Mind over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations - Hardcover

Berdik, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591845092 ISBN 13: 9781591845096

Verlag: Current, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

“Our brains can’t help but look forward. We spend very little of our mental lives completely in the here and now. Indeed, the power of expectations is so pervasive that we may notice only when somebody pulls back the curtain to reveal a few of the cogs and levers responsible for the big show.”

We all know expectations matter—in school, in sports, in the stock market. From a healing placebo to a run on the bank, hints of their self-fulfilling potential have been observed for years. But now researchers in fields ranging from medicine to education to criminal justice are moving beyond observation to investigate exactly how expectations work—and when they don’t.

In Mind Over Mind, journalist Chris Berdik offers a captivating look at the frontiers of expectations research, revealing how our brains work in the future tense and how our assumptions—about the next few milliseconds or the next few years—bend reality. We learn how placebo calories can fill us up, why wine judges can’t agree, how fake surgery can sometimes work better than real surgery, and how imaginary power can be corrupting. We meet scientists who have found that wearing taller and more attractive avatars in a virtual world boosts confidence in real life, gambling addicts whose brains make losing feel like winning, and coaches who put blurry glasses on athletes to lift them out of slumps.

Along the way, Berdik probes the paradox of expectations. Their influence seems based on illusion, even trickery, but they can create their own reality, for good or for ill.

Expectations can heal our bodies and make us stronger, smarter, and more successful, or they can leave us in agony, crush our spirit, and undermine our free will. If we can unlock their secrets, we may be able to harness their power and sidestep their pitfalls.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, history, and fascinating true stories of xpectations in action,Mind Over Mind offers a spirited journey into one of the most exciting areas of brain research today.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Berdik is a science journalist and a former staff editor at The Atlantic and Mother Jones. He has written for numerous publications, includingNew Scientist, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The San Diego Union-Tribune. He lives in Boston.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

HEAD GAMES

[1 ] RUNNING ON EMPTY

Why are we thrilled by the crack of the starter’s pistol or the referee’s opening whistle? The contest of strength, speed, or endurance has begun. The game is under way. That split second is the pinnacle of sports expectations, which go way beyond who will win and who will lose. Indeed, they push up against our limits. And then they keep going.

On a breezy day in May 1954, a twenty-five-year-old medical student named Roger Bannister stepped onto the soggy track at Oxford University. He knew the time to beat, and so did thousands of spectators who had come to watch him run. The long-standing world record for a mile was 4 minutes and 1.4 seconds. But beating the world record wasn’t enough. Ever since Bannister failed to medal in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, he’d dedicated himself to running a mile in under 4 minutes.

Bannister knew that some doctors believed his goal was impossible, and possibly life-threatening. In a book about that race at Oxford, Bannister wrote, “I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well. I drove on, impelled by a combination of fear and pride.”

When Bannister finished in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, a jubilant crowd rushed the track. The record Bannister beat was nine years old. His new record stood for less than two months. Remember who beat it?*

The fact is that while few of us will ever run a 4-minute mile, it’s no longer newsworthy. Today it would likely earn no better than ninth place at international track competitions such as the Wanamaker Mile. Bannister’s achievement remains remarkable, because 4 is a nice round number, and because it symbolizes our ability to push beyond limiting expectations and bust the myths of impossibility—like Sir Edmund Hilary scaling Mount Everest in 1953 and Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947. Bannister’s legs powered him through that mile, along with a heart and lungs strengthened by years of preparation. Still, he needed something else to beat 4 minutes. He needed to believe it was possible.

Defining human limits is a mean business, something “the man” has always done to keep us down. Consider how much better the “best” is now than it was a century ago. In 2012, the current high school record for the 200-meter dash beats the 1912 Olympic gold medal time by a full second and a half, and the top high school marathoner would finish more than 13 minutes ahead of the 1912 gold medalist. The assumption that the future promises ever more astounding athletic feats fascinates audiences and motivates competitors. Suggesting that the days of “faster, higher, stronger” are numbered is about as popular as farting in church.

Of course, there are limits, not only for the mile, but for human athleticism more generally. The pace of new world records is slowing in competitions of pure speed, power, and endurance. At some point, these limitations will hold us back despite our steadfast refusal to accept them. What then? Change the rules? Change our bodies? Change the Olympic motto? Or do we need to change our minds?

Reflecting on the final sprint of his legendary mile, Bannister wrote, “My body had long since exhausted all its energy, but it went on running just the same. The physical overdraft came only from greater willpower.”

How far can willpower take a runner’s legs? How much of our muscle power is mind power? As athletes push up against our physical limits, the question looms large.ARE WORLD RECORDS BECOMING EXTINCT?

In 2004, Nature published a short piece extrapolating the trends in world record times for men and women running the 100-meter dash from 1910 to 2252. Because women’s times were improving faster than men’s, the authors concluded that women would one day be running faster than men, possibly before the end of the century.

Among the article’s many critics was Geoffroy Berthelot, a statistics-minded researcher at Paris’s Institute for Biomedical Research and Sports Epidemiology.

“If you just extrapolate the data, then you eventually say that the 100-meter record will be under one second,” Berthelot says. “But you can’t go beyond the physiological limit. And while we don’t know exactly where that is, we know you can’t go beyond zero. You can’t arrive before the start.”

Actually, Berthelot seems to know fairly precisely where the limits are, at least in some cases. In several swimming events and the sprint competitions in track, he thinks we’ve already reached them. A 2008 paper he coauthored looked at the progression of world records in Olympic events since the first Games in 1896. It concluded that performance in 13 percent of the events had already plateaued, and half of them would most likely max out within two decades. The paper’s title, “The Citius End,” suggests that the Olympic spirit might soon need to be redefined.

In a 2010 follow-up analysis, Berthelot and his coauthors went beyond world records and collected the top ten performances each year for seventy events, including thirty-six track and field events between 1891 and 2008 and thirty-four swimming events between 1963 and 2008. Plotted on a graph, the top performances improve in fits and starts. The steeper slopes hint at something unusual—a war’s end, a game-changing new technique, better equipment. Or doping.

For Berthelot, the fact that some world beaters likely cheated only strengthens his argument that the end is near for pure athleticism. In January 2013, after years of denials, Lance Armstrong admitted to doping throughout his storied cycling career, which included seven victories in the grueling twenty-one-day, 2,000 mile Tour de France.

Even before Armstrong confessed, so many top cyclists had been found guilty of doping, including nearly all of the cyclists who finished second and third behind Armstrong in his Tour victories, that the sport already seemed to have moved to a drug-enhanced level of performance expectations. There’s a tipping point after which the athletes who take drugs are no longer the exception. They become the new normal.

“Things were just getting faster and faster,” said cyclist Frankie Andreu in a May 2011 segment on 60 Minutesabout doping on the U.S. Postal Service’s cycling team, which Armstrong captained. “There’s 200 guys flying over these mountains, and you can’t even stay in the group. And it’s just impossible to keep up.” It was either dope or go home, Andreu said. So he doped.

There are plenty of people who have no real problem with that. They dismiss anti-doping efforts in professional sports as much ado about nothing, a crusade beset by double standards. At its core, the argument over sports doping is about our expectations for athletics. What do sports at the highest levels mean to us?

If the answer is striving for victory, overcoming failure, and, ultimately, pushing the boundaries of human athleticism, then we should try to keep the contests as clean as possible. Roger Bannister was lionized because he embodied a new sense of possibility for what human beings could do—what we could do. That was what captivated the world, not the absolute number of seconds that he ran.

Still, it would be naive to suggest that’s all, or even most, of what we want from top-level sports. We don’t pay good money to sit in the stands and be inspired. We want our team to win. We expect to be entertained. If this is what we want, then why not legalize performance boosters, so long as they’re reasonably safe. After all, dunking a basketball from the foul line is pretty cool,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Current
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1591845092
• ISBN 13: 9781591845096
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar