Comments on: Mind Hacking at the gym

By: chris chatham

chris chatham — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 00:34:28 +0000

There are many examples of prior expectations either completely “overpowering” sensory input or, conversely, making the unexpected sensory input especially salient:
- the jolting surprise you feel after taking a deep sip of what you think is water, only to find out it’s soda (or vice versa, of course). Or the same surprise you feel when you’re about to bite into a luscious, chocolate brownie, only to discover it’s rock hard
- if you have ever tried to intentionally draw your own blood, you know that it is incredibly difficult to do so, even though on some other day you might scrape yourself and draw blood without even knowing.
- smooth eye saccades can only be made in the presence of smoothly moving objects OR with the expectation that an occluded object is moving smoothly
- the placebo effect
And then there’s the classic study showing drastic academic improvement among those students from whom teachers were told to expect high performance, relative to other students, even though these students were selected randomly (Rosenthal & Jacobson’s “Pygmalion in the Classroom”).

By: sugarbat

sugarbat — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 22:34:42 +0000

Dumbo, of course. Who thought he could fly only if he carried the magic feather.
Another example with which most of us are familiar is the one where Mom or Dad first teaches us how to ride a bike with the training wheels off. “Don’t let go!” we yell as we pedal, and Dad runs behind, holding the seat. After promising to not let go, Dad typically does, in fact, let go at some point, after which we ride on for awhile all by ourselves; we usually topple the moment we realize Dad is yards behind.

By: christian

christian — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 22:25:11 +0000

Thanks to Daniel C. Siadak for sending in the following comment:
“I read your article and noticed a familiarity between your story and that of a Russian weightlifter who was training for a new world record in a certain lift. After warming up, the trainers told the weightlifter that he was going to lift a weight that he had previously accomplished. The reality was that the trainers actually put on additional weight that surpassed the current record. The lifter successfully lift that weight and set a new record. This story is at least 10 years old, but with some researching, I bet you will be able to find it”.
Anyone know more details on this story?