Heuristics & The Great British Bake Off.
Sarah Jons 
The Great British Bake Off is a very strange affair for many. Stranger still for those that do not live in the UK
The Great British Bake Off is a very strange affair for many. Stranger still for those that do not live in the UK. It even made network news with Baked Alaska-gate. What is interesting to neuroscientists is that your brain is continually taking shortcuts and it wants cake (well wants you to eat cake). Your highly evolved, best in class super computer brain is cheating you out of your success. Your brain also enjoys the drama of GBBO, not making decisions and searching for rewards.
I am sure you have experienced times when it is one bad thing after another? Diets don’t apparently work, people don’t do what they say and it all seems pretty tough. It seems like a long sequence of ‘bad luck’ and eventually you believe it is a crisis and it seems like the world is out to get you?
You see, it is not the economic climate, people being nasty or environment conditions: they do not shape your destiny. It is yourdecisions that determine your destiny. Before you take any action (like starting a diet) you have to decide to focus on what is really important. I find that most people don’t make a decision to change or focus on inefficient behaviours. Then they suffer from something that scientists are calling willpower deletion.
Many people find themselves in these crisis points and fail to see that the one thing they need to do is make a decision to change. It might be at work. It doesn’t matter what you do or where you work, everyone is looking for ways to be more productive on the job. But excessive amounts of caffeine and list-making won’t get you any closer to reaching peak productivity levels today. Truly productive people aren’t focused on doing more things; this is actually the opposite of productivity. If you really want to be productive, you’ve got to make a point to do fewer things. This decision process is the centre of much research.
One of the most interesting is theStanford marshmallow experiment(watch it!) with Walter Mischel. In this defining 1960 experiment, he looked at the principle of delayed gratification. A child was offered a choice between one small reward (sometimes a marshmallow, but often a cookie) provided immediately or two small rewards if he or she waited until the tester returned (after an absence of approximately 15 minutes). In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational success body and success in dieting. But that doesn't explain how shortcuts (and compliments) help reward failure.
Let’s go back to the theory of how your brain works and the internal meta-programmes. Brain scans (fMRI and PET) have shown that different parts of our brain light up when we're thinking about YOU rather when we're thinking aboutOTHER people. In other words, if someone asks you to think about what you will look like in 10 years, your brain treats it as though you are trying to picture some bizarre stranger. What that hints at is how you make decisions, how you deal with challenging, changing conditions and your ability to fix what is wrong in your life. Logically, you understand that you are endangering the person you will become, but subconsciously, your brain doesn't have any sympathy to spare and just wants instant gratification. Yay, Marshmallows!
Your brain likes efficiency and mindless habits are efficient. What your brain really wants, is to shift into a cruise or autopilot state, to turn your life into repetitive patterns and create heuristics. These are mental shortcuts that help you get through the day using the least amount of brain-power possible. This trance-like state and heuristic short cuts dominates most people’s lives. Short cuts that allow you to drive to the supermarket half asleep and hung over, and get there with no recollection of the trip you just made. They compel you to repeat the same little things over and over day after day, because these routines require way less energy.
Let’s imagine breaking out of these brain short cuts. That actually requires a huge amount of energy: it hurts. If you want to change your routine, your previously automatic response, effortless choices now have to be made using a conscious, concerted effort. That can be truly exhausting.
Assume for a minute that you want to go jogging every day. Maybe you want to complete a half marathon. Of course, what is probably more likely to trip you up during your 10 weeks of learning to be the type of person who jogs every morning isn't some uncontrollable circumstance (conditions) but your own lack of motivation. It is not the conditions it is lack of decisions. This shows up as the sense that, because you've been so good with the jogging, you owe it to yourself to take a break.
This seems to be the same result that scientists can reproduce in the lab. Exercising your willpower in one instance simply makes it more difficult to exercise it in the next. There's even a term for it now:willpower depletion. This is very sad but, in one study, scientists asked one group of students to memorise a two digit number and another group a seven digit number. They then offered both groups a choice between cake and fruit salad. Here is the brilliant result: the students who memorised the longer number were twice as likely to choose the cake. It's as though the simple act of remembering five extra digits was enough to reduce their willpower to dust.
In other ground breaking piece of research, this study, tried it from the opposite direction. Volunteers were shown a plate of freshly baked cookies and a plate of radishes. Half of them were instructed to take a cookie, and the other half were instructed to take a radish. All were then asked to complete a difficult geometric puzzle. Bizarrely, those who had been told to take a radish gave up on the puzzle after only eight minutes, while those who were told to take a cookie stuck with it for a full 19 minutes. Yay Cookies!
Even though no physical effort was involved, simply being forced to resist cookies actually depleted the volunteers' will to solve a puzzle, because apparently we never really stop being toddlers.
In a recent study, scientists gathered a group of successful dieters and started manipulating their self-control. Splitting the volunteers into two groups, they praised the volunteers in the first group for how much progress they had made toward their ideal weight. They made no mention of any kind of progress to the other group, and presumably just stood there scowling.They offered all of the volunteers their choice of either an apple or a chocolate bar as a thank you gift for participating in their study. An extra-ordinary 85 percent of those who had been reminded of their success chose the chocolate, as opposed to only 58 percent of the other group. Those who had been praised for their success figured they could reward themselves just this once with some sweets, while the others sat eating apples and brooding in the quiet shame of failure.
In other words, simply acknowledging success triggered failure. That wouldn't be a big deal if all it meant was that the occasional compliment resulted in one celebratory cheeseburger later. So, if you make progress on your diet or your 12-step program, you are very likely to give yourself an excuse to splurge just once. As soon as you do, it's like opening a floodgate of self-defeating behaviour that crochets a net of failure to drag you all the way back to square one.
So while your conscious self is busy hating you for not fixing your bad habits, your subconscious self is secretly doing everything it can to sabotage any efforts to correct them, because self-indulgence (non-growth / not self-improvement) is what it actually wants.
So I suggest you watch more Mary Berry, or more of the Great British Bake Off in general and don’t ask for compliments. Oh, go on have a marshmallow.
I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity. —Aaron Swartz
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