Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:29 Range-frequency theory
03:04 Negative experiences
04:46 Happiness
06:18 Personal examples
07:53 Diet
09:46 Holidays
10:37 Fitness level
12:06 Conclusion
Transcript:
You probably didn’t think you were going to study psychophysics today, but you are. In this video, I’m going to cram a psychophysics lecture down your throats and at the end of this video you’re going to, first of all, thank me for it and, second of all, understand this joke better. I’m going to explain the psychophysics of how our minds work with widespread implications, such as how to plan your holidays, whether or not you should use steroids, whether or not you should have cheat meals, and how much risk in general to take in life.
Specifically, range-frequency theory explains how our minds process stimuli. Now, before I explain what that means and what kind of stimuli we’re talking about, it’s important to note that theory in this case doesn’t mean it’s just speculation. Just like the theory of evolution, range-frequency theory is based on a lot of evidence. There have been numerous experiments across numerous fields validating this theory, indicating that this theory explains how our minds work. Range-frequency theory was first postulated in 1965. Originally, psychophysics was mostly concerned with things like how loud do we perceive a sound to be or how intense do we perceive a certain light to be? You might think our brains just have some mechanism that explains these things, but if you think about it from evolutionary terms, our minds don’t have any hard wired set of what is a loud sound. Because if you grow up in an environment where there are no loud sounds, then any small difference in sound is more relevant to you than when you grow up in an environment in which there is tons of loud sounds and you’re mostly concerned with very loud and maybe just normal loud sounds. So what our brains do is they formulate a reference set and they compare an incoming stimuli to the other stimuli in the reference set. So for example, if you hear a certain amount of sounds this one is this loud, you don’t know if it’s a certain amount of decibel, but you know it’s louder than the other one.
So our brains construct this reference set that we have, which is in our memory, and then how loud we perceive any sound to be depends on where in this range mostly, so it’s rank ordered, it’s not based on decibels, it’s not an actual numerical scale, where in this rank order the sound is. So a sound can be perceived as extremely loud if the reference set that we are used to or that’s in our brain is very narrow. If someone is not used to any loud sounds then anything that we might consider a normal sound is the loudest sound in their memory and therefore their brains will process it as a thunderously loud sound. So how intense we perceive any stimulus to be depends on our reference set of other similar stimuli. Since the 60s this theory has been applied to numerous fields outside of the more narrow field of psychophysics to things such as job satisfaction, how happy we are with a certain amount of money, how happy we are in general, how happy any certain event makes us, the ratings we give to certain products, like how happy we are or what rating on Amazon do we give to this new shaving cream that we just bought. And our body image perception. Like how fat do we think we are? It depends on the body image of the people in our environment or, in general, the body image of the people in our mental reference set. So all of these things are very relative. We have very little sense of the absolute value of how loud a certain sound is, just like we have very little sense of how happy a certain event makes us. All of these things are entirely relative.
Importantly, all of these experiences are relative, not just to other people in our environment, but also to our own past experiences. And the striking implication of this is that adding negative experiences can make our overall happiness higher. The most striking experiments illustrating this are those when the participants experience extreme pain. There are experiments, for example, in which people have to put their hands in extremely cold water or they have to undergo a colonoscopy procedure. And the studies find that distribution of the pain over time has a stronger effect on your memory and your total experience then the actual total amount of pain. For example, when you add a low amount of pain at the end of a very painful procedure like a colonoscopy… For those of you who don’t know, colonoscopy involves putting a tube through your anus, so it’s very uncomfortable, and you have this thing inside your intestines just prodding about. It’s a very unpleasant procedure and funny enough, if you leave it in at the end of the procedure, so you leave the tube inside you, deep inside your intestine somewhere, people actually rate the whole procedure as less painful because the part up until that point was so painful that just having a tube in your intestines feels like heaven at that point, and it makes the whole thing seem less bad. Whereas if you have the procedure and they intensify it, so they prod deeper and harder, just they start gentle and then they go harder and harder and harder, that’s the worst. That makes the whole procedure seem terrible because every part of the procedure is worse than the last part. Whereas if you start with the worst part and then you taper it down, every part seems a little bit less painful because, relative to the start, it’s not so bad, even though objectively it’s still like an 8 out of 10 miserableness in your life.
This finding has been extended not just to acute pain events, but also to happiness in life in general. The key implication of this is that for maximum happiness we don’t want to maximize total happiness. It’s not the total amount of happiness or pain in our lives that really affects us. It’s how happy or painful our life is relative to our past events. And that means that for maximum happiness you’re not just maximizing the area under the curve of happiness in your life, rather, what you want is what’s called in statistics a negatively skewed distribution. This means that most of your happiness should be good, like your life in general should be happy and then occasionally you should have very bad things happen. That’s actually a good thing because those bad things elevate everything else in your life.
Now, this stands in stark contrast to how we typically think of happiness, where we want to maximize the number of awesome events in our life. But awesome events, awesome as they may be, have a negative effect on everything else in your life. Because if you have one awesome thing that happens, it makes everything else seem less awesome. When you introduce any new peak happiness event in your life your reference set, by definition, now changes so that you have one event at the tail over here. This is now peak happiness. That means that everything else in your life is now less than that, whereas before, if your peak happiness was over here, then all the other daily events in your life might be closer to that and you will perceive them as better. Conversely, the upside of extremely negative things in your life is that everything else, because you now have this reference of really, really bad, everything else seems better in comparison.
A personal example for me, is for taste with ayahuasca. Range-frequency theory has also been strongly validated for taste. And me and my friends, we tried ayahuasca one time and it was extremely disgusting. It was a level of bitterness, acidity, disgustingness in general, overall, that is completely unparalleled. My frame of reference up until that point was maybe that paracetamol or certain painkiller medication or something was the most disgusting thing I could imagine, but ayahuasca was by far the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tried. One of my friends literally puked while drinking it. His response to drinking it was immediate vomiting. I’m not talking, like, afterwards, I’m talking literally when he experienced the taste he acutely started vomiting and ever since then, for me, any medication or anything that’s disgusting is not so bad because my frame of reference now includes ayahuasca so everything else in comparison doesn’t really seem that bad.
On the flip side, after being a digital nomad for over a decade and having lived in over 50 countries, I also have a frame of reference that includes a lot of very, very positive events and that’s actually detrimental in a lot of ways. For example, when I now see a waterfall, I’m like: “Oh yeah, it’s nice. It’s like the one in Mexico or Belize, but smaller.” So there are a lot of things I don’t enjoy quite as much anymore and a lot of travel destinations I just don’t enjoy as much anymore because my frame of reference includes something like that, but better. So what I recommend is that in your life you do not seek out the most awesome things. Rather, you work up your way in happiness throughout life and you try to make your life a little bit more awesome every single year. Let’s apply this to some real life situations.
The first area we can apply this knowledge to is to our diet. I know a lot of people have a diet that they’re not really happy with. It’s kind of bland. It’s boring. They don’t really enjoy what they eat on a day to day basis, and then occasionally they splurge, either with a cheat meal or going to a restaurant or buffet, Michelin dining, and they eat things that are way better than what they normally eat. Based on range-frequency theory this is probably not ideal. Rather, what we want is we want a diet that we generally like. It doesn’t have to be amazing, but it has to be good and then maybe occasionally it’s actually good to eat some things that you don’t like, just veggies that you don’t like, force yourself to eat them, because it makes everything else in comparison seem better, and then you want to avoid these massive outlier events because they drag everything else down. So rather than splurge, say, two times per year on some extremely fancy restaurants where you eat things that you would never otherwise eat, it can be better to maybe once a month go out somewhere where the food is very nice, but you can do that every month, or every week. More frequent good experiences, in research, outweigh these infrequent, amazing experiences. I would also caution you about cheat meals. When Sunday is your “Pancake day”, Monday to Saturday often turn into thinking about “Pancake day” day. And that means that, yes, “Pancake day” is awesome, but it drags the happiness of all the other days down, and research is quite consistent with this, I’ve already talked about cheat meals in some of my previous videos and my book: “The Science of Self-control”, so you can read about it in depth there, but the short version is that research in general is not favorable about cheat meals, at least not in the way most people implement them.
Holidays are another area where most people do the opposite of what maximizes happiness according to range-frequency theory. Instead of a negatively skewed distribution, holidays for most people create a super positively skewed distribution. Meaning, for most people a holiday is a period in time when their happiness is dramatically higher than during the rest of their life. Now this is great, but it means that it drags down the happiness you experience in the rest of your life. And most people experience this when you have to get back to work after a holiday. It feels really miserable. So instead of splurging on some amazing holiday maybe it’s better to have more frequent nice holidays, maybe more smaller holidays or trips or events rather than splurging on these super big holidays occasionally. And as you get wealthier, as you age, you can increase the standard of your holidays and make them progressively more extravagant over time. Because what you want to do is push out the new standard of maximum happiness in your life throughout time.
We can also apply range-frequency theory to our fitness level, our body image and whether or not we should use steroids. In my mind, an even stronger argument for not using steroids other than the health and ethical implications is that, when you use steroids and you get a physique that you cannot maintain afterwards without the steroids, either you’re going to have to be on them for the rest of your life or you just screwed yourself over for life because now you’ve had a physique where you were extremely shredded and six pack lean, ultra jacked, vascular, super full, you had a look that you will never maintain, a level of muscle mass that you can never maintain naturally. What do you think that does to your happiness for the rest of your life? When you go off the steroids, even when you end up with a great physique that many people would aspire to you’re going to be miserable about it because you used to look better. And I think one of the best things about fitness and strength training and dieting is the progressive improvement in your physique. That’s why I always say the joy is in the journey. I have never been as happy with my physique as when I started lifting in the first months. I gained a little bit of bicep size and, in my mind, I was jacked. And now I’ve been at pretty much the same physique for a long time and I’m like: “Eh, yeah, I look good. I know I look good.” In comparison to the average American my physique stands out as exceptional, but my frame of reference is fitness models and, in comparison to them, my physique is just like: “Yeah, it’s okay.” So you’re going to be much happier with slow, continued improvements in your physique for a long period of time then by temporarily getting this amazing physique that you’re not going to be able to maintain and it’s going to make you feel miserable about your physique for the rest of your life.
In conclusion, psychophysics teach us how to design our life for maximum happiness. Rather than make our life occasionally awesome we want our life to be mostly good. A life where you enjoy the little things and you have frequent experiences that you like, with a day to day life that you like is generally much happier than a life which is mostly miserable and occasionally awesome. I think many people will be better off focusing on their day to day life and frequent nice experiences in their life rather than seeking out these amazing experiences that will overshadow the rest of your life. On the other end, we don’t want to avoid misery completely. Hardship not only breeds character, it also makes everything else in your life seem better. So take some risks. Take some chances. Occasionally failing and being miserable and having a hard time is great for the rest of your life, as long as your life on balance is mostly good.