Author: Jeff Wise

Gerry Duffy, a rangy, chiseled 43-year-old from Ireland, ranks as one of the most remarkable endurance athletes in the world. Last year, he took first place in an insanely grueling event called the UK Deca Ironman Challenge that required its participants to complete, every day for ten days, a full triathlon: a 2.4 mile swim followed by a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run. He has also completed a number of other punishing long-distance events, including one perversely torturous undertaking of his own devising in which he raced a marathon in each of Ireland’s 32 counties over the course of 32 consecutive days. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Duffy, though, is that he used to be just like the rest of us.

At the age of 26 he was a chubby, chain-smoking traveling insurance salesman, 60 pounds overweight, unambitious and comfortable with life. Then one day he saw a photograph of himself taken as he met his hero, golf champion Seve Ballasteros. The sight of the chubby man next to the legendary duffer shocked him. “I said, ‘Mother of…!’” he recalls. “I just felt that I was better than that. I said to myself, ‘I have to do something about this.’” And so he did. Starting with small, easy steps, he began a long journey that ultimately shaved off 30 percent of his body weight and transformed every aspect of his life. From an ordinary schlub, he turned himself by force of will into a man of unparalleled resilience.

Duffy’s story offers a perfect example of a profound but often overlooked truth about human toughness: even the most physically punishing feats of endurance are less about the body than they are about the mind. Sure, Duffy is an incomprehensively fit individual. But it’s how he’s trained his mind that’s allowed him to keep going while his competitors are dropping like flies.

It’s a lesson we all can learn. Though we may not need to run multiple triathlons, we all could benefit by being more determined, more resilient, more resolute in achieving the things that really matter to us. Duffy’s journey serves as an example we all can follow, if to a lesser degree. On his own initiative, he launched himself on a course of self-improvement that bolstered the inner quality that positive psychologist Salvatore Maddi calls “hardiness.” Continue reading Forging a Soul of Iron

We seem to be having a hard time keeping it together lately. Americans are more overweight, more addicted, and more indebted than ever. Congress, meanwhile, is becoming ever more dysfunctional, seemingly unable to come to grips with spiraling deficits.

These two levels of dysfunction – personal and collective – surely must be a coincidence, right? After all, the give-and-take of representative democracy is a completely different process from the infinitely complex tangle of neurons and synapses that underlie individual decision making. But if one addiction researcher’s groundbreaking ideas are correct, then governments’ plans tend to fall apart for the very same reason that our individual attempts at self-control do.

Basically, Congress operates a lot like an addict’s brain. Continue reading How Congress is Like a Crack Addict’s Brain

In 2008, Haile Gebrselassie made the run of his life. The weather for the Berlin marathon was perfect, a clear cool morning in late September. At the starting gun the 35-year-old Ethiopian set off at the front of the pack. By the halfway mark, he was running at a record-beating pace. But with Kenyan James Kwambai matching him stride for stride, the path to victory was still uncertain. An hour and a half into the race, however, Kwambai fell back, and from then on Gebrlassie might as well have been running solo. He passed under the Brandenburg Gate and crossed the finish line, breaking the world record by nearly half a minute.

The performance was a remarkable achievement by a human body continuously pushed to its limit. Or rather, that’s what it looked like to the untrained eye. But when South African research physiologist Timothy Noakes reviewed Gebrlassie’s performance he noticed something extraordinary: even though the runner had seemed to be going flat-out throughout the race, when he reached the last mile Gebrlassie began to run even faster. Somehow, he had harnessed a previously untapped reserve of energy to accelerate himself toward the finish line. Continue reading The Thing Inside You That’s Holding You Back

Recently that the German government moved to phase out nuclear energy in the country. The industry, it reckoned, poses an unacceptable risk to the health of the population, despite the fact that its atomic energy program is well regulated and has never resulted in an injury or death.

Coincidentally, around the same time an outbreak of E. coli spread by organic bean sprouts killed dozens of people in the country. Yet in the aftermath no one suggested that organic vegetables should be banned.

Clearly, what the general public perceives as dangerous is very different from mortality statistics alone would tell us. Are we simply irrational, or is there an underlying logic behind our intuitive perception of risk?

For answers, I turned to David Ropeik, a well-known risk management consultant, fellow Psychology Today blogger, and author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.

JW: Can you explain this disparity to me, between the reaction to atomic power and to the E. coli outbreak?

DR: Risk is subjective, a mix of the few facts we have at any given time, and how those facts feel. We have developed a set of instincts that help us gauge potentially risky situations, quickly, before all the facts are in. Which is pretty important for survival, though it may not make for the most fact-based, rational choices. In essence, risks have personality traits, psychological characteristics that make some feel scarier than others, the statistics and facts notwithstanding.

JW: So what’s the personality of nuclear power? Continue reading It’s Not the Scary Things that Kill You

As I post this, the world is supposed to be ending, according to a fervent group of Christian cultists. Despite the insignificant size of their membership, the group has attracted an enormous amount of press attention and internet buzz – mostly, I think, because of the remarkable self-confidence with which they peddle their lunatic project. How, we wonder, could someone believe something so baseless – and embrace it so fervently?

We should not be so smug. Erroneous theories aren’t just the province of the lunatic fringe. They’re part of everyone’s basic cognitive legacy. We are hardwired for a phenomenon I call “theory lock,” a predilection rooted in the fact that there’s one concept that the human brain finds almost impossible to grasp: “I don’t know.”

Our minds recoil from uncertainty. We are wired to find order in randomness and chaos. We look at clouds and see sheep. We look at stock price charts and detect patterns. We read our horoscope and think “yes, that totally applies to me!”

In evolutionary terms, this can be a useful feature. After all, when it comes to making decisions, we’re helpless without a theory, a way to make sense of the situation that we’re in. Powerlessness is a deeply upsetting and stressful condition. So when a theory, even a weak one, presents itself amid an explanatory vacuum, we instinctively seize hold and hang on for dear life.

Once we have a theory in our grasp, we begin to see everything through its lens. Information that otherwise seem ambiguous, or even contradictory to that theory, is understood within its framework. And so just by holding a belief we tend to gradually strengthen our conviction that it is true, a tendency that psychologists dub “confirmation bias.”

It’s hard to overstate the power of this effect. Continue reading Apocalypse Today: The Allure of Bad Theory

How can we lead meaningful lives in an age when the broad culture no longer embraces a single vision of religious truth? In a remarkable new book, All Things Shining, philosophy professors Sean D. Kelly of Harvard and Hubert Dreyfus of UC Berkeley undertake a rollicking survey of three millennia of Western thought, contrasting the ways that Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Melville, and others found meaning in their worlds. The main challenge we face today, they write, is to find a convincing response to nihilism, a position that they identifying particularly in the writings of David Foster Wallace.

What’s particularly fascinating about Kelly is that he began his academic career not in philosophy but in computer science and artificial intelligence.The deep problems that arose in trying to understand the nature of consciousness led him to philosophy. But he remains deeply steeped in the scientific perspective, and I was curious to ask him about how the practice of philosophy – mankind’s attempts to understand what it means to exist – has been affected by, or perhaps even superseded by, rapid scientific progress in understanding how our brains work.

What is nihilism?

It’s the feeling that nothing in the world matters any more than anything else.  Nietzsche’s analysis was that people once found meaning in their belief in the Judeo-Christian God, but that in the post-medieval world belief wasn’t sufficient anymore to give people the sense that things really mattered.  The basic philosophical issue underlying the book, then, is: how are you supposed to live your life in order to make it possible that things matter again?

Is nihilism an intellectual problem, or an emotional one?

Some people really suffer from the feeling that nothing seems to matter any more than anything else. David Foster Wallace called it a ‘stomach-level sadness.’ I think that’s  a pretty good description of it.

Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Arizona congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others, seems to have been obsessed with philosophy, and had some strange ideas about meaning. Was he a nihilist? Continue reading Has Psychology Killed Philosophy? A Chat with Sean D. Kelly, Co-author of All Things Shining