WHY RATS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE
AND HOW YOU CAN BE SMARTER
As I pointed out in The Believing Brain - Know This! Or Be The Victim Of It, For Life! summary piece: "It is said that rats are smarter than people, because when there is no cheese at the end of the tunnel they stop going down that tunnel. Somehow humans get stuck in believing if I do x enough times somehow I will eventually to get what I want."
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THE BIG QUESION: DO YOU WANT TO BE RAT-SMART OR LESS?
Rats, unless ruined by humans, are quite directly connected to what it takes to survive, making very pure decisions based on reality. Of course, they are highly motivated.
They stop going down a tunnel when there is no cheese there any more. Simple.
Humans, perhaps sometimes ruined by influences of other humans or by faulty learning, will stick to their old behaviors that might have worked once, but no longer work. (
A CASE IN POINT
Recently, I tried my hardest and really devoted myself and my focus on one great objective involving making a really big difference in someone's life at a crucial time. Finally, I got so tired of pushing and doing all I could that I finally was up to making a "(smart) rat conclusion".
The reality was: there was no cheese down that tunnel. Sure I wanted well for the person, but there was nothing to be gained. No foul - it just didn't work. No one to blame. And nothing to regret, as I knew there was risk that it wouldn't work.
HUMANS DON'T SEEM TO ADJUST TO REALITY...OR THINK!
When we see there is no cheese (or we conclude that is what's so), then we can only sit there looking at the empty tunnel or we can go find a tunnel with cheese in it. We can only look forward and try to progresss, and not stay gaping into the empty tunnel.
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Champions look to see what the results are or aren't and if there is no or too little chesse down a tunnel, they quickly switch - they do it very, very fast, and adjust to better cheese tunnels very, very frequently.
Those who keep going down the same tunnels with no cheese hoping that somehow the cheese will appear are simply "dumb rats", not thinking, not using even our "rat brains". "Well, there was down there before, so I'll keep going down the tunnel and maybe it'll happen again."
It looks like the rats with their tiny little brains are getting more net firepower and thinking out of them than us humans with these really big brains out of which we only use a "teeny" bit for thinking, infrequently at that .
We just don't use our brains. We just let all the cheese in life go to rot, uneaten, unenjoyed, hoping for a little cheese here and there, versus being the master of getting cheese and having all we want in life. And the "masters of getting cheese" are the winners in life in that they not only get more cheese but they also, it turns out, spend less energy getting a better life with alot less difficulty.
EASIER? OR HARDER?
It takes a lot of effort to do things wrong.
But some people think (or actually just "brain fart" along in life with no real thinking) that life is easier without the effort of thinking.
To the contrary, the smartest of us figures out ahead of time (or as rapidly as possible, how to get the most cheese with the least effort. Another way of saying that last part is "they get more cheese per amount of effort." Which means, of course, that to get a certain amount of cheese we get it so effectively that we don't have to spend much effort - which leaves over lots of energy for getting what we want in the rest of our live!
[If I can get 10 oz. of cheese in one hour and another rat gets 2 oz of cheese per hour hour, the last rat will have to take 5 hours to get the 10 oz. of cheese to satisfy him for the day. Who's better off? The one who took all the time figuring it out once how to be better at cheese getting did have to spend some time figuring, planning, making trials and errors, but from that one fairly large effort he saved 4 hours a day for the rest of his life. Guess who the smart rat is.
For instance, our archetypical character, Daniel, to accomplish all of his low value meetings with which he has overfilled his day and life, has to stress himself out to do even 1/10 of our other archetypical character (we'll call him Mr. Covey) who only chooses to go down tunnels with lots and lots of cheese down them, so that he attains more total value in a day, by far, in his "work" in far less time and has plenty of time for the even more valuable activities of personal care, health, emotional well-being and then plenty of time for his next most valuable ring out from the center, his family. Daniel invests most of his efforts in the sixth circle out, of geometrically less value from each prior ring in - and then has no time to take care of the ring that yields 10,000 (or some very large number) times the value per unit of time!'' (See The Concentric Rings Of Importance - Placing The Stuff Of Life In Its Right Place.)
Daniel keeps running and rushing down the low cheese tunnels (many without cheese at all and many with false cheese appearing to be cheese but not feeling very filling....frantically, frenetically, in a super high stressed lifestyle full of anxiety and pressure. He never really stops and thinks for a sustained level of time where he would go all the way through to a better solution, as he runs back quickly to his old supply of low cheese tunnels as he is worried about starving of cheese and he keeps eating alot of faux cheeses (pride, getting approval, trying to "look good", etc.) in his sights, almost compulsively going after them, because of the effects of "intermittent reinforcement" (see sidebar).
