Reading your post I was reminded about a description of an experiment on a chimpanzees in the book The Number Sense by Stanislas Dehaene. I dug it up so I could show you. The book is available on pdfdrive.com:
"I cannot leave this topic without mentioning the curious difficulties that Sheba met when she had to pick the smaller of two numbers. The experimental situation seemed quite simple. The animal was shown two sets of food, and when it pointed to one, the experimenter gave it to another chimp while Sheba received the other food set. In this novel situation, it was in Sheba's interest to
designate the smaller quantity, so that she would then receive the larger one. However, the chimpanzee never succeeded. She continued to point to the larger set, as if the maximum number of food was an irrepressible response. Sarah Boysen then thought of replacing the actual piles of food with the corresponding Arabic digits. Immediately, from the first trial, Sheba chose the smaller digit! Numerical symbols seemed to liberate Sheba from the immediate material contingencies. They enabled her to act without being influenced by the parasitic impulse that otherwise compelled her to always pick the larger amount of food."
So it seems that the idea of distancing yourself from the immediacy of yourself can offer benefits, at least in chimps.
How does this work in practice for humans? Control yourself like a character in the sims, and be in the moment when something novel occurs. That's my guess! Good luck.
roud:
