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I'll tell you a little a bit about irrational behavior --
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(Laughter)
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I want to talk about one particular problem which is self control.
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There were two sisters, in Northern Carolina,
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the Delaney sisters,
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and when the youngest of them got to be 100 years old
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they asked her "What was your secret for longevity?"
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-- they had an interview with the New York Times --
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"What was your secret for longevity?"
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and they said they had two secrets.
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The first one was that they said they decided never to get married.
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(Laughter)
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They said they did not want a husband to drive them to an early grave.
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(Laughter)
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And my wife is sitting here
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so I am going to skip this particular insight,
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(Laughter)
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but the second thing they said was that they did not want to go to hospital
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because hospital is a place where you get diseases.
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And there is a lot of wisdom in what they said.
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I was in hospital for a very long time
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and like many other people I got some new diseases
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while in hospital.
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I got burnt, I was in the burn department,
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but I got an infected blood transfusion
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and I got a disease as a consequence of that.
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It's bad enough to be in hospital, in general,
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it's worse to get a liver disease
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it would affect my recovery, it'd slow down the operation,
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it rejected transplants, all kinds of bad things,
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but it was also the case that the doctors didn't know where it came from.
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They didn't know what was the essence of the problem.
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Fast forward years from time to time my liver would act up,
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about seven years later I have some kind of episode.
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I check myself into hospital and they tell me the good news:
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they know what the problem is, it was hepatitis C.
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It that was a particular virus that I got at the time
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and they did point they had -- they've isolated the problem
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and not only that. It that was a new FDA trial for that;
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they were trying a new medication
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call Interferon, to see whether this would work on hepatitis C.
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And they ask me whether I want to join the clinical trial.
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And of course I wanted to,
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who would want to die from liver cirrhosis?
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So I join this trial,
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and what they told me when I joined
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was how annoying and difficult Interferon really is.
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And here was that -- for me these injections of Interferon
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kind of symbolize the complexity of human life.
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Imagine that you are standing there with an injection,
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and you have to inject your thigh
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three times a week, for a year and a half.
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And you knew that if you did it for a year and a half,
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you might not have liver cirrhosis 30 years from now.
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But you also knew that if you did it right now,
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you will be really miserable for the next 16 hours:
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vomiting, headache, fever, shaking,
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now think for a second whether you would do it?
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Like, would you do that? Would you be able to take on
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the short terms consequences of a loss,
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for a potential probabilistic long term gain?
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If you think about it this is kind of an ancient problem
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for human behavior: It's this question, Adam and Eve.
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You would say:
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"Who would give eternity in the garden of Eden for an apple right now?"
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(Laughter)
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It seems crazy!
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But here's the modern version of this question.
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(Laughter)
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"Who in their right mind would risk their life while texting?"
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Please rise your hands if you have texted while driving.
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I'm guessing that most of the rest of you are just lying!
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(Laughter)
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There was a study a couple of weeks ago that asked the question of
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"What happens in states that restrict texting while driving?"
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Accident rate actually goes up! Why?
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Because instead of texting like this, people start texting like this!
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(Laughter)
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Anyway the problem is much more general
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than texting. Right?
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This is about health.
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Think about dieting, really good for the long term,
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not so fun right now.
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Exercising, not so good now, good for the long term.
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Financial savings, not fun now, good for the long term.
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Safe sex! The same applies.
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And it turns out that when we face these problems
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we just fail regularly, systematically and consistently.
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Here is one way to think about it.
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Imagine I offered you a choice between half a box of chocolate right now
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and a full box of chocolate in a week.
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Half a box of chocolate now, and a full one in a week.
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And imagine that you actually have a sample.
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So it's not just hypothetical,
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but you could see it and smell it and feel the chocolate.
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Under those conditions,
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how many of you would wait another week for another half of a box of chocolate?
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Rise your hands. Ok! We have a few patient people here,
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maybe 20% and I am sure if it would be for real there would be less of you that would be --
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(Laughter)
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-- but the majority said, "Give me the chocolate now!"
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Now imagine I push the choice to the future,
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and I said what would you rather have,
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half a box of chocolate in a year,
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or a full box of chocolate in a year and a week?
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Now, notice it's the same question,
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it's the question whether you are willing to wait another week for another half a box of chocolate.
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How many people now are willing to wait?
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Everybody! (Laughter)
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--because in the future we are wonderful people!
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(Laughter)
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We will exercise, we will diet, we will save!
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The problem of course is we never live in the future.
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We always live in the present. And in the present, we are very, very different people.
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Fast forward, I took these injections for a very long time,
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and it was a very miserable period of my life,
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and when I finished, the doctors told me two things.
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First of all they said that the medication worked,
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it eradicated the virus from my system. That was good news!
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The second things they said was that in this whole FDA protocol,
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I was the only patient who took their medication on time.
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The question is, how could I do it?
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Do I have better self-control, do I look better to the future than other people?
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Do I care more?
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And the answer is none of those!
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The answer is that I designed a trick for myself.
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And my trick is based on the fact that I love movies.
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If I had time, I would watch lots and lots of movies,
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sadly I don't have that much time.
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So I basically had a deal with myself, that I'd only watch movies after I inject myself.
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So on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, which were injection days,
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I would go to school, I would stop on the way to a video store,
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I would rent some videos I really wanted to watch,
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I would carry them in my backpack the whole day anticipating watching them,
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then I would get home in the evening, I would put a video in,
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I would inject myself, I would get a bucket and a blanket for the side effects,
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I would inject myself and start watching the video immediately.
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Now if you think about it this is kind of a strange idea.
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'Cause if you think about things in life that are important or not,
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livers are really important. (Laughs) It's somewhere up there.
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Injections, side effects: not that important in the big scheme of things.
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Movies are even less important!
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So what happened?
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The problem is that we see the problem, we see the world,
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it's not like this, it's not that we say
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that livers are important and side effects are not,
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we also have a time horizon for this.
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And when we add a time horizon,
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because livers are important but they are far in the future,
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we discount them dramatically, like we did for the chocolate in a week.
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And because the injections are now, we exaggerate their importance dramatically.
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So let's think about it, did this trick with the movie
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help me care about my liver,
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did I wake up every morning, feeling energized to do something about my liver?
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No! I did what we call reward substitution,
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I replace the liver with movies.
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I started behaving as if I cared about my liver.
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I cared about it because there was something else in the way
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that was immediate and appealing.
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And even though it was not as important as the liver,
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it became a substitute for the reward.
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Now, the reality is that we face problems
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with self-control all the time,
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all these problems I describe are really basic human problems.
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Can we get people to wake up in the morning and feel energized about solving these problems?
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Very unlikely.
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Can we use reward substitution? Maybe.
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Think for example about something like global warming.
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If you were going to design the problem that people would not care about,
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it would be global warming.
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(Laughter)
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Right?
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It has all the elements for human apathy.
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Long term in the future, will happen to other people first,
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we don't see it progressing, we don't see any other individual suffering,
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and anything we would do is a drop in the bucket!
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All the elements that create human apathy rolled into one!
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Can we get people to wake up in the morning and feel energized about global warming?
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Maybe a very few fraction.
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But perhaps the key is in creating reward substitution!
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Getting people to care about other things that would be linked to behaving well,
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and getting people to behave nicely for the wrong reasons.
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So, if we think about self-control I told you a little bit about reward substitution,
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I want to tell you about one other approach.
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And this is what I'd call self-control contracts or the Ulysses' contracts.
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So if you remember the story about Ulysses and the sirens,
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Ulysses knew that if the sirens would come he would be tempted.
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So, he tied himself to the mast, he got the sailors to put earplugs in their ear,
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so even if the sirens would come he would not be able to be tempted.
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That's a different version of the self-control mechanism,
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and it's quite more sophisticated!
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It says, "We know that when the time comes, we will be tempted,
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so we are going to do something now that would eliminate temptation from our path".
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Imagine for example that you go to a restaurant,
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and you've vowed to be on a diet.
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What are the odds
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that if the waiter comes with chocolate soufflé,
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you will resist temptation?
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Not very high!
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Would you be willing to do a Ulysses contract, which is to say to the waiter:
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"Here is a dollar, don't show me the dessert tray."
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(Laughter)
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Before we look at this, let's go back for a second,
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and think about whether animals can do that.
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So imagine you are a pidgeon or a rat,
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and imagine that you learn two things.
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You learn that the green button,
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means one pellet of food immediately,
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and the purple button means 10 pellets of food in 10 seconds.
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So you learn this one, you learn this one, now we put them together.
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The question is,
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you are a rat or a pidgeon, what would you choose?
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And just to kind of get a feeling of scale, for a rat 10s is like a week for us.
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What do you think they choose?
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They choose the green one.
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Sadly, they take the 1 pellet, they forego the 10 pellets.
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It gets slightly worse, you start the trial,
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the purple button comes up, some times passes
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and then the green button appears.
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If the rat or the pidgeon can just hold off, they can just sit on their hands,
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they can wait, they can distract themselves,
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they would get 10 pellets of food.
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They can't!
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They press the green one and they forego the 10 pellets of food.
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But here is kind of a good news!
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The good news is that if you introduce a red button,
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and the red button is not connected to food,
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and pidgeons and rats don't like pressing them,
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but the red button is going to eliminate the appearance of the green button.
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The purple button appears, they press on it, the red button appears.
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If the rat or the pidgeon would press that,
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the only thing that would happen is temptation would not come!
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What do you think? Do they do it?
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They do it!
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Not all the times, but they do it quite often.
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And I think that's very optimistic because if they can do it,
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you know -- maybe -- we can do it too!
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(Laughter)
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So here are a couple of examples.
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This is a clock that one of students in the Media Lab has designed.
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It's called Clocky. It has two big wheels as you can see,
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and when the alarm starts it also starts running in the room.