There’s a nice looking girl across the bar. You saunter up, elbow onto the bar and lean in close to give her your best line. That’s when you see the enormous mole on the left side of her nose. You try not to stare. It’s no big deal, right? The rest of her is pretty good, right? You decide to give it a try anyway. Just don’t mention the mole.
“Hi,” you say. “My name’s Carl. What’s your mole? Name! I meant name! What’s your name?”
But it’s too late. She gives you one glance full of withering contempt and stalks off into the darkness at the far end of the bar.
What the heck just happened? You told yourself to avoid talking about the mole, yet you did it anyway. Take comfort. You’re not alone. According to a scientific paper published last week in the journal Science, it’s a common phenomenon.
“There are all kinds of pitfalls in social life, everywhere we look; not just errors but worst possible errors come to mind, and they come to mind easily,” said the paper’s author, Daniel M. Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard. “And having the worst thing come to mind, in some circumstances, might increase the likelihood that it will happen.”
At a fundamental level, functioning socially means mastering one’s impulses. The adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action, some studies suggest, and mental health relies on abiding strategies to ignore or suppress deeply disturbing thoughts — of one’s own inevitable death, for example. These strategies are general, subconscious or semiconscious psychological programs that usually run on automatic pilot.
Perverse impulses seem to arise when people focus intensely on avoiding specific errors or taboos. The theory is straightforward: to avoid blurting out that a colleague is a raging hypocrite, the brain must first imagine just that; the very presence of that catastrophic insult, in turn, increases the odds that the brain will spit it out.
Oddly, even little kids have figured this out. A friend of Speed Racer’s once told me that whenever people in a room stop talking, someone will be thinking about Abraham Lincoln. I said that sounded pretty unlikely. Then she responded: “Well, now it’s going to happen because you’ll be thinking of Abraham Lincoln.” And you know what? She was right.
Being told, even by yourself, not to think about something increases the odds that you’ll think about it. It’s something heavy drinkers and smokers who are trying to quit know all too well. The effort to squelch a longing for a smoke or a drink can bring to mind all the reasons to break the habit; at the same time, the desire seemingly gets stronger.
So that’s something to think about the next time we tell our little dudes not to think about that delicious, sugar-coated gut bomb of a cereal that’s in the aisle of the grocery store you’ve just finished walking. Maybe we can tell them about Abraham Lincoln?
Oh yeah, I also need to say happy birthday to probably the greatest father-in-law ever, Nick Cimmento. Hi birthday is today, one day after Zippy the Monkey Boy’s birthday and we love it. We get to have a two-day celebration and that’s fun. Nick is a warm, wonderful man who knows more about cooking than I’ll ever be able to learn. He’s also one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. I won the in-law sweepstakes when I got Nick as a father-in-law. I hope he’s around for a long, long time.
– Richard
Tags: A Dude's Guide to Life, Abraham Lincoln, Adult, Adult Brain, Author Daniel, Automatic Pilot, birthday, Brain, Celebration, Contempt, cook, death, Disturbing Thoughts, dude, father, Freaky Friday, Freaky Friday, friend, Fundamental Level, Happy Birthday, Harvard, health, Hypocrite, Imps, Impulses, Inevitable Death, Inhibition, Insult, Journal Science, kids, little dude, little dudes, Little Kid, Little Kids, Man, Mole, Monkey Boy, Pitfalls, Psychologist, richard, science, Smokers, Speed Racer, Taboos, What The Heck
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