning if you think about it it's kind of a weird phrase who's dragging whom there's only one person in the bed what's going on it's a feeling of struggle we feel we often feel this kind of internal struggle between what seems like two different forces in us and I would suggest that this is even though we're integrated mind body units there's there's two modes of cognition that are built into us and cognitive scientists have a lot of different terms for these hot versus cold system one system to Fast and Slow bottom-up top-down every cognitive scientist has to invent their own set of terminology for this but what they all agree is that these systems are designed to work together they're built to work together but they're functionally distinct in certain ways and they're also phenomena logically distinct so they feel different to us from the inside so hot cognition system one is emotional it's fast it's automatic it's mostly unconscious so when you're driving and you've been driving your whole life you know how to shift gears and steer and that's your hot cognition doing that for you cold cognition system - is non emotional it's slow it's under executive control and it's mostly conscious it's a seed of our consciousness so if you're learning how to drive for the first time you have to constantly think about everything you're doing that's cold cognition action so these two modes of cognition give us this illusion of mind-body dualism we associate ourselves with system two because that's the only system we have access to it's the source of consciousness it's the seat of our narrative sense of self the story we tell about ourselves and so our hot cognition often presents itself to us as alien tis something we need to deal with that's that's separate from us another helpful thing about employing this this dual system model is it actually gives us a sense of why the mind ball paradox is a paradox because you're trying the thing you're trying to shut down is the thing you're using when I'm saying to myself relax relax relax the part of my brain cold cognition that's saying relax is actually the part that needs to shut up and stop firing if I'm actually really going to relax so the paradox really falls naturally edit this dual system nature of our cognition now it's a real paradox and yet in life we managed to get around it people with insomnia eventually fall asleep hopefully people who are nervous on a first date can sometimes relax into the date so there are ways around it and if we're going to be successful we need to figure out strategies for getting around the paradox and this is where I find early Chinese philosophies so helpful so this is my original specialty early early Taoism and Confucianism and what I find helpful about these thinkers is they never went down this disembodied rationality rabbit hole they've always had from the very beginning a very embodied picture of the self that incorporated skills and emotions and they formulated some very important concepts and also some practical strategies that I think can be very helpful so the first of these concepts I want to talk about is Wu Wei effortless action so this is a bit like being in the zone in sports so it's a it's a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent you lose a sense of self-consciousness and yet everything works out perfectly you're perfectly efficacious in the world so for instance Confucius at age 70 was said to be able to follow his heart's desire and never transgress the bounds so he was perfectly ritually correct even though he just did whatever came into his head the Taoist texts the duong has these skills stories about butchers and wood carvers who move through the world with perfect ease they this amazing skill because they're in a state of way now in the text way is often described as someone giving up control to a force within them so sometimes the shun or the spirit that's kind of heavenly force that's inside people I would argue that from a contemporary perspective what's going on is the cold mind cold cognition is ceding some control to the hot systems it's it's still monitoring thing but it's not the driver's seat anymore and so this is what's going on in way is a kind of melding of cold and hot hot is really driving things now in the early Chinese conception the way in which you get into this state is to give yourself up to something bigger than yourself so that one hallmark of way is absorption and it's absorption into something that's bigger than you and also something you value it's something you care about is something that that means something to you now for the early Chinese this is going to be a religious concept so these were all religious thinkers so their concept of what the valued whole is is theological so it's the Dow the cosmic way the way of the universe but I think we can still this idea still make sense today and in fact a lot of us today probably get into way through formal religion a lot of us especially use rituals participating in rituals that we care about and we that make us feel at home to get into a state of way but it doesn't have to be religious it could be just any sort of activity with people we care about playing with children sharing a meal with friends walking in a landscape that we love and that makes us feel small in a good way that makes us feel part of something larger than us we're just engaging in activities that we love especially if we're sharing these activities with other people now this idea of sharing is important the social aspect of way is important and that brings us to the second concept I want to introduce this idea of duh sprouts and modern Mandarin charismatic power is how I would render it so this is a force that someone who is in a way emanates this kind of force field that you emanate when you're a new way and it's what attracts people to you it what it's what makes them want to follow you it is what makes them trust you and it's the key to success political spiritual personal success for all of the early Chinese thinkers as you might expect they have a religious story about how weigh and fit together so in their view when you're in a way you're in harmony with the DAO heaven who created the dow gives you this power does so that you can be successful and it's kind of like a little gold star you get say heaven likes you and people will follow you again I think we can tell a modern cognitive scientific story about this connection I think what's going on is when uh are related to trust they're related to the fact that there are many domains in human life where human cooperation is only possible because of emotional commitments trust love loyalty there are lots of cooperative dilemmas that self-interested rational agents so agents working only with cold cognition can't solve they can only be solved by throwing yourself in by being emotionally committed the problem with this is a very powerful strategy the commitment strategy is that it's vulnerable to a certain type of defection what economists call defection which is hypocrisy it's vulnerable to the danger that someone's faking the commitment and so they're getting all the benefits of the cooperation but not paying any of the costs I think the solution that human beings have evolved to deal with this is this ability to read hot cognition in other people we can we pay a lot of attention to subtle facial expressions to body language that actually are signalling people's cold cognition can be telling us whatever story they want to tell us but we're looking at their body language to figure out what their hot cognition really feels what's really going on with them so I think this explains the connection between spontaneity and Trust we all have a kind of low-tech version of that EEG monitor we can pick up alpha and theta waves or the lack of alpha and theta waves and other people and this is why we like people who are spontaneous so we're attracted to people who have charisma have it because we have a feeling that they're not faking it that what they're saying is really who they are and that there's no ulterior motives going on in the background so this connection between trust and spontaneity makes a lot of sense and also interestingly I think is an example of using the mind ball paradox as a signal as a hard to fake signal we know that it's very hard to relax on command and we also know it's very hard to feel and look genuinely loving on command so when we see signs of genuineness and other people we take it as a sign that this is really true this is telling us something about them we can trust them so this is one way in which I think engaging with early Chinese thought could be helpful it gives us really new scientific insight so this connection between trust and spontaneity is something that's only recently started to be examined in social psychology social neuroscience partly because of it being inspired by Chinese thought another may be more practical way we can engage with Chinese philosophy as they all wanted to be a new way they all want to do obtained so they all had to deal with the paradox the mind ball paradox or the paradox of way and they develop various strategies for getting around it for circumventing it so Confucius had the carving and polishing strategy basically try for a really long time and eventually the trying will fall away and you'll be able to be spontaneous the first Taoist thinker loudly hated this strategy he said no it's terrible idea no carving back to the onion would stop trying reconnect with the basic simplicity that you had before you started trying that's how you're going to get into a way the next Confucian mensches actually tried to split the difference so he said no we're born with these sprouts these moral sprouts were born with the potential to be way in a morally proper way and we just have to cultivate it and we can't try too hard because we have to water and weed but you can't pull on your sprouts and try to make them grow faster that's going to kill them so try but don't try too hard and then finally drama the last the Taoist thinkers it says don't try don't not try it just relax make your mind empty and let the world take over let the environment actually dictate what you do take yourself out of the equation that's how you're going to get into way now none of these strategies wins the history of East Asian religious thought is just a cycle of these strategies one wins officially and then the other ones pop up again anyway and this is because it's a genuine paradox there's no one solution to it but I think that it's helpful to know which strategies can be helpful in different situations so it very much probably depends which strategy is good for you depends on your situation you're facing what what are your barriers to way it probably depends on life stage so in early stages of life probably carving and polishing is more important and then the letting go comes later after you've developed actual real skills it probably also depends on innate personality so if you're an introvert or an extrovert you're prone toward liberalism or conservatism different strategies are going to appeal to you it's helpful though to have these strategies at our fingertips as it were to have a kind of toolbox we can draw upon of different strategies for getting into a state of way most broadly I think this embodied model of the self helps get to get us beyond this idea that everything is about abstract thought abstract thoughts important but it's not everything embodied imagination training the emotions is crucial and not just for children for all of us this is complex problems can only be solved by drawing on embodied cognition and it's a fragile thing we can easily drown it out with too many distractions with too much information too much stimulus so we need to figure out ways to create a space for a way to happen to make space for spontaneity to arise and not drown it out so unfortunately the ancient Chinese fortune cookie is blank there's no solution to the paradox of hue no money-back guarantee some people wanted their money back from the book I thought there'd be a little pullout or ten steps two away but so there's no one solution but I think that actually engaging with early Chinese thought helps us in many ways helps us recover a sense of the importance of spontaneity and Trust in human life and it also gives us a sense of our fundamentally and body nature thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 98,115

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Netherlands, Humanities, Goal-setting, Happiness, Philosophy

Id: GIdrptTwzQY

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2016