Exploring Sensory Associations and the Power of Belief

Adam Mastroianni is a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School and a writer whose research focuses on how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds.

Does being smart make you happy? Does being dumb make you miserable? Why did the guy who created eugenics also get published in Nature for a revolutionary way to cut a cake? Adam is one of my favourite writers so today I get to ask him all these things.

Expect to learn why super smart people can be so stupid, Adam's issue with the productivity approach of eating frogs, whether you can learn arithmetic by smell, why humans misjudge what other people want to talk about, why we forget so many of the things that we've learned, how come it's trendy to call the general public stupid and much more...

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro (05:23) Why Aren’t Smart People Happier? (16:25) Adam’s Issue with ‘Eating the Frog’ (25:12) The Strange Work & Tests of Sir Francis Galton (34:31) How We Misjudge Conversations (38:26) What the Media is Overlooking in Society (41:04) Why We Forget So Much of What We Learn (49:45) How Adam Overcomes Writer’s Block (1:00:30) How We Misperceive the Sanity of Others (1:06:55) Is It Possible to Overcome our Inherent Biases? (1:11:11) Where to Find Adam

Extra Stuff:

Follow Adam's Substack - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/

Check out Adam's website - https://www.adammastroianni.com/ 

Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/

To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom

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Episodes You Might Enjoy:

This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠

How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠

The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠

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Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ 

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