ASM080 Apologetics, Personality, and a One Track Mind

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apologetics personality and a one-track mind all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and this week wow are there some tough questions uh seems to be the trend lately that you're sending me harder and more difficult to answer questions and uh boy i'll see if i can rise to the challenge what do you say let's get it [Music] started a couple of quick announcements this week one season three of the liturgist podcast is here we kicked off a new season with uh episode 37 on the enneagram we've gotten really good feedback on that so if you're a liturgist podcast listener go ahead and fire up your uh feed subscription to that show it's back on the air and another thing that is pretty amazing honestly for me is if you hear this sound that's me knocking on a hardback copy of my upcoming book finding god in the wave so this multi-year journey of mine that many of you have been on with me that's coming september 13th is the big day that finding on the waves will be on book shelves everywhere so if you don't have your copy yet go to findinggontheways.com we've got some pre-order bonuses for people who go ahead and buy the book before it comes out you'll get a chance to win a one-on-one conversation with me and a pre-release copy of the book you'll get some bonus meditation content to help guide your prayer practice or meditation practice whether or not you believe in god those are things that are neurologically beneficial we've got one more bonus we're going to announce really soon but other than that it's coming it's real this book about my journey of faith lost and found becoming an atheist having that mystical experience on the beach and then stuff i've never talked about anywhere half the book is about the science of how i put my faith back together how i found a way to approach the bible to approach the church to approach christianity at all as a skeptic and as someone who questioned supernatural claims so finding god in the ways is coming as is um the finding gone the ways book tour there's a lot of stops on this thing so here's the problem with uh talking about the book talking about the book tour i don't want to like wear out the people who listen to the show all the time but i get constant tweets and facebook messages from people who listen to the show or follow my work asking me if i'll be in a given city and i'm going to be there so i've got to get the word out about these dates so here's kind of a rundown of where we're going to be i'm going to launch the whole book tour right here in tallahassee florida with a launch party on september 13th i'm gonna have some musical guests uh that's gonna be a lot of fun and i'd love to see you there if you're in or around the tallahassee area from there and i'll just kind of list these off i'll go to denver to naples to philadelphia chicago nashville columbus atlanta savannah georgia several los angeles stops you've been asking about those we'll go to glendale to mission hills and then we'll also go to costa mesa for you orange county folks going to portland oregon grand haven michigan headed to northwest nazarene university in idaho and headed to houston texas with biologos now that's the stops we've been out so far and that is quite a few but i will also be going uh to other cities that aren't announced yet so you want to keep going to findinggodontheways.com tour to find out uh if i'll be near you finally and this is pretty cool andrew golucky is uh the guy that does all the pre-production work on science mike he goes through and filters through all your questions and picks out questions for our patrons to answer and he is not just a podcast person although he has his own show called middle class musician which is quite good um but primarily he's actually a singer songwriter and a musician and he's really talented it's hysterical to me that i'm like a you know a nerd and andrew's like this really cool musician guy and then he helps me with the podcast just seems kind of backwards that seems like i should be getting andrew coffee or something but he has a new single out called i'm not going anywhere on noise trade it's free it's amazing so i'd encourage you i'll have a link on sciencemic.com this week to andrew's new single i'm not going here i'd really encourage you go check it out it's it's quite lovely and uh that's all the announcements this week so let's answer some science questions [Music] okay so i just listened to an episode of this great podcast called invisibilia this episode is particularly called the personality myth and in it they break down the notion that personality is a fixed part of us and that we perceive that what we perceive as personality is just how we respond to our circumstances this raised so many questions for me but i bring this to you to see if you know how prevailing this notion is or if it's fairly uncommonly believed among scientists also if this is a new way we should be thinking about personality what does this mean for faith how can we believe we're made uniquely when we don't even have an actual personality anyways just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on the subject i've really been enjoying contemplating this thank you so first of all i really love invisibilia it's a great podcast from npr and although i haven't heard this particular episode uh when i do have time to listen to podcasts invisibility is usually way up my list although i tend to be very very far behind on most podcasts as i've noticed people who make podcasts are generally really behind on listening to podcasts it's kind of a strange thing most of the people i know who make podcasts are they just get behind i don't know maybe it's because we don't commute as much as everyone else [Laughter] so we don't have much as much car time or subway time to listen to podcasts but this thing of personality is something i think about a lot you know our first episode of the liturgist podcast this season was about the enneagram and the enneagram is a personality typing system with spiritual roots and like other personality typing systems it does not have a lot of scientific or clinical merit the results and methodologies that produce these personality typing systems tends to be non-rigorous although they can be extraordinarily useful means for introspection and to create a common language to talk about how you view the world how you feel how you respond in different situations um well let's talk about what personality is at all i literally here's a definition the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character and if you look in psychology or sociology in any science which they tend to be the softer sciences that study personality um there's absolutely a scientific basis to what we call personality for example research pretty consistently bears out that introversion versus extroversion is a is a real phenomenon uh that is consistent in studies that involve brain imaging for example although lately i've read a couple articles that uh would say that you're not fixed as an introvert or an extrovert that that is actually something that can change over time and no matter what metric you're looking at for personality that's a key thing to look at the change over time see our personalities really do vary based on our circumstances and our experiences so no personality is not some fixed attribute personality itself is really just a construct of describing the emergent behaviors and patterns in a very sophisticated organism humans we have the ability to have a consciousness that is a narrative story we tell ourselves which means we can describe ourselves to ourselves and that's where you get things like a construct like personality a way of describing ourselves to other people or for others to articulate their observations about us when you combine this with some sort of clinical discipline where we study people in groups and write down the results we look for physical and physiological correlations or environmental correlations then you start to see some scientific basis to personality but it is not fixed now we can have different inclinations towards different personality attributes one person may be genetically and environmentally more predisposed to be angry for example but with intentional work with assistance in therapy someone can learn to be less angry and another person may be provoked so often that they become more likely to be angry i don't think this means that we're not uniquely made or that we don't really have a personality i actually think one of the most beautiful things about people is our capacity to change over time to respond to different environments to grow but this this capacity to grow must have a dark side we also have a capacity to get worse there's no inevitable you know moral progression in the human species it's something that comes with work and on that note it's also our capacity to willfully influence and change our personality is also limited it's it's something that is a discipline that must be taken over time uh to shift personality features intentionally uh although you know traumatic experiences poor access to basic resources and life necessity chronic stress those things can also change your personality it's just not a willful process that's you responding to your environment um if you listen to the show for a long time you know that i'm a mystic i don't have very specific ideas about god i have experiences with god but my theology is much more limited towards most people who or or compared to most people who would call themselves christians or use the label christian but if we imagine kind of a for a moment a more conventional christian depiction of god a being with consciousness and will and a desire a specific plan for humanity who uniquely made individual people with intent the fact that our personalities can change don't in any way undermine that idea in fact if you have a creator leaving human beings with a unique mark but still the capacity to change over time i think that would be a stroke of genius not not a design flaw in fact one of the things we work hardest at creating artificially intelligent systems and robots then can navigate environments is that very capacity for change we're pretty good at engineering a machine that can operate in a very specific condition say an automotive robot that can paint a car fender or place welds in a certain position and they can do that with a speed and a dexterity that we can't match but if you change anything in that environment the robot is no longer able to cope so our capacity to change the fact that our personality is not fixed but can change over time is really a sign of human resilience and strength and beauty not some kind of divine negligence [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike like you i was also raised southern baptist became an atheist and refound my faith yet instead of coming back to christianity on faith alone i found my way through it all using reason and logic and of course his call it was because of good apologetics and answers to all my questions that i came back to my faith which is why it struck my curiosity when you said you didn't find apologetics satisfactory when trying to answer your burning questions as an atheist i am very passionate about using reason and logic to defend the christian faith because i know what the effects are when you are told to believe something without reason so all this to say i was wondering what sort of apologetics and philosophy you read and why you found it so dissatisfying it's a really excellent question and i know that my dispassion or my antipathy that's the word i was looking for my antipathy for biblical apologetics and other forms of faith apologetics is not representative of everyone i have an old friend who also struggled with doubt and he like you found his way back to you know a very orthodox evangelical christian faith and uh he now it's what he does he is an apologist and i am not [Laughter] i am not an apologist i don't make a rational defense of the traditional christian faith this is it's tough to do this without getting really thorny i think we've discussed this in like a lot greater detail because of the lack of time limitations on the liturgist podcast i also talk about this a lot in my upcoming book finding god in the waves but essentially my objection to both apologetics and most systems of philosophy is a failure to ground claims in evidence physical forensic evidence and here's why if you use your reason to make a claim which frankly there are many biblical apologists who make very very reasonable sounding claims about god's nature character relation to historical events using reason but someone else can use reason to make a contradictory claim and you don't have any way to decide which of the two claims is correct elegant reasoning can ultimately lead you astray it can separate you from what's happening in reality and the reason i find science so compelling is science is a methodology based on checking your thinking using results in the real world now you would say that science can't speak to the supernatural and i would agree but my point is we haven't found anything that can authoritatively demonstrate that the supernatural exists and if so what is the nature and character of the supernatural realm a supernatural creator any of those things we can pontificate about we can reason about but we are not able to demonstrate with evidence those claims now there's a problem with that approach i can't scientifically justify many of the beliefs i hold in relationship to my christian faith i think the resurrection of jesus is a core such claim i can't historically demonstrate that that happened it is not a scientifically reasonable belief to hold which is why you never hear me trying to convince someone else the resurrection occurred i don't make public policy decisions based on the resurrection i don't expect other people to make lifestyle choices or moral ethical decisions based on an authority claim centered on christ's resurrection my belief in the resurrection is something i experience through god and this is the main difference between empiricists and people of faith they believe that god's revelation is an authoritative way to learn things but i say i believe that jesus rose from the dead and some other person of faith who equally with the same level of conviction believes in god in another form of faith and would say that jesus did not rise from the dead and how do we decide who is right well a court of law would say we look at the evidence that's it now peter rollins and michael gunger and i talked a little bit about philosophy its strengths its limitations on an episode of the liturgist podcast i'd encourage you to check that out if you want to hear more about uh what kind of philosophies and schools of philosophy i've studied i've studied a lot i just don't find philosophy as convincing in our world as science but it doesn't mean i dismiss spiritual insights spiritual truths i just don't place them as fact claims that i can use to impact the lives of others and the biggest thing i worry about answering a question like this is that if if apologetics is working for you it's making your life more beautiful and it's making you treat others with dignity and respect and kindness and it leads you to a faith which is fulfilling then i would not dissuade you from your passion towards apologetics don't let my objections hold you back i'm just giving you you know my honest answer it's the only thing i can do on the show and listen the questions lately have been getting harder we've gone from a show where people of faith have some basic science questions i think to where a lot of this audience is pretty dialed in on science already and they send me the questions they couldn't figure out on their own so as a result to try to get answers that i can you know defend pretty well i'm having to go from spending 10 minutes per question to an hour two hours or three hours per question to try to get reasonable answers for you and that's just the nature of uh having a really smart audience honestly i think most of you are smarter than i am because of that when i say things like i just said and really no apologetics if it doesn't work for you it doesn't work for you i'm not here as an expert i'm here with one commitment and one commitment only and that is to create the space for your questions and to answer them honestly that's the whole thing so in that spirit of creating space for your question and answering honestly those are my objections to apologetics and why i think empiricism is the most defensible epistemological [Laughter] philosophy and now you know that's the easiest way to say that so for those of you listening who don't know what epistemology is google will be happy to fill you in [Music] hey science mike i have a question for you about having a one-track mind i'm somebody who can get very obsessive about projects that i'm working on especially if they require a lot of creativity and this can be very beneficial in the sense that it motivates me to actually get some work done on those projects and accomplish some things creatively but it can be very detrimental when i'm sitting with my fiance and she knows that i'm not listening to her because i'm giving her short answers and it seems like i would rather be doing this other thing than talking with her or sitting with her or having dinner with her um so i guess my question is what is the science behind having a one-track mind um and why does my brain seem to snap to these things that i'm thinking about without me intentionally doing it or without me even wanting to think about those things in that particular moment it seems to just happen and then furthermore what productive things can i try to do to change this behavior so that it's not detrimental to my relationships but also so that it doesn't sacrifice my motivation for these creative projects that i'm working on thank you for everything you do for ask science mike and for the liturgist um thanks for keeping the conversation open i appreciate everything you do and i'm looking forward to speaking with you again bye oh well the first thing is i don't know i have the standing to answer this question um you and i suffer from a similar affliction my wife jenny who i often call the honey badger with great affection still complains that i get distracted that sometimes i'm not present in our home because i work here now and in this office i'm recording right now i'll have this strike of inspiration about one of your questions or an idea for something on the liturgist podcast or a new book or an article i've been working on and i have to come running into the room to kind of get it out of my head and sometimes when i don't do that i'll just sit at the table and think about this work and meanwhile my wife and children say i'm there but i'm not there so i know what you are talking about and what we see in research is well not all that encouraging at first basically there are several conditions several psychological conditions which are similar in neurological origin and those are workaholism obsessive-compulsive disorder attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive obsessive-compulsive personality disorder now ocd and ocpd are different and we'll talk about that in a minute but what all these conditions have in common is this kind of compulsive focus often on things other than those around us would expect people to focus on neurologically this comes down to a relationship between your orbital frontal cortex which is a part of the brain i talk about a lot because of its roles in ethics and consciousness and also in focus and concentration and for example in people with ocd or adhd some studies have shown that the orbital frontal cortex in these states of of inappropriate focus or intense focus will actually have a higher glucose metabolism than a neurotypical or a baseline brain and uh it's a relationship there and then also uh with your basal ganglia which is the very most primitive part of the human brain right down by the brain stem and the hippocampus so these three this network between these three parts of the brain gets intense in people who are workaholics who exhibit ocd adhd or ocpd and clinically speaking workaholics are much more likely to be diagnosed with one of those conditions and it's not all bad now ocd tends to be somewhat crippling adhd can really interfere with work but workaholics who don't have adhd or workaholics with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder ocpd tend to be really successful they tend to get ahead at work when they're artists they tend to do great work if you can imagine that people with ocd are plagued by unwanted thoughts people with ocpd are delighted by them that's a little uh difference in the conditions we imagine that many of the great industry titans of the 20th and 21st century are people who exhibit symptoms of ocpd steve jobs was one there's there's stories of steve jobs and when the macintosh factory was being created crawling around the floor looking for grains of sand or dirt because he believed that the factory couldn't be kept spotless it couldn't produce perfect machines thomas edison henry ford other titans of an industry have exhibited signs of ocpd now we don't want to remotely diagnose people but it's something that experts have talked about and theorized and when this happens when you dig into something you just can't let go and this can be destructive in relationships as much as it can be good for your career it can be bad for your personal relationships now i have made great progress in managing my workaholic tendencies though i relapse often and this is from a series of experiences first of all workaholics uh those of us who get obsessed with our craft or our trade are prone to burnout we work too hard for too long to the point we lose the ability to work and if you know anything about workaholics when you can't work you get anxiety guilt depression and so this becomes like it intensifies the burnout because you can't recover because you can't deal with not working by the way neurologically speaking workaholism shows the classic signs of of any addictive behavior or substance so you don't want to burn out and that means even if you're not worried about relationships just for your own productivity the best way to continue to do the thing that you enjoy is to learn to control your work here's some things that help one structure becoming more structured about your time is essential i run my day on a calendar and a clock and i have times of creative output i have times where i return emails and phone calls and then i have time where i am not allowed to work where i'm with my family where i spend time with friends and i have a set of controls that let me offset that impulse because a lot of times if you're a creative person you have an idea and if you don't get it out of your head you lose it and that's like in our industry that's losing gold so i have a little apps on my phone i have mind mapping apps i have which is called my node i have an app called evernote and when i have that little strike of inspiration i just go ahead and get out of my head and into the app in just 20 or 30 seconds right really really fast as fast as possible sketch out the idea so i can come back to it later and rekindle that inspiration so combining you know more regimented schedule uh with the capacity to to do mind dumps and get things out of the brain helps train me to feel like i don't have to run into my office and get working immediately now i also have times of the day when i don't allow myself to use computers or a smartphone in those times i have legal pads and notebooks i write ideas down in but it's this idea of you're kind of redirecting this impulse this compulsion to get to work instead of fully working you're just giving yourself the breadcrumbs to get back to that state at a time that you're actually working another technique that i practice a lot is mindfulness of course if you're familiar with mindfulness meditation which if you listen to the show i'm sure you are it's a way of simply being aware of your actions and thoughts and i'll use mine mindfulness in conjunction with something called cognitive behavior therapy to train myself to let go to focus on this moment when i'm in conversation with someone i have little tricks i've trained myself to seek presence in a conversation i look in people's eyes i pay close attention to the sounds and mannerisms they make i dial up my awareness of what they're doing and using mindfulness i interrupt my brain's desire to anticipate what they're going to say and have a response ready i've learned to have slower conversations to allow pauses when the person i'm talking to finishes speaking before i respond a to give myself time to think of something since i've trained myself not to preemptively have a retort and also sometimes i've found in conversations when you don't immediately say something the person will keep talking they have more to say this has led to a deepening of the relationships in my life learning to have this slower more intentional more focused conversational energy so uh yeah this is totally a brain science thing i've got some links uh talking about these conditions on sciencemic.com this week and then i'll also have a couple of resources about cognitive behavior therapy if you'd like to check that out it's good that you're aware that this tendency that has the potential to lead you to success can also have a lot of costs in your personal relationships and we all need those relationships to live lives of happiness and contentment and fulfillment a really good life i'm finding is a life that combines meaningful work with meaningful relationships [Music] our last question came in via email and it reads hey mike what's the science behind remarriages being single and approaching 30 it's almost a given that a lot of people i date are coming with past relationships and or kids i know remarriages are common but what is the science behind them lasting i hear statistics all over the place of second marriages being doomed is that the case should i steer away from previously married dates if there is hope what is a single to look for in their potential mate to indicate they are a lifelong partner material and being that i love your heart and faith what would the christian view of remarriages be i would love to believe in god's redemption and renewal being lived out in the story of my life and remarriage seems like a grace-filled second chance that christ gives to us all but growing up in conservative christianity it's hard to swallow remarriage or past divorces thank you so much for all you do and for reading this you rock okay first of all the statistics on remarriage that's real repeat marriages are statistically less likely to last these figures vary year by year but about 50 of first marriages fail about 67 of second marriages fail about 73 of third marriages fail uh the first message there is marriage is tough statistically i mean you know depending on the year it's actually falling it's less than half today um but a significant number of first marriages fail and because of that the marriage rate is falling people divorce is so traumatic many people are opting to not get married at all and they still share life cohabitation they have children together but we don't know as much about how successful those relationships are because they're a lot harder to gather data about because there's no like government filing that happens when those relationships fall apart or when they form unlike with marriage and divorce which gives us these big pools of data to work with but i don't think this means repeat marriages are doomed i don't think it means marriage is impossible for those people who are interested in marriage i just think it means we don't teach people how to have successful marriages and honestly the church really hasn't helped that very much what we see in science is that there may be some good anecdotal anecdotal device in society and even religious society about how to have good marriages but when scientists have studied couples they have found some interesting things one when one neuroscientist used brain imaging to study older couples and he found that happy couples had an interesting neurological correlation between their uh the wife's level of neurological activity and unexpected emotional responses from her spouse in other words if um you shared showed a video of the spouse laughing and you told her that he just saw bad news and she had elevated neurological response compared to what she would have for a stranger that was a predictor for which couples reported being happy or not i just thought that was fascinating i don't have necessarily a conclusion from that it's just a little data piece but when people have dug in deeper into marriages and and family therapy and learning science driven insights about that then we find some interesting things so these are a few tips that you would look for in yourself and a partner to evaluate how successful a relationship could be the first one which is really amazing is happy satisfied couples have five positive interactions for every one negative interaction with each other so if you have asked people to like score their interactions and write them down the happiest couples have a five to one ratio couples that end up in divorce it's point eight to one they have a few more negative interactions and aggregate than positive isn't that interesting a happy couples talk about five more hours per week than unhappy couples um how a partner responds when you tell them good news is a big indicator if they ask a lot of questions if they offer congratulations and are very enthusiastic if they want to hear the story about what happened that's a good indicator they'll be a good partner according to the data and the way you and your partner deal with conflict is really important displays of contempt or relationship killer displays of affection amid conflict is a sign of health and here's something really surprising studies are showing that unresolved conflict is very healthy so relationships where people feel like they have to come to a resolution on every issue are actually less likely to be successful than people who can disclose conflict and then basically agree to disagree and this was a huge insight for me when i learned that because my wife and i disagree about a lot of things and we get it out but we don't come to any like agreement over sometimes even substantive issues but we love and respect each other and acknowledge the validity of the other's position the last thing i would say is the friendship aspect of a relationship frames every other part of our factor including sex romance attitude towards money all those things come down to how you feel about the friendship and the marriage so regardless of whether someone's been married or not you're looking for these things the positive to negative ratio of experiences the amount of time you spend in conversation how they respond to good news when you tell it to them how they respond in conflict and what the friendship part of the relationship feels like now if someone has been divorced it's entirely possible that they have decent relationship skills and their partner did not statistically speaking these numbers make a lot of sense as subsequent marriages tend to statistically put your relationship skills at a fundamental level more into the spotlight but i would evaluate less based on how many times someone has been married and more on these kind of quantitative relationship dynamics that are predictors for long-term marriage success lots of resources on the website this week at sciencemike.com about this topic if you'd like to dig deeper into these numbers and learn more about them really really great question thank you well that does it for ask science mike this week if you heard snoring and click clacking in honor of national dog day this week i didn't kick the dogs out of the office when i recorded the show and they are terrible podcast recording companions they have no respect uh for your audio environment but they are they are at least good dogs um so a couple things send in your questions using the hashtag asksciencemike or go to asksciencemike.com where you can type out a text question or record a voice question and put that on the show we want to thank our patrons on patreon for not only picking the show's questions every week but for making the show financially possible i want to thank andrew golucky for being an amazing contributor to the program and organizing our together groups on facebook if you'd like to connect with other people in your city who listened to ask science mike go to sciencemac.com and click on the gather button in charge of all that craig nordin handles production and sound design and my boy jeb botteford wrote the ask science mic theme song thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week