Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) - David Epstein - #1121

What's the green eggs and ham effect? That is a describes a finding in psychology that people become more creative when the easiest solution is taken away from them. So it is named after the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, which he wrote on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. And that restriction forced him to experiment with his rollicking rhythm, right?

Because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary. So It's it got that name in psychology because it represents this huge body of work that shows, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham likes to say, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly. And so your brain wants to do the convenient thing, the easy thing, what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance. Like just reach for stuff you've seen before.

And so it actually becomes kind of impossible to be creative unless the easiest thing you would reach for is. is blocked. So the thing that actually led to that bet with Theodore Geisel aka Dr. Seuss was before that he was asked if he could write a children's book using about 200 words from a from a vocabulary list for kids. Is that so that most kids would have access to it, not not be able to not comprehend?

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