Big Brain Psychology
@BigBrainPsych • 20,960 subscribers
Learn to not suck at controlling your mind
Videos
Robert Greene on how to read people's true character: Most of us judge people by their best moments. The polished apology, the charming first impression, the carefully crafted image. Robert Greene argues this is exactly why we keep getting fooled. "People have patterns of behavior. Nobody ever does anything once." Greene uses a familiar example to illustrate this. Someone sends you an angry, offensive email. Then comes the apology: "I'm sorry, but that's not who I am. Something came over me. I'm not that person." Most of us accept this. We want to believe people are their best selves. "The truth is, they never did that once. It's a pattern. They've done it many times. If they've screwed you in some way, they've screwed 10 other people in their past." The lesson? Don't evaluate people based on isolated incidents. Look for the compulsive, repeating elements in their behavior. That's where their real character lives. What we need is to watch people when their guard is down. "We all wear masks. We all try to present ourselves as being noble and great. But the mask comes down in certain elements." Where do you look? According to Greene: "You want to look at how they treat their children, their spouse, their employees. They might be nice to you because they want something out of you, but when their back is turned and they're talking to other people, they're the biggest raging assholes around." This is the gap Greene wants you to notice. The distance between how someone performs for you versus how they behave when there's nothing to gain. "In the little details of life, they kind of reveal who they are."
Big Brain Psychology22,253 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Tim Ferriss on the dangerous trap hiding inside self-help: Most people approach self-improvement the same way someone might prepare to play soccer, except they never actually get on the field. Tim describes this pattern in striking detail: "You want to play soccer but first you're going to read all the textbooks and get a master's degree and PhD in soccer and then you're going to practice dribbling and penalty shots and so on by yourself and you want to become as perfect a player as possible by yourself before you ever actually get on the field and play the game of soccer." The result? You begin to believe that practising alone is the same as playing the game. This is the hidden danger Tim calls the self-help trap, the implicit belief that you must fix yourself, do the work, and polish yourself to readiness before you can meaningfully engage with other people, relationships, or family. The problem is that it never ends. There's always another edge to smooth, another flaw to address. The self becomes a project with no completion date. As Tim puts it: "You're always polishing this self and it can become this real recursive dangerous trap, this fixation on the self." The real game, relationships, family, community is learned by playing, not by preparing to play. The friction, the discomfort, the messiness of showing up imperfectly with other people is the development. You can't practise your way into readiness for it in isolation. The irony of self-help is that taken too far, it keeps you away from the very thing you're supposedly preparing for.
Big Brain Psychology16,712 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Most dysfunctional adults weren't raised by bad parents. They were raised by parents who never healed their own wounds.
Big Brain Psychology15,283 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Doctor Mike on grief: "Put on your shoes. You'll go somewhere. Doesn't matter where." Doctor Mike lost his mother to cancer. She had an aggressive form of CLL, a disease that normally moves slowly, but hers didn't. After gruelling treatment that changed her physically and left her weak, her oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering shook Mike's hand and told him she was cured. "That's the greatest news anyone can hear. Your hopes, ten out of ten." Days later, she developed gram-negative sepsis. Her blood pressure collapsed. The pressors didn't hold. She was gone. One of the hardest parts wasn't even his own grief, it was watching his father fall apart. Two Russian immigrants who had given up everything. His father retrained as a doctor in a foreign country. His mother, despite holding a PhD in Russia, went back to university just to learn enough English to teach high school math. "It was painful to watch my dad go through it. For the first few months, my focus was more on him than on myself." For those in the middle of that storm right now: grief, depression, whatever has brought you to your knees, Doctor Mike has one piece of advice: Action comes before motivation. Not the other way around. You don't wait to feel ready. You don't wait for the fog to lift. You put on your shoes. "You'll go somewhere. Doesn't matter where. Gym, not gym, walk, dog park." After his mother passed, the thing that helped him most wasn't traditional therapy, though he's done that too. It was going to the dog park with his dog. "Animal therapy is real." He even notes you don't need a dog to go. Just go. When you're inside the storm, you can't see a way out. That's not weakness, that's just what storms do. But motion creates momentum. One small, physical act: shoes on, door open, they interrupt the paralysis. What's the smallest action you could take today?
Big Brain Psychology17,709 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
![Simon Sinek on why society gets relationships wrong: Simon Sinek opens up about the decades-long stress of being judged for his relationship status. "I've gone on dates where literally the person I'm on a date with [asks] 'have you ever been married?' I'm like no. They're like 'what's your longest relationship?' I'm like about three years. And they say to me, 'What's wrong with you? Why haven't you been married?'" He explains the weight he carried from internalising this judgment: "The stress that I've carried for decades… I believed my own narrative that I am a failure and I am bad at relationships. And people like, 'you have commitment issues.' They all diagnose me and it didn't sound right because I don't think I do. Maybe I do. It's stressful and you carry that weight that I'm bad at relationships and I don't know how to make people happy." Then Simon shares the insight that challenged his entire self-narrative. He describes a friend who spent 16 years in an unhealthy relationship: "She admits freely that she should have been in it for one year. Society looks at her and says, 'She did it right. I did it wrong.'" He continues: "She got it right and I got it wrong. There's something wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with her because there's something flawed in you if you can't figure out how to do it. But [she was] staying in a 16-year relationship that you should have only been in for one that was unhealthy and unhappy and just not a good thing." That realisation reframed everything: "I'm a very happy person despite my lack of relationships because I have great friends." Simon's bigger point is about what society chooses to value: "Why does society overvalue the romantic relationship? This is the world we live in where there's an excessive amount of pressure to get married, white picket fence, 1.3 children or whatever the statistic is. And entire economies [are built] on how to find it, nurse it, get it, make it. And yet there's so little on friendship." We've built a cultural scoreboard that rewards people for staying in the wrong relationship longer than people who leave or never enter the wrong one. A 16-year unhappy marriage gets treated as success. A happy life full of deep friendships gets treated as a problem to be diagnosed. Maybe the real question isn't "what's wrong with you for not being married?" it's "what's wrong with a culture that measures a life by that metric in the first place?"](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2047337271284953397/amplify_video_thumb/2047337217253834754/img/XM4tCisFY2sinhan.jpg)
Simon Sinek on why society gets relationships wrong: Simon Sinek opens up about the decades-long stress of being judged for his relationship status. "I've gone on dates where literally the person I'm on a date with [asks] 'have you ever been married?' I'm like no. They're like 'what's your longest relationship?' I'm like about three years. And they say to me, 'What's wrong with you? Why haven't you been married?'" He explains the weight he carried from internalising this judgment: "The stress that I've carried for decades… I believed my own narrative that I am a failure and I am bad at relationships. And people like, 'you have commitment issues.' They all diagnose me and it didn't sound right because I don't think I do. Maybe I do. It's stressful and you carry that weight that I'm bad at relationships and I don't know how to make people happy." Then Simon shares the insight that challenged his entire self-narrative. He describes a friend who spent 16 years in an unhealthy relationship: "She admits freely that she should have been in it for one year. Society looks at her and says, 'She did it right. I did it wrong.'" He continues: "She got it right and I got it wrong. There's something wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with her because there's something flawed in you if you can't figure out how to do it. But [she was] staying in a 16-year relationship that you should have only been in for one that was unhealthy and unhappy and just not a good thing." That realisation reframed everything: "I'm a very happy person despite my lack of relationships because I have great friends." Simon's bigger point is about what society chooses to value: "Why does society overvalue the romantic relationship? This is the world we live in where there's an excessive amount of pressure to get married, white picket fence, 1.3 children or whatever the statistic is. And entire economies [are built] on how to find it, nurse it, get it, make it. And yet there's so little on friendship." We've built a cultural scoreboard that rewards people for staying in the wrong relationship longer than people who leave or never enter the wrong one. A 16-year unhappy marriage gets treated as success. A happy life full of deep friendships gets treated as a problem to be diagnosed. Maybe the real question isn't "what's wrong with you for not being married?" it's "what's wrong with a culture that measures a life by that metric in the first place?"
Big Brain Psychology12,413 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Chris Voss on the gut feeling you should never ignore: The former FBI hostage negotiator says your body knows when someone is lying even before your conscious mind does. In the clip below, Christopher Voss explains the science his team is actively teaching: "Learn the difference between your gut and your amygdala for lack of a better term, your fear centers and know which one is which." He's drawing a critical distinction most people miss. The amygdala triggers panic, anxiety, and self-doubt. The gut, however, is something else entirely: "Your gut is ridiculously accurate. Our gut is being fed by all these different inputs that we're aware of or that we have yet to be made aware of." What kind of inputs? Voss gives a concrete example: "The tone of voice doesn't match their words. The head tilt." Your brain is already processing these micro-signals and routing them through your gut before you can consciously articulate what's wrong. As Voss puts it: "You've got a supercomputer in your brain." The problem isn't that people lack this instinct. It's that they override it: "As soon as you start listening to your gut, you can't explain it at the time but you got a bad feeling. And later on, you saw it. It all came together." That lag, the gap between the gut signal and the rational explanation is exactly why most people dismiss it. They wait for logical proof that never arrives in time. The lesson from one of the world's most experienced negotiators is surprisingly simple: the feeling in your stomach during a conversation isn't anxiety. It might be data.
Big Brain Psychology12,252 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Jordan Peterson on why you must never give yourself an "easier" task to avoid the hard one: Peterson explains a psychological trap that almost everyone falls into when facing something difficult. "Don't practice what you do not want to become." He describes what happens inside your brain when you're avoiding a hard task: "If you're really sneaky when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard, so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to 'cause you're doing something else useful." This is the trap. You feel productive. You're busy. But you're not doing the thing. And every time you give in, you make it worse: "If you give into that temptation which you often will, then it wins. And because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick and it grows stronger. Anything you let win the internal argument grows. And anything you let be defeated shrinks, because it's punished." This is Peterson describing neurology: "Those are neurological circuits. You build those things in there. They're not going anywhere. You can build another little machine to inhibit them. That's the best you can do. Once they're in there, you can't get them out." Even the circuits you build to resist the bad habit aren't permanent: "The ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress and the old habits will come back up." So what's the actual lesson? Every time you dodge the hard thing, you're casting a vote for the version of yourself that avoids hard things. You're wiring that pattern deeper into your brain.
Big Brain Psychology12,779 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
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