A.J. Jacobs Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  My friend Jessica Shaw—a fellow Entertainment Weekly reporter covering the event—has joined me at this point and is acting as my publicist: “We’ve got to keep moving, people,” says Jessica, who’s wearing a bright red dress. “Got to keep moving.”

  Things are going smoothly. Nothing can stop me. Across the lobby, I spot Geoffrey Rush, my co-star. Should I say hello? Yes, why not! I wait for him to finish his conversation, then approach.

  “’Ello, Geoffrey!”

  No response.

  “It’s me! ’Ow’s tricks, mate?”

  He looks at me. Alarm spreads over his face—the exact same expression my son had when he first saw the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I’ve gotten so cocky, I forgot that I don’t exactly resemble Noah Taylor. I forgot Geoffrey Rush actually knows the real Noah Taylor.

  Geoffrey glances around, hoping to lock eyes with a security guard. And then backs away without a word.

  Shaken, I head back into the crowd for the deep-tissue ego massage of my adoring fans. “Congratulations, man.” “Wow.”

  The (late) comedian Chris Farley grabs my shoulder as I walk by. “You were wonderful,” he gushes, adding that he loved the piano playing. “Well,” I confess, “that was done by a double.”

  I get a few more “I’m a fan of your work” remarks but it’s almost over. Billy Crystal is about to crack his last joke. It’s the usual four-hour triathlon for those watching at home, but I could have kept going for a day and a half.

  The theater doors open and those of us in the lobby are engulfed by a throng of exiting actors and hangers-on. I’m pushed down a hallway. I accidentally step on the long train of the green dress worn by Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Will Smith. The dress catches and she jerks back.

  “Watch the dress! Watch the dress! Don’t step on the dress!” Will Smith says. He isn’t angry, just authoritative, the same way he handled the panicky crowds in Independence Day. He’s even charismatic when he scolding you, that guy.

  My friend Jessica and I are limoed to an after party. I give respectful nods to the Gold’s Gym rats at the velvet ropes. I bask in the giddy welcome from publicists with headsets and clipboards.

  Inside, more fans. I meet a screenwriter who tells me I have to go to Burning Man. I make sure to take time out and thank the cater waiters for bringing me my chicken satay. Noblesse oblige. Jessica and I linger for a while. But we both sense the night is over.

  I go to my hotel room, undo my bow tie, and collapse on my bed, knowing that people like me, really like me. Or at least someone who closely resembles me.

  For two days after the Oscars, I am on a high. I feel different, special. I get annoyed at the indignities of everyday life. Why am I waiting on line at the pharmacy? With all these…people. It’s so…ordinary…Don’t they know who I am?

  I mean, I know, deep down, that all the gushing at the Oscars wasn’t actually for me. But the intensity of the praise was such that it penetrated on some level. As with my stint as a hot woman, the lines between me and my subject have blurred.

  Then the crash. The inevitable and depressing acceptance of my anonymity. You know what? I deserve to wait on line. I’m not special. Paul Hogan is not a fan of mine. In the span of three days, I go through a microwave version of the famous person’s life arc: from a nobody to a god on earth to a has-been.

  CODA

  My night of fame put me in an altered state. I was drunk with fame, and not just buzzed, but seven-vodka-tonics drunk. The question is, Would I want to be drunk all the time?

  I don’t think so. I hope not.

  Why? Because fame messes with your mind—even the fleeting version I had. In fact, if you believe a Cornell professor named Robert Millman, I might have been suffering from an honest-to-God mental disorder. Acquired Situational Narcissism. This is a multisyllabic way of saying that celebrities often become wankers. When you’re famous, when everybody stares at you, flatters you, insulates you, you start to think you’re the center of the world (a thought that has a grain of truth to it).

  You gain the classic narcissism symptoms: lack of empathy, grandiose fantasies, rage, and excessive need for approval. It’s why, as Stephen Sherrill writes in the New York Times, celebrities are so prone to throwing tantrums, getting married in the morning and divorced by the afternoon, demanding a private chef for their pet ocelot, and so on.

  (Incidentally, not everyone buys the notion that people become more narcissistic as they gain fame. An opposing study argues that narcissists flock to show business in the first place. They arrive in Hollywood pre-deranged. Especially reality show stars. See note in back.)

  You can see the quandary here. Fame makes people role models, whether they like it or not. It also probably makes them immature schmucks, if they weren’t already. Therefore, our role models are immature schmucks. Which then creates a new generation of immature schmucks. Which is how we’ve arrived at the Kardashian sisters.

  I don’t know what the solution is. Term limits on celebrity? Five years as a movie star, and then you’re shipped off to work at a T.G.I. Friday’s? Should we boycott anyone famous who throws iPhones at their assistants? Should we do what the Romans did with their generals during the triumphal march? They put a slave behind the general to whisper in his ear that he was mortal, so his ego wouldn’t expand.

  Or maybe we should only support humble celebrities. Not all famous people are twisted monsters. Consider this: After the Oscars, I got a call from Noah Taylor’s agent. Apparently Noah was shy and not into all the pageantry, so he was grateful I was there at the Oscars to represent him. He figured better me than him.

  Chapter Five

  The Rationality Project

  Part of my quest: Find the most rational toothpaste on earth.

  My brain is deeply flawed. And no offense, but so is yours.

  Your brain is not rational. It’s packed with dozens of misleading biases. It’s home to an alarming number of false assumptions and warped memories. It processes data all wrong and makes terrible decisions. Problem is, the brain didn’t come to us fully formed from a lab at MIT. The brain is merely an ad hoc collection of half-assed solutions that have built up over millions of years of evolution. It’s Scotch tape and bubble gum. If it were a car, it would not be a Porsche; it’d be a 1976 Dodge Dart with faulty brakes and a missing headlight.

  As one scientist puts it, we’ve got Stone Age minds living in silicon-age bodies. Our brains were formed to deal with Paleolithic problems. When my brain gets scared, it causes a spike in adrenaline, which might have been helpful when facing a mastodon but is highly counterproductive when facing a snippy salesman at the Verizon outlet.

  And yet we remain enamored of our ancient responses. These last few years have been a golden age for our most primal impulses. We recently had a president who spent eight years leading from his gut, and look where we are: a financial meltdown and a world filled with America haters. We’ve got Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, a best seller with a subtle thesis that has unfortunately been boiled down to the pro-intuition message “Don’t think, blink.” It’s given birth to a million stupid decisions.

  I’ve had enough. I’m going to try to revamp my brain. Bring it into the modern era. I’m going to root out all the irrational biases and Darwinian anachronisms one by one and retrain my brain to be a perfectly rational machine. I will be the most logical man alive, unswayed by unconscious impulses. I’ll use any means necessary—vigilance, repression, science. I’ll also use duct tape, forty tubes of toothpaste, and a shroud over my cereal bowl. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  THE LAKE WOBEGON EFFECT

  I came up with Project Rationality a couple of months ago. I’d always considered myself pretty logical, more Spock than Homer, more ego than id. But then I read a book called Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which details the alarming number of built-in irrational quirks of the brain. Then I read another recent book called Predictably Irrational. Then another. And another. Turns out
brain-bashing is an exploding genre, right up there with tomes about inspirational dogs and atheism.

  If you read these books all in a row, you will feel like amputating your head. You learn your brain is programmed to be bigoted and confirm stereotypes. It’s easily fooled by anecdotal evidence. Or a pretty face. Or a guy in a uniform. It’s a master of rationalization. It believes what it hears. It overreacts. It’s hopelessly incompetent at distinguishing fact from fiction. There are scores of “cognitive biases” identified by researchers (Wikipedia lists more than ninety of them).

  When I told my brother-in-law, Eric, a behavioral economist at Columbia, about my plan to eliminate all cognitive errors from my brain for a month, he chuckled. He said I was suffering from the Lake Wobegon Effect: Our brains are delusively cocky. We all think we’re better-looking, smarter, and more virtuous than we are. (It’s named for Garrison Keillor’s fictional town, where “all the children are above average.”)

  “You’re vastly overestimating your abilities,” he said.

  THE AVAILABILITY FALLACY

  I wake up on the first morning of Project Rationality. I’ve come armed. I’ve got a folded three-page list of cognitive errors, more than one hundred of them that I’ve cobbled together from books and Wikipedia. My method will be this: I’ll analyze every activity throughout the day, see which blunder I’m committing, and try to correct it.

  In the kitchen, I find Julie reading the New York Times. That’s trouble right there. Journalism is an enemy of rationality.

  What makes news? The unusual and the spectacular, which by their nature distort reality and pervert our decisions. You read headlines like 15 KILLED IN PLANE CRASH IN WYOMING. You don’t read headlines like ANOTHER 2,000 DIED OF HEART DISEASE YESTERDAY. This leads to the Availability Fallacy. Our lazy mind gloms on to the most vivid, emotional examples. When we think of danger, we think of hideous plane crashes or acts of terrorism, even though boring old cars kill eighty-four times more people.

  Today, there’s an article about salmonella. Eight hundred people have gotten sick from salmonella, possibly from tainted tomatoes—which later will turn out not to be the case. I’m a paranoid bastard, so I would normally purge our house of anything tomato related: the pint of cherry tomatoes, the ketchup bottles, the Esquire cover of Andy Warhol in tomato soup. Salmonella would climb onto my list of Top Ten Worries.

  Instead I take my first countermeasures. I ask my wife for the newspaper, find a Sharpie, and scribble under the headline: “Meanwhile, millions of people ate tomatoes and did NOT get sick. But thousands did die from obesity.”

  “That’s better,” I tell my wife, handing it back to her. There’s something validating about writing it out. I explain that every newspaper article should come with a reality-check box, like cigarettes and their surgeon general’s warnings. For now I’ll have to provide my own.

  I go to the fridge and consider eating a cherry tomato to spite the media. But that’d be falling for the Reactance Bias, the unreasonable desire to do what others forbid you from doing.

  UNIT BIAS

  I do want to have breakfast, though. How to eat rationally? It’s a minefield. For starters, my list has something called “The Unit Bias.”

  As humans, I’ve learned, we have an irrational urge to finish everything on our plates. No doubt this served our Paleolithic forefathers well when food was scarce and unreliable. But now it just makes us a bunch of fat-asses.

  I recently read about a brilliant experiment at the University of Illinois a few years ago. They gave a group of test subjects bowls of soup. What they didn’t tell them was this: hidden tubes underneath the table were constantly refilling the bowls. Guess what? The subjects just kept on eating, long past when they were full. If the scientists hadn’t dragged them from the table, they might have exploded.

  I need to eat less. I pour my MultiGrain Cheerios into a bowl, then cover the bowl with a napkin. I’m not going to let my brain see what’s inside the bowl. That’d be too tempting. I’ll just eat till I feel full. It’s a time-consuming process trying to negotiate the spoon around the napkin. Which is probably a good thing, since it’s healthier to eat slowly.

  And yet I feel I have miles to go before I can say I ate a rational meal. Like yours, my brain is packed with food-related biases. People often choose the medium size at a restaurant even if the small would suffice—we have a fear of the extremes, so we go with the middle option. We find it logical to eat cows but not other mammals such as dogs or mice. Studies have shown we find things tastier if we pay more for them. Or if we eat them out of fancier containers. Later in the day, I eat microwaved chili off our wedding plates. It’s delicious.

  SOURCE AMNESIA

  Here’s one thing I’m learning: my brain is full of crap. I need a mental colonic.

  It’s the end of Day One, and I’m grappling with the startling number of myths, half-truths, and outright lies that clog my brain. It’s not that I believe in ghosts. Or numerology. Or that Barack Obama secretly belongs to a mosque. My misconceptions are less obvious but just as false.

  This struck me as I was brushing my hair. It sounds reasonable, and I suppose, for the first few seconds I get my hair into place, it is.

  Problem is, I keep on brushing for another thirty seconds. I brush my hair till my scalp tingles. Why? Because someone—I think my mother—told me when I was about ten years old that you need to stimulate the scalp or you’ll go bald. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years.

  As soon as I uncover the almost-unconscious belief, it smells rotten, and about three minutes of Googling confirms it: it’s a myth, about as effective as rubbing chicken manure on my head, another ancient remedy.

  I call my mom to ask whether she was, in fact, the one who told me.

  “That sounds like something I said,” she says.

  “Well, it’s not true. It’s a myth.”

  There’s a pause. “Sorry.”

  “Well, I spent a lot of time brushing my hair because of that.” (More than three total days of hair brushing, to be precise.)

  “I’m not sure what to tell you except sorry.”

  Damn. Now I’m the bad guy in this scenario.

  “Anyway,” she says. “Why were you taking advice from me about baldness? You should have talked to your dad.”

  “I was ten!”

  A huge chunk of my life has been wasted. Why? Because I’m the victim of two brain flaws. First, we place too much trust in authority. We follow the captain even if it’s clear he’s leading us right over Havasu Falls. It is hardwired into our brains. The second is just as insidious: Source Amnesia. We forget where we learned a fact. Facts are initially stored in a pinkie-shaped region called the hippocampus. But eventually the information shifts over to the cerebral cortex—where, as Welcome to Your Brain authors Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt put it, it is “separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.” A fact learned in the Wall Street Journal gains as much credulity as a “fact” learned from your cousin’s barber.

  And it gets worse. Even if we are told—clearly warned—that something is false or unsubstantiated, we often remember it later as gospel.

  I need to root out these untruths. With a little research, I refute some of my more dubious beliefs: Shaving your hair does not make it grow back thicker, turning lights on and off does not waste more energy, sugar does not make you hyperactive. Despite what Mom said, I don’t need to wear socks or slippers around the house for health reasons; you can’t get a cold from cold feet.

  Yet when I try to go shoeless around the house, it causes me such low-grade angst, I give up and put my Merrells back on. They are stuck deep, these myths. And I know there are dozens, hundreds, of other undiscovered falsehoods lurking in my neurons and warping my choices. But how do I identify them?

  THE HALO EFFECT

  It’s Day Three and I’
m pissed at the brain. It’s not just flawed; it’s superficial and cruel, like a cable TV pundit. This sunk in today when I was at Starbucks.

  I bought a cappuccino and got back $1.35 in change. How much should I tip? Thirty-five cents or a dollar? I stuffed the dollar into the box and smiled at the barista.

  As I poured my sugar, I realized I’d fallen for the Halo Effect. Terrible. One of the most evil biases on my little folded-up list. If a person is physically attractive, we unconsciously heap all sorts of wonderful, unrelated qualities onto them. Studies have shown we think attractive people are smarter than ugly people. We tend to hire them more often and promote them faster. We think they’re more virtuous. Teachers treat attractive children better than their unfortunate-looking peers. In short, we judge a book by its cover.

  And yes, the barista was really cute. A Maggie Gyllenhaal type with a moderate smattering of piercings. I know that was the reason I tipped her the buck. If she’d looked like Vladimir Putin, I would have gone with the thirty-five cents.

  I unconsciously assumed she was a good person and deserved a dollar. I also, no doubt, unconsciously wanted to sleep with her and spread my DNA. (And assumed the sixty-five cents would help with that cause, naturally.)

  The Halo Effect runs deep in our genes. It probably made sense to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. If someone had a misshapen face, there could be a greater chance he had an inherited disease. So you might want to avoid breeding with him. You want your offspring to have grade A genes.

  I hate the Halo Effect. It’s like Nature said, Hey, let’s make life as unfair as possible. Let’s load up the misery on one side and give all the happiness to the pretty people.