![]() “Thoughts have meaning, so every thought is the tip of an iceberg,” Jonathan Shedler, a Colorado psychologist, told NPR’s Invisibilia.Īccording to Freudian psychologists like Shedler, there is great value in understanding where your thoughts come from. In addition to giving us modern psychoanalysis, Freud also taught that beneath our thoughts lurked a treasure trove of hidden information about our lives. But while our thoughts are undeniably connected to us, our true relationship to them is much more complicated.Īs spiritual teacher Francis Lucille says about our thoughts: “The thinker and the thought, the seer and the seen, the hearer and the heard are names that refer to this one single Reality.”įor a long time, our thoughts formed the basis of our reality-thanks in large part to Sigmund Freud. So strong is our connection to our thoughts that we often think they are the core of our being. In the quest for our true identity, what could be more authentic than our own thoughts? They are real and vibrant, and always with us, like children-or sometimes wild animals-tagging along wherever we go. Listen to the the full episode this story appeared in here. This story was produced by Invisibilia, a podcast from NPR exploring the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Scientists are still studying this phenomenon in people, Dweck says, learning more about "things that are possible and mechanisms through which a belief affects an outcome or one person affects another person." Analyses suggest that the expectation effect on students is small. The study made a splash, yet has proven difficult to replicate and has been hotly debated. Rosenthal pioneered some of these ideas in a study on school children. ![]() Teacher expectations can raise or lower a student's IQ score. Military trainers' expectations can literally make a soldier faster or slower. She was one of several researchers who have explored all kinds of surprising effects that expectations can have: A mother's expectations can affect the drinking behavior of her middle-schooler. We're not usually aware of how we are conveying our expectations to other people, but it's there," says Dweck. "And it's not something you can put your finger on. If you have lower expectations of someone, your body language will reflect it: You may stand farther from them, or make less eye contact, for instance, says Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. ![]() Subsequent research found that a similar dynamic can happen in people, too. "We do know that handling rats and handling them more gently can actually increase the performance of rats," Rosenthal explains. So, when the experimenters thought that the rats were really smart, they felt more warmly towards them and touched them more carefully. Their expectations subtly changed the way that the experimenters touched the rats and then, in turn, the way that the rats behaved. But what he eventually figured out was that the expectations that the researchers had in their heads actually translated into a whole set of tiny behavior changes. "I was having trouble publishing any of this," says Rosenthal. The results were dramatic: The allegedly smart rats did almost twice as well as the "dumb" rats, even though they were all the same kind of albino lab rat.Īt first, no one believed him. He told them that over the next week, their job was to run these rats - some of whom were very smart and some of whom were very stupid - through a maze and to record how well it does. Next, Bob brought a group of experimenters into his lab and assigned each of them to a rat.
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