Two Guys On Your Head

At the end of the day the brain wants what it wants, but you might not know that the brain also wants things associated with what it wants, it notices more things that can get it what it wants, and it doesn't really like things that are not aligned with its goals. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of desire.

Tales of bloody tears, looming sharks, and possessed children can be terrifying — that's why we love them! It's just one of the many things that make the human experience truly remarkable: We can tell stories and scare ourselves. Moreover, being scared can teach us how to overcome other things we fear day to day. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about why we like scary stories, and what we can learn about life from being "safely" frightened.

In this episode, KUT's Rebecca McInroy is joined by Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke (of Two Guys On Your Head) in a discussion about the definition of Human Nature. Deep Down, is it better to know that people are all the same or to think they’re all different? How does this understanding influence our perspective on crisis, forgiveness, control, and so much more?

Why isn't information enough? Facts. Dates. Names. Why do we as humans need more in order to understand our world?

As Americans, we spend a lot of time working. Sometimes we even think if we put in only 40 hours a week we're slacking. No judgment here, but if we are going to work that much, we should like what we're doing at work — right?

Thank god it's Friday! Right? What's so wrong with working hard all week and wanting to go out and let loose Friday night? Nothing really — except that when you look at the work week through this lens, you are more likely to set yourself up for unhappiness.

It's no surprise that reading aloud to your kids is good for them. But why is it so important? What's going on in a child's brain when they're hearing stories of giant fruit carrying orphans across the ocean? On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the child's brain on books.

Kids these days typically get a trophy for participation in most events. Some argue that the practice ultimately serves as a disincentive for a child to compete. Others ask, if your kid is smiling, what more do you want? In this week's edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke look into the system of reward and evaluate what we are rewarding and why.

So you just got that raise you've been working toward, and a new project starts tomorrow, and you're making great money, but — you don't really like the work. You're moving up, but you're not happy. It might be time to re-evaluate your situation, and maybe get on a different proverbial treadmill. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the concept of The Hedonic Treadmill, and what we can do to set ourselves up for a happier life.

Failure is a word that carries a lot of baggage, arousing emotional responses that we’d usually rather avoid. What about success? Why does the thought of success conjure images and feelings of comfort and satisfaction. This week, "Two Guys on Your Head" examine how the heights of success and the "training wheels" of failure impact our everyday lives.

Our sensory systems are pretty smart. Typically we like things that are going to be good for us to ingest, and dislike things that are going to be bad for us to ingest. Pretty simple right? Not so much! In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about benefit of the disgust reaction, and how we as human beings co-opt that system and use it more conceptually than it what it’s meant for. Therefore disgust has come to have a moral dimension to it.

In this episode, KUT's Rebecca McInroy joins Two Guys On Your Head's Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke to talk about the psychology of living the good life, and planning for death. We’ll discuss why it’s so difficult to confront end-of-life concerns with your loved ones and your doctor, and we’ll offer some strategies that might help ease the pain of these difficult conversations.

Food can be delicious, heart-warming and life-sustaining. So, how did eating become a constant battle with the refrigerator? In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Bob Duke and Dr. Arthur Markman discuss the challenges in maintaining a healthy diet and how changing our perspectives on food may be a vital approach to solving these problems.

Therapy can be life-changing. However, anyone who’s ever seen a bad therapist likely agrees, on at least some level, that virtual therapy may be a step in the right direction. But is it actually effective? Virtual therapy offers a true judgment-free zone. It also removes much of the shame and fear associated with telling even (or perhaps especially) the kindest of therapist one’s deepest and darkest secrets. It’s also much more convenient and, likely, inexpensive. However, a good therapist can sense what’s going on beneath the surface. Due to the way the brain is structured, we can rationalize our emotional problems in a way that fits into the context of our current environment and feels safe, which can have little to do with accuracy. A good therapist also provides advice on how to face these issues, as we become ready to hear it. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss the purposes of therapy and provide some perspective on the roles virtual therapy can and can’t fill.

Most people feel in over their heads when they first enter a challenging situation or even a new job. And, while conventional wisdom suggests those with trepidations about trying new things should "fake it 'til they make it," it may not always be the best course of action. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Bob Duke and Dr. Art Markman discuss what's known as "imposter syndrome" — the practice of pretending to be the person you want people to see you as rather than who you truly are — and explain why it may just be better to just start working towards your goals instead of faking it.

Painkillers: Our societal views on pain are right there in the name of its cure — or, rather, primary form of treatment. The high reliance on painkillers by the medical community has become an increasingly controversial topic. And for patients, that reliance can easily transform a treatment to an addiction or recreational drug use.

Pain can range from barely noticeable to excruciating. Yet pain, in all its forms, is important. It is how the body communicates there is a problem. Physical pain in the ankle may ask us to stop walking so fast or demand a pair of crutches immediately. Likewise, emotional pain may indicate that we need to talk about a problem with our partner or severe the relationship entirely. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, add to the series on pain and the brain, with a discussion on emotional pain and memory.

Understanding how our brains interpret pain is an ongoing investigation. Some think pain can be as much a physical phenomenon as it is a cultural one. While in the West pain management seems to be just part of life. We wanted to investigate what psychology can tell us about pain and the brain. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, kick off our three-part series on "Pain and The Brain" with a discussion of "Phantom Pain." What it is, and how psychologists are finding new ways of helping patients who suffer with it.

Even though is seems like a neverending April day in Austin, it's technically summertime. For some of us that means we take a break, with the intention of tackling all those projects we never had time to get to during the harsh Austin winter. So why, when the summer comes to an end, do we feel disappointed when we haven't written that novel or cleaned out the closets? In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the many elements of summer that can make it difficult to let go, and how re-thinking our intentions and being present can allow us to make the most of time off.

Nuclear energy. Penicillin. Lasers. Science produces some pretty groundbreaking discoveries, but when we focus on the products, as opposed to the process, we miss a huge part of what makes science one of the most valuable resources we have as humans. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about some of the aspects of science education that could be improved upon, in order to ensure we have a public that's well-informed.

When you think of science, what comes to mind? Maybe you think about launching rockets into space, or antibiotics, or the electric car? Maybe not. But let's say you do. If that is the case, it's more accurate to say you love what scientific developments have brought us, but not necessarily science itself. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about what science is, why the scientific process is important to understand and why it's so difficult to communicate science to the general public.

Philosophers have long proposed that there is no objective reality. And now science agrees — at least as far as our personal experiences are concerned. Perception is the process of interpreting our present environment through the lens of our past experiences. Everything we sense, think, feel, and even remember, actually arises in response to a combination of what is currently happening and our stored long-term memories. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Bob Duke and Dr. Art Markman discuss the evolutionary advantages of flexible perception, and how this process can influence both our behavior and modern day society.

Defiance is an impassioned refusal to conform to some form of expectation, typically a social one. This point is well illustrated by John Bender in The Breakfast Club, who, among other feats, earns himself eight more detentions by arguing with the principal during detention. Many great historical moments also provide beautiful examples — take Rosa Parks sitting in a banned bus seat or Martin Luther’s nailing of his 95 Theses to the Castle Church door. It’s hard to get more straightforward than that. These acts of rebellion — large or small — may be considered disruptive, shocking, reprehensible, inappropriate, or even heroic. The commonality across contexts is that they are essentially guaranteed to evoke an equally intense response. But intense doesn’t necessarily mean counterproductive. In fact, sometimes it’s necessary. Defiance can possess a great degree of social utility. It allows us to protect our rights and what we value most. But to use it in a purposeful manner, we must first see the problem and then decide how to achieve its solution. For example, as detention progresses, we learn Mr. Bender comes from a violent home where self-assertion only provokes more violence. He also lives in a society that largely turns a blind eye to his experiences or calls him a degenerate for them. His behavior, as do most acts of defiance, screams, “things must change now!” When the school authorities meet his act of defiance with a discipline that focuses on changing his behavior, instead of looking at what is motivating him to act out, they miss the opportunity to address the larger system of disenfranchisement that is at the root of his defiant behavior. So next time you witness defiant behavior, in your 15-year-old or on the news, asking yourself, “What is the motivation here?” might be productive. Changing behavior is one thing, but changing minds and systems is quite another.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of egocentric bias. It can be pretty destructive, but not necessarily in ways we predict.

Are you an auditory learner or a visual learner? If you answered "yes" you would be right. That's because we use all our senses to learn and process information. In this edition of Two Guys On Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke dispel the myths behind learning styles preferences: they don’t really exist. Our reliance on the theories of learning styles to explain our success or failure of understanding certain information is actually serving our human need to put things into categories – combined with our need to explain things when they don’t work.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how our brains process information differently based on the mode of consumption.

The idea that money doesn't make you happy is easy to get behind if you have it, but if you don't it can be a hard concept to buy into (pun intended). Yet the correlation between money and happiness is more complicated then one might think. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explain the relationship between money, security, opportunity, memory, and happiness.

As it turns out, the way we answer that question defines the relationship itself. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about the various ways we understand the economics of the relationships in our lives, and why the value of community should never be underestimated.

For example, when people look up, fidget or stutter they might just be nervous, and not exactly lying. However, because we rely on the truth to make our culture go round, it might make our lives easier if we could just spot a liar out of the crowd. As it turns out you can tell if people are telling the truth or not, but it takes some skill, time and knowledge. In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about lying, and a new study that reveals a more accurate way to catch someone in a lie.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the relationship between sleep, age and cognitive decline.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how and why placebos can make us feel better.

Forgiveness, as Dr. Markman points out, benefits the forgiver. It allows us to get past the wrong we’ve received and move on. If we don’t forgive we have a hard time forgetting the negative elements of the event, and subsequent interactions are therefore imbued with retribution; it’s hard to start over. But what if my enemy is not sorry? In fact, that doesn’t really matter from a psychological perspective. You can still reap the benefits of forgiveness even if your aggressor doesn’t repent. The roadblocks we place in the way of forgiveness are often cultural and even though it may feel like we don’t have a choice in the matter, we do. We might say, “I’m not going to forgive him, until he says he’s sorry.” But this may never happen. So why wait? If we hold on to the pain and refuse to let it go “until”, we are the only ones hurting. Like Oscar Wilde said, “Forgive your enemies—nothing annoys them so much.” It’s a win-win!

Coincidences stand out to us because they are salient. We notice them, but with the amount of ideas, people places and things coming into our brains everyday, it's not uncommon to have overlapping content. It's just that we are not very good at understanding the probability of things occurring simultaneously. As an exercise try to think of how many things pop into your head each day that don't have a corresponding "match," and you might get a different answer to your question when you ask, "Are there any coincidences in life?"

Most of us can recall a time when the mere funny feeling of the lining of a sock caused us (or our children) to spiral into a hour of uncontrollable tears, screams and thrashing about. This is what we like to call a tantrum. The question for parents and caregivers is, what is the best way to deal with a tantrum? There are a couple things to remember when it comes to tantrums. The first is that kids throw tantrums, in part, because their brains are not yet fully developed. The region of the brain responsible for helping us to inhibit aggressive, spontaneous behavior just isn’t quite ready to deal with the wrong socks, or bedtime, or turning off the iPad. That is not to say that kids can’t stop themselves from erupting when they’re angry, or develop tools to help them deal with tantrums, it’s just to say it takes practice and time to learn to temper yourself when you’re upset. No need to dismiss bad behavior, and let’s be fair, adults with fully developed brains throw tantrums too. But maybe give your kiddos a break sometimes, they’ve got a lot going on between their ears. And actually giving them a break is exactly what you should do. Any energy you add to tantrums just fuels the fire. The best thing to do is leaving the kids alone (as long as they’re safe) and let them tantrum until they chill. Tantrums are also not the best time for kids or adults to learn lessons. After the storm has calmed give it some time, then talk about more constructive ways of dealing with anger, and frustration.

"He slit a sheet, a sheet he slit, upon a slitted sheet he sits." Okay now, five times fast. Tongue twisters and rhymes are a great way to entertain yourself and your friends at parties and on long road trips, but what makes for a good tongue twister and how do they work in the brain? As it turns out, the structure of a syllable lends itself to our linguistic foibles, but it's more than that. So much of how language works in the brain is automatized, and so when we focus on how we form sentences and words, we mess up what we are actually trying to say. Rhymes are a little different. Rhymes work because our brains love to predict what is going to happen next. When sounds and word patterns are familiar to us, we tend to like them more. In addition, when we're really paying attention to what we are listening to, and predicting what is going to come next, we remember better what we are listening to. Therefore, you're more likely to be able to recall poems and rhymes from your youth, when other things may elude you.

In this special holiday edition of Two Guys On Your Head, we'll explore questions about the link between freewill and gratitude, why we feel so compelled to recreate traditions exactly as we remember them, and why yawning is contagious. Plus, we'll take a trip to The Thinkery with Dr. Cristine Legare.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss how and why we misperceive how memory works in the brain.

For many of us, Thanksgiving means spending time with our families, carrying out traditions that we’ve practiced for years. While it can be very stressful, messy, and challenging to spend time with family members you don’t see very often, it can also be a beautiful time of re-centering. Traditions serve a psychological function. By repeating the same traditional activity with the same group of people over the years, we construct a chronological record of who we’ve been before – and who we are now. It’s a hidden way of staying in touch with the consistent elements of our identities, and it allows us to track ourselves as we develop and change. Traditions give us an opportunity to become psychologically close to the person that we used to be in childhood, or adolescence – or even as recently as last year. And that’s something to be thankful for. As always, Drs. Bob Duke and Art Markman are carving it up.

No pain, no gain. There is a common misconception in our society that the more we have to exert ourselves to accomplish something, the higher the value of that accomplishment. It feels very rewarding to create the positive feedback loop in our minds that we’ve endured suffering in order to reach a goal. That’s how our minds work. At the end of a challenging task, we like to reap the rewards of our exertion. When it comes to physical exertion, those rewards are usually benefits like strength, fitness, endurance and a pretty hot bod. There are, of course, also the bragging rights of having climbed a mountain, or some other extreme. We take social pride in such an achievement. Very simply, it feels good to work hard.

After age 80, many bodily functions – including brain function – seem to have reached the average limit of their operation. So what can we do to preserve our brains for as long as possible?

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the development of Artificial Intelligence and what it might mean for humans in the near future.

In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the history and development of intelligence tests; as well as what these tests can actually tell us about ones ability to achieve.

In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the evolution of our psychological responses to fear.

In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about what goes into our ability to naturally be happy, and how we can influence our perspective to feel more positive.

For those of us who have friends or relatives recently becoming acquainted with the phenomenon of the internet, or just people in our lives who like to scan the latest meme trail, we might be frequently introduced to the latest cat video meme. Even if we have better things to do, it seems so hard to resist watching those things when we have the chance. What the… ? Why? On this week’s show, Dr. Art Markman, Dr. Bob Duke and host Rebecca McInroy discuss the riveting topic of cat videos. Essentially underlying the cat, or kitten video phenomenon, is our evolutionary instinct to fall in love with babies. Babies are really hard to care for. It’s a huge challenge. If we all knew the trouble involved, none of us would take much interest in reproducing. However, babies are also irresistibly adorable. Our ingenious genetic evolution has instilled in us an insatiable attraction to the cuteness of small, helpless baby creatures, of all species, not just humans. Hence, within the modern era of easy access to technology that allows us to record, publish and distribute whatever our little hearts desire, we often want to share cute videos of kittens. Or deer, or koalas, or sloths, or puppies, or human babies… Or tsunamis. Basically, anything that’s unusual and provokes an intense emotional response is compelling to watch and share. We’re at the beginning of this technological development, so in this stage, we’re too excited by the opportunity to enjoy the instinct gratification of the meme to let it pass us by. The memes are taking over the Internet…

While you can spend all of your leisure time focused on brain exercise, in the hopes that it will make you smarter, there are many other activities that could improve your brain just as much. In reality, all of life is brain exercise. Playing piano, reading for leisure, or building a dog house are all great activities that develop different cognitive skills, just as well or better than playing a game on the computer. The truth is, there are all kinds of pleasurable activities that will make you smarter, but they all require effort. There is no improvement without effort. The key to success in any skill development is commitment to repeated practice. As the old saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Procrastination is the all-too-familiar foe of productivity, but why do some wait until the last minute to even get a project started? It also comes down to evolution of the human brain. The frontal lobe is the behavior and –planning controlling part of the brain that also regulates the distribution of dopamine. However, it’s also the most recently-evolved section of the brain – meaning it’s occasionally overridden by baser, more primal desires. So overcoming this age-old cognitive fallback to achieve long-term goals takes a fair amount of energy. Breaking up longer-term goals is the best way to do this – breaking it down into steps and rewarding oneself along the way. It makes a daunting task seem less intimidating, and it helps manage time, effort and energy, rather than putting it off.