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🧠 BrainBank #024

How to Read Body Language (in Poker & Life) & The Anti Doom-Scrolling OS

Welcome to BrainBank— Your weekly dose of continuous learning, served w/ a splash of tomfoolery 💦

What We'll Learn (in <4 minutes):

🃏 How to Read Body Language: 9 quick poker tells & their real life equivalents.

📜 The Anti Doom-Scrolling OS: Phone configuration tips, feed workarounds, & other resources.

🃏 How to Read Body Language

Pokerstars

Our eyes are like vacuums of information, & this guy was born w/ a pair of industrial HVAC units.

We're constantly sucking in, filtering, & giving meaning to what we see.

So how do we determine, w/ a high degree of certainty, what the body language we see means?

After sifting through books like Influence & Caro's Book of Poker Tells; there's 2 themes that come up.

1. Weak Means Strong, Strong Means Weak

Our unconscious bias is to act opposite.

Unless you're aware of these tells, you probably do them w/o thinking.

Poker Example

Player's hands are likely weaker if they:

mad-dog you across the table
aggressively toss chips in the pot
do any behavior to seem stronger or intimidating

Player's hands are likely stronger if they:

look away
sigh
make this ": /" face
Do any behavior to seem weaker or less intimidating

When playing weak to average players, you can bet on these behaviors w/ a high degree of success.

Life Example

If someone:

raises their voice
perks up on their toes
flaunts status items, brags, gloats

they probably don't have as much concrete leverage as they want you to think.

Ask, " What are they hoping I'll think by doing/saying _____? "

& you can usually assume the opposite is true.

2. Unconscious Releases of Tension

People release tension out of positive anticipation of what's to come.

When they can't wait to get to the next step.

Poker Example

When players:

tap foot, knee, or finger while waiting for a call
have shaky hands
clack their tongue on the top of their mouth
take a deep breath to stabilize heartbeat

they likely have strong hands.

These are all tension releases.

People don't build tension when they bluff, tension builds when something great is coming but there's an uncertain variable (your call) that determines how great it could be.

Life Example

When people:

nod quickly over & over
tap foot/finger/knee
open their stance/point their feet away from you
take deep breaths while someone's talking

they likely have something they're waiting to say or somewhere else to go.

Ask an open ended question or give them an exit point.

When I was younger, I'd bounce my leg incessantly at church.

That was my tension release until I got home to play Nintendo 😉

There's few actions that you can label with 100% certainty.

But you can almost always ~increase~ your certainty.

Know someone who reads body language for a living (poker, therapy, negotiator)?

Text them this card : )

📜 The Anti Doom-Scrolling OS

Lumps

We've solved boredom.

If you have a phone & a feed (especially w/ personal recommendations), you'll never be bored.

But some find they're spending more time than they intended on these boredom-solving-platforms.

Okay, it's me.

I'm the one checking my phone at 7 then blinking for the first time @10 to see the 3hr time-chunk I was gunna use to build stuff disappear.

Curse you Dinkleberg !!

So I created some screens & systems to stop the infinite scrolling.

Phone Configurations

The piece that led to these configurations --> Dopamine, Smartphones, & You: A battle for your time (Trevor Haynes, Dept. of Neurobiology @Harvard Med School)

Turn phone to grayscale & turn off white point (bad for sleep, spikes dopamine in the brain)

Settings>Accessibility>Display & Text Size>Color filters>Grayscale

Settings >Accessibility>Display & Text Size>Turn off white point

Create shortcut for grayscale (to make scanning QR codes/seeing color easier)

Settings>Accessibility>Accessibility Shortcuts

Turn off face ID for unlock

Prevents unconscious phone checking.

Turn off notifications besides messages & calls
Remove unconscious cues (seeing an app) by rearranging/deleting

1st page: utility, 2nd page: categorized folders.

Feed Workarounds

Feeds are optimized for max attention.

Is your goal to spend maximum attention, get a lil entertainment, or engage w/ your friends?

Ask what your goal is then create mindful workarounds.

Here's the tools I like.

Twitter

Use TweetDeck (free) to remove ads, create custom feeds using lists, & exclude retweets.

Instagram

I haven't found a way to customize the feed/remove ads & 20-25% of our feed is promotions now 🙄

IG DMs & stories have the deepest rewards for me.

A dashboard that lets me access them w/o the feed or app is ideal.

Eclincher (paid) gives you a dashboard for posting pics, stories, & managing DMs w/o using the app.

Combin (free) lets you post pics & stories, but you can't manage DMs through their dashboard yet.

Settings>preferences>feed preferences>curate to yo needs

For all other feeds, try Feedly .

Other Resources I Love

Website blocker: cold turkey .
Timed lockbox to physically lock distractions.
Minimalist phone: Mudita Pure. Funded this baby on indiegogo a year ago & can't wait for it to come (this summer!)
For Product Managers: A design guide to build products that support human well-being (Center for Humane Tech)