Look Again

I just finished the book, Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein.

This book discusses how we habituate in life.

Situation habituation (How we start to ignore that which doesn't change)

There is evidence that we start to habituate to a tropical vacation within 43 hours!

Pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires

Use small brakes from habits (create changes) to minimize habituation

Habit and routine are anti-aphrodisiacs - more time apart can increase interest.

How do you seek knowledge?

Busy bodies tend to Explore and Exploiters tend to Hunt

Explorers look at different loosely related topics (Bill Gates - Book list is quite varied)
Hunters look at more related topics (Warren Buffet - Book list covers Economics)

Busy buddies are more likely to be sensation seekers or explorers

Persuading others

Don't repeat falsehoods even to debunk them as the repetition makes people habituate to believing it in the first place

We believe repeated information due to a sense of familiarity the repetition gives.
We believe things that are easier to process such as those presented in an easier to read or bigger font.

Risk

The more often we face risk the less risky it seems to us this is risk habituation (I thought about motorcycle riding vs airplane flying)

To improve safety, every now and then, mix things up to help reduce the risk desensitization and de-habituation.

Prediction Errors

You are always trying to predict what is going to happen next

"Reward prediction errors consist of the differences between received and predicted rewards. They are crucial for basic forms of learning about rewards and make us strive for more rewards—an evolutionary beneficial trait. Most dopamine neurons in the midbrain of humans, monkeys, and rodents signal a reward prediction error; they are activated by more reward than predicted (positive prediction error), remain at baseline activity for fully predicted rewards, and show depressed activity with less reward than predicted (negative prediction error)." ¹

The difference between expectations and outcomes are prediction errors.

Positive or negative prediction errors result with emotional connotations:

More reward than predicted (positive prediction error)
Baseline activity for fully predicted rewards
Depressed activity with less reward than predicted (negative prediction error)

Create some happiness by minimizing your negative prediction errors.

A positive prediction error will be elicited when a cue predicts a reward that was more valuable than expected.

What we notice

We noticed what is surprisingly different not what we are used to.

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it” ― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

[1] Schultz W. Dopamine reward prediction error coding. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2016 Mar;18(1):23-32. doi: 10.31887/DCNS.2016.18.1/wschultz. PMID: 27069377; PMCID: PMC4826767.

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