David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist from Binghamton University, did a couple interesting experiments with sitters and rovers. In one study, he put metal traps in a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The rovers, being more active, were the first to check out the traps. Consequently, they were also the first ones to be caught. The sitters, because they were more likely to sit on the sidelines, were impossible to capture using these traps.

However, in another experiment, Wilson transported all the fish to a new environment. He found that the rovers were most likely to begin investigating their new surroundings and finding food. Due to this, the rovers began eating five days before the sitters started. In this example, it was the rovers who were most likely to survive.

In some cases, the sitters’ passiveness directly led to their survival (especially when their passiveness helped to avoid a dangerous situation). But during other times this passiveness actually hurt their ability to adapt to new surroundings when necessary.

“Just Do It” vs. “Look Before You Leap.”

In a lot of personal development literature we hear the mantra, “Just do it!” Take the common example of diving into a cold pool. Often, when we try to go step-by-step, the coldness becomes that much more unbearable. This can actually inhibit us from adapting to the temperature fast enough to act and fully immerse ourselves into the water. Sometimes it’s easier to just “jump in” and get it over with. This is when the common attitude of a rover becomes most beneficial.

A less popular phrase in personal development is “Look before you leap.” This strategy is different than “Just do it.” It means we take a step back and evaluate our situation more carefully before diving in. Take for example addictive behaviors like gambling or sex. If we always act impulsively (automatically, without thinking) then we tend to engage in these risky behaviors without inhibition. Then we are more likely to end up with an empty bank account or an STD.

Thinking and doing need to be balanced.

Sometimes “thinking” gets a bad rep. We hear of people planning and contemplating ideas all day, but never doing anything productive about them. Maybe we want to approach a girl at a bar, thinking of all the things we want to say, but then we over-analyze the situation and cripple ourselves from ever approaching. In these kinds of cases, too much thinking can turn out to be a bad thing. For some people it is very easy to get “stuck in their heads” and never step into their bodies.

On the other end of the spectrum, too little thinking can often cause us to be foolish or reckless. If we never think about the consequences of our actions, then we may neglect something important and pay the costs later. People who live impulsively (with no projection of the future) tend to not have very positive futures, because they fall into mistakes that they could’ve avoided by being a little more thoughtful and cautious.

Smart and healthy risk-taking.

The balance between thinking and doing is going to largely depend on what you are trying to achieve.

As I mentioned earlier, approaching a girl at a bar may be something that is easier to “just do.” What is the worst that can happen? You’ll say something stupid and embarrass yourself? You’ll get rejected? Maybe worst-case-scenario you get slapped?

The risks and costs are relatively minimal, so there is little sense in worrying about it. Yet, some people never face this anxiety because they convince themselves that this minor embarrassment is the worst thing in the world. That’s not smart risk-taking – that’s dumb risk-avoidance. You’ll probably never see the girl again and she’ll forget about the experience by the end of the week. Don’t make a big deal out of nothing.

The same goes for jumping into cold pools.

Of course, there are other situations we may find ourselves in where the potential risks and costs are much greater. Like investing your retirement funds. That is something that is worth deliberately thinking about and making sure you go over every detail before making your decision. Making a mistake here could cost you all the money you’ve saved over the years – that’s a biggie. That’s when you need to act smarter, minimize the loss of risk, and try to play it more safe. Acting impulsively with your savings is a disaster waiting to happen.

Anxiety and uncertainty.

All risk is a result of uncertainty. The future can be somewhat predictable, but we can never quite know what will happen. It is often this uncertainty that causes us to experience anxiety before choosing a course of action.

Anxiety is a type of forward-thinking – it looks into the future and sees where things may go wrong. We feel anxious before giving a public speech because we don’t know if it will go over well or if we might embarrass ourselves.

The same is true for any other kind of social anxiety or performance anxiety.

Of course, some anxiety is good. Distinguishing “good anxiety” from “bad anxiety” is an important part of smart decision-making and risk-taking. Sometimes anxiety is an important signal that we should not follow a particular course of action because the potential consequences are too great. Sky diving is going to typically make us more anxious than petting a bunny because the risks of sky-diving are much higher. When people develop “irrational” fears about bunnies, that is usually a sign of an unhealthy phobia – because the fear doesn’t necessarily match the risks.

Mundane activities (like tying your shoes or taking a shower) don’t usually elicit much anxiety because they are more familiar, and therefore you go in with greater certainty of how the event will unfold. Only if someone has a bad experience in a shower will they develop that anxiety and uncertainty that the bad event may repeat itself.

Does your anxiety match the risks?

As I mentioned before, anxiety is often deemed “irrational” if it doesn’t match the potential risks. Some people are afraid of being in the same room as mustard, even when they understand that it poses no real threat. Anxiety may mismatch with risks depending on a number of things: unfamiliarity of an experience, a faulty belief system, or a traumatic experience.

Some unhealthy anxiety can be overcome by trying to change our thoughts (like in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy). We can reframe our perspective by looking at a situation from a different angle.

Sometimes we put too much importance on the present moment, but miss the bigger picture.

Let’s go back to the approaching a girl at a bar example. In the moment, you may know that it will completely SUCK if the girl rejects you and embarrasses you in front of your friends. You’ll be the laughing stock for the rest of the night.

But if you zoom out and see the bigger picture, you often realize that this event isn’t as important as you were making it out to be.

Imagine yourself 90 years old looking back on your college experiences at the bar: are you really going to care that 70 years ago some girl poured beer on you, or slapped you in the face, or told her friends your cheesy pick-up line? Probably not. In fact, you’d probably have more regret if you never took those little risks in the first place. Those little mistakes are what make your life richer (and besides, you now have good stories to tell your grandchildren!)

This is one simple example of how reframing your perspective can give you the freedom to take these little risks. Because they’re just that – little risks. And although in the moment you may experience a little pain and discomfort, in the end these short-term costs can often lead to long-term gratification.

Too risk-avoidant.

When individuals become too risk-avoidant, they are chronic “sitters” – always sitting on the sidelines, never doing anything, and never taking any chances with their life. As we know, sometimes this temperament can be quite beneficial, but other times it inhibits us from adapting to life in a more effective way. It inhibits us from personal growth.

Even when we try to avoid risk-taking altogether, it is something that we can’t completely avoid. Every time we don’t act, we risk losing opportunities to improve our lives. On your death bed, you may find that you regret all those times you didn’t take risks. “What ifs” can haunt you, and sometimes it is better to try something and fail (and fail) than to never try at all.

In the end, healthy risk-taking is about balance.

By the end of the day, I think it is clear that we need to find a balance between risk-seeking and risk-avoidance. We should try to identify times where we should be more cautious and safe in our decision-making, but also identify other times where the risks may be worth taking.

Check out this online course by Sean Cooper designed to help you face your social anxiety and shyness.

“To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches. The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start:

‘…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved.’

The second speech contained the ‘damn it’ at the end and the third had neither.

When participants’ attitudes were measured, they were most influenced by the speeches with the mild obscenity included, either at the beginning or the end.”

2. How Porn Can Hijack Your Brain

“’The addictiveness of Internet pornography is not a metaphor,’ explains psychiatrist Norman Doidge in The Brain That Changes Itself. Porn users are seduced into pornographic training sessions that meet all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps, namely, rapt attention, reinforcement, and dopamine consolidation of new neural connections.”

3. Women’s Grey Matter Grows After Giving Birth

“A small study published by the American Psychological Association contradicts the long-held notion that motherhood addles a woman’s brain.

Neuroscientists from the respected Yale University in the U.S. scanned the brains of 19 new mothers in the weeks after they had given birth.

The results showed that the amount of grey matter – brain cells that crunch information – had increased by a small but significant amount by the time the women were three to four months into motherhood.”

4. Do Dogs Dream?

“Many people believe that dogs do dream. Most dog owners have noticed that at various times during their sleep, some dogs may quiver, make leg twitches or may even growl or snap at some sleep-created phantom, giving the impression that they are dreaming about something. At the structural level, the brains of dogs are similar to those of humans. Also, during sleep the brain wave patterns of dogs are similar that of people, and go through the same stages of electrical activity observed in humans, all of which is consistent with the idea that dogs are dreaming.”

5. Hire Happy People!

“Want your customers to have a better experience? Instead of trying to train your employees to smile, just hire happy people.

Apparently, you don’t have to be an expert in reading faces to tell the difference between a real smile and a ‘social smile.’ The latter is what facial coding experts call the smile we use when it is socially appropriate to smile but we aren’t really filled with delight. In a social smile, we form a smile with our mouth but far fewer facial muscles are engaged. In his new book About Face, Dan Hill (who actually IS an expert in facial coding) reports:

‘Participants watched previously videotaped interactions that, unknown to them, had been staged between a hotel check-in clerk and a would-be guest. The variable was that for some check-in enactments the actress playing the clerk was invited to feel, then project, genuinely positive feelings toward the guest (true smiles). In other cases, the actress was instead told she had to smile (social smiles). Observers of the respective videos find the service performed with a truer smile far more satisfying.’

6. The Power Of Loss

“The Frontal Cortex blog has a fantastic piece on ‘loss aversion’ – the cognitive bias where try to we avoid losses more than we try to obtain gains – and its origin in the Allais Paradox.

The crucial thing about loss aversion is it is not about just losing things – it’s also about the perception that we might be losing something, regardless of the actual impact on our resources.

For example, people tend to be less keen to undergo surgery when it is described as having a 20% death rate than when described as having a 80% survival rate, even though both mean exactly the same thing.”

7. How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction

“Prozac is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 54 million people around the world, and prevented untold amounts of suffering.

But the success of Prozac hasn’t simply transformed the treatment of depression: it has also transformed the science of depression. For decades, researchers struggled to identify the underlying cause of depression, and patients were forced to endure a series of ineffective treatments. But then came Prozac. Like many other antidepressants, Prozac increases the brain’s supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter. The drug’s effectiveness inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical hypothesis: Sadness is simply a lack of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us up because they give the brain what it has been missing.

There’s only one problem with this theory of depression: it’s almost certainly wrong, or at the very least woefully incomplete. Experiments have since shown that lowering people’s serotonin levels does not make them depressed, nor does it worsen their symptoms if they are already depressed.”

8. See No Shape, Touch No Shape, Hear a Shape? New Way of ‘Seeing’ the World

“Scientists at The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital — The Neuro, McGill University have discovered that our brains have the ability to determine the shape of an object simply by processing specially-coded sounds, without any visual or tactile input. Not only does this new research tell us about the plasticity of the brain and how it perceives the world around us, it also provides important new possibilities for aiding those who are blind or with impaired vision.

Shape is an inherent property of objects existing in both vision and touch but not sound. Researchers at The Neuro posed the question ‘can shape be represented by sound artificially?’ ‘The fact that a property of sound such as frequency can be used to convey shape information suggests that as long as the spatial relation is coded in a systematic way, shape can be preserved and made accessible — even if the medium via which space is coded is not spatial in its physical nature,’ says Jung-Kyong Kim, PhD student in Dr. Robert Zatorre’s lab at The Neuro and lead investigator in the study.

In other words, similar to our ocean-dwelling dolphin cousins who use echolocation to explore their surroundings, our brains can be trained to recognize shapes represented by sound and the hope is that those with impaired vision could be trained to use this as a tool. In the study, blindfolded sighted participants were trained to recognize tactile spatial information using sounds mapped from abstract shapes. Following training, the individuals were able to match auditory input to tactually discerned shapes and showed generalization to new auditory-tactile or sound-touch pairings.”

Reminds me of a video:

9. Why Laughter Is Contagious

“How many times has it happened that when one person starts laughing, it takes no time till everybody else in the group starts rolling too? And now, researchers have found clues behind this common phenomenon and have explained why laughter is so contagious.

Sophie Scott at University College London measured the brain activity of 20 volunteers in a functional MRI scanner while she played them laughter, squeals of triumph and moans of fear and disgust. She also played a neutral, artificial sound that would have no specific meaning to the subjects. It was found that all the emotive sounds triggered a response in the brain’s premotor cortical, the area that controls the movement of facial muscles.

Inside the brain scanners, though, the subjects were not actually using these muscles. To Scott, that indicates the brain is wired with “mirror circuits” that prime us to copy another’s behaviour when we recognise their emotions.

The brain response was more pronounced for the sounds of laughter and triumph than the vocalisations of negative emotions, suggesting that the urge to copy is greatest when we hear another’s delight or amusement.”

10. Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself

“In considering people’s motivations for killing themselves, it is essential to recognize that most suicides are driven by a flash flood of strong emotions, not rational, philosophical thoughts in which the pros and cons are evaluated critically. And, as I mentioned in last week’s column on the evolutionary biology of suicide, from a psychological science perspective, I don’t think any scholar ever captured the suicidal mind better than Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister in his 1990 Psychological Review article , “Suicide as Escape from the Self.” To reiterate, I see Baumeister’s cognitive rubric as the engine of emotions driving deCatanzaro’s biologically adaptive suicidal decision-making. There are certainly more recent theoretical models of suicide than Baumeister’s, but none in my opinion are an improvement. The author gives us a uniquely detailed glimpse into the intolerable and relentlessly egocentric tunnel vision that is experienced by a genuinely suicidal person.”

The article was rather short (and not too informative), but one excerpt suggests a compelling parallel:

“Staff at Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park in Stirlingshire used video cameras to document the death of a terminally ill female named Pansy, believed to be more than 50 years old.

When she became lethargic in the days leading up to her death, other members of the group became quieter than usual and stayed with her at nights, grooming her more than they did normally.

After her death, her daughter stayed near the body for an entire night, even though she had never slept on that platform before.

All of the group were subdued for several days afterwards, and avoided the place where she had died, spending long hours grooming each other.”

Visit here to see two excerpts of some of this footage: the first video reveals a moment of death in a chimps life with surrounding family, and the bottom video shows a young chimp playing with a dead one until the mother takes it away.

Primal Empathy: Your Suffering Is My Suffering

When a chimp notices a family member is dying they become more attuned to that member’s needs (in the same way a mother becomes attuned to the needs of her baby). Like chimps, our brains “sync up” (as Daniel Goleman puts it in his book “Social Intelligence,”) and we feel what another being is experiencing. In social neuroscience this is referred to as primal empathy or “the ability to sense the non-verbal emotional signals of others and to feel what they are feeling.” Evolutionary psychology tell us that we are biologically driven to respond to those needs; in other words: they are instinctual.

We all experience primal empathy in one form or another. Narcissists and sociopaths show weak empathy for others while those who are charitable and compassionate are seen as more empathetic.

Whenever I think about empathy I am reminded of the teachings by Buddha. He emphasized the wisdom of interconnectedness and described loving-kindness and compassion as a logical moral consequence of this insight.

Science is bringing us one step closer to this knowledge. Through neuroscience we are seeing the biochemical effects of brains and minds feeling connected. In evolutionary psychology we are witnessing high-order thinking mammals exhibit empathy and compassion for one another.

Animal Consciousness

Who knows what it’s like to be a bat, or a whale, or even a tyrannosaurus? Each has a completely different sensory system and a completely different way to interact with its environment. If we were to zoom into the consciousness of any animal it would probably be akin to a psychedelic experience. Yet at the same time we are all united by the fact that we live, we breath, and we are all fighting to stay alive and satisfy our desires.

We often like to see animal consciousness as inherently distinct from human consciousness. Some claim animals aren’t even conscious at all (even to the extent that they don’t experience pleasure and pain). But this assumption seems to ignore even a basic commonsense understanding of other living things.

When viewing these videos of these chimps, when looking at animals at the zoo, or even when just observing our own pets, we are peering into the minds of these living creatures. For humans, empathy is inter-species.

Where Is Evolution Heading?

I don’t think anyone is truly qualified to say where nature is heading. Nature is always changing and adapting in unpredictable ways. If empathy proves to be a dominant force in our evolution, then perhaps we can conclude – to some extent – that nature is a scientific, moral, and practical argument to act good? Perhaps, nature is heading toward a direction of less suffering and a greater sanctity for life?

Maybe sometime in the far away future the golden rule can even beat out natural selection and “survival of the fittest.” Maybe nature does have the potential to be divine? Maybe I am also just dreaming, but one can have their suspicions…either way it won’t be in any of our lifetimes.