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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Then we'll explore what time is, what is now, and how managing time can backfire.
The more accurately we try and measure time, the more efficiently we try and use our time, the more we're trying to pack in, the less time people feel they have. So this is why it's called time famine. So we're living longer than ever, and yet people feel like they haven't got enough time. They're always rushed.
Also, how the lack of sleep can make you gain weight. And the personality traits of poisonous people and the damage they can do.
People with these personality traits, by virtue of being callous and manipulative, that manipulative part comes with a lot of deception. When you're around these people, you know, you start to see what they're saying and the reality does not line up.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.
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Chapter 2: What insights does the Harvard Grant Study provide about happiness?
And then if you look at it from a neuroscience perspective as well, even if there was a now perspective, Stuff happening right now out there in the world. By the time we experience that, it takes a certain fraction of a second for that information to reach us for those events. So you're experiencing everything with a slight delay.
It feels like now, but it isn't the same now as for the person that was speaking and different moments.
senses as well work at different speeds sight and sound travel at different speeds through the air and our brain then processes them at different speeds so you've got all this information coming in and it's delayed it's out of sync and yet we can still experience what's happening around us as this unified now so again i think that's telling us that now is something that we create within us rather than something that's just simply given to us from the outside world
So you hear a lot about being in the present moment, to not spend a lot of time worrying about the future or agonizing over the past. And yet, when I think about that, the present moment, you being in this present moment, is the result of your past, your memories, that you bring to this present moment, as well as the things maybe you're worrying about in the future.
So this idea that you can be in a vacuum in the present moment doesn't really make sense because you are your memories and your concerns and what's important to you in this moment.
Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? Because there's a lot of research showing that your sense of time, that the way that we bring our different time scales and our past, present and future into a moment.
So all of everything you've learned through your life, all of your experiences, all of your memories and everything that you're expecting to the future, all of that is being brought into each moment. And if you take those things away, there isn't really anything left. A pure present would have nothing in it.
And it's when we are in different mental states where we lose our sense of time, we also tend to lose our sense of self. Those two things are very entwined together. together, whether it's in psychosis or people who've taken psychedelic drugs or even just in flow states where you're really immersed in the moment. When your sense of time falls away, your sense of self falls away.
So I think it's a balance. We do need to be able to not just always be obsessed with the past and the future and appreciate what's happening right now. But I think that what's happening right now, everything in your moment around you is that you're experiencing depends also on your past and your future.
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Chapter 3: How do scientists define the concept of 'now'?
And is it the same thing as a toxic person? And what are the traits of a poisonous person? All of that to set the stage here.
Yeah, that's a great question. So we end up using kind of lots of euphemisms for these folks in our lives. But when I talk about a poisonous person, what I am describing is someone who's really high on what I call the dark tetrad. So these are a particular set of personality traits. They include psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism.
And the thing that all of those traits share in common is that they involve callousness and manipulation. And so by virtue of that, people who come into contact with these personalities tend to be on the receiving end of that, resulting in lots of pain, an outsized amount of harm that they cause in their social networks, and certainly can create these kinds of toxic cultures.
And where does that come from?
And maybe it's not all that important to know why, but why are some people so poisonous?
We have fairly good data now to suggest that these personality traits, particularly psychopathy and narcissism, which we know the most about, come from a fairly even mix of genetics and environmental influences.
So when it comes to psychopathy in particular, so these folks are characterized by that callousness and manipulation that I talked about earlier, but also impulsivity and really low remorse. And so unsurprisingly, these folks tend to be overrepresented in, say, prison populations and engage in a whole lot of antisocial behavior, both criminal and non-criminal in nature.
And we can see these traits early in life. So research suggests that you can detect callous and unemotional traits in particular in kids as young as about two years old. And that suggests that there's a genetic component. So we do know from twin studies that individuals who have a shared genetic component are more likely to share that psychopathic
type of personality than those that are less related, like fraternal twins or siblings. And there is also a component of our environment. So we do know that harsh parenting practices and outright abuse as children can also increase the likelihood that kids start to show these callous and unemotional traits. And that tends to continue throughout their lives.
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Chapter 4: What factors influence our perception of time?
What they... do not see as the problem with that because generally they perceive the problem to be like your problem, Mike. It's your problem or my problem and their behavior doesn't affect them so much. So they don't necessarily see much of a reason to change.
Okay, so they see themselves as that way. Do we see them as that way? In other words, do we think that poisonous people are poisonous people and we can spot them a mile away, or do we think something else?
That's a great question, and it's a bit complicated. One, because... People with these personality traits, by virtue of being callous and manipulative, right, that manipulative part comes with a lot of deception. And we are terrible lie detectors.
And so even though we might think that we're very good at it, if you actually give people a whole bunch of truths and lies and ask them to sort out which is which, they tend to perform around chance, like 54% accuracy, which is not much better than flipping a coin. And usually when we're talking to another person just in a conversation, we aren't even really on the lookout for lies.
And so sometimes we see things like what psychologists call love bombing at the start, particularly of a romantic relationship. you know, they come across as like the perfect partner. They're saying all of the things that you want to hear. Now, some large proportion of those might be lies that we're just not catching.
Similarly in the workplace, you might hear someone with these traits talk about all the great ideas that they've had, all the successes that they had, how they're such a wonderful leader. But if you ask other people on their team, you might get a very different story. So
When you're around these people for long enough, you know, you start to see that what they're saying and the reality does not line up. But deception can be quite convincing at the outset. And we also confuse confidence, which they have in spades, with competence.
And so we sometimes perceive they really strongly think they know what they're doing, and we're like, oh, they know what they're doing, not recognizing that there's a difference between confidence and competence.
So what's the goal with dealing with these people? Is it to identify and then walk away? Is it to try to somehow work around it? What's the goal here?
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