Interesting connection here with “Breakdown of Will” (which I finally received and read yesterday): Ainslie hypothesizes (rather convincingly) that pain and negative emotion are also associated with a burst of “reward”—i.e. attention and interest. This might be where “Bruce” comes from… not to mention other forms of drama addiction.
(I’m tempted to link to this article from my blog as well, but the jargon really does make it a tough read. Maybe I’ll wait until it can supplement a more substantive Bruce-related post of my own.)
I also read about some similar research on video games: when hooking machines to the brains of people playing Super Monkey Ball, they found that the biggest burst of reward was when the players died. They explained this by saying that that’s when the most learning occurs.
I notice that myself when playing some games—“awesome, I just died ! I have to start over”. For some games, Losing is fun.
I… honestly feel like I have no clue at all what this emotion feels like. I wonder if my brain would actually show that burst of reward.
I read the article and thought, “Hm, I have an inner name-of-loser-relative”, which was a very frightening thought; but I didn’t parse that in terms of enjoyment, that seemed to me like needless psychoanalysis. It was just a loser side with bad habits, probably formed mostly by hyperbolic discounting or poor impulse control. And it occurred to me that I should give this side a name and separate it out from my real me.
Now I’m wondering if the part about “enjoyment” wasn’t mere psychoanalysis but something I either unusually lack, or which is unusually obscured from my sight. I know there are men who get sexual pleasure out of being kicked in the balls but I don’t really know what goes on in their minds. I’m trying not to sound boastful here, but losing, generally speaking, hurts like a bastard. I can imagine other minds in which a little flash of malicious enjoyment or self-flagellation or something is tacked on, but I have no idea if that imagination is the right one.
Now I’m wondering if the part about “enjoyment” wasn’t mere psychoanalysis but something I either unusually lack, or which is unusually obscured from my sight.
Enjoyment isn’t the right word, I don’t think. My wife and I both described the “Bruce effect” sensation as being more like a sense of recognition or rightness—like confirmation of something that you expected, something that’s just the way the world works. That, upon successfully losing, it’s like, “yep, this is where I’m supposed to be”. Not enjoyment… more like satisfaction… though that’s still too strong. Closure, maybe? Relief? It’s a brief and subtle reward, not a conscious pleasure.
It was just a loser side with bad habits, probably formed mostly by hyperbolic discounting or poor impulse control.
Anosognosia. Don’t speculate, investigate—observe the automatic thoughts in action, rather than adding voluntary thoughts on top of them.
And it occurred to me that I should give this side a name and separate it out from my real me.
Be careful of how you do that… dispassionate separation is okay, rejection is not. When people actively reject parts of themselves (“that’s not me; I would never do that”), they make it more difficult to observe or change the actual motivation involved. (“After all, I would never do that… therefore it’s irrational/bad/whatever.”)
The way to remove something like this is to imagine what it’s like when that part of you gets its wish, so you can get a glimpse of what the reward is. Then you imagine having that reward, and find out what, if any, reward is behind that… and so on, all the way to the root reward emotion, fully experienced in your body, and chain backwards through the same path by which you came, re-experiencing as though you already have the root reward… noticing the difference in available choices, i.e., “If I already have this feeling, do I really need to do X? Is it easier to get X?”
Once you’ve fully worked back to the starting point, you’ll have changed the response options for the original behavior context—i.e., the original response will no longer be compulsive.
This is a very short sketch of the technique; my shortest training on it takes over an hour and assumes at least a little prior mindhacking experience. (The technique itself can be applied in about 10-20 minutes after some practice, or with the assistance of an instructor/guide.)
There are a few subtleties, not the least of which is that you need to be able to actually pay attention to your autonomous responses without injecting conscious interpretation, speculation, or critique (e.g., “that’s stupid, why would I want that?” etc.).
Enjoyment isn’t the right word, I don’t think. My wife and I both described the “Bruce effect” sensation as being more like a sense of recognition or rightness—like confirmation of something that you expected, something that’s just the way the world works.
Okay… I understand that, but only because of my struggles with my diet.
I recall you were trying paleo/primal at one point. What failed? Didn’t/couldn’t stick to it? Or even with eating completely paleo, you failed to lose weight and don’t know why? Did you keep a food log and/or track calories? Any intermittent fasting experimentation? Are you currently trying anything in particular?
Reminds me of Big Mind Technique a little bit. Acknowledging and integrating all your voices, including the self-destructive ones.
Techniques for working on brains are similar because brains are similar. ;-) Do you have anything you can point me to that’s a brief introduction, though? I’m always curious about new techniques. There are a lot of techniques that involve integration of multiple points of view, both in NLP and other branches of psychology, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find more of them that I haven’t heard of.
My wife (who is a life coach) has been to a couple of seminars and liked it. As wikipedia says, it evolved out of the “Voice Dialogue method created by Hal Stone and Sidra Stone”.
BTW, your work is very interesting and I look forward to your upcoming book.
Personally, I’ve only really noticed this reaction in myself in an academic setting with moving goalposts. If I’m putting effort into something I find at least mildly stressful, and success is “rewarded” with heightened expectations and further obligations, I develop a desire to prove that I’m capable of melting down and failing. The hypothetical satisfaction derives more from the thought of specific individuals observing my failure than from the failure itself.
Perhaps you’ve haven’t optimized much against pathological incentives?
I don’t think the “reward feeling” for losing at a video game is the same thing as what our “Inner Bruce” goes after. They may be related, I don’t know. But losing as a video game can be fun, more than losing in real life. Fun in the same way the rest of the game is fun, it’s not a special kind of fun.
I get that a lot in Spelunky, where you often make a small mistake and splat blood flies and you have to start over again. but it can be fun.
That’s an important distinction between hardcore and casual games. Some players don’t mind getting killed horribly and having to start over again—it’s what they expect. But other players will be discouraged and feel bad if the game tells them that they suck. That’s why most casual games are very nice to the player, and often you just can’t lose at all. A decade or two ago, the game industry was mostly focused on hardcore players; recently they have found out you can make a lot of money with casual games (targetting “middle aged women”), but you have to make the games differently.
Maybe it’s because hardcore players expect to die over and over in video games, and they know viscerally that it doesn’t matter at all, so when they lose, they don’t have any negative associations. On the other hand, new players haven’t made that dissociation, and feel bad about losing.
I never thought much about the relationship between “self-sabotaging to lose in real life” and “enjoying losing in video games”, it’s interesting …
I propose a good word to use instead of enjoyment would be “drama” or “intensity”. If losing has become a personal narrative, an instance of losing feels like a turning-point in the plot.
Most poker players, even the losing ones, don’t like losing, but I think it is sometimes a driver for losing players continuing to play. Sometimes it is self-hatred (vindicating the feeling that you don’t deserve to win). Sometimes it is the desire to whine—to have something bad happen to you that can plausibly be blamed on someone else.
Actually, from what I have read, feeling like one doesn’t deserve to succeed, and self-sabotaging, and feeling some kind of sick satisfaction when one fails, is pretty common.
Interestingly I have the opposite response. I genuinely don’t understand how some people get so much pleasure from the act of winning, to the extent they will cheat or subvert the game (or in the longer term memorise moves by rote). Generally I enjoy the process of playing the game and will be annoyed at myself if I make particular mistakes that cause me to lose, but if I play to the best of my ability, enjoy it and my opponent simply plays better I wouldn’t be upset.
[Standard disclaimer about difficulty of self reporting internal states and the possibility of rationalisation applies, its possible I have a strong self image as someone uninterested in winning.]
I’m definitely a gaming masochist—I often like extremely difficult games the most, as long as the deaths seem fair. Having played games most of my life, I’ve gotten quite good at them and frequently get bored when a game is too easy.
It seems to me that avoiding fear is one of the major motivators of humans and animals. Winning is scary because it creates the expectation that you will continue to win—and therefore the fear you won’t. And that fear is justified.
In this highly-connected and competitive world, it’s virtually impossible to be the best in any endeavor. Therefore, winning just delays and worsens your ultimate failure. Since you are ultimately going to lose anyway, you would often be better off learning how to be content with losing rather than striving to win at all. In this sense, Bruce is your true friend.
Of course, this only applies when you are playing competitive games. When your definition of winning is something like growing a beautiful garden or stopping children dying of diarrhoea, Bruce is your enemy.
Personally, I feel I get along better with the inconsistent parts of myself when I acknowledge that they have reasons for existing. So I don’t hang up on Bruce… I ask him why he wants to lose in each case, and sometimes I decide that he is right. But this may just be a feature of my own psychology.
Looking back at my own game playing experience I would often do a move I considered “interesting” or fun rather than playing conservatively or thinking through the consequences of the action.
This may be because I have never particularly valued “winning” in and of itself, games are a form of entertainment, so I optimise my play for that not winning. Or that could just be me rationalising.… Would be interesting to see if that habt generalises into things I genuinely value the results of.
Interesting connection here with “Breakdown of Will” (which I finally received and read yesterday): Ainslie hypothesizes (rather convincingly) that pain and negative emotion are also associated with a burst of “reward”—i.e. attention and interest. This might be where “Bruce” comes from… not to mention other forms of drama addiction.
(I’m tempted to link to this article from my blog as well, but the jargon really does make it a tough read. Maybe I’ll wait until it can supplement a more substantive Bruce-related post of my own.)
I also read about some similar research on video games: when hooking machines to the brains of people playing Super Monkey Ball, they found that the biggest burst of reward was when the players died. They explained this by saying that that’s when the most learning occurs.
I notice that myself when playing some games—“awesome, I just died ! I have to start over”. For some games, Losing is fun.
I… honestly feel like I have no clue at all what this emotion feels like. I wonder if my brain would actually show that burst of reward.
I read the article and thought, “Hm, I have an inner name-of-loser-relative”, which was a very frightening thought; but I didn’t parse that in terms of enjoyment, that seemed to me like needless psychoanalysis. It was just a loser side with bad habits, probably formed mostly by hyperbolic discounting or poor impulse control. And it occurred to me that I should give this side a name and separate it out from my real me.
Now I’m wondering if the part about “enjoyment” wasn’t mere psychoanalysis but something I either unusually lack, or which is unusually obscured from my sight. I know there are men who get sexual pleasure out of being kicked in the balls but I don’t really know what goes on in their minds. I’m trying not to sound boastful here, but losing, generally speaking, hurts like a bastard. I can imagine other minds in which a little flash of malicious enjoyment or self-flagellation or something is tacked on, but I have no idea if that imagination is the right one.
Enjoyment isn’t the right word, I don’t think. My wife and I both described the “Bruce effect” sensation as being more like a sense of recognition or rightness—like confirmation of something that you expected, something that’s just the way the world works. That, upon successfully losing, it’s like, “yep, this is where I’m supposed to be”. Not enjoyment… more like satisfaction… though that’s still too strong. Closure, maybe? Relief? It’s a brief and subtle reward, not a conscious pleasure.
Anosognosia. Don’t speculate, investigate—observe the automatic thoughts in action, rather than adding voluntary thoughts on top of them.
Be careful of how you do that… dispassionate separation is okay, rejection is not. When people actively reject parts of themselves (“that’s not me; I would never do that”), they make it more difficult to observe or change the actual motivation involved. (“After all, I would never do that… therefore it’s irrational/bad/whatever.”)
The way to remove something like this is to imagine what it’s like when that part of you gets its wish, so you can get a glimpse of what the reward is. Then you imagine having that reward, and find out what, if any, reward is behind that… and so on, all the way to the root reward emotion, fully experienced in your body, and chain backwards through the same path by which you came, re-experiencing as though you already have the root reward… noticing the difference in available choices, i.e., “If I already have this feeling, do I really need to do X? Is it easier to get X?”
Once you’ve fully worked back to the starting point, you’ll have changed the response options for the original behavior context—i.e., the original response will no longer be compulsive.
This is a very short sketch of the technique; my shortest training on it takes over an hour and assumes at least a little prior mindhacking experience. (The technique itself can be applied in about 10-20 minutes after some practice, or with the assistance of an instructor/guide.)
There are a few subtleties, not the least of which is that you need to be able to actually pay attention to your autonomous responses without injecting conscious interpretation, speculation, or critique (e.g., “that’s stupid, why would I want that?” etc.).
Okay… I understand that, but only because of my struggles with my diet.
Now you’ve got me curious: where have you experienced that in relation to diet?
That when it fails, it feels like the thing that was supposed to happen has happened.
I recall you were trying paleo/primal at one point. What failed? Didn’t/couldn’t stick to it? Or even with eating completely paleo, you failed to lose weight and don’t know why? Did you keep a food log and/or track calories? Any intermittent fasting experimentation? Are you currently trying anything in particular?
Heh. Reminds me of Big Mind Technique a little bit. Acknowledging and integrating all your voices, including the self-destructive ones.
Techniques for working on brains are similar because brains are similar. ;-) Do you have anything you can point me to that’s a brief introduction, though? I’m always curious about new techniques. There are a lot of techniques that involve integration of multiple points of view, both in NLP and other branches of psychology, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find more of them that I haven’t heard of.
http://www.bigmind.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mind
My wife (who is a life coach) has been to a couple of seminars and liked it. As wikipedia says, it evolved out of the “Voice Dialogue method created by Hal Stone and Sidra Stone”.
BTW, your work is very interesting and I look forward to your upcoming book.
Personally, I’ve only really noticed this reaction in myself in an academic setting with moving goalposts. If I’m putting effort into something I find at least mildly stressful, and success is “rewarded” with heightened expectations and further obligations, I develop a desire to prove that I’m capable of melting down and failing. The hypothetical satisfaction derives more from the thought of specific individuals observing my failure than from the failure itself.
Perhaps you’ve haven’t optimized much against pathological incentives?
I don’t think the “reward feeling” for losing at a video game is the same thing as what our “Inner Bruce” goes after. They may be related, I don’t know. But losing as a video game can be fun, more than losing in real life. Fun in the same way the rest of the game is fun, it’s not a special kind of fun.
I get that a lot in Spelunky, where you often make a small mistake and splat blood flies and you have to start over again. but it can be fun.
That’s an important distinction between hardcore and casual games. Some players don’t mind getting killed horribly and having to start over again—it’s what they expect. But other players will be discouraged and feel bad if the game tells them that they suck. That’s why most casual games are very nice to the player, and often you just can’t lose at all. A decade or two ago, the game industry was mostly focused on hardcore players; recently they have found out you can make a lot of money with casual games (targetting “middle aged women”), but you have to make the games differently.
Maybe it’s because hardcore players expect to die over and over in video games, and they know viscerally that it doesn’t matter at all, so when they lose, they don’t have any negative associations. On the other hand, new players haven’t made that dissociation, and feel bad about losing.
I never thought much about the relationship between “self-sabotaging to lose in real life” and “enjoying losing in video games”, it’s interesting …
I propose a good word to use instead of enjoyment would be “drama” or “intensity”. If losing has become a personal narrative, an instance of losing feels like a turning-point in the plot.
Most poker players, even the losing ones, don’t like losing, but I think it is sometimes a driver for losing players continuing to play. Sometimes it is self-hatred (vindicating the feeling that you don’t deserve to win). Sometimes it is the desire to whine—to have something bad happen to you that can plausibly be blamed on someone else.
Actually, from what I have read, feeling like one doesn’t deserve to succeed, and self-sabotaging, and feeling some kind of sick satisfaction when one fails, is pretty common.
Interestingly I have the opposite response. I genuinely don’t understand how some people get so much pleasure from the act of winning, to the extent they will cheat or subvert the game (or in the longer term memorise moves by rote). Generally I enjoy the process of playing the game and will be annoyed at myself if I make particular mistakes that cause me to lose, but if I play to the best of my ability, enjoy it and my opponent simply plays better I wouldn’t be upset.
[Standard disclaimer about difficulty of self reporting internal states and the possibility of rationalisation applies, its possible I have a strong self image as someone uninterested in winning.]
It should be noted that death is funny and pretty in Super Monkey Ball.
I’m definitely a gaming masochist—I often like extremely difficult games the most, as long as the deaths seem fair. Having played games most of my life, I’ve gotten quite good at them and frequently get bored when a game is too easy.
Kill me more, please! ;)
Have you ascended in Nethack?
Yes.
I am curious about how you see Bruce.
It seems to me that avoiding fear is one of the major motivators of humans and animals. Winning is scary because it creates the expectation that you will continue to win—and therefore the fear you won’t. And that fear is justified.
In this highly-connected and competitive world, it’s virtually impossible to be the best in any endeavor. Therefore, winning just delays and worsens your ultimate failure. Since you are ultimately going to lose anyway, you would often be better off learning how to be content with losing rather than striving to win at all. In this sense, Bruce is your true friend.
Of course, this only applies when you are playing competitive games. When your definition of winning is something like growing a beautiful garden or stopping children dying of diarrhoea, Bruce is your enemy.
Personally, I feel I get along better with the inconsistent parts of myself when I acknowledge that they have reasons for existing. So I don’t hang up on Bruce… I ask him why he wants to lose in each case, and sometimes I decide that he is right. But this may just be a feature of my own psychology.
Looking back at my own game playing experience I would often do a move I considered “interesting” or fun rather than playing conservatively or thinking through the consequences of the action.
This may be because I have never particularly valued “winning” in and of itself, games are a form of entertainment, so I optimise my play for that not winning. Or that could just be me rationalising.… Would be interesting to see if that habt generalises into things I genuinely value the results of.