Psych-Out

If you’re someone who sees poker as a game of luck, then chances are you’re not a very good poker player. Elite poker players are master psychologists. They know themselves — their tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses. They read other players. They understand the probabilities behind their choices.

A great poker player understands that luck is a part of the game, but Lady Luck is not where he or she rests their hopes. When taking a chance, playing a bluff, raising, or folding, the best players understand the probabilities, the psychology of the game and the other players. At the drop of a hat, they can tell you why they played their cards the way the did.

Alan Schoonmaker lays out several central principles that great poker players live by in his book, The Psychology of Poker.

* Your greatest enemy is denial. We deny the truth about our own abilities. We exaggerate our wins, and fail to register our losses. We chase weak cards, or sit at games where we have no hope of winning. We tell ourselves stories that a flush is easier to draw than it actually is, or that we lose because we’re just unlucky, or someone else is luckier. Or, we fall prey to betting a hand that we know has no chance of winning because…well…just because.

* You should understand yourself more deeply. Why do you play the way you do? What are your tendencies? How does your style of play affect other players around you? Do you blame others, lousy luck, make excuses? Or, do accept responsibility when you have no chips left at the end of the day?

* Focus on other players. Are you self absorbed? Weak players fixate on their own hands. They think only of themselves.  Strong players study the players around them, their tendencies, their talk, and what their talk says about them. They engage the other players as much, if not more, than their own hands. Who is he? What moves the way she plays her cards?  They get to know the other players intimately.

* Playing styles are caused by and reveal people’s desires and fears. What do you want? Why are you playing this game with these people? What are your fears? How many times in our life do we get hijacked by wishes and fears — we chase that one card denying it’s poor probability, or we fold with a winner?

* Think visibly. Make your assumptions and thought processes explicit. Great poker players talk to themselves, at least in their own heads. They can tell you what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Great poker players live mindfully, attending to each check, raise, and call made, as well as each card dealt and how it changes the whole table.  They play knowing that the last hand, win or lose, has little to do with the cards in front of him.

* One of the best ways to improve your results is to change your style. Change it up. If you tend to be loose and aggressive, tighten up. If you tend to hold back, push forward. Great poker players don’t have a one size fits all style. They are continually adjusting to the players in this game, and this pot.

In life, success is not always about winning or losing, but how effectively we navigate the bumps, opportunities, and good and bad chances that fall our way. There are times when that great hand we are dealt, falls short. There are other times, we win on a bluff that was better not taken. Either way, don’t fool yourself that the failure or success of one hand means anything. Until that last hand in life is dealt, there’s always another hand to play. There’s always room to improve our game.

Great poker players are self-aware, conscious of who they are for better and worse, take responsibility for their own results, understand probabilities, aren’t given to superstitions, don’t play in games they’re not suited for, and are brutally realistic about the hand they are dealt and the game they are playing.

Gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to walk away.

Watch Daniel Negreanu talk himself out of a winning hand!

In 1974, Philippe Petit stepped out of the ordinary and onto a tightrope that he’d secured between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. 200 feet of empty space from tower to tower. 110 stories up. No net. No harness. 6 years of planning. 6 years of patience, risk, setbacks, and heartaches. All for over an hour of daring.

As for the onlookers below? They, too, had been shaken out of their ordinary worlds as they watched the man dancing on the tightrope more than a quarter of a mile above their heads. “Is he crazy?” Who wouldn’t have asked it? “Of course…he has to be!” Still, no one could deny it was 45 minutes of awe — of beauty.

“Why? Why? Why did you do it?” he was asked over and over. Was it his childhood? An absent parent? Toilet training? Was he thumbing his nose at authority? Was he a harmless sociopath? Did he harbor a death wish? We had to have an explanation.

“There is no ‘why’,” he answered. Philippe Petit refused to cut it to pieces. He refused to make it easy to figure for the rest of us who choose to live on life’s sideline.

We are questioners. We are storytellers. When something strikes us as out of the ordinary, we are compelled by over two hundred thousand years of evolutionary history to fill what we can’t understand with a story. We are driven by a desire to make sense of our world, to reduce it to a single idea so that we can make life’s absurdities comprehensible.

The stories we tell will bring us comfort. Our world will seem less uncertain — more predictable. We will come up with that one answer that explains to us what on the surface may appear to be crazy. We will take the extraordinary and make it seem to be ordinary by bringing it to a predictable formula. The story doesn’t have to be accurate, only that we believe it to be so.

Jon Krakauer wrote, “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation…”

You wake up every morning at 7. Get to work by 9. Eat lunch at noon. Come home at 6. Plant yourself in front of the TV or computer screen until you fall asleep — then, the next day, and the next day after that for months and years, do it all over again. You will owe the world no explanation. And no one will think to ask you why.

But what if you decide to go backpacking in Nepal for a year, or spike your hair and join a rock n roll band, or suddenly take up comedy improvisation, or string a tightrope between two towers and walk from one end to another? The question will start to roll. Why? Why? Give us an explanation, please?

We all take comfort in the story of Sisyphus who was doomed to an eternity of rolling that rock up the hill day in and day out, only to have it roll back down. We take comfort in it, even as we curse it as our own fate. Sisyphus had no doubt what his eternity of tomorrows would bring. How many ideas do we nip at the bud because they seem to ourselves, our friends, and our families to be just a little crazy, or that they may bring that dreaded uncertainty to everyone’s life.

Unlike that cursed son of a king, we can even for a moment each day, week, or month of our lives step out from behind that rock.

Change a routine. Break from the chains of our predictable day to day. To be able to wake up to a day of uncertainty may be cause for our greatest anxiety — yet it can also open some door to our greatest joy.

As Philippe Petit said, “Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge, and then you live your life on a tightrope.”

Ali accepts Foreman’s blows

“The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules.”  Baltasar Gracián

Nothing can be more disarming than restraint in the face of powerful forces you can’t control.  To simply lay against the ropes.  Hold back.  Let the forces around you work themselves out.  Sometimes it means accepting the blows, while protecting yourself in the best way possible until the time is right for you to act.  The right time to make your move.

No one thinks of the courage, strength, and fortitude that restraint requires of us.  Our instincts compel us to act quickly in face of perceived threat or danger.  Push out, quickly.  Fight or flee.  Our evolutionary heritage has wired us with the decision rule, “it’s better to be wrong and act quickly, than to weigh it all out to be accurate.”  In the wilds, the time you take for accuracy, could be the last time you see.  When running from lions, it’s a great strategy.

But what if you’re in the ring and there’s no running, no readily available escape.  And what if to fight, at least at that moment, puts you in even greater jeopardy.  It takes over-riding millions of years of evolutionary programming to lay back, protect yourself, and wait.

On the night of Octoer 20, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire, one of the greatest and most cunning fighters ever, Muhammad Ali, came to such a moment.  After the first round, Ali came to the sudden realization that he couldn’t master his opponent, the powerful George Forman, by taking him head on.  He couldn’t out punch him.  Forman was far stronger.  He couldn’t out dance him.  Foreman was far younger, and would endlessly stalk him.  He couldn’t intimidate him.  Foreman was confident and fearless.

Foreman had dominated every opponent who had entered the ring with him.  He’d readily knocked out Joe Fraziar and Ken Norton.  Two boxers who had handed Ali his only losses.

Foreman crushes Joe Frazier

What strategy did Ali come to?  He laid against the ropes and waited.  The famous Rope-a-Dope.  It’s unimaginable to think of the blows Ali suffered for three rounds.  Foreman owned arguably one of the most powerful punches of any boxer in history.  The continuous volley of blows to Ali’s gut and head were punishing, even as Ali did the best he could to protect himself.

But Ali waited.  He waited knowing that eventually Foreman’s force would punch itself out.  All he had to do was survive until that time.

Of course, most of us aren’t boxers in a ring.  But in our day to day there are times when we find ourselves against the ropes with no place to go, and lashing out would make matters even worse.  There are forces around us we can’t seem to control.  Sometimes, the best strategy?   Hold back.  Restraint.

By the 8th round Foreman had punched himself out.  In one of the most amazing moments in boxing history, George Foreman was knocked out.  As the old saying goes, “Time and I can take on any two.”

from When We Were Kings,  Ali masters the beast in Zaire (Watch it!)

“More humans have run away from their enemies than have fought them.”
Theodore Zeldon, An Intimate History of Humanity

We are escape artists.  We are a species more prone to flight, than facing our battles with our backs up, teeth bared and claws ready to dig in.  (Our teeth and claws are pretty useless in a fight, anyway, except against each other.)  For most of us, to stand in there and fight means over-riding a highly evolved impulse that commands our bodies, “Run!  Get out of there!”

Escape brings us to safety.  Escape brings us respite.  If successful, we come to a place of real or imagined sanctuary, whether physical or emotional.  Escape allows us safe haven where we can gather our wits, our strength, and our allies.  And if we need, it allows us to lick our wounds.   Emily Dickinson wrote, “Escape – it is the Basket/In which the heart is caught.”

The notion of escape gets a bum wrap in cool-headed times.  Only cowards fail to turn and face the test, we’re often told.   But, how much we enjoy those Hollywood chase scenes (nearly all movies have one), and how many times do we whisper to the hero or heroine when the villain is nearby and has the upper hand, “Get out of there – please.”

Matrix Bike Chase

In the Alain Resnais film Mon Oncle d’Amerique, the real-to-life neurosurgeon, philosopher, and behavioral researcher Henri Laborit proclaimed that science confirms the opinion of the ancient sages – to run away is the truest wisdom.  Fighting, if successful, becomes addictive and draws us into the stress of a competitive life.  And the chronic stress of a competitive, combative life will eat at us from the inside out.

You see, it’s not escape that’s the problem, but an inhibited fight-or-flight response.   Inhibition can affect health and our immune systems.  Once we start a cycle of inhibited action that habit engraves itself into our body-memory.  Instead of fighting or fleeing, we will habitually freeze in face of those pesky modern day threats, and thus render ourselves helpless.

Cat and mouse between blind Audrey Hepburn and Alain Arkin, Wait Until Dark

As Laborit urges, escape first and foremost from your inhibitions.  We need to fight;  or,  we need to flee.  If neither is possible, then find some other way of turning the unbearable situation into meaningful action. Talk.  Write.  Get angry.  Laugh it off.  Insult the person who’s annoying you.  Whatever it is, do it with a sense of purpose.

Watch an animal escape from a trap.  He’ll escape with power, assuredness, and intent.  How far will he run, once free?  Until he’s out of harm’s way — no more, no less — then, back to business.

Our escapes are many.  We escape into alcohol, religion, art, sports, vacations, movies, drugs, sex and rock-n-roll.  We no longer escape boars, bulls, and saber tooth tigers, but bosses, spouses, bill-collectors, kids, and head-concocted threats that live in either our memory or our imaginations.  When we meet the enemy now, often he is us, and as often there’s no place to run but to select corners of our own thoughts.

Remember, however, escape, too, can be habit forming.  When we run often we forget to stop, or run too far, or run to the wrong corner, or don’t look back so we know when we’re out of harm’s way, thus over-stressing our resources. Sometimes we overstate the danger before us and run when there’s nothing to run from.  And other times, we mistake a healthy dose of flight with avoidance, choosing to hide out indefinitely in our trees, caves, or burrows instead of stepping back out into the bump-and-grind of everyday life.

Escape from swift Cheetah!

Imagine. You are running. The sun warms your skin. You feel the drumming of the pavement against the bottoms of your feet. Your arms move in rhythm to your steps. Beads of sweat trickle down your forehead. Smell the freshly mowed grass. Birds flutter and chirp along the tree lined street. An occasional car passes. You hit stride. You are running with more energy than you’ve ever run before. A feeling of health and animal pleasure glow inside your body.

If you stayed with the above fantasy, the same regions of your visual, olfactory, and kinesthetic brain circuits lit up as would have if you really were taking that run. It’s the same if you imagined tapping out a pattern with your fingers, hitting a tennis ball, or imagining your cat hop onto your lap.

We’ve known for some time that experience changes the function and structure of our neural wiring. We call this learning. But what has become increasingly evident is that thinking alone, with no input from the outside world, can also change the physical structure of our brain.

Researchers asked one group of subjects to visualize practicing a 5-finger right-handed piano exercise over and over again for several hours. They were not to touch the keys, but only imagine themselves doing so. The same regions of the brain that controlled the right fingers expanded in the same way as those subjects who were instructed to actually practice the piece touching the piano.

The mere thought of doing something has the capacity to change your brain structure, and thus your performance. It’s something that sports psychologists have know for a long time. If you can see it, you’re training your brain and your body to make it happen.

Researcher Gary Klein found that imagination, or mental simulation, is one of the most important decision making tools for combat commanders, fireman, chess masters, ER doctors, ICU nurses. In the heat of the moment, experts don’t follow rules and procedures. Nor do they use formal logic. Instead, they create mental images based on their experiences. As one fire commander confided, “To be a good fire ground commander, you need to have a rich fantasy life.”

Klein writes, “he was referring to the ability to use the imagination, to imagine how the fire got started, how it was going to continue spreading, or what would happen using a new procedure. A commander who cannot imagine these things is in trouble.” (1)

Visualization is not just for athletes or experts under fire. It can be a crucial tool for navigating your day to day, especially if depressed, anxious, or finding yourself facing some uphill battle. If we practice the scene in our imagination and build into the fantasy as much positive emotion as we can muster, then we have brought ourselves several steps closer to accomplishing whatever challenge is before us. If you can see it, you are crucial step closer to making it happen.

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(1) Klein, Gary. Sources of Power. US: MIT Press, 1999. (p. 45.)

Col.  John Boyd knew a thing or two about life and death decisions under conditions of rapid change, uncertainty, and ambiguity.  As a fighter pilot he bet any taker that he could maneuver onto his tail position and shoot him down within 40 seconds.  Most of the time it took less than 20.  He never lost the bet.  Boyd was arrogant, brash, cocky, and always testing limits – whether airplanes, people, ideas, or the military bureaucracy, itself.  To some he was a crackpot.  To others he was one of the greatest military and strategic thinkers of the 20th century.

Boyd read extensively.  Mathematics.  Physics.  Genetics.  Biology.  Anthropology.  Sociology.  Political and military history.  His intellectual grasp of scientific and philosophical ideas was expert.  He found connections everywhere.  In a conversational flourish, he might weave together Marx’s theory of alienation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Mendel’s genetics, and throw in Sun Tzu, quantum physics and Michael Jordan’s slam dunk for emphasis. Boyd believed that learning how to think sharply, deeply, and quickly was a prerequisite to our ability to adapt to complex, uncertain, and ever changing circumstances.  His motto may well have been, “Think sharply and innovate, or die.”

The basis of Boyd’s philosophy of adaptability is that we must stay open to survive.   Living systems are open systems, communicating continuously with the outside world.  We communicate to gather information, knowledge and understanding, as well as replenish our life energy.  If we close ourselves in and the wider world out, we cripple our capacity to adapt, and eventually die out as a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.

When under fire – whether it be through misunderstandings, failings, bad breaks, setbacks, disappointments – our tendency may be to isolate ourselves to the security of a more certain physical, emotional, or intellectual space.

We hide out in our living rooms, we close ourselves off from other people, we fix ourselves to our secure biases about other people and the world, failing to let ourselves be challenged by new information.  What we gain in temporary sense of safety and security, we lose in the potential of stretching our capacity to not only adapt, but even thrive in face of uncertainty, ambiguity and change.

Boyd’s key concept was the OODA loop.  It was a strategy of staying engaged both physically and mentally during times of uncertainty.

Observation: gather information from the world by means of experience and your senses.  Pay special attention to information that runs counter to your experience or expectations.

Orientation: Analyze and synthesize the information to form  a perspective from which to guide a strategy of action.

Decision: Determine a course of action based on how you’ve chosen to orient yourself to the situation.

Action: Play out the decision, while continuously adjusting according to how the world responds.

For Boyd, a life that always works out, a life without loose ends, or failings, or humiliating defeats, or blown fuses would not be a life worth living.  We need challenges.  We need to be pushed.  Without problems to solve, and setbacks to overcome, we would become automatons — life’s furniture rather than creative, thinking agents of change.

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To read more about this amazing personality see:

Coram, R. (New York). Boyd: The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War. 2002: Little, Brown, and Company.

Hammond, G. T. (2001). The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

rock climber

“Improvisation is based on building from what is already given, accepting it, and taking it one step further,” writes comedian Andy Goldberg. One of the first rules of improvisation, any improvisation, DON’T DENY. Accept what’s been established. In improvisational comedy, denial is “refusing to give up a preconceived notion of what is going to happen next in a scene.”(1)

Denial stops action. Denial is our refusal to accept the unfolding moment.

Saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker never stopped mid-riff if he didn’t take to a particular chord. His saxophone flourishes wove themselves throughout whatever augmented 7th or diminished 9th flashed his way. Another bird, basketball legend Larry Bird, never stopped action mid-game to complain, “I don’t like the way you’re defending me!” Whatever the defenses threw against him, he found a way.

Both birds were great improvisers. They excelled at playing the moment. Playing the moment is the second golden rule of good improvising. Every action builds from the previous one. Each response leads to the next. Goldberg writes, “You can’t be so busy thinking about what you are going to say or do next that you miss what is going on.”

Keith Johnstone, another master of comedic improvisation writes, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged.” Why? Because good improvisers accept all offers. (2)

Great improvisers are great listeners. Their senses are ever alert to what’s in front of them. A basketball player scans, a chef smells and tastes, a musician hears. Great improvisers don’t deny what’s in front of them. They don’t resist it. They don’t sit back brooding and wishing things were different. “Bring it on!” is their mantra.

Rock climbing pioneer Arno Ilgner talks about “hoping” and “wishing” as passive mental states that bleed off our capacity to respond in the immediate. (3) When on a difficult part of a climb it’s useless to escape into wishing that a particular hand or foot hold be different. You still have to push past. (See Lynn Hill climbing video below.) Yet, it’s a trap into which we all can fall. How often do we sit fixated on a past conversation, or replaying a long gone moment, or wishing that we weren’t in the spot we were in and that things will somehow magically turn out differently?

Rock Climber, Lynn Hill

Survival expert and trainer John Wiseman knows a thing or two about improvising. “When facing a disaster it is easy to let yourself go, to collapse and be consumed in self-pity,” he writes. “But it is no use giving up or burying your head in the sand and hoping that this is a bad dream that will soon pass.”  (See PsychOut post entitled Shame.) Stay confident. Accept your circumstance. Use everything in front of you to the fullest. (4)

In life, we all find ourselves in tough spots or in new and unfamiliar circumstances. When there, don’t deny. Accept the moment. Keep your senses engaged. Take what’s given. Think of the two Birds. Improvise!

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1) Goldberg, Andy. Improv Comedy. Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1991.
2) Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.
3) Ilgner, Arno. The Rock Warrior’s Way. La Vergne, TN: Desiderata Institute, 2003.
4) Wiseman, John “Lofty. SAS Survival Handbook. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Dear Son –

I often spend my evenings writing.  Well, while writing, I found myself thinking about your first game experience with the JV team tonight.   One of the strongest mental qualities anyone can cultivate is learning how to turn a disappointment into an advantage.  It’s part of what I call resilience – resilience meaning the ability to recover quickly after difficult circumstances.  If fed and nurtured it will take you far in life.

I know those feelings of heartbreak, anger and embarrassment when you sit the bench the entire game.   It’s a good thing to let yourself feel those feelings.  Don’t block them out.  Use their burn to feed that hunger you have to be out there on that court.  Playing hungry motivates, encourages risk, boldness, and strength of spirit.

Hungry players make things happen for themselves and their teammates.  Harry Sheehy — the once basketball coach and now athletic director of Williams College — wrote that every player should have the experience of working their tails off for a whole season while having to sit the bench.   It creates mental toughness, a strong work ethic, along with humility and respect for the game.

Those who are given their chances easily, without having to work hard for them, are those who will have a harder time later in life when facing challenges, obstacles and setbacks that require hard work and perseverance.   You’re learning what it is to bust your butt with no guarantee of succeeding, but are choosing to do it anyway.  It’s a quality to admire and that will take you far.

Watch Mugsy Bogues, 5′3″ NBA player (warning: uncensored strong language)

It’s no lie, as a small guard you will have to work three times harder, play three times smarter, and be three times tougher than everyone else out there.  So be it! Keep at it, challenge yourself, challenge your teammates, hone every aspect of your game in the secret of the practice court — away from the fans, your friends, and the public eye.  When your opportunity comes you will be ready.  (And it will come.  It’s only the first game of a very long season.)

There have been many times in life I’ve had my back against the wall, or I’ve faced setback, embarrassment, or disappointment.  It’s the lessons I’d learned facing these moments in my sports life from which I’ve drawn to pull me through.

Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Bulls, and now coach of the Lakers once said, “There’s more to life than basketball, and there’s more to basketball than basketball.”  If you never a play a minute the whole season (which won’t happen), yet keep pushing yourself just the same, you’ll learn life lessons that will take you far beyond the high school basketball court.

Dad

He Got Game, Public Enemy

“…the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”    Leo Tolstoy.

Life besets us with gambles.  Do I invest in stocks or stash my money under the mattress? Do I leave my job for more money now, or wait it out for that promotion? Is it Obama, or McCain? Yet, choose we must. And, it always feels better coming to the table knowing that our choice is absolutely the right one.

Our feeling of certainty is seldom the result of logical analysis.  In reality, it’s an involuntary mental sensation firing off deeply in our brain’s circuitry.  First, we think a thought.  Then, we make an involuntary assessment of the accuracy of that thought.  When that assessment lights up our reward circuitry, we glow beneath that hot, intoxicating feeling “I am right!”

Archimedes shouting, "Eureka!"

Our perceptual circuitry has evolved to reinforce our conclusions, whether or not the information we receive is convincing. During elections, how many of us actually go seek out information against our pet candidate, party, or issue.   In fact, if you’re honest with yourself, you might have to agree that any thought of doing just that is met inside your head with a resounding “No!”

Research has shown that we determine whether something is good or bad within a quarter of a second.  The rest is mental fine tuning.  Once that evaluation is made, we are primed to seek out evidence upholding that initial evaluation and avoid, or spin, information that contradicts it.  First impressions are highly weighted in our perceptual system, and thus powerful cues to the formation and sustaining of our beliefs.

Ask a subject to evaluate a person’s happiness, or sociability, or likeability on the basis of a list of adjectives describing him.  Envious.  Stubborn.  Critical.  Industrious.  Talkative.  Intelligent. If the list is given in the above order, the subjects will rate the person negatively.  Reverse the order — same words, same person — the subjects will rate the person positively (Myers, 2007).

Our brains have evolved in favor of rapid evaluation about the world around us.  First impressions bring us to certainty most quickly.  In low complexity, high danger situation, it’s highly adaptive to go with “gut instinct.”  We give up accuracy, yet gain in our capacity to leap quickly into action. In more complex situations, especially ones where we have more time to think, this mental tendency leaves us vulnerable to prejudice, premature judgment, and possibly costly error.

If you want to be truly fair in your evaluation of a circumstance and you’re not running from a saber-tooth tiger:  question your initial perceptions;  spend time looking for evidence that you are wrong;  in forming an impression of a person (or object) try to break your judgment down into his (or its) separate qualities without letting any strikingly good or bad first impression influence your opinion about the remainder; and,  practice suspending judgment, especially in light of that great feeling of “I know I’m right!”

Finally, beware of people who claim absolute certainty on matters where certainty is impossible.  As neurologist and “certainty” researcher Robert Burton suggests, “Intuitions, gut feelings and hunches are neither right nor wrong but tentative ideas that must then be submitted to testing. If such testing isn’t possible (such as in deciding whether or not to pull out of Iraq), then we must accept that any absolute stance is merely a personal vision, not a statement of fact.”

Rummy’s “Theory of Knowing.”

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Lehrer, J. (2008). The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous mental Flaw. Scientific American.

Mlodinow, L. (2008). The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives. New York: Pantheon Books.

Myers, D. G. (2007). The Powers and Perils of Intuition. Scientific American Mind, Vol. 18, No. 3, 24-31.

Okay, so my son sags his pants. When I was 15, the hem of my raggedy bell-bottoms dragged under my shoes. A dozen fights with horrified mom and dad. A dozen garbage rescues. In all primate species — whether we’re talking about humans, baboons, or macaques– the young are most likely to have the accident doing some foolhardy thing, while their elders shake their heads and cluck “I told you so.”

Ahhhh…those foolhardy skater dudes!

And yet, it’s the young who often push the world forward. Alexander the Great founded his first colony at the age of 16. Joan of Arc led the French army before the age of 20. The Beatles were 17 year old kids when they took the world by storm in 1960 and changed the sound of pop music forever.

1960 Beatles — and we’d never be the same

Something new? It’s not mom and pop who embrace it. It’s the same with all primates. When japanese snow monkeys discovered washing food in seawater, it was the youngsters who picked up the practice. The old folks looked on dumbfounded, if they looked on at all. Have a computer problem? Who would you trust more, the retired accountant across the road, or your 14 year old saggy panted son?

Snow Monkey at play

Some researchers point to the prefrontal cortex, which has been shown to be not yet fully formed in the teen brain. As a result, teens may find it difficult to override certain impulses in face of logic. Researcher Robert Epstein says not so fast. Correlation does not mean causation. According to him, the idea of a teen brain different from an adult brain is “a hoax, pushed to some extent by drug companies who are funding research.” Research in mental functioning has shown that teens are as competent as adults across a wide range of abilities. Studies of intelligence, perceptual abilities and memory function show that teens, in fact, are in many instances far superior to adults.

Paul Anka croons Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit”??

One thing for sure, all social primates have evolved a tendency for its youngsters to take off into the wilds and leave the safety of their own group. In chimps it would be the girls. In the Old World monkeys, like baboons, it’s the boys. According to neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, “It’s a simple fact driven by genetics and evolution: if everyone stayed on, matured, and reproduced there, and if their kids stayed on, and their kids’ kids too, then ultimately everyone would be pretty closely related.” (Sapolsky p. 78) Genetically, not a good idea.

Still, what’s going on in our primate genes, hormones, and neurotransmitters to make us hit the road? Why would we risk predators, disease, and loneliness? Animals hate novelty. And according to basic behaviorist theories, we tend to do things for which we are rewarded and tend to avoid things for which we get punished. And it’s not that we primates are pushed out. We choose it!

“We don’t know,” Sapolsky admits. “But we do know that following this urge is one of the most resonantly primate of acts. A young male baboon stands riveted at the river’s edge…To hell with logic and sensible behavior, to hell with tradition and respecting your elders, to hell with this drab little town, and to hell with that knot of fear in my stomach.”

Extreme bikers raising the hair on the back of your neck.

So, next time you see a teen with his jeans sagged down to his knees and grinding his skateboard down a handrail, smile and recognize that it’s his version of setting out into the open savanna. He’s following a deep seated urge as old as the hills and programmed somewhere deeply in his other set of genes.

Skateboarder Rodney Mullens — sagged pants and all

“Smells like Teen Spirit” Take 2 — String Quartet Tribute

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Epstein, Robert. “The Myth of the Teen Brain,” Scientific American Mind Vol. 18, No. 2 (2007): 57-63.

Sabbagh, Leslie. “The Teen Brain, Hard At Work,” Scientific American Mind Vol. 17, No. 4 (2006): 21-25.

Sapolsky, Robert M. The Trouble With Testosterone. New York: Touchstone, 1998.