Stop fighting your brain. Start winning.

Our species has it made these days. Instead of facing frostbite during winter, we live in comfortably heated houses. Instead of being forced to hunt to avoid starvation, we can go to supermarkets, where our biggest problem is deciding which of the 50 brands of cereal to buy. Yet our conquest of nature has imposed on us new challenges of life. Rather than fight starvation, we now face an obesity pandemic. Without artificial diet and exercise programs, our health is threatened not by scarcity and war but by abundance and leisure.

Without being forced to build shelter or find food, many people struggle to motivate themselves to work. More freedom brings with it more decisions. In making these decisions, we often encounter a conflict between our primal instincts and our conscious will. We intend to get some work done, but we end up procrastinating on Instagram. We intend to stick to our diet, but we end up eating pizza. Our intentions give way to hunger and other forms of instant gratification. We have difficulty enforcing our conscious will: our self-control fails us.

We like to think we are aware of everything that happens in our brain, but that is not always the case. For example, why are we sexually attracted to certain people? I’m sure you can come up with many reasons. Their personality, their body, maybe their bank account. But you probably didn’t list circumstance. Yet the circumstances in which we meet someone significantly influence how attractive we find someone.

In 1974, a team of psychologists set up a clever experiment to demonstrate the importance of circumstance, and in doing so, taught us something very important about how our brains work. An attractive woman approached men privately either on a high, shaky suspension bridge or on solid ground. She thought her task was to survey them. In reality, the researchers were interested in how attractive the men found her. As it turned out, high up on the shaky bridge, the men gave more sexually themed answers during the survey and were more likely to call the female interviewer for ‘follow-up questions’ than the men that were interviewed on solid ground. Replication of the experiment with a male interviewer showed no differences between footing conditions.

This experiment demonstrates what psychologists call a ‘misattribution effect’. Being on a suspension bridge makes us anxious. When we then meet a potential romantic partner, we misinterpret the arousal we feel as attraction.