Stress, memory, poker, Lost Cities, and good friends.

(What on earth could have all these things in common?)

About 25 years ago, I had a job as a house player (or “prop) in a poker room in Los Angeles. My job was to help start games and to move to faltering games to help keep them from breaking up.

I love to play all different forms of poker and I love playing short-handed, so it was a great gig for me. If I wasn’t needed for any of those above tasks, I could just sit there and get paid to do what I love doing anyway, play poker.

I met a guy back there named Mike who had the same job. He was smart, funny, and played poker well. We became really good friends. In fact, he was a groomsman at my wedding 22 years ago.

We live far apart these days, he in Chicago, me in Las Vegas. But we still keep in touch, mostly by playing online board games heads-up once a week or so. Being competitive, of course we keep track of who wins and who loses — or rather, I do.

One of our favorite games is called Lost Cities. It’s a great game. It’s also an awful, terrible, mind-destroying game. It’s simple, yet complex. There is a lot of strategy to it. There is a lot of “gamble” in it. It’s a game that’s fun to win and wretched to lose.

Anyway, I bring that game up because Mike is a little better at it than I am. After a little over 220 games, Mike has won about 10 more than I have. But when I tell him this, he swears I’m lying or mistaken.

How could that be? How could he be so sure he’s lost more games than he’s won against me? Easy. We are hard-wired evolutionarily to remember bad things more than good ones.

I know this well from playing poker all these years. We remember every intimate detail when we’re running bad and losing. But wins? Eh, that’s just par-for-the-course. A good player is supposed to win.

It’s a very well-known thing: “Losses hurt worse than wins feel good”.

Of course, events that cause any kind of very strong emotion form stronger memories than events that aren’t associated with any particularly strong emotion. But even still, it’s the negative emotions that form the strongest memories.

And of course, there’s an obvious evolutionary reason for that. It’s important to remember where and when something made you afraid. It’s also important to remember where and when and how and why you were stressed for some reason.

We need those memories to inform us and motivate us to figure out how to deal with the things that caused such negative emotions. Either stay away from them or figure out how to master them.

When things are going great, when they are routine or mundane, there’s no great need for you to remember them. And, of course, there’s a good reason to remember exceptionally great events — so that you are motivated to work to repeat them.

But nothing forms stronger memories and motivations than negative emotions. Fear, anger — and most particularly, stress.

It’s stressful as all hell when the cards just won’t cooperate with you in poker — or Lost Cities.

And that’s why my buddy is positive that I’m beating the stuffing out of him in that game, even though it’s entirely the other way around.

Interesting, yeah?

Naturally,

Adam

PS: Tyrone the Porcupine Hobo and I are going to start live-streaming the show next week. Why not? All the cool kids are doing it! It’ll happen on Sunday, February 2, 2024 sometime in the late morning on my X account and on YouTube.com/@HamanNature.

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