Mon­ty Python icon John Cleese had this to say about Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene yes­ter­day: “She is the per­fect exam­ple of some­one who is not intel­li­gent enough to realise that she’s not very intel­li­gent. Hence her enor­mous self-con­fi­dence. Sad­ly, her sup­port­ers are even less intel­li­gent than she is. Hence their con­fi­dence in her.” It turns out that, as Cleese fur­ther explains in the video above, there’s a sci­en­tif­ic term for MTG’s con­di­tion–the Dunning–Kruger effect, “a cog­ni­tive bias where­in unskilled indi­vid­u­als suf­fer from illu­so­ry supe­ri­or­i­ty, mis­tak­en­ly rat­ing their abil­i­ty much high­er than is accu­rate” owing to “a metacog­ni­tive inabil­i­ty of the unskilled to rec­og­nize their inep­ti­tude” (and, by the same token, of “high­ly skilled indi­vid­u­als to under­es­ti­mate their rel­a­tive com­pe­tence, erro­neous­ly assum­ing that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for oth­ers”). This con­di­tion gets its name from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty researchers Justin Kruger and David Dun­ning, the lat­ter of whom Cleese–who has spent time at Cor­nell as a long-term vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor–counts as a friend. You can learn more about the Dunning–Kruger effect here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

24 Com­mon Cog­ni­tive Bias­es: A Visu­al List of the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sys­tems Errors That Keep Us From Think­ing Ratio­nal­ly

John Cleese Revis­its His 20 Years as an Ivy League Pro­fes­sor in His New Book, Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

A cou­ple of weeks ago, the New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle head­lined “How to Stop Rumi­nat­ing.” If your social media feeds are any­thing like mine, you’ve seen it pop up with some fre­quen­cy since then. “Per­haps you spend hours replay­ing a tense con­ver­sa­tion you had with your boss over and over in your head,” writes its author Han­nah Seo. “Maybe you can’t stop think­ing about where things went wrong with an ex dur­ing the weeks and months after a breakup.” The piece’s pop­u­lar­i­ty speaks to the com­mon­ness of these ten­den­cies.

But if “your thoughts are so exces­sive and over­whelm­ing that you can’t seem to stop them,” lead­ing to dis­trac­tion and dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion at work and at home, “you’re prob­a­bly expe­ri­enc­ing rumi­na­tion.” For this broad­er phe­nom­e­non Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Ethan Kross has a more evoca­tive name: chat­ter.

“Your inner voice is your abil­i­ty to silent­ly use lan­guage to reflect on your life,” he explains in the Big Think video above. “Chat­ter refers to the dark side of the inner voice. When we turn our atten­tion inward to make sense of our prob­lems, we don’t end up find­ing solu­tions. We end up rumi­nat­ing, wor­ry­ing, cat­a­stro­phiz­ing.”

Despite being an invalu­able tool for plan­ning, mem­o­ry, and self-con­trol, our inner voice also has a way of turn­ing against us. “It makes it incred­i­bly hard for us to focus,” Kross says, and it can also have “severe neg­a­tive phys­i­cal health effects” when it keeps us per­pet­u­al­ly stress­ing out over long-passed events. “We expe­ri­ence a stres­sor in our life. It then ends, but in our minds, our chat­ter per­pet­u­ates it. We keep think­ing about that event over and over again.” When you’re inside them, such men­tal loops can feel infi­nite, and they could result in per­pet­u­al­ly dire con­se­quences in our per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives. To those in need of a way to break free, Kross empha­sizes the pow­er of rit­u­als.

“When you expe­ri­ence chat­ter, you often feel like your thoughts are in con­trol of you,” he says. But “we can com­pen­sate for this feel­ing out of con­trol by cre­at­ing order around us. Rit­u­als are one way to do that.” Per­form­ing cer­tain actions exact­ly the same way every sin­gle time gives you “a sense of order and con­trol that can feel real­ly good when you’re mired in chat­ter.” Kross goes into greater depth on the range of chat­ter-con­trol­ling tools avail­able to us (“dis­tanced-self talk,” for exam­ple, which involves per­ceiv­ing and address­ing the self as if it were some­one) in his book Chat­ter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Mat­ters, and How to Har­ness It. His inter­view with Chase Jarvis above offers a pre­view of its con­tent — and a reminder that, as means of silenc­ing chat­ter go, some­times a pod­cast works as well as any­thing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fil­ment: Psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gole­man Explains the Pow­er of Focus

How Lit­er­a­ture Can Improve Men­tal Health: Take a Free Course Fea­tur­ing Stephen Fry, Ian McK­ellen, Melvyn Bragg & More

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Lis­ten­ing: Learn the Keys to Under­stand­ing Oth­er Peo­ple from the Famed Psy­chol­o­gist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Big Think uploaded the video on how to argue above at the end of last month, just in time for the Unit­ed States midterm elec­tion. Where pol­i­tics — or rather, polit­i­cal­ly inflect­ed con­flicts — have become more or less anoth­er nation­al sport, every­one is always look­ing for an edge. But the expert who stars in the video, Harvard’s Inter­na­tion­al Nego­ti­a­tion pro­gram head and Nego­ti­at­ing the Non­nego­tiable author Daniel Shapiro, has an unusu­al­ly capa­cious notion of what it means to win an argu­ment. Our goal, as he con­ceives of it, is to have “more effec­tive con­ver­sa­tions,” and this entails under­stand­ing three keys to hav­ing those con­ver­sa­tions: iden­ti­ty, appre­ci­a­tion, and affil­i­a­tion.

“The moment your iden­ti­ty gets hooked in these con­flicts,” Shapiro says, “all of a sud­den your emo­tions become a hun­dred times more pow­er­ful” — and the debate at hand becomes a hun­dred times less tractable. You there­fore must “know who you are and what you stand for,” the “val­ues and beliefs” dri­ving you to argue for your par­tic­u­lar posi­tion.

Ide­al­ly, you’ll also put some effort toward find­ing out the same things about your oppo­nent, or rather your inter­locu­tor. This is where appre­ci­a­tion comes in. Shapiro’s advice: “When you’re in the midst of the con­flict, don’t talk. Take the first ten min­utes to con­scious­ly lis­ten to the oth­er side. What’s the val­ue behind their per­spec­tive? What’s the log­ic, the ratio­nale?”

This allows you to assess the “emo­tion­al con­nec­tion” between your­self and the oth­er per­son. The trick is to “turn that oth­er per­son from an adver­sary into a part­ner” by fram­ing the con­ver­sa­tion as not a con­flict but as “fac­ing a shared prob­lem,” not least by ask­ing their advice on how to solve it. You can learn more about Shapiro’s con­cept of “inter­est-based nego­ti­a­tion” in this oth­er short Big Think video, and much more about his prin­ci­ples of argu­men­ta­tion in his talk at Google just above. In it, he breaks down the ele­ments of the “tribes effect” that keeps us butting heads, includ­ing our atti­tudes about taboos and our ten­den­cy toward iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics. And all of this is espe­cial­ly valu­able view­ing, of course, with the approach of that day of din­ner-table argu­men­ta­tive blood­sport known as Thanks­giv­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Win an Argu­ment (at the U.S. Supreme Court, or Any­where Else): A Primer by Lit­i­ga­tor Neal Katyal

Lit­er­ary The­o­rist Stan­ley Fish Offers a Free Course on Rhetoric, or the Pow­er of Argu­ments

How to Argue With Kind­ness and Care: 4 Rules from Philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett

A Guide to Log­i­cal Fal­lac­i­es: The “Ad Hominem,” “Straw­man” & Oth­er Fal­lac­i­es Explained in 2‑Minute Videos

Read An Illus­trat­ed Book of Bad Argu­ments: A Fun Primer on How to Strength­en, Not Weak­en, Your Argu­ments

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

You may nev­er have tried psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. You may nev­er have had an inter­est in try­ing psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. But if you’re read­ing this, you do have a mind, and you’ve almost cer­tain­ly felt some curios­i­ty about how that mind works. As any engi­neer knows, one of the short­est routes to under­stand­ing how a machine works is to dis­rupt its nor­mal oper­a­tions. Psy­che­delics do just that for your brain, shift­ing your con­scious­ness into a new per­spec­tive that can offer insights into your very per­cep­tions of real­i­ty. Or at least they do it in the view of Michael Pol­lan, Sam Har­ris, Jacob Sil­va, Ben Goertzel, and Matthew John­son.

The more famil­iar you are with cur­rent psy­che­delics research, the more of those names you’ll know. Pol­lan, who made his name writ­ing about food, stars in the Big Think video above about the sci­en­tif­ic renais­sance of mind-alter­ing drugs. “The brain is a hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tem, and the default mode net­work appears to be at the top,” he explains. That net­work is “the orches­tra con­duc­tor or cor­po­rate exec­u­tive. You take that out of the pic­ture, and sud­den­ly you have this upris­ing from oth­er parts of the brain and you have net­works that don’t ordi­nar­i­ly com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er sud­den­ly strik­ing up con­ver­sa­tions.”

Psy­che­del­ic sub­stances do this, mean­ing that when they’re in use, “you might have the visu­al cor­tex talk­ing to the audi­to­ry sys­tem, and sud­den­ly you’re see­ing music.” Any music-lover would feel at least some desire for the same expe­ri­ence. And even those with­out any inter­est in music would sure­ly like to enjoy for them­selves what Sam Har­ris describes feel­ing dur­ing one of his own psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ences: “There was a whole veneer of fear, frankly, that I did­n’t know was there that got stripped away,” leav­ing a “naked aware­ness of the present moment.”

This may sound sim­i­lar to the kind of state com­mon­ly ascribed to inten­sive med­i­ta­tion, and indeed, Har­ris — him­self a prac­ti­tion­er and advo­cate of med­i­ta­tive prac­tice — acknowl­edges it as anoth­er path to the same des­ti­na­tion. But for some peo­ple, Har­ris says, “tak­ing a drug is the only way they’re going to notice that it’s pos­si­ble to have a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of the world.” Even if we’re not so “lumpen and un-inquis­i­tive,” we still may not have seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered the range of ben­e­fits psy­che­delics could offer human­i­ty. “Many of the dis­or­ders that psy­che­delics appear to treat well are man­i­fes­ta­tions of a stuck brain,” Pol­lan says, “a mind that’s telling itself destruc­tive sto­ries like, ‘I can’t get through the day with­out a cig­a­rette,’ ‘I’m unwor­thy of love,’ ‘My work is shit.’ ”

The Unit­ed States was actu­al­ly con­duct­ing research into psy­che­del­ic drugs up until the ear­ly 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s admin­is­tra­tion made them ille­gal due to their poten­tial to sap the will of the men who were sup­posed to fight the Viet­nam War. (“He may well have been right,” Pol­lan acknowl­edges.) But now our soci­ety has found itself in a “men­tal health cri­sis,” as John­son, a psy­che­del­ic-sub­stance researcher at Johns Hop­kins, puts it in the brief explain­er just above, we’ll have to explore all pos­si­ble avenues — even pre­vi­ous­ly closed ones — in order to change our minds.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Use Psy­che­del­ic Drugs to Improve Men­tal Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

New LSD Research Pro­vides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Poten­tial to Pro­mote Cre­ativ­i­ty

Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Pro­gram That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Con­trol (1953–1973)

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Intel­li­gence is a fraught sub­ject of dis­cus­sion, and only becom­ing more so. Among the frame­works devel­oped safe­ly to approach it, one has gained spe­cial promi­nence: the the­o­ry cham­pi­oned by devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist Howard Gard­ner, author of the book Frames of Mind: The The­o­ry of Mul­ti­ple Intel­li­gences. And how many such intel­li­gences are there? In the Big Think video above — post­ed in 2016, 33 years after Frames of Mind — he names ten: lan­guage, log­ic and math­e­mat­ics, musi­cal, spa­tial, bod­i­ly-kines­thet­ic, inter­per­son­al, intrap­er­son­al, nat­u­ral­ist, teach­ing, and exis­ten­tial. 

Some of these may strike you as only tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed to intel­li­gence, tra­di­tion­al­ly defined. Gard­ner has con­sid­ered this: “Peo­ple say, ‘Well, music’s a tal­ent, it’s not an intel­li­gence.’ And I say, ‘Well, why, if you’re good with words, is that an intel­li­gence, but if you’re good with tones and rhythms and tim­bres…”

Nobody, in his telling, has ever come up with a con­vinc­ing response. Hence his mis­sion to expand the def­i­n­i­tion of intel­li­gence beyond the aggre­gate mea­sure of brain­pow­er long known as the gen­er­al intel­li­gence fac­tor — or more com­mon­ly, “g fac­tor” — to encom­pass the sort of skills whose use­ful­ness we can see in the real world, away from the con­struct­ed rig­ors of psy­cho­me­t­ric tests.

“Whether there’s eight intel­li­gences or ten or twelve is less impor­tant to me than hav­ing bro­ken the monop­oly of a sin­gle intel­li­gence, which sort of labels you for all time,” says Gard­ner. You can see eight of his intel­li­gences bro­ken down in more detail — and per­haps even iden­ti­fy your own strongest suit — in the Prac­ti­cal Psy­chol­o­gy video just above. Gard­ner also express­es opti­mism about our abil­i­ty to devel­op dif­fer­ent intel­li­gences: you can choose to con­cen­trate on a spe­cif­ic one, but “if you want to be a jack of all trades and be very well-round­ed, then you’re prob­a­bly going to want to nur­ture the intel­li­gences which aren’t that strong.” What­ev­er your own view on mul­ti­ple intel­li­gences, don’t for­get how the old say­ing orig­i­nal­ly went in full: “Jack of all trades, mas­ter of none, though often bet­ter than a mas­ter of one.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fil­ment: Psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gole­man Explains the Pow­er of Focus

How Read­ing Increas­es Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence & Brain Func­tion: The Find­ings of Recent Sci­en­tif­ic Stud­ies

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

You Don’t “Find” Your Pas­sion in Life, You Active­ly Devel­op It, Explains Psy­chol­o­gist Car­ol Dweck, The­o­rist of the “Growth Mind­set”

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.