Objective:
Unlearn false truth indoctrination that
breeds wrong conclusions.
Pivot toward evidence-based thinking.
Consciousness is only possible through change;
change is only possible through movement.
—Aldous Huxley
M
ike Birbiglia unzips his sleeping bag. He’s not camping, just starting his Sunday morning ritual inside his posh New York Upper West Side apartment: coffee, brunch, joke writing, and some much-needed rest. In a few hours, he’ll be back on stage again.
Birbiglia, thirty-nine, is an award-winning comedian, actor, and producer. You might know him from his role on Orange Is the New Black, Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien appearances, or his 100-city tour. Between his self-deprecating transparency and highly relatable obsession with pizza, he’s become one of the hottest in the business. He’s that funny.
His rise to fame also has a lot to do with his sleeping bag—or to be more precise, the reason behind it, which isn’t so funny. On the road trying to launch his career, he jumped from the second-floor window of his hotel room in Walla Walla, Washington. It wasn’t a Jackass-style stunt or a suicide attempt; he wasn’t even conscious at the time. Birbiglia has a condition known as rapid eye movement (REM) behavior disorder, an intense version of sleepwalking.
Before this all went down, Birbiglia had no-showed for the sleep study his neurologist father arranged. He yes-manned every gig that came his way. Pizza and beer were his staples. His screens blared right up until the second he fell asleep. His behaviors were all on the “don’t” side of the REM behavior disorder checklist. He was the poster child for overstimulation and sleep deprivation.
At night, he fended off creatures, jumped from podiums, and fought off bad guys. By day, he’d emerge bloody and bruised, dismissing the red flags, much to the chagrin of his worried family. They used every strategy humanly possible to get him to wake up to the fact he needed help: scare tactics, sleep tips, brain books, bribes, ultimatums, jumping up and down. As is with life, the disaster finally woke him.
While doctors pulled the chunks of glass out of his leg, they told him he’d just missed his femoral artery and was more than a little lucky to be alive. Thirty-three stitches and a hella story later, Birbiglia finally underwent the highly anticipated sleep study, which revealed his rare disorder—one that causes him to act out his dreams in full force, ninja style.
Walla Walla couldn’t have been more of a literal wake-up call. It became the catalyst that spurred Birbiglia into lasting behavioral changes so he’d be less apt to sleepwalk himself into harm’s way. The new protocol wasn’t rocket science. Lay off the pizza and beer nightcaps. Don’t screen leech right before bed. Get enough sleep. Zip up that sleeping bag, so you’ll stay put.
Stay Woke
If you think about it, most of us have a little Birbiglia in us. We humans don’t have the best track record when it comes to being consistently attentive or following the best course. We might not thrash in our sleep or Evel Knievel out of hotel windows, but we all have foggy moments that get us lost.
This type of unconscious behavior doesn’t happen because we skip our Wheaties or forget our V8. It’s not a moral failing or sign of low IQ. It doesn’t necessarily mean we have the latest disorder du jour, either.
Consciousness is a state of being characterized by thought, sensation, and volition—the process of deciding on and committing to a specific course of action. It can be experienced individually and within a group with shared interests. One of the most common myths about sleepwalking is that we shouldn’t wake the sleepwalker. In reality, it has to happen if we want to get to the good life.
Consciousness
Academic Definition
Consciousness is the quality or state of being awake and aware, allowing for active engagement in the world that’s within and around you. It gives us access to specific knowledge about issues and phenomena. It allows us to reflect deep awareness of self and regard for contributing positively in our behavior.
Street Definition
Consciousness helps us stay woke. Instead of falling asleep behind the wheel of life, it’s like a jolt of caffeine that keeps us on point. All kinds of lightbulbs go off that help us get what’s really going on and what we can do about it. Consciousness is like a huge spotlight that startles us in a good way.
Staying woke is one of my favorite terms of today. It means we stay on guard against alternative truths and falsehoods perpetuated by media, politicians, and social institutions. It spurs us on to be more socially conscious, seeing through rhetoric and refusing to assume our so-called place to those in power. Staying woke helps us guard against bullies who try to fearmonger and oppress the masses.
Realizing this helps us wake the sleepwalker and stay woke. Instead of being blindly comforted, we’re ready to see beyond illusions of absolute truth. When we train ourselves to rethink what we’ve been sold, everything changes. We learn to productively resist whatever blocks our vision for leveraging human potential.
False truths keep us from realizing we’re even sleepwalking. Daytime sleepwalking, or unconsciousness, is the exact behavior my students told me got them into hot water. There were lost opportunities. Close calls. Unhealthy behaviors. Isolation. Regression. And it wasn’t because of a lack of thinking. They were simply misguided.
As sapient beings, we possess a high capacity for thinking skills. This is one of our most underrated capacities, and arguably one of our untapped resources. In a world where we can find an alleged answer in a fraction of a second, we are easily distracted from being conscious and expansive. Most days we’re lucky if we’ve grabbed five minutes of quiet. On better days, our sapience can bring us far, though.
As sentient beings, we can experience a wide range of sensations and emotions. These attributes combine to allow us to process pain and suffering in ways that spur on empathy and greater compassion toward ourselves and one another. We are capable of taking our consciousness to new levels. Hello, good life!
Hang Up the Telephone Game
Doug Bernstein clears his throat. I’ve just peppered him with a few too many tangential questions. It was hard to contain myself. A few months before our phone interview, I was inspired by a talk he gave at the Vancouver International Conference on the Teaching of Psychology. I’m hanging on his every word. He answers me with predictable ease and brilliance. And like any good conversation, I end up with more questions at the end of it. Mission accomplished.
Bernstein, seventy-four years old and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has a bio like a book. That’s because he’s spent his life writing psychology books,1 teaching, and trying to slow down sugary pop psychology myth contagion. After a lifetime of campaigning for better public understanding of psychology, he’s just as determined as ever to help us load up on the peanut butter side of our Fluffernutter sandwiches.
As we spoke, I flashed back to his presentation. There were hundreds of us behavioral science evangelists salivating for some peanut butter to bring back to our students. We all knew how spreadable fluff was. Like the childhood telephone game that starts with an original statement that ends up twisted as it’s relayed around the circle, there’s an abundance of sticky misinformation being passed around.
In our global game of telephone, the bulk and speed of skewed information being whispered and shouted are clouding our vision. The fluff that’s being constantly waved in front of our noses and shoved down our throats is doing nothing to nourish us. But sugar is very addictive.
When you can get a roomful of academics to stay put in an air-conditioned room so cold that our lips turn blue, with dingy yellow 1970s wallpaper and no windows on a spectacular July day in Vancouver, you know you’ve done your job.
One of his first slides read “Introductory Psychology: Putting Students to Sleep Since 1879,” which drew a solid nervous half laugh out of us. He was basically telling us to rip up our curriculum. After he told us our students would pretty much forget everything we taught them, you’d think a mass exodus to the park and gyros place around the corner would be a given—but we’re that kind of quirky breed that likes these kinds of challenges.
He flashed a bunch of black-and-green slides up that read, “Myths and Illusions About Human Behavior in Everyday Life,” as a guidepost. You could hear a pin drop as we scanned the list to make sure we weren’t smearing any fluff around:
Myth #1: It’s better to stick to your first impulse than to go back and change test answers. Uh-oh. I just told my son that last week.
Myth #2: Opposites attract. My closest inner circle is stacked with introverts. C’mon, are you sure?
Myth #3: We are in touch with reality. Jeez, I thought I was in the moment here.
Myth #4: We make our own decisions. This is getting a little unnerving.
Myth #5: We only use 10 percent of our brainpower. Whew, I knew this one was outdated. One for five.
Myth #6: Eyewitness testimony is the best kind of evidence. Oops again.
Myth #7: Subliminal messages have powerful effects on behavior. Is he trying to send a subliminal message now?
Myth #8: There are effective hangover cures. Good thing I’m more of a kale juice drinker.
Myth #9: Drug education programs (e.g., DARE) are effective in deterring teen drug use. Is that why 90 percent of my high school classmates sported mullets (equal amounts of girls and guys) and always had the munchies?
Myth #10. We taste sweet, sour, salty, and bitter on specific areas of the tongue. You’re making me hungry.
Bernstein reminded us that despite the massive research that proves otherwise in each of his examples, we’re still very likely to believe falsehoods. That fluff is like tree pitch. Hard to wash off. Even in the subzero AC, the room felt heavy. All of us had made it our life’s work to stop the misinformation epidemic. We knew the telephone game was dangerous. What if it wasn’t enough? What if people were prone to believe what was easy, not valid? What if they don’t know or even care? What if truth isn’t even a thing?
As leaders in our field, we took these questions seriously. In lockstep with the American Psychological Association, Bernstein emphasized how vigilant we need to be to make sure scientific inquiry, critical thinking, and ethical and social responsibility in a diverse world remain our absolute priorities.
That’s what drew us to his talk in the first place. As head of the Behavioral Science Department at my university, the majority of my time is spent making sure we’re disrupting, not perpetuating, fluffy thinking.
There are barriers to overcome. White papers are filled with esoteric jargon, making it hard to translate into everyday life. It’s like psychobabble. Esoteric means intended or likely to be understood only by a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest. See how annoying that is? Our appetite for understanding human behavior sends us skimming off the top from research findings, getting a quick fix, but missing the sustenance we desperately need. When we apply with a broad brush our morsels of surface learning to everybody and everything, we engage in what’s known as overgeneralizing, a big no-no in interpreting scientific research.
Know the Difference Between
Self-Help Fads and Scientific Evidence
Self-help fads are enticing, with their “groundbreaking” and “astonishing” findings that rake in a half billion dollars a year. Fads are easy to confuse with evidence-based practice, especially since we tend to be biased toward what we think already.
Self-help books can be written by anyone. Even famous authors and TV personalities don’t always have the credibility to support their claims. The principles are not supported by scientific research, and it’s not a guarantee that they actually improve lives. In some cases, the oversimplifications are harmful.
Evidence-based theories come with a solid measure of quality control, helping us work to bypass our biases and override preconceptions. They require application of scientific methods to produce findings that are well grounded. Solid research and practice that are built on evidence, not fads, will always include disclaimers so as not to overgeneralize. It will pose new questions needing to be explored to help us base what we do on something more stable than the latest five-step method that completely broad-brushes the complexity of human experience, behavior, and phenomena.
All research has limitations, even protein-filled, evidence-based psychology. Human bias, error, subjectivity, and even who’s funding studies all play a role in credibility. If you look at the end of any peer-reviewed study, the researchers offer a disclaimer recognizing its limitations. But that’s not the part that gets blasted across the news. Instead, results are shared as absolute truth, as if they apply 24/7 to every human being across the entire plant.
At the time of my phone interview with Bernstein, my mentalligence model had already emerged from my teaching and grounded theory research, and I’d been on my own version of a fluff purge for a while. My students from around the world were showing me we couldn’t keep buying into overinterpreted findings being passed around writ large.
Move Beyond WEIRD
The telephone game isn’t the only problem. Most research that dictates clinical and teaching practice has been deemed WEIRD, meaning that it comes from a primarily Western-Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic bent, rather than a global perspective that represents the vast spectrum of people populating planet Earth.
The behavioral science research landscape displays only about 12 percent of the world’s population. Picture standing in a room full of 100 people, and then only a dozen people are picked to speak on behalf of everyone else—and if you’re not a college student, chances are only 50/50 that you’ll get asked. That’s because half of all behavioral studies rely on college students as subjects. Forget about understanding life across age and life stages. Instead, like mainstream television, the data only represent select slices of the human experience.
Even one of the most popular theories of our time, emotional intelligence, has WEIRD elements. Daniel Goleman popularized Peter Salovey and John Mayer’s seminal article on emotional intelligence (EI) with his book of the same name. Goleman went on to sell over 5 million copies, including translations in forty languages, becoming sainted in the world of work and education.
Salovey and Mayer didn’t intend for their paper to travel that far, especially when their theories hadn’t been tested and measured properly. It’s not that Goleman’s work isn’t solid. A lot of noble attributes, like empathy, are taught within the EI framework. It’s the way that Goleman packaged it that makes some scientists shake their heads. The claims that EI determines real-world success are unproven, and brain research doesn’t support the construct. It’s not fatally flawed. It just needs to be less WEIRD.
One criticism of EI is that it doesn’t translate well across cultures and varied populations. This was a hot topic in my classroom and research study. My students from collectivist cultures didn’t get how EI was beneficial. They were like, “Whaaat? Abandon my roots and start making the rounds, to make friends and influence people?” It went against their instincts and values. It felt manipulative to them. Many of them also felt like it was encouraging stifled emotions rather than authentic expression.
Emotional intelligence has cult appeal across the business, social science, and educational sectors, informing the way we do work, school, and relationships. We love theories like this—where we can hack the system by becoming emotional ninjas. We’re inclined to believe what is comforting, and many aspects of EI are useful, for sure.
Most people wouldn’t suspect that such an accepted framework from a Harvard graduate that is built on a peer-reviewed article has holes in it. It doesn’t need to be blown up, but it also shouldn’t be propagated as a universal template for behavior.
We’re not just subjected to this problem in popular psychology realms. Myth contagion has many launchpads—professional disciplines, religion, and breaking news, among other platforms. They all have their slant. And when word gets out on the street, it gets convoluted fast. Between the conference and my telephone interview with Bernstein, I was more determined than ever to stop sticky illusions from spreading. Myths are the last things we need to stay woke. When we hung up, I knew it was time to try to hang up from the global telephone game, too.