Past exploits include relieving actress Jennifer Garner of her engagement ring and basketball Hall-of-Famer Charles Barkleyof a thick bankroll. In 2001, he virtually picked former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail clean, netting badges, a watch, Carter’s itinerary, and the keys to his motorcade. (Robbins wisely steered clear of their guns.)
How does he does he do it? Practice, practice, practice… and remaining hyper vigilant as to the things commanding each individual victims’s attention, in order to momentarily redirect it at the most convenient moment.
Clearly, he’s a put lot of thought into the emotional and cognitive components. In a TED talk on the art of misdirection, above, he cites psychologist Michael Posner’s “Trinity Model” of attentional networks. He has deepened his understanding through the study of aikido, criminal history, and the psychology of persuasion. He understands that getting his victims to tap into their memories is the best way to temporarily disarm their external alarm bells. His easygoing, seemingly spontaneous banter is but one of the ways he gains marks’ trust, even as he penetrates their spheres with a predatory grace.
Watch his hands, and you won’t see much, even after he explains several tricks of his trade, such as securing an already depocketed wallet with his index finger to reassure a jacket-patting victim that it’s right where it belongs. (Half a second later, it’s dropping below the hem of that jacket into Robbins’ waiting hand.) Those paws are fast!
I do wonder how he would fare on the street. His act depends on a fair amount of chummy touching, a physical intimacy that could quickly cause your average straphanger to cry foul. I guess in such an instance, he’d limit the take to one precious item, a cell phone, say, and leave the wallet and watch to a non-theoretical “whiz mob” or street pickpocket team.
Though he himself has always been scrupulous about returning the items he liberates, Robbins does not withhold professional respect for his criminal brothers’ moves. One real-life whiz mobber so impressed him during a television interview that he drove over four hours to pick the perp’s brains in a minimum security prison, a confab New Yorker reporter Adam Green described in colorful detail as part of a lengthy profile on Robbins and his craft.
One small detail does seem to have escaped Robbins’ attention in the second demonstration video below, in which reporter Green willingly steps into the role of vic’. Perhaps Robbins doesn’t care, though his mark certainly should. The situation is less QED than XYZPDQ.
While you’re taking notice, don’t forget to remain alert to what a potential pickpocket is wearing. Such attention to detail may serve you down at the station, if not onstage.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. The sleeping bag-like insulating properties of her ankle-length faux leopard coat make her very popular with the pickpockets of New York. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Last year we told you about the importance of messy desks and walking to creativity. This year, the time has come to realize how much creativity also depends on boredom. In a sense, of course, humankind has utterly vanquished boredom, what with our modern technologies — computers, high-speed internet, smartphones — that make possible sources of rich and frequent stimulation such as, well, this very site. But what if we need a little boredom? What if boredom, that state we 21st-century first-worlders worry about avoiding more than any other, actually helps us create?
Even if we feel no boredom in our free time, surely we still endure the occasional bout of it at work. “Admitting that boredom to coworkers or managers is likely something few of us have ever done,” writes the Harvard Business Review’s David Burkus. “It turns out, however, that a certain level of boredom might actually enhance the creative quality of our work.”
He cites a well-known scientific experiment which found that volunteers did better at a creative task (like finding different uses for a pair of plastic cups) when first subjected to a boring one (like copying numbers out of the phone book) which “heightens the ‘daydreaming effect’ on creativity — the more passive the boredom, the more likely the daydreaming and the more creative you could be afterward.”
Burkus also refers to another paper documenting the performance of different subjects on word-association tests after watching different video clips, one of them deliberately boring. Who came up with the most creative associations? You guessed it: those who watched the boring video first. Boredom, the experimenters suggest, “motivates people to approach new and rewarding activities. In other words, an idle mind will seek a toy. (Anyone who has taken a long car ride with a young child has surely experienced some version of this phenomenon.)”
Writing about those same experiments, Fast Company’s Vivian Giang quotes researcher Andreas Elpidorou of the University of Louisville as claiming that “boredom helps to restore the perception that one’s activities are meaningful or significant.” He describes it as a “regulatory state that keeps one in line with one’s projects. In the absence of boredom, one would remain trapped in unfulfilling situations, and miss out on many emotionally, cognitively, and socially rewarding experiences. Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.”
“Boredom is a fascinating emotion because it is seen as so negative yet it is such a motivating force,” says Dr. Sandi Mann of the University of Central Lancashire, one of the masterminds of the experiments with the phone book and the plastic cups, quoted by Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton. “Being bored is not the bad thing everyone makes it out to be. It is good to be bored sometimes! I think up so many ideas when I am commuting to and from work – this would be dead time, but thanks to the boredom it induces, I come up with all sorts of projects.” (This also manifests in her parenting: “I am quite happy when my kids whine that they are bored,” she said: “Finding ways to amuse themselves is an important skill.”)
“Nearly the Weekend,” by David Feltkamp. Creative Commons image
How to make use of all this? “Taken together,” Burkus writes, “these studies suggest that the boredom so commonly felt at work could actually be leveraged to help us get our work done better,” perhaps by “spending some focused time on humdrum activities such as answering emails, making copies, or entering data,” after which “we may be better able to think up more (and more creative) possibilities to explore.” In the words of Dr. Mann herself, “Boredom at work has always been seen as something to be eliminated, but perhaps we should be embracing it in order to enhance our creativity.” And so to an even more interesting question: “Do people who are bored at work become more creative in other areas of their work – or do they go home and write novels?”
David Foster Wallace took on the relationship between boredom and creativity in an ambitious way when he started writing The Pale King, his unfinished novel (which he privately called “the Long Thing”) set in an Internal Revenue Service branch office in mid-1980s Peoria. The papers related to the project he left behind included a note about the book’s larger theme:
It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
This, as well as the more everyday suggestions about working more creatively by doing the boring bits first, would seem to share a basis with the ancient tradition of meditation. If indeed humanity has gone too far in its mission to alleviate the discomfort of boredom, it has produced the even more pernicious condition in which we all feel constantly and unthinkingly desperate for new distractions (which Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew B. Crawford memorably called “obesity of the mind”) while knowing full well that those distractions keep us from our important work, be it designing a scientific experiment, coming up with a sales strategy, or writing a novel.
Maybe we can undo some of the damage by deliberately, regularly shutting off our personal flow of interesting sensory input for a while, whether through meditation, data entry, phone-book copying, of whichever method feels right to you. (WNYC’s Manoush Zomorodi even launched a project last year called “Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out,” which challenged listeners to minimize their phone-checking and put the time gained to more creative use.) But we all need some high-quality stimulation sooner or later, so when you feel ready for another dose of it, you know where to find us.
Who really killed John F. Kennedy? Did America really land on the moon? What really brought down the Twin Towers? Few modern phenomena possess the sheer fascination quotient of conspiracy theories. If you believe in them, you’ll of course dig into them obsessively, and if you don’t believe in them, you surely feel a great curiosity about why other people do. Science writer and Skeptic magazine Editor in Chief Michael Shermer falls, needless to say, into the second group; so far into it that examining conspiracy theories and those who subscribe to them has become one of his best-known professional pursuits since at least 1997, the year of his straightforwardly titled book Why People Believe Weird Things.
On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Shermer wrote an article in the Los AngelesTimes about the reasons that event has drawn so many avid conspiracy theorists over the past half-decade. First: their cognitive dissonance resulting from the two seemingly incompatible ideas, that of JFK “as one of the most powerful people on Earth” and JFK “killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone loser, a nobody.” Second: their participation in a monological belief system, “a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network.” Third: their confirmation bias, or “the tendency to look for and find confirming evidence for what you already believe” — the umbrella man, the grassy knoll — “and to ignore disconfirming evidence.”
These factors all come into play with the other major American conspiracy theories as well. In the podcast clip at the top of the post, you can hear physicist Michio Kaku trying to set straight a moon landing conspiracy theorist. They argue that man has never set foot on the moon, but that the government instead hoodwinked us into believing it with an elaborate audiovisual production (directed, some theorists insist, by none other than Stanley Kubrick, who supposedly “confessed” in fake interview footage that recently made the internet rounds). Should you require further argument to the contrary, have a look at S.G. Collins’ Moon Hoax Not just above.
No higher-profile set of conspiracy-theory movement has come out of recent history than the 9/11 Truthers, who may differ on the details, but who all gather under the umbrella of believing that the events of that day happened not because of the actions of a conspiracy of foreign terrorists, but because of a conspiracy within the United States government itself. In the Q&A footage above (originally uploaded, in fact, by a believer), one such theorist stands up and asks linguist and activist Noam Chomsky to join in on the movement, pointing to a cover-up of the manner in which 7 World Trade Center collapsed — a big “smoking gun” of the larger conspiracy, in their eyes.
This prompts Chomsky to offer an explanation of how scientists and engineers actually go looking for the truth. Have they eliminated entirely their cognitive dissonance, monological belief systems, and confirmation biases? No human could ever do that perfectly — indeed, to be human is to be subject to all these distorting conditions and more — but the larger enterprise of science, at its best, frees us little by little from those very shackles. What a shame to voluntarily clap oneself back into them.
After a long hiatus, the RSA (The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has returned with another one of the whiteboard animated-lectures they pioneered five years ago.
The animated reboot (above) brings to life the thoughts of another Stanford psychology professor, Carol S. Dweck. The author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success(a book that appeared on Bill Gates’s Best of 2015 list), Dweck has looked closely at how our beliefs/mindsets strongly influence the paths we take in life. And, in this clip, she talks about how well-meaning parents, despite their best intentions, might be creating the wrong mindsets in their kids, paving the way for problems down the road. You can watch the complete, unanimated lecture here.
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At the stroke of midnight on January 1, millions of New Year’s resolutions went into effect, with the most common ones being lose weight, get fit, quit drinking and smoking, save money, and learn something new (we can help you there). Unfortunately, 33% of these resolutions will be abandoned by January’s end. And more than 80% will eventually fall by the wayside. Making resolutions stick is tricky business. But it’s possible, and Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal has a few scientifically-proven suggestions for you.
For years, McGonigal has taught a very popular course called The Science of Willpower in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, where she introduces students to the idea that willpower is not an innate trait. (You can sign up for an online version of her course which starts on January 25. Get details here.) Rather it’s a “complex mind-body response that can be compromised by stress, sleep deprivation and nutrition and that can be strengthened through certain practices.” For those of you who don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can also find McGonigal’s ideas presented in a recent book, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Below, we have highlighted 15 of Dr. McGonigal’s strategies for increasing your willpower reserves and making your New Year’s resolutions endure.
Will power is like a muscle. The more you work on developing it, the more you can incorporate it into your life. It helps, McGonigal says in this podcast, to start with small feats of willpower before trying to tackle more difficult feats. Ideally, find the smallest change that’s consistent with your larger goal, and start there.
Choose a goal or resolution that you really want, not a goal that someone else desires for you, or a goal that you think you should want. Choose a positive goal that truly comes from within and that contributes to something important in life.
Willpower is contagious. Find a willpower role model — someone who has accomplished what you want to do. Also try to surround yourself with family members, friends or groups who can support you. Change is often not made alone.
Know that people have more willpower when they wake up, and then willpower steadily declines throughout the day as people fatigue. So try to accomplish what you need to — for example, exercise — earlier in the day. Then watch out for the evenings, when bad habits can return.
Understand that stress and willpower are incompatible. Any time we’re under stress it’s harder to find our willpower. According to McGonigal, “the fight-or-flight response floods the body with energy to act instinctively and steals it from the areas of the brain needed for wise decision-making. Stress also encourages you to focus on immediate, short-term goals and outcomes, but self-control requires keeping the big picture in mind.” The upshot? “Learning how to better manage your stress is one of the most important things you can do to improve your willpower.” When you get stressed out, go for a walk. Even a five minute walk outside can reduce your stress levels, boost your mood, and help you replenish your willpower reserves.
Sleep deprivation (less than six hours a night) makes it so that the prefrontal cortex loses control over the regions of the brain that create cravings. Science shows that getting just one more hour of sleep each night (eight hours is ideal) helps recovering drug addicts avoid a relapse. So it can certainly help you resist a doughnut or a cigarette.
Also remember that nutrition plays a key role. “Eating a more plant-based, less-processed diet makes energy more available to the brain and can improve every aspect of willpower from overcoming procrastination to sticking to a New Year’s resolution,” McGonigal says.
Don’t think it will be different tomorrow. McGonigal notes that we have a tendency to think that we will have more willpower, energy, time, and motivation tomorrow. The problem is that “if we think we have the opportunity to make a different choice tomorrow, we almost always ‘give in’ to temptation or habit today.”
Acknowledge and understand your cravings rather than denying them. That will take you further in the end. The video above has more on that.
Imagine the things that could get in the way of achieving your goal. Understand the tendencies you have that could lead you to break your resolution. Don’t be overly optimistic and assume the road will be easy.
Know your limits, and plan for them. Says McGonigal, “People who think they have the most self-control are the most likely to fail at their resolutions; they put themselves in tempting situations, don’t get help, give up at setbacks. You need to know how you fail; how you are tempted; how you procrastinate.”
Pay attention to small choices that add up. “One study found that the average person thinks they make 14 food choices a day; they actually make over 200. When you aren’t aware that you’re making a choice, you’ll almost always default to habit/temptation.” It’s important to figure out when you have opportunities to make a choice consistent with your goals.
Be specific but flexible. It’s good to know your goal and how you’ll get there. But, she cautions, “you should leave room to revise these steps if they turn out to be unsustainable or don’t lead to the benefits you expected.”
Give yourself small, healthy rewards along the way. Research shows that the mind responds well to it. (If you’re trying to quite smoking, the reward shouldn’t be a cigarette, by the way.)
Finally, if you experience a setback, don’t be hard on yourself. Although it seems counter-intuitive, studies show that people who experience shame/guilt are much more likely to break their resolutions than ones who cut themselves some slack. In a nutshell, you should “Give up guilt.”
You decide you need some medical advice, so you take to the internet. Whoops! There’s your first mistake. Now you are bombarded with contradictory opinions from questionable sources and you begin to develop symptoms you never knew existed. It’s all downhill from there. So I’ll say this upfront: I have no medical qualifications authorizing me to dispense information about sleep disorders. The only advice I’d venture, should you have such a problem, is to go see a doctor. It might help, or not. I can certainly sympathize. I am a chronic insomniac.
The downside to this condition is obvious. I never get enough sleep. Whenever I consult the internet about this, I learn that it’s probably very dire and that I may lose my mind or die young(ish). The upside—which I learned to master after years of trying and failing to sleep like normal people—is that the nights are quiet and peaceful, and thus a fertile time creatively.
Medical issues aside, what do we know about sleep, insomnia, and creativity? Let us wade into the fray, with the proviso that we will likely reach few conclusions and may have to fall back on our own experience to guide us. In surveying this subject, I was pleased to have my experience validated by an article in Fast Company. Well, not pleased, exactly, as the author, Jane Porter, cites a study in Science that links a lack of sleep to Alzheimer’s and the accumulation of “potentially neurotoxic waste products.”
And yet, in praise of sleeplessness, Porter also recommends turning insomnia into a “productivity tool,” naming famous insomniacs like Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, and Madonna (not all of whom I’d like to emulate). She then quotes psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic of University College London, who made the dubious-sounding claim in Psychology Today that “insomnia is to exceptional achievement what mental illness is to creativity.” Everything about this analogy sounds suspect to me.
But there are more substantive views on the matter. Another study, published in Creativity Research Journal, suggests insomnia may be a symptom of “notable creative potential,” though the authors only go as far as saying the two phenomenon are “associated.” The arrow of causality may point in either direction. Perhaps the most pragmatic view on the subject comes from Michael Perlis, psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who says, “What is insomnia, but the gift of more time?”
Dennis Drabelle at The Washington Post, also an insomniac, refers to a recent study (as of 2007) from the University of Canterbury that suggests “insomnia and originality may go hand in hand.” He also points out that the notion of sleeplessness as productive, though “counterintuitive,” has plenty of precedent. Drabelle mentions many more famous cases, from W.C. Fields to Theodore Roosevelt to Franz Kafka. The list could go on and on.
Actor and musician Matt Berry tells The Guardian how, after years of tossing and turning, he finally harnessed his sleepless hours to write and record an album, Music for Insomniacs. “I knew that this was dead time,” says Berry, “and I could be doing something instead of sitting worrying about not being asleep.” Another musician, Dave Bayley of band Glass Animals, “owes his career in music to insomnia,” The Guardian writes, then notes a phenomenon sleep researchers call—with some skepticism—“creative insomnia.” Other musicians like Chris Martin, Moby, Tricky, and King Krule have all suffered the condition and turned it to good account.
The Guardian also notes that each of these poor souls has found “sleepless nights inspiring as well as tormenting.” Insomnia is not, in fact a gift or talent, but a painful condition that Porter and Drabelle both acknowledge can be associated with depression, addiction, and other serious medical conditions. One might make good use of the time—but perhaps only for a time. A site called Sleepdex—-which offers “resources for better sleep”—puts it this way:
Occasional insomnia appears to help some people produce new art and work, but is a detriment to others. It is perhaps true that more people find it a detriment than find it useful. Long-term insomnia and the accompanying sleep debt are almost surely negative for creativity.
This brings us to the subject of sleep—good, restful sleep—and its relationship to creativity. Sleepdex cites several research studies from Swiss and Italian universities, UC San Diego, and UC Davis. The general conclusion is that REM sleep—that period during which dreams “are the most narratively coherent of any during the night”—is also an important stimulus for creativity. There are the numerous anecdotes from artists like Salvador Dali, Paul McCartney, and countless others about famous works of art taking shape in dream states (Keith Richards says he heard the riff from “Satisfaction” in a dream).
And there are the experimental data, purportedly confirming that REM sleep enhances “creative problem solving.” European scientists have found that people were more likely to have creative insights after a long period of restful sleep, when the right brain gets a boost. Likewise, Tom Stafford at the BBC describes the “post-sleep, dreamlike mental state—known as sleep inertia or the hypnopompic state” that infuses our “waking, directed thoughts with a dusting of dreamworld magic.” It isn’t that insomniacs don’t experience this, of course, but we have less of it, as periods of REM sleep can be shorter and often interrupted by the need to scramble out of bed and get to work or get the kids to school not long after hitting the pillow.
Stafford points us toward a UC Berkeley study (apparently the University of California has some sort of monopoly on sleep research) “that helps illustrate the power of sleep to foster unusual connections, or ‘remote associates’ as psychologists call them.” Like nearly all of the scientific literature on sleep, this study expresses little doubt about the importance of sleep to memory function and problem solving. Big Think collects several more studies that confirm the findings.
On the whole, when it comes to the links between sleep—or sleeplessness—and creativity, the data and the stories point in different directions. This is hardly surprising given the slipperiness of that thing we call “creativity.” Like “love” it’s an abstract quality everyone wants and no one knows how to make in a laboratory. If it’s extra time you’re after—and very quiet time at that—I can’t recommend insomnia enough, though I wouldn’t recommend it at all as a voluntary exercise. If it’s the special creative insights only available in dream states, well, you’d best get lots of sleep. If you can, that is. Creative insomniacs—like those wandering in the confines of a dream world—know all too well they don’t have much choice in the matter.
The title of the TED talk above, “Flow, the secret to happiness,” might make you roll your eyes. It does indeed sound like self-help snake oil. But as soon as you hear the speaker, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describe the rationale for his happiness study, you might pay more serious attention. After living through the Second World War in Europe (he grew up in what is now Croatia), Csikszentmihalyi says he “realized how few of the grownups I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that were visited upon them; how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war.”
He became interested, he says, “in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living.” Csikszentmihalyi’s concerns are far from trivial, and his background and wealth of research lend his ideas a good deal of weight and credibility.
After chancing upon a Jungian lecture in Switzerland by a speaker who turned out to actually be Carl Jung, Csikszentmihalyi embarked on a course of study in the field now widely known as “positive psychology.” He now co-directs the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University and studies “human strengths such as creativity, engagement, intrinsic motivation, and responsibility.” Yes, he may present his ideas in popular self-help books and articles, but this does not make his data or conclusions any less sound than in his academic work. “Flow” is the shorthand word he uses to refer to the thesis of his book of the same name: “A person can himself [or herself] be happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside,’ just by changing the contents of consciousness.”
What does this mean? Youtuber Fight Mediocrity’s short book video book review above—which also teaches us how to pronounce Csikszentmihalyi’s name—explains the concept in brief, noting the book’s references to Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl to point out that the idea isn’t new but has been around for centuries: The idea being, as Csikszentmihalyi says in his TED talk, that we naturally experience the greatest happiness when fully absorbed in work we find meaningful and fulfilling. What Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” is a meditative state we might compare to the ancient Buddhist state of ekaggata—or “one-pointed concentration”—a state meditation teacher Shaila Catherine describes as “certainty, deep stability, and clarity…. The mind is completely unified and ‘one with the experience.’”
Indeed, like the Buddhist conception, which contrasts ekaggata with a restless greed that can never be satisfied, Csikszentmihalyi contrasts “flow” with wealth, and cites research suggesting that above a certain level of basic material well-being (which far too many people do not yet have), “increases in material resources do not increase happiness.” Csikszentmihalyi partly reached his conclusions by studying the emotional states of artists, musicians, scientists, and other creative individuals, who all reported experiencing pure states of contentment and joy when so fully concentrated on their work that they forgot themselves—or, more accurately, the constellation of daily anxieties, regrets, worries, fantasies, and preoccupations that we tend to call the self. As Csikszentmihalyi strongly suggests in his books and talks, the more we can lose ourselves intensely in creative activities that bring us fulfillment, the closer we come to being in harmony with ourselves and our world.
See another talk on “flow” and happiness above, from a 2014 “Happiness & its Causes” conference in Sydney, Australia.
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In February, Oliver Sacks announced that he was suffering from terminal cancer. And, by August, he was gone — but not before showing us (if you read his op-eds in the Times) how to die with dignity and grace. All of this I was reminded of again today when I stumbled upon a recent animation inspired by Sacks’ work. Called The Lost Mariner, the short film offers an animated interpretation of a chapter in Sacks’ 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The chapter (also called “The Lost Mariner”) presents a curious case study of a patient known as Jimmie G. who, suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome, loses the ability to form new memories. To see how Tess Martin made this award-winning short, you can watch the making-of video below.
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