If you’re expecting not to like this email, you probably won’t
👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #188: hot sauce, getting older, and titrating your news intake
By Harris Sockel
Be honest… what did you expect when you opened this email?
Information? Entertainment? Controversial opinions? Obvious ones? All of the above? None??
Whatever your expectations, they’re shaping your experience of what you’re reading right now. “Our perceptions of reality are… fragile things,” Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE writes. What you expect to think and feel not only shapes your perception, but it literally changes what’s happening in your brain.
Wilson cites a study of hot sauce. People volunteered to sit inside fMRI machines while being fed one of a few hot (or hot-ish) sauces through a tube. (I would never in my life volunteer for this, but good for them!)
A warning flashed before each sauce: one jalapeño pepper for “mild,” two jalapeños for “very hot.” The most significant finding: People who already hated spicy food hated it more when they were warned about it first. If you think you won’t like something, knowing it’s coming intensifies your dislike. And not just on a subjective level, but on a real neurological one.
After seeing two jalapeños, the fMRI reveals that your “spiciness” neural pathways lightup — they’re “on a hair trigger to cause pain perception — and when the spicy squirt comes, they fire.” You feel the spice that much more intensely.
I think there are all kinds of extensions of this idea: If you expect to hate a move, a job, an assignment, or a person… you will. More! On the other hand, if you go into it with an open mind, or even a little distracted by something else, you might still dislike it — but not as much.
🔥 Lighting round: Great, recent Medium stories in 1 sentence or less
- If a project intimidates you, ask yourself this clarifying question: “Why am I doing the thing I’m about to do?”
- Loneliness is simply the difference between your desired and perceived connections, the key word there being “perceived.”
- As you get older, you start to develop an intuitive understanding of what you want to say “no” to — even if you’re not sure what to say “yes” to.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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