YouSaid · the spoken record

Emily Balcetis

lines on the record: 89
first: 2022-12-13
most recent: 2022-12-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The pace is faster towards the end once these rats and mice are getting nearer to the finish line than it was at the beginning. Even when they have just expended some resources to try to make it through the maze to engage in this maze, they have even less than the deprived state that they started with and they're doubling down. They're moving faster through this when they're in the last quarter of their maze compared to the first quarter of their maze and like cute little studies where they've put restraining harnesses to measure how much pull is there. So how hard are they pulling to try to cross that finish line to get the treat and they pull harder at the end than at the beginning? And that's the idea of the goal gradient hypothesis that as we get close to meeting our goal, whether we are rats, mice, or people, that we double down on how much we're investing to cross over that finish line.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Respond, how do rats respond, all different kinds of animals, in addition to studying people, but some of the best work on this goal gradient idea came from the study of mice and rats looking to see, you know, when they're running a maze, what is their pace? How fast are they trying to finish this maze? And I say this just with a little grimace, that oftentimes they motivate these animals by making them hungry, depriving them of food for a bit, or of water so that their treat at the end is something that their bodies really want more water or more food or a treat of some kind. And the rats and mice will know that that's what they're going to get when they get towards the end. And I mentioned that just also to note that like they don't like marathon runners, they don't have a lot of resources to go off of, especially as they're getting towards the end of the race. And yet what these scientists find is that”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, do keep in mind that there are options for most people, that that finish line could capture attention, but so could the competition. That's, you know, running neck and neck alongside you or the people that are cheering you on and that are holding signs with your name or, you know, hitting the cowbell off to the sides. That's all possible forms of distraction that would widen your attention. And these data are suggesting that that may not be the best thing to focus on, even if it's exciting to see, you know, your sister who's screaming for you over there. It might not be the best to really pay her a lot of attention towards that end. Okay, so that was the first thing that I wanted to respond to. And the second one was the goal gradient hypothesis. Now, you're getting it deep in the weeds on some, you know, classic psychology, which is really great, those that don't know about this, you know, this was work that was started in the 30s and the 40s, oftentimes in those decades people were using animal models where they would look at, well, how do my...”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so two parts there that it seems like one way to put your first part of your question of like when the finish line is present, like how could you not be focused on it? Yes, you would be focused on it, but you could also be focused on your competition unless you're five minutes ahead of the pack, there's probably other people that are around you. And how much are you paying attention to those people? And just, you know, to remind you, like our Olympic athletes said they don't do that. They are not, they are not really focused on, you know, where are other people relative to where they are when they're really trying to push themselves over the finish line.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, you know, so yes, people who already can perform at this are using these two strategies pretty strategically that they recognize, as you intuited, Shane, that like they can't use this at the beginning, you know, max capacity because it would be tiring to engage in that kind of effort of finding a target, focusing on it, fixating on it, setting another one that would be really challenging to do and come at a cognitive and maybe even a physical mental cost. But they do use that strategy and then sort of conserve its use to maximize it towards the end. And that seems to be correlated with high performance.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Race times. Those are the people that use this strategy of ramping up narrowed attention and ramping down wide attention to the greatest degree. Does that make sense?”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that by the time they're nearing the end, reaching the halfway point, there's a kilometer left, they're nearing the end, they're really using narrow attention quite a lot and really have dropped off on that wide attention. And that sort of polarizing polarization of the use of these two strategies where narrowed is increasing and wide attention is decreasing. That is especially done by people who end up who run faster. We've collected their bib numbers and then looked up their performance statistics by whatever organization is responsible for recording official race times. That's publicly available information. And what we found is that the people who actually run races faster and in other studies who report that their fastest race time or what they're currently running at is faster than those that have slow.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great question. And the answer is yes. When we've done extensive studies, like of thousands of people who are runners, you know at all levels of accomplishment. And we ask them about these strategies, you know, starting at the beginning of the race. Let's take a 5K. The beginning at the beginning, when you're just coming out of the starting blocks versus you're a kilometer in, you're halfway, you've got a kilometer left, you're nearing the finish line. You know, when we break a race down like that and ask them, how frequently are you using narrow detention? How frequently are you using more expansive widened attention? What do you find is that for people who already can perform at that level, you know, to run a 5k for most people is they have to train at least to some degree for that. So these are people who are capable of running and who have chosen to run and report on their experience about running. They use the narrow detention a little bit more than the wide attention, but that gap grows tremendously over the course of the”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not about having accomplished it already. It's when you're trying to track where are you at and where do you have to go, it's sort of in these moments of accountability when you're taking You know, that's a different conversation about well, do you need to reset the goal? What kind of goal is this? Is it a one and done experience or is this something that requires sort of a habitual life change? You know, fitness, health does, right? You can meet your ideal weight, you can get your A1C to where you want it to be. But unless you sustain that for a very long time, you're going to be back to square one pretty soon.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They probably come as no surprise. It's like, yeah, I know that moment. But being able to self diagnose, what is this goal? What is your personal commitment to this goal? And if it feels low to you, then looking backwards might be motivating in that middle ground. But if it is something that you've always wanted to do, you're passionate about, you've already shown interest looking forward might be a source of motivation.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To that goal. So if you already know this is something that I want, this is something I'm passionate about, this is, you know, I've got a personal intrinsic interest in this. People find motivation by looking at closing that gap between where I am and where I want to be. But for people who are less committed, maybe, you know, this is the first time they're trying out this goal or it was a goal that was given to them. They haven't had buy-in at a personal level themselves. Looking backwards, back is what is useful, focusing their attention on how far they've come. This is where I am now. And that's where I started. And they get a sense of, you know, so they get to pat themselves on the back in a sense. Like, I didn't even know that I cared about this. I didn't even know I was capable of doing this. But look how far I've come. And that's a source of energy or motivation for them. So the takeaway here is that just recognize that there are options. I say them now.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the middle where we've been working at it for a while, but there's still kind of a ways to go. I don't know. How's my progress? There's obstacles. There's competing goals. The middle gets murky. And that's oftentimes when we see drop-off happening, after people have given the first stab at it and then they have to reassess their commitment and try something else. And that's where this strategy that Ilet Fishbach has talked about can come in useful, which is being intentional about where you direct your attentional focus. Intentional about attentional focus. And what she has found is that people get a burst of motivation or, you know, and performance increases, people engage in the goal-relevant activity at that halfway point, if they look towards the finish line, look towards what separates where I'm at right now and where I want to go. But especially for people who are committed.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so my lab hasn't done this work, but a great suggestion comes out of IL at Fishbox research at the University of Chicago that, again, if we realize that we have different places that we can look or that we can focus our attention, our cognitive attention, or our visual attention, again, we can open ourselves up to more possibilities than we might use as a default. So if we're thinking about a goal, oftentimes the tricky part is in the middle. You know, if we've set a goal, usually we've set the goal because we're excited to try something new. That's often the cases that we are setting these goals and there's a moment of excitement about it, or we're getting towards the end, and there's either the panic because we need to get this thing done or the excitement that we're almost done or the impending reward that we're looking forward to receiving. So, you know, the beginning and the end have sort of unique motivational properties in and of themselves for where they're at.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of proximity, that visual illusion of greater proximity changes their psychology, that then is what translates into the improved performance. So here, really to understand, how do we get people to exercise better? One is that we want to induce that perception reality gap. It's not something to be afraid of or to think is a deficiency. It's an opportunity, actually. It's an opportunity for some sort of self-trickery, self-deception here that can work to our advantage once we know we are capable of changing our eyes that can change our psychology, that can change our performance, why not embrace this perception, reality gap, and use it as a source of power and control and opportunity.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then let us see how it's going for you using the strategy that we talked to you about now. Why does that happen? I think that's pretty amazing that that does happen because it's not magic. It's about changing people's psychology. Yes, we're changing what their eyes are doing. That's changing their visual experience of the landscape. But that then has psychological consequences. People, when they see that, when they experience that finish line is closer or the stop sign that they've focused on or the building that they've always hoped that they could walk to, that they've focused their attention on is closer, that changes their mindset. Now it doesn't seem so hard because now it looks close. It looks closer to me. They believe in themselves. They have a sense of self-efficacy that is higher now. The task doesn't seem so difficult. They believe they have the resources to take on this challenge. There's a host of cascading sort of psychological effects that comes from that misperception.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Increase the efficiency of this particular exercise. Now, of course, that's not going to make people one bout of efficient exercise isn't going to change people's body composition or that won't have the meat a health goal. They need to do this over time. But what we also found is that if we taught them that strategy and tested its impact right here in front of us when we're watching and then tell them, now go out and exercise over the course of the next week and do you mind if we check out your fitness tracking app what we find is that people who have been trained in that narrow focus of attention go out for more walks, they take more steps and they walk faster in each walk. So we've improved the efficiency of their exercise even when we're not there to monitor what they're doing. And even when they're like compensation isn't contingent on what they're doing. It's just like, hey, if you could go for some walks and go for some or some runs and”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People can do that. We have them talk to us about what is it that you're focused on? What's catching your attention right now? Those are easy instructions to understand and it's easy to make your eyes do it. What's important though is that that's not what their eyes do naturally. When they're walking or when they're running, people do take a sort of wider perspective. They broaden their scope of attention relative to what these instructions are having them do. And when we talk people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that They moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line. It was always exactly the same distance and we were using our stopwatches to see how fast did they move. They moved 23% faster. And they said it hurt 17% less. So exactly the same actual experience, but subjectively it was easier and they performed better.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, visual experience does seem to be implicated in how they're moving their body at these amazing paces. And what they're talking about is something that we can teach other people to do. We're not going to be able to take somebody who is really struggling to be in shape and turn them into a gold medalist. That's not the point here. That's not most people's goal. But can we improve their experience in some way? By teaching them to do with their eyes what these Olympic athletes are doing? The answer is yes. You can tell people just like I have you to focus their attention, choose a target, imagine there's a spotlight shining just”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intuition going into these conversations was that they would say that they have like amazing powers of perception. They could see in front of them, on the sides, behind them. I know that's not physically possible, but that's just what I thought would happen, that they knew exactly where they were relative to their competition, that they could do something with their peripheral vision that maybe I couldn't do. But that's not at all. I was totally wrong. They said they had this sort of hyper focus that, you know, for shorter runs, that they just focused on the finish line as if there was, you know, a spotlight shining just on that finish line and that they weren't paying any attention at all to their peripheral vision. When it was longer runs, that they would choose a target up ahead and focus on that till they hit it and then they would choose another target. And that seemed to resonate with other sort of memoirs that I was reading about accomplished athletes as well, like marathon runners would take that approach. So then I thought.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That suggested our visual experiences are not just reflective of the world that's out there, but instead it has to do with what is our body capable of doing and what is our brain capable of supplementing our own motivational states and physical states of our body are working together to shift what it is that we're seeing in the world out there. Now you couple that with like around this time we had the opportunity to talk with some amazing athletes, some Olympic athletes, some of the world's fastest runners like the fastest guy out of Trinidad, someone else who's trained against Hussein Lightning Bolt. Like these are amazing accomplished athletes. And I was wondering what are they doing? What's happening with their eyes as they are running? And like I have no expectation that if I just interview them and then adopt what they say, that I'll be able to do what they have done. Of course not. But I just wanted to get some insight from some really accomplished people.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To people for whom it might be harder to make it to that finish line, to navigate that space. We also found that that's the case with motivation, that when people are more motivated to exercise or to make it to that finish line, that motivation can, in a sense, compensate for that effect of their body on their perception of distance so that even highly motivated people who are highly motivated, even if they have a higher waist to hip ratio, might see the distance in a way that suggests it's just as short as people who have a lower waist to hip ratio. So motivation can change our visual experience and align people to experience a world that looks more like a person who'd have an easier time navigating it. So those were like, you know, two initial findings that sets of findings.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the first places that we started looking was how people perceive distance, and is it related to something about their bodies or about their motivation? We spent a long time looking through the literature to see how do people study distance perception, coming up with their own measures as well as using those from the past to see not just what do people think about distance, but how are they really seeing distances? And some of the things that we found, regardless of what measures we were using, was that people who weigh more, we index this by waist-to-hip ratio and by BMI to metrics that the medical community uses to index people's weight status or to diagnose weight status. And we found that people who have a higher waist-to-hip ratio or a higher BMI see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist-to-hip ratio or a lower BMI. Those distances literally look farther.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been engaged in is trying to think okay when it comes to exercise distance perception is something that really matters that you know we have to assess how much energy do I have how much motivation do I have and how far do I need to go and trying to regulate that get those two in sync with one another”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To push people, in some cases literally over the finish line, if we're talking about the context of exercise. So we were taking that idea that I had said 20 years ago, I was so naive to think I had discovered and applied it to the context of exercise and tried to think, okay, maybe there's something about exercise that not everybody sees it the same way. Of course, we don't all think about exercise the same way. I like exercising. My husband hates it. He's a very fit person, which is annoying that he can hate exercising, yet still be quite fit. He burns his calories when he sleeps. It's so weird and he's so lucky. But that's because it's not fun, right? So like we all know those kinds of examples where we think about exercise in different ways, but maybe there's something about the visual experience when exercising that is helpful for some people and might be part of the problem for others who are struggling to do it at the level that they want. So that's one of the questions that motivated a big line of work.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that question that you're asking really is at the heart of one of our longstanding lines of research is one trying to understand, well, what are sources of problems as people are trying to get stuff done in this world? The goals that they care most about as a motivation psychologist, which I am also a lot of work has been done trying to understand, well, maybe people just really don't care. Maybe they actually aren't as motivated on the things that they're working towards than they should be. So let's increase motivation. Yeah, that's part of it. Maybe they are doing themselves a disservice. They're talking to themselves in ways that aren't helpful. Like, you know, they're putting themselves down or they don't really believe in themselves enough to be able to get the job done where our own worst enemy when it comes to self-sabotaging kinds of language. Yeah, that's part of it. And we can change those things, but those changes don't help enough.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This point. So I started doing some studies and then grew much more aware of the literature that I was engaging with to realize that people had been asking this question for a really long time. But now in the last 20 years ago, we were at a time in science where the technologies available to us are just much better. And our understanding of how the brain works is much better. And so we can develop more sophisticated, accurate theories about how is this possible? How could I see something different than you, but you and I both don't know it? So like, how is that even possible? And so now we're at a time in our understanding of science to be able to answer those kinds of questions with more sophisticated technology to study them with more precision. Like in our lab, we use eye tracking. We have sensors that emit light that bounces off the back of our retina and goes through our pupil, bounces off our retina.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About sort of the malleability of how those pairings come to be that not everybody sees the same thing and does the same action. Not everybody sees a cigarette and wants to hold it or doesn't feel that craving, right? Of I want to smoke this. Not everybody feels that way, but some people really do strongly. The actions can vary with what it is paired against the visual stimulus is paired against. So he was saying like actions can be automatic but interchangeable from one person to the next. And I thought, well, what about visual experiences? Maybe visual experiences also are malleable. Maybe we don't all, if we don't all act the same way in the same context, maybe we don't all see the same context. Maybe we see things in different ways too. 20 years ago when I had what I thought was this great insight, it was me just not realizing that people have been studying this at this point for 70, 80 years. It had been like theorized by psychological theorists for hundreds of years.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be perfectly honest, it's because I didn't really know the literature well enough. And I thought I had discovered something totally amazing and mind-blowing. But no, because all of science is developed in this sort of incremental way. So to be completely transparent, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientists who've done great work before me. So I had read a really important paper by somebody named John Barge, who's at Yale, a faculty member at Yale University, and he had talked about the perception, behavior link that we react, we can react very automatically, instantly to what it is that we're seeing. And we can sort of build up these habitual patterns of acting in a particular context in response to a particular person, or when we see something like chocolate cake. Oh, I just want to eat it right now, you know, all kinds of pairings can happen that when we see something, we act in a certain way. And he was talking.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There isn't a definitive answer on that, but one source of insight on why do we do that, it could be related to the neurological real estate that's taken up by our visual experience. There's far more of our cortex, the outer layer of our brain that responds to visual information than any other form of information. So our brain thinks it's important. More of our brain space is taken up to respond to visual input than auditory input or to tactile input. And I think, and not just might reflect our sort of evolutionary origins as well, that we base a lot of what we see, what we're going to think, what our next actions are going to be based on what it is that we're seeing that has done us well to be able to prepare for something that might be dangerous by being able to see it before it's right upon us.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know to be true. It's relying on memories that we have formed to help us very quickly piece together those little bits of information that we've gotten from the world around us to construct something meaningful, to put that information together to acknowledge this is what I'm looking at right now. It does that based in part on what it already thinks we're going to be seeing. What we already think we're going to be seeing and then sort of tests the input against that visual hypothesis.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, because it's not just what light lands on our retinas and then gets fed up through our optic nerve into our brain. That's not what seeing is. Seeing is taking that information, taking the light and the cells that respond to that light, but then making sense of it, seeing is making sense of that information. And that's where our brains really come into play, that we are incredible, A, well, not AI, we are, you know, not artificial intelligence. We are true intelligence. Our brain has created this great algorithm to help us do that really efficiently, to take these little bits of light and craft something meaningful out of it. So it's not just zeros and ones, but it's the face of our husband. It's the crawling of our child, right? That's what we're seeing. But we can only do that if we can put those little bits of information into context. Our brain is taking what we are.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is coming in ambiguously in a degraded fashion in a sense. And all of that is stuff that like, yes, once we talk about it, you know that, but you're not thinking about that at any given point in time. And you're not correcting for it. You're not acknowledging that like, oh, most of what I think is true right now, I should put an asterisk next to. I should take with a grain of salt because I recognize the biology of my physical construction and the way that our eyes are set up at this moment is going to leave me information deficient. We don't think that way. And as a result, I can often go overlooked and help to foster that perception reality gap.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What your eyes are doing if you're reading text in a book, you're trying to read a passage and you know that to pick out those words and to take those letters and construct Because we know that we can't pick up on, we can't focus on everything. We don't take a snapshot of the page. We have to moveed view around. To put it in a perspective, essentially if you take your two thumbs, put them side by side and hold them at arm's length. That surface area of your thumbnails is what you can take in with great precision and clarity. And the rest is coming in fuzzy. It's coming in through our peripheral view. We're missing details about we can't detect sharp edges necessarily. It sort of blends together. It's more foggy what's coming in. We lose information that comes in through our peripheral vision. We can't really pick up on color very well of what's on the sides outside of that focused foveal view. And so as a result, you know, a lot of the information that narrowed selected amount of information that our eyes are even capable of taking in.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We get the whole story. Why aren't we getting the whole picture? Because what our eyes are pointed at reflects a very narrow selection of what is in the world that we are situated in at any given moment. Now, we know that, but are we really consciously aware of that at any given point in time? Of course, we know it. We can know it, but are we thinking about it and taking that into consideration when we're trying to decide if we've got the whole picture or not? And I would say like for the most part, no, that's not generally that important to us to be constantly reminding ourselves of the unknown unknown. So things you don't even know that are happening all around you. Are you thinking about those things? No, you're thinking about the things that you do know more so than the things that you don't know that you don't know. Another thing about our physical construction is that, you know, if you think about what can you take in with great clarity and precision, our fovial view.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's things about the way that the eyes are constructed that I think are also really interesting. Again, it's always helpful to put it in contrast or in comparison. So if we think about how our faces are structured, we have for the most part two eyes on the front of our face that point forward. But think about a horse. Think about any other animal that's an animal of prey, that it is what is eaten. Like horses, they have eyes on the sides of their head, like literally on the sides of their head. And so as a result, their field of view is like, you know, 270 degrees, three quarters of everything that's around them, they can pick up with their eyes. Now, that's not true for us. We have to move our heads around. That's not true for owls. We are so excited when we can see what an owl's neck is capable of doing because it really moves its head all around. So when we look at the basic biology of our physical construction, we can see why don't”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Visual experience unique and builds a unique sense of trust and miscalibration. It's because we lack the opportunity for feedback and updating.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Delicious that you're tasting or smelling at a restaurant and you're trying to figure out what the chef put in there, and you know that you don't have the whole story. But rarely do we have that experience with vision? And that's what I think is one of the things that makes it really special is that if we are seeing something the way that it is not really, or if we've missed seeing something very rarely does the world correct that experience for us, and that contributes to a sense of confidence that we're getting the whole picture, which builds a trust in visual experience that may not be so well founded. We believe that we're seeing everything that's really out there because very rarely do we ever have that impression, that belief, second guessed or corrected for us to learn otherwise, especially when you make that, when you take that in contrast to all the other senses that we have. So that's just one of the things that I think makes that.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you know, I think there's something really special about vision for the reasons that you've just articulated, but in comparison to other sensations, other ways that we get information about the world, we don't get the kind of feedback about our visual experience the way we do about all the other senses. So, you know, oftentimes we could be touching something really wonderful, like a new fabric or trying to find the right kind of the right outfit on the shelves. And it feels so soft. And then we look at the label to find out, well, what is that? And only sadly, to discover it was polyester and not silk that we thought or something, right? So we get that kind of tangible feedback that what we think we're feeling isn't quite what is really true. You have a conversation with somebody and you've misunderstood what they said and they correct you in the moment. Oh, that's not what I said, and not just meant, but that's not what I said, right? So you've gotten their words wrong or something.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can tell people just like I have you to focus their attention, choose a target, imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it. Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery, almost as if you have blinders on, right? So don't pay attention to those distractors. And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up from the start line to the finish line. It was always exactly the same distance. And they said it hurt 17% less. We are capable of changing our eyes that can change our psychology, that can change our performance. Why not embrace this and use it as a source of power and control and opportunity?”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT