The Impulse Factor

Why Some of Us Play it Safe and Others Risk it All

Nick Tasler

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847374226
• eBook ISBN: 9781471109812
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Some people can take risks - move abroad, switch careers, and give up everything to chase their dreams - with hardly a second thought. For others, looking before they leap is vital to making even simple decisions. In his first book, Nick Tasler, research and development director for cutting-edge think tank TalentSmart, turns conventional wisdom on its head by explaining that there are actually two factors that determine whether an individual will be impulsive or cautious. The first is genetic, and the second is Tasler's theory of Conditional Impulsivity, in which the gravity of a particular situation can trigger unusually risky responses from a cautious person. More than just a book, The Impulse Factorprovides a clear understanding of why we make the choices we do - and the tools to turn those decisions into something great.

CHAPTER ONE

Origin of Seekers:
From Cavemen to Cage Fighters

According to the official program, Nick Wernimont stands just under six feet tall and weighs 170 pounds. He looks like the kind of guy who, if you saw him walking down a dark alley … well, you would probably think he got lost looking for the VIP entrance to a night club. What’s most striking about his appearance is how much he does not look like a ruffian compared to the other raw slabs of beef lumbering around inside the ring. Although he appears to treat his trips to the gym with due respect, Wernimont reminds you more of an underwear model than a cage fighter. Even from the cheap seats (which describes pretty much every seat in the house at an amateur boxing match), you can see Wernimont’s sparkling rows of white teeth. He has a day or two’s collection of stubble sprouting on his face, where an aspiring beard will have its hopes dashed by a razor as soon as tonight’s fight is over. The shadow beard is presumably an attempt to draw attention away from his other metrosexual features, like the suspiciously perfect tan and what I can only guess are well-manicured nails. In truth, it just makes him look even more like Brad Pitt, but less like Pitt’s demented character in the movie Fight Club and more like his dapper Dillinger role in Ocean’s Eleven. Either way it’s a thinly veiled effort to deceive, which probably fills his rough-looking opponent with confidence. Unfortunately for his foe, that confidence will prove to be painfully false. And then I start to think that maybe that has been Wernimont’s strategy all along.

There is definitely more to this guy than meets the eye. Wernimont has been training with his boxing coach, his world champion Jiu-Jitsu coach, and his Muay Thai coach twice a day for six days a week for the last year, with just three exceptions. He took one week off to run with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain … on all five of the five days he spent there before returning home to Chicago. He spent a week in Florida in late December getting his skydiving certification. Then there was his trip to Brazil to experience the festival of sensory excess found nowhere else in the world except at Carnivale. Wernimont has no shortage of friends, but it seems right that the only person he could find to join him on his wild adventures should be a member of his own gene pool. His brother Chris’s work schedule helps. He works two weeks on, two weeks off as a helicopter pilot carting roughnecks from their New Orleans homes out to drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. But the average person would agree that spare time alone isn’t a good enough reason to go on these types of adrenaline binges. Nick and Chris have far more than flexible schedules in common.

Tonight’s boxing match was arranged as a warm-up bout before Wernimont’s first full-contact cage fight in a few months. The arena is alive with murmurs of bloodthirsty fans hoping to see a pretty-boy pummeling. When the bell sounds, the pugilists dance around the ring for a few seconds and size each other up. Wernimont’s face reveals what could best be described as a controlled ferocity—aggressive yet strategic. After a swing and a miss from his opponent, Wernimont makes his strike. A couple of hard blows reach their destination, and it isn’t long before a cut opens up under his opponent’s eye, causing a rivulet of blood to run down his cheek. The second round offers more of the same. The referee eventually intervenes, calling for a standing eight count to let Wernimont’s opponent regain his composure. By the third round, the fight is all but over. Shortly after the bell sounds, the referee decides he’s seen enough and the fight is called. Wernimont is officially one and oh in his fight career. His first full-contact fight is on the horizon.

Full-contact fighting (or mixed martial arts) is the closest thing America has to ancient Roman gladiators. Except for biting, hitting below the belt, and finger torquing, no violence is spared for the audience.

“Five wins and I can start making some money at this,” he told me with a wink. Five wins on the sanctioned amateur full-contact circuit qualifies a fighter for a professional bout where they can actually get paid for doing something that most people would ransom their firstborn child to avoid doing. The real joke, however, is that Wernimont will have to become the world Ultimate Fighting champion before he begins to make the kind of money he does now at his day job. In this way he is like the rare few ancient gladiators who were not slaves, but free citizens who simply enjoyed the thrill of the games.

Wernimont’s career, just like the rest of his life, is marked by short bursts of intense activity and radical changes. After graduating from the University of Iowa, he moved to Los Angeles, where stimulation is never in short supply. Once there, he spent his days at Morgan Stanley, clocking in as a financial analyst and earning their number-one new salesman award. He moonlighted as a bartender at the Saddle Ranch on the Sunset Strip. After narrowly missing final selection as one of the cast members for MTV’s The Real World: Chicago, he decided to pack up and head to the Windy City on his own, leaving bartending and financial planning behind. Now he spends his days working as a successful sales manager for a dental implants manufacturer (an ironic selection for the future cage fighter) and buying real estate. His evenings are spent at the gym sparring with world-champion martial artists.

Getting to know Nick Wernimont only creates more questions. Of course, anyone who voluntarily chooses cage fighting as a hobby is a rather intriguing individual. But he is extraordinary even compared to his cage-fighting peers. This is what makes Wernimont’s foray into full-contact fighting so compelling. He is not a former Olympic gold medalist who wants to make a living doing what he knows how to do best, nor is he a deluded dock worker who has seen one too many Rocky movies. His collar is as white as his teeth, and the only gold he owns is wrapped around his wrist and tells time with amazing accuracy. He lives each day in a waking, postmodern American Dream—young, smart, good looking, and financially successful, with no visible regrets about any of it. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. With all of this going for him, why would he subject himself to the kind of punishment inherent in a crazy sport like full-contact fighting?

1. The Novelty-Seeking Gene

At the turn of the millennium, the world buzzed with anticipation about the possibilities and pitfalls in store for Y2K. Inside the walls of Jim Swanson’s research lab at the University of California in Irvine, the level of anticipation was no exception. Two courses of fascinating research were about to collide in an unexpected way that would cause scientists from around the world to drop what they were doing and take note.

Jim Swanson is a humble man who insists that much of his success as a scientist is owed to his “collaborations with other great scientists.” Nevertheless, Swanson is still recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on child development. His research center in Irvine was one of the first seven labs chosen as a Vanguard Center for a very ambitious project called the National Children’s Study that will stretch across the country with the aim of understanding the biggest problems facing American children.¹ Over the span of the next twenty years the centers will collaborate to study more than 100,000 children and their families. Swanson’s recognition is due in large part to his groundbreaking work on the rising occurrence of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Most people today recognize the disorder by its original name of just ADD, which first came into vogue in the 1980s after it was formally recognized as a psychological syndrome rather than a behavioral problem.² The term ADD has since infiltrated the everyday lingo that Americans use to describe kids who are unfocused or inattentive. Now psychologists have officially thrown hyperactivity’s hat into the ring to describe the fidgety aspect of the disorder. As Swanson’s team was about to discover, the hyperactive element of the syndrome is a key piece of the puzzle that may help explain a lot about ADHD, and also about human history.

Like many other mental illnesses, treatment of ADHD was very rudimentary once it was first recognized. But as the number of children diagnosed began to skyrocket, there was a need for treatment and understanding to catch up. From 1994 to 2004 the number of paid doctor visits for treatment of ADHD nearly tripled. This alarming increase has had many doctors and educators wondering how big the next wave of this possible epidemic might be. For researchers like Jim Swanson, the clock was ticking on finding some answers.

Early in 2000 Swanson’s team sat a group of ADHD kids down to play a few brain-teaser games.³ One of these games is called the Logan stop-signal test and resembles the popular children’s game red light/green light. Each child was given a task such as watching a light or pressing a button on a computer keyboard. When instructed to do so, the child had to stop whatever action he or she was engaged in. Children with ADHD usually take much longer to complete this task than typical children, because they react more slowly to the stop signal. What Swanson’s team found when they tallied the results surprised everyone, including Jim Swanson.

Before the experiment, Swanson’s team had split the kids into two groups based on whether or not the children carried a specific variation of a gene called dopamine receptor gene DRD4.⁴ The function of DRD4 is to tinker with the levels of dopamine in the child’s brain. (As noted earlier, dopamine is the brain chemical that makes us feel happy and vibrant.) Every person has this gene in one variation or another, but we don’t all have the exact same variation of it. This is standard practice in the world of genes. For example, we all have a gene that determines what color our eyes are, but we don’t all have the same eye color gene. Some people have the blue eye gene, while others have the brown eye gene. The same is true about the DRD4 gene. Everybody has it, but not everybody has the same variation. What separates the variations is how many times a segment of this gene repeats itself in the genetic sequence. Most people have a shorter variation of the gene that gets repeated four times. But some people have the longer variation that repeats seven times. This longer variation causes a less sensitive response to dopamine, which then creates a deficit in the amount of dopamine output to a person’s brain. In other words, the dopamine that is present in the brain has to try a little harder. Such people have to round up even more of their chemical friends than the average person in order to get the dopamine party started and that requires extra-stimulating activities. In the mid-1990s scientist Richard Ebstein⁵ found that people with the longer variation were also likely to have a personality trait called “novelty seeking.” Thanks to Ebstein’s discovery, the longer variation of the DRD4 gene is commonly dubbed “the novelty-seeking gene.”

As you might expect from the name, people with the novelty-seeking trait feel more compelled than the average person to seek out new and exciting experiences. The problem is that everybody’s brain craves dopamine, so the people born with a natural shortage of dopamine output have to overcompensate. They find it hard to keep themselves satisfied with the ordinary, slow-moving pace of just about everything that happens in their lives. The normal acts of reading a book, sitting through a meeting, obeying traffic laws, and even a roll in the hay don’t necessarily keep these people’s attention. While most of us are happy and relatively satisfied doing most of these things, they quickly bore people with the novelty-seeking gene. That means these restless souls have to go looking for action anywhere they can find it in order to stir up some more dopamine just to feel “normal.” They might drive fast. They might disregard instructions designed for safety. They might jump up in a cage with their fists cocked.

Heart-racing, dopamine-producing endeavors can also cause feelings of bliss in the ordinary person. But it’s not all fun and games with dopamine. Too much of this good thing can easily turn excitement into fear and bliss into anxiety. What gives the carrier of the novelty-seeking gene an exciting rush is likely to do nothing for the ordinary person other than cause a panic.

Currently about one-quarter of people have the novelty-seeking gene, but more than half of people diagnosed with ADHD have it. Not surprisingly, Ebstein’s discovery led many scientists to believe that the novelty-seeking gene may as well be nicknamed the “attention-deficit gene.” Although not all kids with ADHD have the gene, researchers believed that the kids with the most severe cases of ADHD symptoms would carry the gene. The purpose of Jim Swanson’s study was to verify that exact point. His Irvine research team expected to find that the kids with the novelty-seeking gene would do significantly worse on their brain-teaser tests than the ADHD kids without the gene.

After the experiment, Swanson’s team tallied the results. The ADHD kids without the novelty-seeking gene performed just like run-of-the-mill kids with ADHD should. They made more mistakes than typical kids, and they were slower to respond. Their inability to pay attention caused their minds to drift, without giving their conscious reasoning a chance to catch them. Swanson’s team reasoned that if ADHD kids with the normal version of the dopamine gene performed poorly on the test, then the kids with the novelty-seeking gene didn’t have a prayer.

But they were wrong. When the numbers were crunched, they did find a difference between the kids with the novelty-seeking gene and those without it, but it wasn’t the difference they had predicted. The novelty-seeking group did much better than expected. These kids ended up scoring the same as the kids with no symptoms of ADHD whatsoever. Furthermore, the novelty-seeking kids proved to be even quicker on the draw. Apparently, there was much more to this new gene than anyone had previously guessed.

Swanson believes that the kids classified as having ADHD who carried the novelty-seeking gene do not actually have the same version of ADHD as those without this gene. In the summary of their research for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Swanson writes that this group only has a “partial syndrome characterized by behavioral excesses without cognitive deficits.” So while these kids may behave a bit on the hyperactive side in the classroom, and have trouble settling down at home, there really isn’t anything dysfunctional about the way they think. It is only those “behavioral excesses” that make these kids a handful for their parents and teachers. Swanson believes it is probably those same excessive quirks that can drive frustrated parents into their pediatrician’s office to get a pharmaceutical fix.

This was a discovery that nobody saw coming. Whatever else they are, these kids are quick thinkers. Whether or not that is a good thing or a bad thing was the real question.

To find out, the Irvine researchers teamed up with another group of scientists and embarked on a journey back in time. In finding the novelty-seeking gene’s roots, they hoped to shed some light on why this mutation lurks in so many of today’s children.

2. Misguided Mutation or Misunderstood Gift?

Roughly 165,000 years ago modern humans (that is, Homo sapiens) debuted on planet Earth. Compared to their stocky and slightly older kin, the Neanderthals, our ancestors had long foreheads in order to accommodate bigger frontal and temporal lobes in their brains. They also were more gracile, with longer limbs and narrower hips. The two groups mostly kept to themselves, coexisting without much incident for the next 115,000 years. Then shortly before cave painting and music came into vogue, the short version of the DRD4 gene, which had been around ever since Homo sapiens first appeared, spawned a lively mutation—the seven-repeat variation now commonly referred to as the novelty-seeking gene.

At this time in our prehistory (40,000–50,000 years ago), modern humans called the savannas of Africa home while Neanderthals dwelled mostly in the caves of Europe, the Middle East, and western Asia. Although the African continent was home to all of what we now regard as modern human civilization, hardly anything that existed then would fit our definition of civilized. In the technical sense, there were people with physical attributes similar to those of the people of today. But they were people with little to no symbolic behavior such as the art and decorative objects that characterize our culture today. They had no complex speech and no music. They hunted, they gathered, and they died. They were not quite the homebodies that Neanderthals were, but our ancestors were not exactly circumnavigating the globe, either. Not yet, anyway.

Then all of a sudden, modern humans made a breakthrough. Some restless souls embarked on a quest to see what they were missing elsewhere in the world. Australian scientists David Cameron and Colin Groves⁶ explain in their book Bones, Stones and Molecules, that “40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began, for whatever reason, spreading into the Neanderthal heartland of Europe.” That move signaled the beginning of the end for the Neanderthals as they then became casualties of rapid extinction. (The last Neanderthals died 27,000 years ago.) But it marked the beginning of something big for modern humans. Their migration north was a bold move, considering the first map wasn’t drawn until just 800 years ago and they certainly didn’t have the luxury of Mapquest.com. Magellan and his troop of fellow seafarers would not set sail for another fifty millennia. Moses didn’t hustle his people toward the exits of Egypt until less than ten thousand years ago. These ancient people didn’t know the world was round, and they probably had no comprehension of what round as a concept even meant, given that the first wheel wasn’t rolled out until about five thousand years ago. Not to mention that their slender physiques were not built for the colder climate inhabited by the husky Neanderthals.

Trekking into unknown territory was a risky choice. Yet humans did it anyway, and history’s course was forever altered because of it. Not only did they become explorers, but a kind of prehistoric Renaissance also began around this time. Archaeologists found a flute in Germany dating back 36,000 years, and two others in France from 32,000 and 27,000 years ago. As early as 34,000 years ago people were carving animal figurines in Germany, and 32,000 years ago they were drawing pictures on cave walls in France and Spain. It’s not that humans made no technological advances in terms of tools and hunting techniques since their inception in the preceding 120,000 years. They just had not made much he...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction Thrill Riders
• Chapter One Origin Of Seekers: From Cavemen To Cage Fighters
• Chapter Two Impulsivity’s Hidden Side: The Secret Of Being Directionally Correct
• Chapter Three Eat Or Be Eaten: What Politicians Have Learned From Primates
• Chapter Four Bubblology: The Plague Of The $76,000 Flower
• Chapter Five Common Sense Of Ownership
• Chapter Six Factoring You Into Your Decisions
• Chapter Seven Potential Seekers: Exploring The Connection Between Sinners, Saints, Barbies, And Farmers
• Chapter Eight Risk Managers: Conquering The Fear Of Big Cats
• Chapter Nine Striking A Balance
• Afterword Putting Big Ideas To The Test
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A Technical Manual For The Impulse Factor Test
• Appendix B Who Is Talentsmart?
• Notes
• Footnote