Modern Life Numbs You. Here’s The Neuroscience Of Waking Up | Tali Sharot
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2024
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s so easy, especially these days, to numb out. To get bored. To move through life on autopilot. There is even a scientific term for this: habituation.
Today we’re talking to a researcher who co-authored a new book about the neuroscience of habit and how to wake up again. To make things exciting. Or as she says, to “re-sparkle”.
Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. She’s written several books including The Optimism Bias and The Influential Mind. Her latest, co-written with Cass Sunstein, is called Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.
In this episode we talk about:
- What habituation is and what’s going on in the brain when it happens
- How it negatively impacts the joy we feel in life – and inversely – how it can make us stop noticing the bad stuff
- Key strategies for disrupting habituation and introducing change and variety into your life
- The interesting relationship between creativity and people who habituate slowly
- How habituation impacts our relationships
- Why it’s important to break up the good experiences, but swallow the bad whole.
- How to wake up from a “technologically induced coma”
- How people emotionally habituate to dishonesty and lying
- And lastly, we talk about the dangers of habituating to a slow, incremental rise in tyranny – and how dis-habituation entrepreneurs can help
Related Episodes:
#345 How to Change Your Habits | Katy Milkman
Making and Breaking Habits, Sanely | Kelly McGonigal
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wundry Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. |
| 0:05.0 | Join Wundry Plus in the Wundry app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:08.0 | This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody how we doing it is |
| 0:27.0 | how we doing it is so easy especially these days to, to numb out, to get bored, to move through life on |
| 0:35.9 | autopilot. |
| 0:36.9 | There is even, apparently, a scientific term for this. |
| 0:39.8 | Habituation. |
| 0:40.8 | Today we're going to talk to a researcher who has co-authored a new book about the |
| 0:44.7 | neuroscience of habituation and how to wake up again to make things exciting to make |
| 0:50.5 | things fresh or she says to resparkel. |
| 0:54.0 | Tolly Sherritt is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. |
| 1:00.0 | She's written several books, including the optimism bias |
| 1:02.9 | and the influential mind. |
| 1:04.6 | Her latest co-authored with Cass Sunstein |
| 1:07.2 | is called Look Again, the power of noticing |
| 1:10.2 | what was already there. |
| 1:11.5 | In this conversation, we talk about what habituation is and what's going on in the brain |
| 1:15.2 | when it's happening, how it negatively impacts the joy you can feel in daily life, |
| 1:20.8 | and inversely how it can make us stop noticing the bad stuff. |
| 1:24.0 | Key strategies for disrupting habituation and introducing change and variety into your life |
| 1:29.0 | including vacations, taking breaks, even taking a different route to work. |
| 1:33.3 | The fascinating relationship between creativity and people who habituate slowly. |
... |
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