Humans Simply 'Hardwired' For Laziness, Study Says (studyfinds.org) 163
Zorro shares a report from Study Finds: [...] A new study shows we may just have to chalk it up to our brains simply being hardwired to prefer hanging on the couch instead of the chin-up bar. Researchers from the University of British Columbia and University of Geneva sought to better understand the brain chemistry behind what they refer to as the "exercise paradox." This happens when people pledge to engage in regular physical fitness, but instead find themselves becoming less active. "Conserving energy has been essential for humans' survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators," explains Matthew Boisgontier, a postdoctoral researcher in UBC's brain behavior lab at the department of physical therapy, and senior author of the study, in a UBC release.
So Boisgontier and his co-authors recruited 29 young adults who wanted to improve the level of exercise in their lives to take part in a computerized test. The test required them to move a human figure on the screen either towards images of physical activities or away from images of sedentary activities that would randomly appear, and then again vice versa. Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalograph to monitor their brain activity during the exercise. The results showed that participants tended to move towards the active images or away from the sedentary ones at the fastest rates. "We found that participants took 32 milliseconds less to move away from the sedentary image, which is considerable for a task like this," says study co-author Boris Cheval, of the University of Geneva, in a university release, adding that this finding went against the so-called exercise paradox.
So Boisgontier and his co-authors recruited 29 young adults who wanted to improve the level of exercise in their lives to take part in a computerized test. The test required them to move a human figure on the screen either towards images of physical activities or away from images of sedentary activities that would randomly appear, and then again vice versa. Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalograph to monitor their brain activity during the exercise. The results showed that participants tended to move towards the active images or away from the sedentary ones at the fastest rates. "We found that participants took 32 milliseconds less to move away from the sedentary image, which is considerable for a task like this," says study co-author Boris Cheval, of the University of Geneva, in a university release, adding that this finding went against the so-called exercise paradox.
destiny (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll take your word for it, I was too lazy to read TFA.
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TL
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Was gonna say "bravo, sir" but couldn't be bothered to post.
Re: destiny (Score:2)
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Oh ho ho. See you are wrong. I once told my Japanese (very thin) counterpart I was "out of shape". His reply was that I was wrong: "Round is a shape".
captcha: svelte
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Re: destiny (Score:2)
Re: destiny (Score:3, Funny)
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I don't know who this creimer is but.. are you him? If so then brilliant
OP is a lazy asshole with a serious pastebin addiction and needs help.
Yep! (Score:1)
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That doesn't necessarily rule out the stupid ones though, just the ones with a poor memory for details. I'm incredibly intelligent in most respects - math, science, english/literature, they all come easy to me - the common thread seemingly being that they can be distilled to a relatively small subset of guiding principles that can be assembled into towering edifices with sufficient skill. History though? Anatomy? Foreign languages? Anything that requires memorizing lots of random, disjointed details and
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Though I should say, the constitution test part sounds good to me - if you're going to participate in government you should at least know how it works in theory. Perhaps coupled with tests of literacy, numeracy, and logic, to show that you are capable of effectively acquiring and applying new knowledge.
I'd be tempted to throw basic statistical concepts in there as well, considering how much politicians like to intentionally misinterpret them - but that would require seriously adjusting our mathematical edu
TLDR (Score:1)
zzzz
I would have read the article (Score:1)
That's Why We're Still Running Around Naked (Score:1)
That's why we're still running around naked with no space ships or computers or anything. Because we are lazy.
Where is Diogenes when you need to refute stupid fucking premises like this?
Clothes and computers make things easier (Score:5, Interesting)
Clothes make it EASIER to stay warm. We can be warm sitting on our butt instead of needing to exercise or otherwise burn calories to stay warm. Clothes help us be lazy.
Computers make things easier. We can lazily click to have things delivered to our doorstep, rather than going to the immense effort of sitting in the car driving to the store. Computers help us be lazy.
We chose to build spaceships not because it is easy, but because it is hard ;) Actually at first we built rockets because we were afraid of the Russians. We're hard-wired for lazy, but we're also hard-wired to be powerfully motivated by fear. Fear overcomes laziness.
These days satellites do make things easier, no need to actually red a nap, we can let our phone read the directions out to us. We can be lazy.
Re: Clothes and computers make things easier (Score:1)
What you describe is the use of technology. What you omit is its development.
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People lazily sitting around thinking instead of going out and exercising?
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You're still young. With age you realize that spending a bit of time thinking can make it so yo don't have to move for 12 hours before partying.
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But that would require thinking. Moving is much simpler and easier.
And partying sounds really stressful, like it involves a lot of moving and loud and distracting noises. Why would anyone voluntarily subject themselves to such?
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And partying sounds really stressful, like it involves a lot of moving and loud and distracting noises. Why would anyone voluntarily subject themselves to such?
Good question. For some reason the post I replied to was interested in partying
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Technology gets developed because people want to earn money so they can spend it to be lazy rather than having to raise cattle and hunt for food.
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People also hunt for sport.
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And even that can be done more lazily with technology.
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But it doesn't have to be done at all.
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But hunting people is fun!
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But its not laziness.
We develop it for use, not to throw away (Score:2)
We develop technology in order to use it, not to just throw it away without uaing it. The purpose is to use it, in order to expend less net effort.
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But in order to use it, it first has to be developed.
The ability to use technology may cater to laziness.
But it first has to be developed.
And that is not laziness.
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We're hard-wired for lazy, but we're also hard-wired to be powerfully motivated by fear. Fear overcomes laziness.
Fear and the other motivators mentioned in earlier replies to your post are only a subset of the prime motivation of all animals capable of having "motivation"; survival .
Laziness, in the textbooks I read in school, was a survival trait passed down because laziness conserves bodily reserves which is a logical response when the availability of food is uncertain as it's been for most humans for the vast majority of human existence.
Seems like pretty solid logic to me and follows along with other accepted evol
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Even survival is secondary to the true primary motivation - effective reproduction. After all, biology is programmed by hundreds of millions of years of reproductive "winners" - *everything* else is secondary. As can be seen in many species where reproduction is dangerous if not outright fatal.
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It's the reason we're, not running around, but walking around at all. If we spent every waking moment working hard, getting more food than we needed, building more shelter than we needed, creating more weapons than we needed, as fast as we possibly could do it, we'd have completed exhausted the resources of any place we lived and would have literally killed ourselves.
We do only what we feel we have to do to survive, sometimes a bit more. You can't do less, you don't survive. If anything, modern society is f
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If you are dense.
Technology and civilization have allowed us to exceed the capacity of pre-historic man. In our drive to do less, we created more.
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Laziness promotes productivity, I always say.
...to a point, of course...
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Food was scarce for the vast majority of our evolution. If you burned too many calories, you died of starvation, or ended up too skinny to be considered a viable mate. Thus, we are wired to hunt for shortcuts and get the most stuff with the least amount of effort.
(I just wish our stack engineer who piles layers of fads onto our stack had this "feature". The bastard seems to like typing...or watching us type.)
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How about this, if at this time, you don't need to do anything to survive, you do nothing. Mud Monkeys smart, of all the animals in the animal kingdom, they use the brains to eat well, to hunt, forage and plant. They simply did not need to do that much work and sought other social activities to keep amused.
Along came a pack of cunts, we all call psychopaths and they hated happy people and wanted everyone else but them of course to work every waking moment to serve the psychopaths, else the psychopaths woul
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The general argument is that there are prescription drugs that sort of work now. When they don't, you're homeless and wish you had a mental institution to call home.
Re: Of course (Score:1)
If you have time and calories to spare, you don't do nothing. You develop arts, science, technology. You find ways to make life more enjoyable. And you end up with even more time and calories to spare.
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Evolution-wise that probably was a rare enough situation so as to be considered an "edge case". It's letting the gray-ware go rogue.
The upper-middle-class ancient Greeks who owned slaves were probably the first "mass case" of such. Most of those people probably just flirted around, with only a few percent doing art, philosophy, or math.
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Do you have a point?
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Excerpt? (Score:4, Funny)
Someone can sum up the article please?
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Two words, selection bias, or, palm face.
I'd write a scathing reply (Score:2)
but I just can't be bothered.
Re:Excerpt? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Calvinist/Presbyterian worship of toil needs another boost given that our society's ability to generate wealth and security has again outrun the fear that religionists love".
What a surprise! (Score:2)
Another scoop at 'Science 101', human are also hardwired to eat fast-food!! /Insert 'you don't say?' meme
I mean, seriously. Human (and all living organisms really) have evolved to survive as long as possible and for calories burning machine like our species, one of the challenge was to survive when food wasn't available. A then evolved to store fat, to love high calorie diet and to love 'not' wasting them when possible. That's how our body are made.
By chance, our brain is now smart enough to understand how
Re: What a surprise! (Score:1)
Explain swimming pools, fun runners, voolleyball, and dancing then.
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Swimming pools? Because your fat ass feels like it weighs less when you're in water. Dancing? Because it's a socially accepted way of touching the other sex inappropriately without getting slapped.
Aside of that, beats me.
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Dancing? Because it's a socially accepted way of touching the other sex inappropriately without getting slapped.
Nonsense.
You don't get to touch anyone inappropriately by dancing. Until about 203 years ago you didn't get to touch anyone by dancing at all.
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Until about 203 years ago, porn was an ankle shown briefly in a dress fault.
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No, that was until almost exactly 100 years ago.
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Maybe in some puritan backwater country. Some countries got more liberal than others.
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Competing.. (Score:2)
competing for sexual partners
Because you find so many more sexual partners hanging on your couch at home than when you are at the gym.
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Actually, when I was a hippie slacker who spend his day smoking or going to stupid festivals or doing "activism", I did get more lays than when I had a real job.
These evolutionary psych hypotheses (Score:5, Insightful)
... are just so stories. Their sole criterion for believing is how believable they sound. They can explain everything, so they shed light on nothing. The leap of logic from the experiment they did to the conclusions they drew was, quite literally, mind boggling.
Sure we have a genetic predisposition to conserve energy, otherwise we'd walk ourselves into starvation. But that's not the same as saying we're born to be couch potatoes; if that were true then how do you explain the existence of marathon runners? You could just as easily argue that we evolved to chase down mammoths; we certainly have physical adaptations unique among land animals for long distance running.
The one obvious thing about human behavior is that it is tremendous flexible. Under the right circumstances a couch potato will become a marathon runner.
The "exercise paradox" usually refers to the fact that increasing physical activity does not, on its own, result in weight loss. That's not really a paradox, it's just a reflection of the fact that calorie consumption tends to naturally rise as our activity levels rise. The behavioral "exercise paradox" they're talking about here isn't a paradox either. It's just social psychology. It's well-established that telling people you are going to pursue a goal (like exercising more) actually reduces the chances of you taking concrete steps toward that goal.
This plus their sample size is ridiculous (Score:2)
The parent's point plus the sample size here is completely ridiculous. You cant draw any meaningful conclusions off those miniscule numbers.
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To be fair, the funding for doing larger, better designed studies isn't exactly abundant.
The US weight-loss industry rakes in nearly seventy billion dollars a year, mostly for stuff that either has little scientific evidence supporting, or more commonly none. That's not even counting spending on foods marketed as "diet" foods, which is probably several times that. A 1% tax on such foods and services would easy fund a Moon shot style research program to discover what actually works -- but of course that wou
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"Conserving energy has been essential for humans' survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators."
I picture being spread eagled out on a couch, someone coming by and telling me I'm lazy, and in reply quoting the above. Maybe making especially direct eye contact during the "competing for sexual partners" clause.
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I'm not saying I agree with TFA's conclusion, but you can easily explain the existence of marathon runners as being a completely insignificant fraction of the population.
It's not reasonable to say that researchers cannot claim things about the majority of humans just because you can dredge up a counter-example. It's implied they are saying that this is true on averag
Same research posted on 2018-08-23 (Score:2)
In a perfect demonstration of laziness, rather than find a new topic to discuss the SAME SLASHDOT EDITOR allowed a submission about the SAME RESEARCH by the SAME SUBMITTER [slashdot.org] but merely from a different and rather tardy source almost a month later. Way to prove the point, guys!
Don't Agree (Score:2)
Humans like most creatures need rest.
not sure this is correct (Score:2)
But I couldn't be bothered to read it.
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Laziness is a virtue (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Laziness is a virtue (Score:5, Funny)
"Your response also seems to indicate a decent amount of impatience and hubris. Welcome aboard, our newest Perl programmer!"
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I once said something similar for an interview and did not get the job, and the tone of voice told me that angle didn't go over very well.
This was after the dot-com crash in CA and IT jobs were scarce because CA was flooded with dot-com "refugees". (I considered moving out of state, but family obligations made that hard.)
At first I was very convention
And shit like this... (Score:2)
Is the reason I'm against things like Universal Basic Income.
Because, if you give some people the opportunity to simply do NOTHING for a living, nothing is EXACTLY what they'll do.
Re:And shit like this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Better than them being lawyers or gun merchants or PR people.
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How is that a problem? The whole premise for Universal Basic Income is that we'll have far more people than work for those people to do. So where is the harm in them not working? Provided that the population numbers are managed such that the demand doesn't out stripe production we shouldn't have any problem.
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The whole premise for Universal Basic Income is that we'll have far more people than work for those people to do.
That's quite a premise.
Especially since it can't be supported.
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It's always been a hypothetical based on the idea of a future where robots and computers are doing all or nearly all of the work. It has been predicted many times through out history and never actually come about because new work was always found to be done. It is entirely possible that the same will happen this time, though there is of course no guarantee.
It bears mentioning that I'm just talking about UBI as a sole source of income for most people. UBI doesn't actually have to start as a large enough subs
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Obvious (Score:3)
Just stand near a place where they have parallel stairs and escalators, and watch people all crowd in front of the escalators. I have witnessed groups of people walking around the stairs so they can get in line to take the escalator down.
Physics 101 (Score:2)
find sexual partners and avoiding predators (Score:2)
you'll wont be good in either of them if the only thing you do is sit on the couch all day.
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Given the choice, I'd rather hide from predators than try to outrun them. Also, if I knew how to lure females to me rather than having to chase after them, I would.
Uhhhh (Score:1)
young adults who wanted to improve the level of exercise in their lives
Also I wondered if this meant that they wanted to "lose weight and get healthier" but weren't doing a good job to / not committed to it. If that's true, shouldn't they also have mixed in people who were fit and worked out regularly along with committed couch potatoes?
yup, thats a fact jack (Score:2)
https://i.imgur.com/OT0cJi8.jp... [imgur.com]
Heinlein (Score:5, Insightful)
—Robert Heinlein
Lizards (Score:2)
That must be down in our lizard brain. Reptiles will often lie around for ages until they see something to eat, then jump on it. It's a simple power-saving strategy... don't do something when you have nothing to do.
TL;DR (Score:1)
Too lazy, didn't read
Just like every apex predator. (Score:2)
Humans? (Score:2)
Just don't look at all the obvious evidence (Score:2)
Why does Slashdot even pay it's editors? (Score:2)
Does BeauHD even read the articles or check for dupes??? see last months post by the same user & also approved by the BeauHD [slashdot.org]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FTS:
"The results showed that participants tended to move towards the active images or away from the sedentary ones at the fastest rates. "We found that participants took 32 milliseconds less to move away from the sedentary image, which is considerable for a task like this," says study co-author Boris Cheval, of the University of Geneva, in a university release,
Hard work (Score:1)
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Yes, I'm work shy. Work adverse, to be accurate. And anyone who isn't is an idiot. Nobody in their right mind would willingly do something they don't want to do for no good reason whatsoever.
Work ethic is for bees and ants (Score:5, Insightful)
Sensible people who understand that time is our most precious and limited resource will work for others only just enough to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Any hours remaining after that need is met can be dedicated to favourite hobbies, pastimes, unpaid vocations or other personal interests --- that's called "Having a life".
If you don't understand that then you're either an employer who benefits from the depressed wages that come with a mass labour pool, which is the primary reason for promoting the work ethic, or you have fallen for it yourself.
Either way, labouring is a distressing waste of people's lives, and advocating that it should be normal in a modern technological society is a barbaric and unethical position.
Re: Work ethic is for bees and ants (Score:3)
Or you're an American. We have to work 12 hours and live to work or we get fired. We have too much work to do otherwise
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
Nah, we'll send people like you to die for us. Like we always do.
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"The youth" has been worthless for at the very least 3000 years now.
They [Young People] have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things -- and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning -- all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessivel
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"The youth" has been worthless for at the very least 3000 years now.
They have. What you fail to realize is that Greece was conquered, its influence began to wane, and it split into warring factions during Aristotle's lifetime.
Aristotle lived from 384 B.C. to 322 B.C. and the "Classical Era" ended in 338 when Phillip of Macedon conquered Greece, and the height of its influence died with Alexander in 323 B.C. After that, the country fractured into the Achaean League and the Aetolian League which began deca
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The Greek empire? Last time I checked before Phillip Greece was a collection of city-states, constantly bickering and warring over nothing other than them being another city-state than us. Conquering that isn't that big a deal.
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Squirrels, the inventors of ADHS.