For clarity, I don’t trust Wiseman since I’ve never read anything and my prior for pop-sci is low. Luke’s endorsement is a positive update to his credibility.
Fully verifying is expensive, but spot-checking is cheap (this post took me about 10 minutes, e.g.). Similarly, most people barely check GiveWell’s research at all, but it still matters a lot that it’s so transparent, because it’s a hard-to-fake signal, and facilitates spot-checking.
Re: music—it looks like you were referring to a different study on the benefits of listening to music than the one I found in Amazon’s preview of Wiseman. “Listen to classical music ” would have been another high-VoI addition to the OP.
Further studies indicate that “self-selected relaxing music” has the same effect, and that it’s probably mediated by general reduction of SNS arousal. This suggests that (a) if you’re doing an SNS-heavy task, like difficult math, you may not want to listen to music at the same time; (b) anything else you would expect to move you around the autonomic spectrum should work the same way (e.g. meditation). On the other hand, neither of the studies asked subjects to do anything while listening to music, so it’s unclear whether the effect would stay visible. A possibly interesting meta-analysis is here. If doing anything while listening to music makes the effect go away, then I would guess that meditation or the autonomic-spectrum navigation that CFAR teaches is a more efficient way to reduce blood pressure.
I don’t know if Wiseman went into any of those in his book, but my take-away is to do some research before installing any new habit.
For clarity, I don’t trust Wiseman since I’ve never read anything and my prior for pop-sci is low. Luke’s endorsement is a positive update to his credibility.
Fully verifying is expensive, but spot-checking is cheap (this post took me about 10 minutes, e.g.). Similarly, most people barely check GiveWell’s research at all, but it still matters a lot that it’s so transparent, because it’s a hard-to-fake signal, and facilitates spot-checking.
Re: music—it looks like you were referring to a different study on the benefits of listening to music than the one I found in Amazon’s preview of Wiseman. “Listen to classical music ” would have been another high-VoI addition to the OP.
Further studies indicate that “self-selected relaxing music” has the same effect, and that it’s probably mediated by general reduction of SNS arousal. This suggests that (a) if you’re doing an SNS-heavy task, like difficult math, you may not want to listen to music at the same time; (b) anything else you would expect to move you around the autonomic spectrum should work the same way (e.g. meditation). On the other hand, neither of the studies asked subjects to do anything while listening to music, so it’s unclear whether the effect would stay visible. A possibly interesting meta-analysis is here. If doing anything while listening to music makes the effect go away, then I would guess that meditation or the autonomic-spectrum navigation that CFAR teaches is a more efficient way to reduce blood pressure.
I don’t know if Wiseman went into any of those in his book, but my take-away is to do some research before installing any new habit.
Difficult math is SNS-heavy?
At least according to Val, activating System 2 requires SNS activity.