Page 235 - Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

Che wing gum had been sold commercially throughout the 1800s: Mar y B ellis, “How We
Have Bubble Gum Today,” oughtC o, October 16, 2017,
https://www.thoughtco.com/histor y-of-bubble-and-chewing-gum-1991856.
Wrigle y re volutionized the industr y: Jennifer P. Mathews, Chicle: e Chewing Gum o f the
Americas, f rom t he Ancient Maya to William Wrigley (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2009), 44–46.
Wrigle y became the largest che wing gum company: “William Wrigley, Jr.,” Encyclopædia
Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wrigley-Jr, accessed
June 8, 2018.
Toothpaste had a similar trajector y: Charles Duhigg, e Power of Habit: Why We D o
What We D o in Life and Business (New York: R andom House, 2014), chap. 2.
he started avoiding her: Sparkly_alpaca, “What Are the C oolest Psycholog y Tricks at
You Know or Have Used? ” Reddit, November 11, 2016,
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5cgqbj/what_are_the_coolest_psyc
holog y_tricks_that_you/d9wcqs r/.
e earliest remains of modern humans: Ian Mcdougall, Francis H. Brown, and John G.
Fleagle, “Stratigraphic Placement and Age of Modern Humans from Kibish,
Ethiopia,” Nature 433, no. 7027 (2005), doi:10.1038/nature03258.
the neocortex . . . was roughly the same: Some research indicates that the size of the
human brain reached modern proportions around three hundred thousand years
ago. Evolution never stops, of course, and the shape of the structure appears to have
continued to evolve in meaningful ways until it reached both modern size and shape
sometime between one hundred thousand and thirty- ve thousand years ago. Simon
Neubauer, Jean-Jacques Hublin, and Philipp Gunz, “ e Evolution of Modern
Human Brain Shape,” Science Advances 4, no. 1 (2018): eaao5961.
society has shied to a predominantly delayed-return environment: e original
research on this topic used the terms delayed-return s ocieties and immediate-return
societies. James Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,” Man 17, no. 3 (1982),
doi:10.2307/2801707. I rst heard of the difference between immediate-return
environments and delayed-return environments in a lecture from Mark Lear y. Mark
Lear y, Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior (Chantilly, VA: Teaching,
2012).
e world has changed much in recent years: e rapid environmental changes of recent
centuries have far outpaced our biological ability to adapt. On average, it takes about
twenty- ve thousand years for meaningful genetic changes to be selected for in a
human population. For more, see Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiolog y (Cambridge, MA:
B elknap Press, 1980), 151.
our brains e volved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones: Daniel Gilbert, “Humans
Wired to Respond to Short-Term Problems,” inter view by Neal C onan, Talk of the
Nation, NPR, July 3, 2006, https://www.npr.org/templates/stor y/stor y.php?
stor yId=5530483.
Disease and infection won’t show up for days or weeks, e ven years: e topics of
irrational behavior and cognitive biases have become quite popular in recent years.