Welcome to the huberman live podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is dr. Maya Shankar dr. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who did her undergraduate training at Yale University, her PhD thesis at Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar and a postdoctoral fellowship. Also, in cognitive science at Stanford,
Diversity dr. Shankar also served as a senior advisor to the White House and she founded and served as the chair of the White House Behavioral Science team dr. Shankar is also the host of her own podcast entitled, a slight change of plans and indeed dr. Shankar herself is no stranger to having to make major changes to one's life plans as you'll learn today. Prior to all of those incredible accomplishments that dr. Shankar has achieved, she was a student at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music, preparing her life to
A professional concert violinist. But as you also soon, learn she then experienced a career devastating injury forcing herself to have to reframe everything about her life plans and her own identity. And that's really what we talked about today. We talk about identity, not just dr. Shankar's prior and current identities. But of course your identity, we posed, a number of questions, geared toward getting you to ask. Who am I really do? My goals align with who I am and what I want.
I want dr. Shankar shares with us. The research on identity goals, motivation and plans, as well as many practical tools to answer. Those key questions that guide us down, either the correct or incorrect, trajectories in life, she shares with us. For instance, how to assess on paper goals of the sort that you would see on a CV. So which school, which job, which salary, which spouse etc, etc. And how to relate those to the deeper feelings that relate to one's ability to?
You really pursue a given goal knowing that it's the right goal for us. We also talked about the science of feelings, what they can and cannot tell us and when they should, or should not serve as a compass for guiding our everyday and longer term Decisions. By the end of today's episode, you will realize that dr. Shankar is essentially handing, you a science supported road map for how to determine and assess your identity and goals and how one influences the other that is,
How your identity influences your goals, and how your goals, influences? Your identity in becoming the person that you want to be. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Maui, Nui, venison Maui, Nui. Venison is the most nutrient dense and delicious red-meat.
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Uberman and you'll save up to $150 off their pod. Three cover eight sleep, currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eight, sleep.com hubermann, and now for my discussion with dr. Maya Shankar, welcome, so happy. You're here. Thanks Andrew. It's great. To be here. I have a lot of questions about identity about goals and motivation and about change in general, but I'd like to start off with identity.
And like to divide it into two segments, the first is how we form an identity and, you know, we'll get into your story and I hope a bit or more detail, but when we were younger, we tend to ask questions about ourselves, but also about the world around us, we want to learn what our parents do for a living. What the workers on the street are doing that for etcetera. How much of our early identity? Do you think is
Formed by observation of what we are doing versus observation and labels of the people that are around us and closest to
us. Yeah, it's a great question. I think a lot of it is based on what we see around us and what we see is deemed successful and Society, Privileges and there's a concept called identity, foreclosure, we're actually, when you're young, right? It's not just that you're observing. What your parents are doing, or what your peer group is doing they. Mmm.
Impose their own structures on you. And so what that can do is it can really limit your mindset in terms of what it is that you want to achieve, and what it is that you're capable of achieving. And so often times, when people experience identity, foreclosure, they have to take a lot of active steps to overcome, whatever bias these are limitations. They experienced as a young person given what they were projected to do or believe, right? So identity, you know, can be about what you do can also be about what you believe in the world, right? And so a
Those belief systems are also passed on you inherit belief systems from the people that surround you when you're young. And if there's one thing that I've learned it's that we tend to put a huge premium on what it is that we do. We tend to Define ourselves by what we do. And you can see this in the questions we asked, young children, what do you want to be when you grow up, right? We never say, who do you want to be when you grow up? What kind of person do you want to be when you grow up? We say, what do you want to be and the consequence of that?
That kind of mindset is that we end up anchoring our identities, very firmly to what it is that we do. And I certainly, you know, we talked you were alluding to my personal story, right? I started playing the violin when I was a little kid, six years old became absolutely obsessed. And for the large part of my childhood, I was first and foremost, a violinist. I mean, if I had met you, I'd be like, hey, Andrew, I'm a violinist. And then the second up would be, I'm Maya. That's how tethered my identity was to, to, being a violinist.
And then fast forward to what I'm a teenager, you know, if these huge dreams of going pro and and becoming, you know, yeah, just like a, hopefully, a professional violinist for the rest of my life. And then I tear a tendon in my hand, my dreams end overnight and suddenly, there's this profound loss of identity because what I hadn't realized is that in losing the violin, sure, I was losing the ability to play the instrument, but I was actually losing a huge part of who I was.
And that was so destabilizing and so disorienting for me because when you define Yourself by the what, then as soon as the what goes away you're like, oh my gosh, who the hell am I right? What do I do? What, what value? Do I bring to the world and what I experienced at the time is known in cognitive science as identity paralysis. Maybe you felt this way during various transitions in your life, but basically
who you are and what you're about is suddenly called into question and you end up feeling really stuck, right? You don't see. You don't have the courage to imagine what a future could look like. And I certainly fell prey to Identity paralysis and it took me a long time to kind of figure out what my path would look like moving forward. But I learned a really valuable lesson from that very formative experience, I had the change about how it is that I should Define myself and for what it's worth.
I don't think our desire is humans do have identities is going anywhere. We're not gonna be able to dispose of identities, and we shouldn't because our self-identity is bring us so much, meaning and purpose in our lives, right? You're a podcaster of a podcaster. You're a scientist. I'm a scientist. These things are actually really helpful in motivating. So we don't want to do away with identities altogether, but we can be more particular about is what we anchor our identities to. And I have learned in my adult life to Anchor my identity to
Oh, why I do the things I do? Rather than what I do. And I found this to be a much more durable reliable relationship. So to make this concrete, let's think about the violin, right? Sure, I loved playing. I loved how music sounded. I love the way the violin felt, but when I Stripped Away, all the superficial features of the violin, what I really, really loved and was so drawn to, as a young child, was the emotional connection that I could form through my
Music. So that might have been with my Orchestra mates, my chamber musician friends, playing solo and performing in front of an audience and ideally, we all feel something new that we haven't felt before. I mean it's kind of an intoxicating feeling when your little to have the ability to inspire you feelings in people, right. And I was so drawn to human connection and when I realized that human connection was at the heart of what it is, that drives.
Me as a person, right? Like, what lights me up every single day is a desire to connect with others to understand, other people to understand their psychology to understand how their minds work. Then when the violin was taken away from me. Even in terms of narrative, I tell myself about my life, I could still find that same core underlying future elsewhere and I have been able to write. I found it as an academic, as a cognitive scientist, who studies the science of connection and emotion, I've seen it, I seen that connection play
In the, in the work that I did in public policy, when I was at the White House. Obviously, with my podcast, a slight change of plans. You're forming these intimate connections with people every day. And so, even though it feels in my life, like I've done such disparate things right there actually is a powerful through line that connects all of them and that is my desire to connect emotionally. And so what I would recommend to people who are listening especially it in there in the throes of change and they're feeling destabilize by that threat to
Aditi. That loss of identity is to try to figure out what their through line is. Right? Like what are the underlying features of the things that you used to do that? You absolutely loved. And you can you find the expression of that elsewhere?
I love that. And I have so many questions. The first one relates back to Childhood identities and how we often can project onto children, what they are likely to become. I see that as mostly benevolent. You know, you you observe a child?
With trucks in the sandbox. And and we say, oh, you know, they're going to become a contractor, we tend to project roles that are fairly high up the within occupation hierarchy, right? We saw like any parents, you know, you wish for the best possible life for your kids, but I can see that the Perils of doing that if then, the kid starts to think. Well, that's what I'm bound to become because it is restrictive. I also am fascinated by
By the fact that when we are adolescents and teens, there's a tendency to ask questions about identity, like, who am I? I don't know, many 40 year olds that, say, who am I at, you know, at ones core ones. Essence and we might change careers, change relationships, change geography as you know, all sorts of things, but there must be something going on in the brain, in those Adolescent, and teen years that forces this question of
You know, who am I and teenagers and notorious were trying on different uniforms, different friend, groups, different behaviors as a way to sort that out, sometimes in ways that support them in and sometimes in ways that act as pitfalls. So, I'm curious about what's known about how we develop our own identity from the inside out, as well as from the outside in.
Yeah, do it. That's really interesting. And it's also something I'm very curious about I mean, we know from Neuroscience research that there are
Are significant changes that the brain undergoes during puberty and other periods of adolescents and and the primary change that we see is a desire for Independence. And so, one reason, why we see teenagers grappling with this question of who I am is that they're actually breaking from these structures that they grew up around, right? The imposed structures, write the identity foreclosure that they might have experienced and are starting to figure out for the first time or wanting to ask the question for the first time.
Do I want to be, what do I want to do outside of the systems that I've grown up in? And I think this is one of the primary reasons why we find that during teenage years. This sort of question is asked more commonly, I think that one challenge that we can, you can face because you, you said this one word that really caught my attention, which was what's my Essence. And, you know, one of the things I studied, as a cognitive scientist is the psychology of what's called essentialism
So our underlying belief that there are essential qualities to people that are immutable and there's lots of studies with, you know, young children and adults showing that we really believe that people do have these Essences, right? And unclear what that even means from a in a metaphysical sense, I don't know what that would even mean. But I think the challenge in believing that we have Essences is that it leads us to believe that there are these truly immutable States about ourselves.
Our that we are incapable of changing and I think this can give rise to feelings of Shame, for example. So what is Shame? Shame is not the feeling. Oh, I did something bad, shame is the feeling I am bad, right? It's not that I lost at something. I feel that something, it's that, I'm a loser, I'm a failure. And so the problem when we try to figure out the essence piece is that it doesn't give you the kind of malleable way of thinking that actually, there might not be something that's so defining.
About you that you're incapable of changing as humans may be all we are collections of behaviors and thoughts, right? And there's nothing more to it than that, and I find that way of thinking a bit more freeing when it comes to who we are. Because I think it allows for I think it allows us to cultivate more of a growth mindset. I think it prevents us from engaging in these very harmful self narratives that a lot of people tend to have about themselves. I mean probably a lot of people listening to your podcast or self-critical. I'm a very self-critical person where we listen to this.
Is going to improve, you know, I'm a fan of your show because I want to be better and I want to improve. But that also is often accompanied by a lot of self berating and questioning himself, right? And so, yeah, I think I've just tried to have a slightly more capacious understanding of who I am. And also recognizing that there might not really be these essential features that are that are immutable. I don't know if you resonate with this notion of like the essence, like the desire to feel that we have
Essences. Yeah, I used the word essence without thinking.
Going to carefully about exactly what I meant. But what I what I what I trying to say, when I said Essence is, you know, as a child, I did certain things and I enjoyed some of them didn't enjoy others, and I really disliked others, a very famous neuroscientist, who's at Caltech named Marcus Meister. People literally refer to him as the great. Marcus Meister one said and I totally subscribe to the fact that neural circuits in the brain basically
Our sensory experience along the dimensions of yum yuck and meth. There's not a lot of in between, yeah, right. Because the circuits ultimately have to drive either forward movement toward more. Yeah, right. Appetitive behaviors, as in nerd, speak or aversive and leaning out. I don't want that or just kind of a neutral response, a Jung hyuk and met. Yeah. Seems to be the the trinary response and there is this
Component of childhood, I think where we are forging naturally using our senses de experiencing yum, Yuk's and Mez and hearing yum, Yuk's and Mez from our parents, that's good, that's bad, that's whatever it's neutral. But at some point I certainly have had the experience and I've observed others. I think having the experience of feeling something that's on a different dimension entirely which is this notion of delight, which is that it sort of fills your body with a sense of so much.
Yum, that it gives you energy to do so much more of it in a way that is almost on a different plane. And and I'm not trying to be, you know, spiritual or metaphysical about it. But it feels distinctly different and I don't know what it represents but I think that's that that piece that perhaps even as a scientist, I don't really need to assign a neural circuit to
so, do you think what you're describing in part is the feeling of awe. Like, when you talk about Delight, do you think part of it is, is
A feeling of
awe. Yeah. Like the first time I went to New York City as a six-year-old kid. I remember thinking and I still feel every time I'm there. I can't believe this place exists. It's like a it's like a human tropical Reef like everywhere. You look there's life. So that was that was awe and Delight. Although I saw some things this was New York in the 70s and there were some things like Time Square in the 70s. Right. If anyone seen that show that Deuces, I went like it looked like that it was especially as a young kid was kind of aversive. Yeah, so it wasn't always odd at but the Delight of for me
In learning and certain animals and certain things for you as the violin. And I want to make sure that
I had all, by the way. I mean it can be aversive, right? So odd isn't necessarily, I think, in the Western World we think of all inspiring experiences as having a positive emotional valence but they can also have a negative emotional balance. So the two criteria for a satisfying, an awe-inspiring experience and a lot of this work comes from dacher Keltner. Professor at UC Berkeley? Yeah, is one. There should be some element of perceived vastness. This is all ref. This is
Reference dependent. So it's all based on your own frame of mind, right. But there's this sense of like mystery and wonder at just how vast either. The physical apparatus is right like Times Square. It's this massive, you know, set of buildings and it kind of overwhelms your senses because of all the lights and sounds that are hitting your visual system and your auditory system. There's also conceptual vastness so we can feel all when we feel the Delight of a new scientific discovery.
Right. Or in my case, like for the first time, reading a book about how the mind works. I just remember marveling at this organ and just being completely in awe of how it works. And then the second criteria for an awe-inspiring experience without which I think might have been met as well. When you were in this, when you were in New York is what's called a need for accommodation. So it's just a fancy way of saying that we have a certain mental model of the world and typically in the presence of all, we need to assimilate this new information, with our existing model because it challenges
Is it in some way? And it makes us it actually leads us to have more open minds because we have to realize, wait a second. I just existing vision of like what the world is like and now I'm experiencing this new thing and I need to kind of make it work. I need to integrate it with my existing understanding the world and that's the mind-blowing part of it. Right. But I absolutely I mean I remember my childhood experience kind of mirroring your experience in New York was I was I was 12 years old, maybe 11 years old. I was at a Summer music camp.
It was late at night. I had my Discman which is how he listened to things back in the day were cool. I had a CD in there. It was the Beethoven Violin Concerto by on Sophie motor and I was I was like I was so young Andrew so I still don't know how to use words to describe how it is. That I felt something that was so powerful and so strands ended. But I remember listening to the first movement of this Violin Concerto and it consumed
Me. I mean I felt chills up and down my spine. My heart would race along with the melody, it felt otherworldly, right? And I think that was kind of what you're getting at before was like it's just, it's this altered state of mind. And I what I have the language I've used since to code that experiences that it was an awe inspiring experience. So I think both things happened, right? I was also, I was in, I was impressed by the vastness of the experience. It also sent me through time. And this interesting way, you know, back to like the time of
Then, right, so vastness can exist along a temporal Horizon and then the need for accommodation, which was, you know, I studied cognitive science at this point. So I remember thinking I cannot believe a collection of musical notes arranged just so can make me feel this way. And that, if you were to tweak, it just slightly just like, take the E flat and move it down the down, the street a little bit, emotional resonance, completely gone from the passage and there was just something so simple and magical about that realization. So,
Anyway, resonate with with this kind of delight and awe experience that you described. Yeah, I'm so glad you. You describe it that way, you know, this isn't a discussion about my experience, but for me, I realize now that New York was awe-inspiring prior to that. The only thing similar was discovering animal. Specialization something. I'm still fascinated by the sensory systems of animals and how they experience the world and how humans experience the world. And then ultimately it was
And I went into skateboarding and that whole landscape and then eventually into Neuroscience. Yeah, the difference between the New York experience of awe and I do think that's what it was and biology animals and eventually Neuroscience. Yeah. Is that, like, your experience with music and realizing that the movement of a note, could change something fundamentally when it came to learning about biology and Neuroscience. I felt not just aw, but a sense of delight in that
I felt there was a place for me there and what came out of what you just described really, really resonated in terms of this moving of a note, because it took something from a passive experience, I believe of, that's this incredible thing. Over there. Like New York City was all, but I didn't see myself having any kind of verb state within it, that would change it or alter it, and how it is or for me, whereas, with music for you, or I think Neuroscience, when I realized that, you
Experiments. You could actually do some sort of manipulation and through that hopefully unveil something fundamental about how the brain works. I thought there's a place for me here. Yeah. And so I think there's something about the, the experience of something. Just from a raw sensory perspective, music, or animals or Neuroscience, in the examples we're using here. But then realizing that there's a verb state of self like that. I could enact something within it. That could give me more of that. Whereas, I think when, as a young kid,
In New York City. I just didn't feel any way that I could plug into it except in a passive way because it's the difference between a kid who in this wouldn't have been me who sees a game of soccer or football or baseball or watches the Olympics. And ghosts that is amazing. And the kid that says I'm going to go do that. In fact I could do that and I could maybe do that even better or even half as well. And so the Delight I think is in the possibility of Engagement of and I'm fascinated, you know, friend of mine who's a trauma therapy.
He doesn't, he's not a neuroscientist. He always says, you know, nouns are just very slow verbs, but verbs are far more exciting because they create this anticipatory activity. Anyway,
I love before you move on from that, I love that. You said that because you're helping me realize something really important about how I saw my role as a violinist and in addition, you know, I'm never going to modify the notes on the page because obviously I'm going to be faithful to what Beethoven wrote.
This is what made you a great musician and me a fit by the way. I was a failed violinist. They pulled me.
Me out of it because the neighbors dogs, how I was in Suzuki method.
That was so
terrible. At it, that they literally made me stop playing music just to just to protect the neighborhood that's
adorable and we will talk about the science and quitting maybe later. But that was a great choice for you. I but what I'm realizing is that there was that element of defining self through the pursuit of the instrument and I saw a place for myself exactly like you do.
Where I thought, I decide how this phrase unfolds, I decide how much vibrato I use. I decide exactly what the angling of my bow is and the Cadence and the pacing and the emotion that I bring to the experience. And when you see it place for yourself and that takes an awe-inspiring experience, and then Trent and actually, there's a translation process where you become something bigger, than what you thought you could be. And actually, so interesting, you mentioned the center, because I've been chatting.
Recently with a guy named Reginald Wayne Betts and he spent nine years in prison and he's now a internationally renowned scholar. So he committed a carjacking when he was 15 years old and then went to an adult prison for nine years. And as a fifteen-year-old it as he just turned 16, by the time he got his sentence, yeah, it was totally wild. And he actually talks about the fact that, you know, there was this underground library in the prison system.
And he didn't know what, he could be in the prison. What identity he could take on when everyone seemed to be defined by what crime they have committed, right? It felt like his imagination was so limited to talk about identity paralysis, right? I mean, like you're denied all your basic freedoms in this environment, right? So you really don't even have the ability to imagine what more you could be. So, one day, he gets a book called the black poets and in the book, he
He read a poem by Etheridge night would also spent time in prison and written this incredibly stirring poem about the criminal justice system. And he goes by Dwayne. But what Dwayne shared with me, as he said, I was in, I was all inspired by what I was reading, but the most important thing that happened in reading that book and understanding the author's history is that it gave me something to be. I saw a place for myself in this world and
Hibiki wrote. I mean, he was so prolific, he wrote like a thousand poems in the year after he stumbled upon this book and he ended up winning in the MacArthur genius award. He went to Yale law school. I mean, he's just crushed it ever since, but I think he's stumbled Upon A really important point, which is all there's a fascinating science of awe and all the benefits that can confer to our well-being, but it can also serve as an entry point to helping to Define our identities in new places and I just love that. I think that's it's a wonderful way to think about it.
Yeah, when we see ourselves entering the sphere of experience that this country is evoking. I do think it's something about it, converts to this thing Delight. Although I have to acknowledge that language is insufficient to describe a lot of what we're referring to. Right. There's a that you know the even the most reductionist language of biology can't grab the higher-order emotions and complexity.
Yet. Anyway, we just don't have a language for it. I'd like to talk more about the violin, not just because I failed miserably at the violin but actually, I figured out pretty early on. I wasn't going to be a musician. I still have absolutely no ability to read music. I can memorize the lyrics very easily, but I love music and I love classical music, as well as other forms of music, but zero musical Talent. You on the other hand, got quite good at violin. It was interesting for me to learn that.
That the violin was a bit of a rebellious choice for you, giving your your family history and you and I do both, share this, fairly unusual fact that both of our fathers are theoretical physicists. So did you feel pressure to be a scientist or something else and being a musician was that initially looked at as you know, a route to Poverty or a bad choice, or where your parents a bit more cautious like, oh, okay. That's great. But maybe make that a supplement to your other studies.
Pursuits.
Yeah, so I'm the youngest of four kids and kind of stereo typically my three older siblings were total Math, whizzes, they were taking the SAT when they were, when they were very young because they were so talented. But I think one antagonist to some of those cultural forces is that my mom when she had grown up in India, has felt very stifled by her environment. Like as a young woman who is very capable and very smart and she majored in physics, she was mostly, you know, kept it.
The spaces of domestic chores, occasional singing lessons but mostly her job was like, do your homework and then help with cooking, right? And cleaning and whatnot. And so when she moved to this country with my dad in the 1970s, she was actually very excited. She was 21 years old by the way. So long story short, she met my dad 20 days, prior to their getting married. So it's an arranged meeting and my dad is doing his postdoc, at Harvard in physics, at the
You fellows and my mom just joins him after a winter break in the door. I mean, everyone's like, hey man how was your break? And there's like I went snowboarding and I want whatever to Tahoe and my dad, like I got married. And so this new, couple arrives and my mom was so lonely in this country. I mean, this was before, you could text your parents overseas or use a WhatsApp group. So she can only hand write letters to her family back home and her goal was, you know what, I'm going to create a little army around me in the form of children, so she
Had four kids and she was absolutely intent on exposing us to as many extracurricular activities as she could. So, I told her brothers and I have an older sister, especially her girls. She said you can do whatever you want, I'll give you the lay of the land when you're young. But when you find something that you're passionate about, I really want to give you the opportunity to explore it. So I think I really benefited from the fact that she had been denied that kind of exposure and the ability to pursue her dreams artistic, or
Wise. And so she was really hell-bent on making sure that we kids were able to. I think they were, I mean, I older three siblings played musical instruments. So like clarinet trumpet flute. I think they were surprised by my Affinity for it because when I was 6, my mom brought down my grandmother's violin from the Attic. So my grandmother had played Indian classical music. That's what she were sitting. Cross-legged on the floor and your violence facing. The ground is a very, very different style of music. That as like, a Parting Gift, my grandmother given it to my mom and said, hey, bring this with you to the US
So she opened the instrument that day and I just instantly fell in love with it and I asked very quickly for a quarter-sized violent of my own and while my parents had to nudge me to do all sorts of things, they really never had to push me to practice which felt extraordinary the time like, okay. Clearly the violin is something that Maya has intrinsic motivation for because how is it that we're not asking her to have to practice all the time. Similar to you, actually Andrew. I never
To this day, I have a really hard time reading music so I never I was a terrible sight reader. I I couldn't if you put a piece of music in front of me, I would not be able to tell you probably what it would sound like. Today I learned entirely by ear. So I started with the Suzuki method which as you know is entirely by ear. And then I had an extremely very kind also but very inexperienced teacher. I was his first student. My mom went backstage at a Symphony concert in New Haven which is where I grew up and just a
Ask the concertmaster, like, hey, will you teach my daughter? And he's like, sure, never taught anyone before, but I'll give this a go. And so, we just made things up along the way. I mean, he would play stuff and I would mimic it. And I would let my emotions and my, you know, whatever innate musicality guide me. And eventually, I mean, I think what that did actually is really interesting from a skill building perspective, my technique absolutely suffered in the long-term from not having a more structured approach, but I was able to fall in love with this endeavor.
Much more quickly than other kids who had drill sergeants that were forcing them to, like practice their scales every day and practice a to, I mean that stuff is so boring, right? And when you're a little kid, you just want to bang your head against the wall when you're put up against that, when there's so much so many barriers to actually enjoying the fun parts that you're actually playing the pieces. So the one kind of fun aside about my musical journey is I got to jump straight to the fun stuff and I think that help me cultivate a much more natural love of the instrument
as many of you know, I've been
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So packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3. K to the intrinsic motivation. Part is Sookie. I've talked to a few times before on the podcast about this. I think, now, famous study that was done at being Nursery School at Stanford, where they observed, what kids did during free time and then they rewarded them, or didn't reward them and then they later, remove the rewards and the essential takeaway is that receiving rewards for something that a child was initially intrinsically motivated to do undermine some of that intrinsic motivation. So I have to wonder whether
Not the fact that your parents neither encourage nor discourage your violin, playing might have allowed you to fully Express and lean into your intrinsic motivation as opposed to, for instance, in my case there is we are distantly related, not closely related. But there is a great violinist by the name of branislav huberman, who has a street named after him in Israel, there's a famous picture of him and Einstein playing violin together, and I was told about that early on and when I failed to play well, after a
A couple of practices. I was convinced that there was no way I was going to live up to it and I
quit it's a high bar. That's a high bar. It's a high bar have any such role models. That is trying to do you like my family, it turns out I mean
but exactly. And so I think that there's actually more opportunity in kids leaning into or in adults probably leaning into the sensory experience of what they're doing and not putting that up against some Benchmark and I worry about that today. So much with social media and with video games where
A video game or on social media, you can see something being done at the very highest level Often by someone quite young or early in their career, to the point where it can be a little bit overwhelming. And I think it then we start measuring ourselves against, you know, metrics that are not about the experience that said, your parents, whatever they did. It worked out well enough, that you became very proficient, right? You succeeded in getting into Juilliard, which is at least from my understanding is that the most competitive
Music Preparatory. Is that how you refer to it? That one can possibly go to. And so at that point, had your identity merged with the behavior and we're you still enjoying yourself up until the point where you had this injury that will also talk
about. Yeah, I was still enjoying myself around the time when I auditioned for Juilliard in particular because of exactly what you said, which was everything was kind of beating my expectations and my parents expectations.
So this point, right? Which is that we didn't really have any and so it all just felt like icing on the cake. Wow, our kids found something that they really love. This is great, right? It can sometimes take you years decades, to figure out what it is that you love what you're passionate about. And I think we go through this renewal process often in our lives. Right. I've had to have moments in life where I'm like, what do I like again? What do I love again? It's not also a one-time experience, but there was, It was kind of there's a thrilling aspect of my musical life. When I was young, which is again, everything kind of felt was like bonus.
And so, once one story love sharing is about how I even got into Julliard in the first place, my parents, you know, so my dad's a theoretical physicist physicist, has he mentioned my mom helps immigrants get green cards to setting this country neither of them had exposure to the classical music sphere. Right? So, they're like the opposite of tiger parents, like, even if they wanted to be tiger parents. They wouldn't know how to detect parents in this domain because they lack the connections in like, the wherewithal to figure out what it would mean to go.
Pro and to access the best teachers or whatever. So my mom who is a very Fearless person by Nature. She knew that at some point my passion for the violin was surpassing her ability to like connect me with the right resources. And so one weekend, we were in New York on spiring, New York and I had my violin with me because I had another audition. And we were just walking by Juilliard with building. And my mom was just eager for me to see it from the outside because
it's just really cool as a kid, right? It's like all your musical. Idols went to this place. I just wanted to see it and, like, imagine what it would have been like for Pearl. Many go in and out, and Midori to go in and out as Yo-Yo. Ma right. Like is so exciting, and as we're passing the entrance, my mom looks at me and says, hey, why don't we just go in? I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, let's just go and let the, what's the worst thing that can happen. And I'm like, security guards and like a lot of other Terrible Things Mom, right? But I had a youthful enthusiasm.
The azzam that like propelled me into the building that day, she strikes up a conversation with a fellow student and her mom finds out that she's studying with like a top teacher at Juilliard asked, if we can get an introduction within an hour, I'm auditioning for this teacher on the spot, right? No idea that this was going to happen while. Yeah, he tells me, he has one of referred to, as a like muted enthusiasm. About my playing doesn't think I'm great. But see something like he told me later like my personality.
Ality my enthusiasm. So I got the personality card coming out of that, music audition great. And what he did is he said, look, I'm with you, I don't think that you're ready, you would not get into Juilliard if you audition today. However, I take residents at a Summer music program in Colorado. If you come there for five weeks, we can do an intense boot camp where I try to skill you up and get you to learn. Like your first scale and your first Etude, which you will need to pass the Juilliard audition and also
Maybe hopefully get you to like read music a little bit better than you can right now and I went to that summer camp and I worked my butt off. I mean you're also in this incredibly intensive environment where everyone your age is there and they're all practicing like their age equivalent, right? And so I felt very inspired by that and I ended up getting into Juilliard in the fall and it was such a wonderful reminder that, you know, when opportunities are not served on a silver platter for you, you just have to have
This kind of imaginative courage and what my mom had that day right to figure out a path from point. A to point B. She really just like created a plate for me and said like okay like you're prepared for this thing, we're going to get you in front of this teacher and that's a lesson. I use time and time again. When I felt like there was something cool I could be doing the opportunity did not exist. So for example when I was in the White House the the job that I wanted which was to be a practitioner of Behavioral Science did not exist and so I sent
Emails and I ditched them on the idea of creating a new position for a Behavioral Science advisor. And then I said, hey, by the way, if you create this position, could you like also consider hiring me to play that job? Even though I'd had no public policy experience and I've been an academic for the entirety of my adult life. And, you know, they said yes. And so it's just, it was such an energizing lesson to learn as a young kid, which is like you can do the cold call. Oftentimes, there's few consequences you'll just get rejected.
That's truly the worst thing that's gonna happen, but it's one thing to be told that it's another thing to have lived, the experience out in a see how amazing the aftermath can be and that's the that's what I got to experience those young kids. So
amazing. And so, let's all Express them. Thanks to your mom for for barging in the door and to you because you also had the agency to to do the audition on the spot. I think a lot of kids and adults would have thought, you know, I'm not ready, I'm not going to do this but it takes a certain
Gumption to just do it, right? And, and also to integrate the feedback and then I'm curious about this Camp. Yeah, I went to a few camps of different types, crashed a few camps. That's a different story. Turns out, if you show up, you know, you can get by for a few days before they realize, you're not one of the main. Oh yeah, no, I there's a whole other set of stories there, but I'm curious, you know, you're among very driven, maybe even obsessive kids. Yeah, were they
A nice to one another. Do you recall the kid? That was the best time recently. There He Go. Is this incredible? Oh my God. We remember these names
Prodigy, I bristle when people say like, oh my like Maya was a young violin Prodigy. I'm like no I wasn't and there's no false humility in my saying that I just actually saw what prodigies were like and I was not one of them. I mean, truly just talk about all inspiring. I'm like, how is it that music comes. So,
Sleet to Rachel. I feel like she, I feel like she was born with a violin in her hands. I mean that's how it felt whenever I watched her play and it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you're driving. You're driving inspiration from the incredible Talent. You see around you, on the other hand, you feel demoralized so often because you're running up against whatever limitations exist when it comes to your natural talent and your work ethic, like at the end of the day, I was never the hardest-working.
Violinist my mom, insisted that we were well-rounded kids. I played soccer all through Elementary School. I audition for the school play Really Rosie. I did Art Classes. Like it was just really important to, you know, both my parents. I think that we had just like relatively normal lives and I was studying alongside kids who had literally left half their families behind in their home country and moved with one parent to a studio apartment in Manhattan.
And or in Colorado for this camp and we're devoting their entire lives to this Pursuit. And so I felt like I was I was a super envious kid. Like I was always looking around being like I suck and they're great, right? We talked about like having a self-critical
personality. I think a lot of, I think a lot of kids feel that way. We're I think at that age and this sometimes, extends into adulthood, we have this tendency to try and find benchmarks of where we are. Yeah, you know.
And sometimes that's about, you know, turns into a hierarchical thing, sometimes very lateralized. But trying to figure out where you are in the landscape of things is just seems like it's fundamental to the teenage
experience, you know, Universe shrinks to right? So like you're no longer getting access to, what the average kid violinist sounds like, I mean, you're in the elite of the elite. And so, it's so intimidating. And I often felt I felt like what happened is, especially when I became a teenager. So, two things happen. When I became a teenager. The first is
At my violin like just started to speed for it. So it's a Pearlman. Inviting me to be his private violin student. You know, consider the best violinist in the world. It was an incredible experience. I felt so overwhelmed. Even by the opportunity, I'd also stumbled upon MTV and was like, do I even want to do classical music? Like Britney Spears is doing much cooler things. So that was my version of like teenage rebellion was coming home from school and what I should have been practicing watching MTV. But the other thing that happened is I went through
The natural teenage process which is I became very self-conscious, I became more insecure. I was trying to figure out who I was, who I am, and I think that was the period of my life. My high school year is when I was the least happy as a violinist. So I described to you earlier that, incredibly all inspiring experience of listening to the Beethoven Violin Concerto and it feeling otherworldly and feeling like I could see a world beyond my own.
Personal wants and needs and desires, right? It really made me feel small against the backdrop of This Magnificent world. And I liked that feeling of smallness. And when I was in my teenage years, you know, we're all in this highly narcissistic State of Mind, were like consumed with ourselves and how we feel. And I just, I just felt like I gave some of my worst performances when I was a teenager and I often found to your point about, you know, these pressure cooker, environments, my best performance was, were actually just to the
Public my worst performances were when I was in my little Studio having to play for my peers, like that's just sap all the joy out for me because I was yeah, just like really tough on myself and I lost that was a period of time where I lost touch with what it is that I loved about music and of course there's an ebb and flow. I had magical experiences playing the violin when I was a high schooler but I just think if you were to do like the average of Joy like pre 12 and then post 12, the average door was much.
Fire before I became a teenager.
Yeah, there's there's so many things to extrapolate from that. I really feel that when we get into a mode of trying to hit Milestones, that are extrinsic that, it really can undermine our love of, yeah, of what we're doing. But if we keep going and we can reframe what those external rewards are. And in part by just realizing that, they're so transient compared to the Delight that we can experience. What I mean is that I don't think of
Is something that that Wells up in us and then and then dissipates I think of it as something that changes, our nervous system in a way that gives us access to new abilities. I really do. I mean, being a faculty member at Stanford at, you know, you look to your left, you look to your right and it's like I literally in the building. I'm in, I've got Nobel Prize. Winner below me like the People by MacArthur Award winners all over the place. Like everywhere you turn and these people do other things too. So like, you know, oh no also D1 athletes and they've got five kids and all their kids seem to be doing great, like, who are these people? And it becomes very important.
In that environment to just shrink your spheres. Like what's, you know, one foot in front of you and just keep going and not pay attention. But it's hard to do not by way of comparison and because I actually get excited about being immersed in a group of where everyone's doing. Well, I do think being among all these other incredibly talented and driven, although you carefully said and importantly said, rather that you did not see yourself as talented. It's very clear that you have a ton of grit and and hard work. Clearly went into it. I think
That word talent can be a little bit misleading. So we want to underscore the fact that you've worked incredibly hard, but I think that it's a tough thing, you know, it's hard for us to develop much in isolation and it's also hard for us to stay connected to the source. Yes. Sort where, exactly? And that's a word that I stole from a former guest on this podcast and a good friend of mine, who's the great Rick Rubin? One of the most successful music. Yeah, do Sir. Rock and Roll music. What is involved? He talks about the source. You know? So
There are so many different Trails we could go down here. Just one thing briefly is I again completely miserable at music, but I once saw Itzhak Perlman in the, in the airport with his family, I was with my father who's a huge classical music fan and we watched him and he said, watch and he turns out he was getting onto our plane. He sat in first class next to his. I presume Stradivarius violin his violin got a first-class seat. He got a first-class seat and his family sat across.
From him and my dad said his violin is so important that it gets its own First Class C, I couldn't believe it. So in any way, in any event,
I think just one thing to your point when reflection, I've had it. And this kind of goes back to this question of identity, right? Which is when you are in these very competitive environments and again, I'm sure a lot of people listening are in very competitive environments. You feel that so much can be taken away from you just in terms of mental, well-being, because you're always looking at the
Through a comparative lens, right? Your benchmarking yourself. As you said, like, there's Benchmark and where do I fall on the Continuum of, you know, mediocre to grade? I don't know. And yesterday, I did it have a terrible performance. So that's going to set me back etc, etc. I have found that when I've anchored, when I re anchor myself to what, you know what, Rick Rubin referred to as the source and identify the characteristics of music or other Pursuits, that really energizes.
To me. It feels like I'm actually insulated from a lot of the external noise and I bring a lot more clarity and focus to the work that I do every day. So, there's two things that I think Define me as a person at least right now, right. I allow for that malleability. One is that I'm a deeply curious person. And the second is that I really relish getting better at things, I love seeing progress internally and
In my violin life. No one could take those two things away from me and my current Life as a cognitive scientist as a podcaster. Like, you just can't take those from me, like no one can take those that Joy from me and it feels protective in a really important way, which is, for example, I mean, I course. I mean just like you, I mean, I see the labor of love that you put into the Hebrew and Lab podcast. It's extraordinary. I put I put so much time and energy and thoughtfulness, and love into making a slight.
Two plans, but at the end of the day when you put the episode out into the world like you just don't get to control what the reaction is. Right? Your favorite episode might not be everyone else's favorite episode and that's just something you have to deal with, right? But what I found is that if I really relish the process of making the episode, right? It fed that Curiosity and I got better as an interviewer. I got better as a thinker. I got more clarity on a topic that I was curious about. I mean, it just, it gives me a foundation that feels really sturdy.
You know what I mean? It's just yeah.
Well those things are intrinsic to you and they are I guess. Now we're using nomenclature but they're not what we would call domain-specific. Like the Curiosity that the desire for Progress through effort and through Focus, those are music, they're not music irrelevant, but their music independent, and and that actually brings me to a very important component of your work and your life Arc, which is
This notion of recreating and re-finding identity in new Endeavors. So if I understand correctly and hopefully you'll embellish on this, you had the unfortunate perhaps unfortunate. Alright experience of playing the violin and then injuring your finger, very badly to the point where it was at least for your music, career career ending. Absolutely. And that happened when you were how old
I was 15.
So given how much of your identity and and energy was put into violin that must have been devastating and yet you obviously don't say recreated yourself because I like the idea that this Essence within you has many opportunities and forms. And I like it as an example. For everybody, having some essence of many things that could give them delight. And that it's something about the feelings associated with a given choice.
Occupation or hobby, or behavior, or perhaps relationship right relationships and sometimes by decision, death or otherwise, you know, and people are devastated, their identities are completely at least in their minds obliterated, and then people have this amazing ability to recreate themselves and new circumstances. So, if you could take us back to the time when you're 15, you have this injury. What was your initial mindset in the days and weeks after that? And then if you would could you link that up to some of
The what I see is incredibly important work that you've done helping people understand not just who they are, but how to identify the components of who they are. That are that are truly indomitable that. That just cannot go away. Yeah. Like your drive for curiosity and hard work and human connection. Yep. Yeah. In the, in the days and weeks and months and year after I felt terrible, it was awful because
I don't I think in my case also you just when you're a kid who's really like bubbly and energetic, you just kind of move forward. And you don't always think about how identity defining the thing you're doing is you just do it. And so it was really interesting, I think in losing the violin that's actually when it became. So Salient to me how much, the instrument had meant to me, and, and had to find who I was. And so, I felt a dampening of some of my more
Ganic traits. Like, I was less curious for a long time
today, I'm going to interrupt you on purpose, I apologize, but at the same time, I've not apologize because there was something that you said in a prior discussion, they just keeps ringing in my mind, which is that your body and your nervous system actually grew up around the violin like that. To me was just, I will never forget that statement. I want to also thank you for it because that to me is perhaps the most profound way to describe an experience of
Did he is that your your nervous system and your body isn't growing up with something or alongside it? But that much like a relationship of human kind human humankind that your body is actually developing around this object.
It absolutely developed around the ergonomics of playing the violin. So to this day, my right shoulder is slightly elevated to my lap relative to my left because of all the hours I spent doing this. It makes strength training really annoying because
cuz I always have the slight imbalance, and I have a light scoliosis in my spine, as well. Also from this posture and yeah, it feels intimate in a way, it's like, wow, the shape of my body, right? Like my architecture was defined by this instrument and so it's left an undue not, it's like a, it's leftist indelible, you know, it has its love this, like, imprint on me that will never go away and
I think that a lot of us feel this this disorientation, right? So it's might not be that you lost the ability to do something, you love, it could be that you lost someone that you love, right? It could be that you you lost your mojo or whatever, right? I mean, there's so many types of loss, and so many kinds of grief, we all experience as human beings and I think in all those cases, again, it really feels like the rug has been pulled out from under you because this thing that
Gave you so much meeting and so much purpose and so much energy, and life no longer exists. And so I think for for a while, yeah, I felt kind of like lost at sea and I assumed I'll never find anything that I'm as passionate about and I think what my dad did for me at that time. So you know, theoretical physicist so he's an academic and he said, I think you should just read a lot just like read a bunch of stuff and I was like, okay I mean I'm supposed to be in China.
Summer touring with my classmates. I am at home in Connecticut with my parents perusing, their bookshelves so like slightly less cool, summer situation but you know a lot of time on my hands because I wasn't I wasn't in Shanghai. So I started, you know, perusing the bookshelf and then I came across this pop science book called The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker and that was a turning point for me. I mean I was I was headed to college maybe later that year. I opened up
This book and it detailed.
Our marvelous ability to comprehend and produce language and up until this point in my life, I had completely taken language abilities for granted. Just like something that I did and they're just like kind of learned it along the way and when Pinker pulled the curtain back and revealed how sophisticated? And complex the cognitive Machinery is. That's operating the power behind the scenes that gives rise to language. My mind was truly blown. I was like, wow, I
I never thought about. It's not like we with three-year-olds, not like we sit down with them or like this is a gerund. This is a past part of whatever. There's no they just learned because they have these kind of light switches in their brain that are, you know, activated on and off, depending on what language they're learning. And it was so fascinating to learn about language development about neurolinguistics about syntax and semantics. And and so I just remember thinking language is fascinating, cognition is fascinating and I'm also now
I'm wondering about all these other systems that are in place, right? So this is what's involved in language. What's involved in, you know, the complex math equations are dads, do right? Like what's involved in what's the mental processing? Behind a new discovery or an Insider and aha moment or falling in love or falling out of love. I mean, it just, it just lit up my imagination and very similar to you and your I love that we had this connection. You said, when you learned about like neurobiology and Neuroscience, you saw that there was a
This for yourself in there. And I remember reading this book and because it was a pop science book and I love Pop science books because sometimes even if they don't fully do justice to the science, they can take someone who's never had any exposure to the subject matter, and it's, it's thrilling to learn about the thing, right? I would never have gotten the same experience that I opened up an introduction to cognitive science, textbook? Okay. It would not have had the same impact on me. So, like, shout out to pop signs clothes,
everywhere. Thank you, for saying that. And you know, and here I'll just
Thank you, because I think that many of my colleagues in academic science at Stanford and elsewhere feel that way. But I think many don't, they think of it as quote, dumbing down of things, but I'll tell you rarely if ever does somebody just wander into a university classroom and hear a lecture on accident. I mean, maybe if your mom was at the, at the helm, they all would so moms everywhere barge right in. But but I think it's, I actually I'll go a step further and I'll do this. So
You don't have to and that these are not your words, these are mine. I think that there's actually a pretty intense arrogance to the idea within the established scientific community that pop science books. While they might not be exhaustive, provided their accurate and they're making an attempt to educate and draw people in from all sectors. Yeah, Amen. To that, I just can't hear a counter argument in my head or elsewhere where that's not one of the best things that people can do. So regardless,
All of, you know, people's motivations for picking them up in the first place. I mean, they brought a lot of people into the Curiosity and Delight that is science or music. Or you know, I think that we the more positive benevolent. You know, safe sensory experiences that we can expose young people to the greater probability that we're going to flush out those professions with the greatest number of diverse Minds. We're gonna have the best ideas. I mean, it's really
I think that there's a ton of foresight in what in what you're describing that picking up a book is now what you're also now a PhD and I mean in cognitive science and you did you press targets damn from your scientist presumably because you went into the bookshelf and picked up
that book hundred percent and I think it was it was also a role model for me because my dad despite being in a very very technical field. Spent a large part of his career actually working on the translation of
complex subjects and trying to convey them to General audiences. And I loved witnessing this because it's like it. You can figure out a way to communicate about theoretical physicist physics, to a general audience, I mean, wow, that's a masterful
Pursuit right Fineman, Richard finds.
Yeah, Richard feinman, exactly.
No one really knows what Feynman did for his Nobel Prize work except physicist, you know that most people yas'm what was fineman's Nobel for and they're like, I don't know, I don't know. He said something about birds and tax know me and how it's less interesting.
You know, quantum mechanics.
Yeah and I and one of the reasons that I love huberman lab and I just love the work you do is that you are taking Concepts. That might have been inaccessible to the average person and you're making science accessible and I feel so much gratitude to every scientist out there. Every researcher out there who thinks that it's worth their time to be a practitioner of their work. Because ultimately I mean think about how many lives you're changing through the show by trying to break down some
of these more complicated things into into Concepts that people can understand and relate to, and actually act on. And it also reminds me, you know, when part of my job when I was in, when I was in the Obama Administration was translating insights from Behavioral Science from cognitive science into interventions that my government agency colleagues could Implement in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense Department of Education and that same translation process was part of that effort to and I
I think it's really really hard to do. Well I respect it so much. I respect pop science writers who do a good job so much and it. Yeah I think it's a wonderful service. They don't have to spend their time writing these books, they could just publish more research papers that, which is the currency that academic institutions care about. And so I see it as just like a public good. What they're doing?
Yeah, I do too and right back at you because you're doing it as well and so we were all better off for it. So thank you. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our
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Again that's inside tracker.com huberman to get 20% off, so I want to go back to this injury to Summer at home, to discovery of something new. Was it at that point that you realize ah, the feeling of excitement that I'm getting from learning about neurolinguistics and related topics is somehow similar to the excitement that I was feeling about the violin, or maybe even superseded that excitement. I mean,
Point were you able to make the pivot with confidence that you know this this is the new trajectory. Yeah. And an important component of that that I'd like to understand is you also had to cut ties with the past. Something that's very hard to do. I mean, I grew up with a number of kids who became very successful teen athletes really. And some of them once they cease to keep up or that an injury or something, their identity, stay
they'd attached to the Past in a way that did not allow them to move forward. Fortunately, many of them did find new identities in business or in other endeavors some became quite successful. But I've seen very often that when people achieve early success and then they hit a cliff that it's very hard for them to part with that, former identity. There's one of the Perils of early success. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't say that. It's
Seated. The excitement that I had with the violin, I would say the quality, the excitement felt very different and that's actually important to convey because I think when someone loses the ability to have a passion, they're seeking exactly the same sensory experience exactly the same high that they experience the first time around. And I think that's a really high bar and sometimes it's more of an apples and oranges type situations. So with the violin, there was a really deep sensory aspect of the experience. I mean, I felt
That thing's, right? You're playing and then you're feeling things emotionally and it all felt super visceral and that was where the passion emerged from. It was just this like very visceral feeling of like this is so beautiful and awesome and I love it with the cognitive science stuff. My, my intellectual brain was delighted and it's just like a different expression of passion, right? I I think the big pressure test was not if I had held myself to the bar of, do I love this as much as the violin? There's no way.
That I would have been confident enough to pursue anything at that point. So instead, I really think the question I asked myself at that time which was a service to me and my more compromise Psychology was. Am I curious enough about this thing? To ask more questions about it. Do I want to learn more and I found naturally 3 days later. I went to the library and I got another book on the cognitive science of language, and then I got
A book on the science of decision-making. So I was there was curiosity and honestly that was all I needed. That was The Little Seedling that I needed to see if it could go somewhere more. I took that as a very strong signal like I care to learn more about this and I don't care to learn about everything, right? And I remember perusing, the course book of my undergrad institution and they had a cognitive science major, which was awesome because not all schools had one at the time. It was very new me.
Jurors interdisciplinary, you approach questions of the Mind from multiple perspectives. So from the perspective of Neuroscience Linguistics philosophy psychology, computer science and anthropology, right? So you're just like a bunch of different disciplines and but that was when I thought, oh, I can at least see if I can get into this major. I remember it was like a selected major selective and so I freaked out of course and had super imposter syndrome is like I'm not going to get in to the program but thankfully, I got
In and I think that's, yeah, that's where I was able to connect like this Little Seedling of curiosity to do the actual pursuit of the thing, right? And that's a really important translation because there can often be a mismatch. You're really passionate about something, but you actually hate the process, right? But you hate, the actual work that's involved in, getting better at it. And I was lucky in my undergrad, because I fought my way, my mom's style barging into classes that like really would only
That's, you know, seniors are Juniors. And I was like, I have a freshly freshman but like, except me and I was able to run experiments on adults and I was actually able to see what it would be like to be a researcher to ask novel questions and to get the Delight that you feel, right? When you're in a lab and you're actually testing out new hypotheses. And so, it was really important that I saw that. I Not only was excited, but that I could actually enjoy parts of the process of getting better.
I love your
ocean of curiosity because it makes me think that in some way, it has something to do with a deep motivation and desire to figure out what's next, or what's around the corner, without an emotional attachment to the outcome. The curiosity is really just trying to figure out what's there, as opposed to hoping that something specific is there, and sometimes even the surprises are more exciting than our predictions. I think the quote was initially from Dorothy Parker, I think this is debated by think it was
The cure for boredom is curiosity, there is no cure for curiosity. Oh, that's
awesome. I hadn't heard that.
Yeah, I believe it was Dorothy Parker sometimes misattributed to Agatha. Christie wedding was Dorothy, Parker. And what I love about it is that there's something about curiosity that when it's genuine itself amplifying, it's an upward spiral because there is no end point, right? I mean, that's one of the, the, the things that you learn early in Sciences, you know, you
Learn you test hypotheses, you get answers and you get more questions and inform hypotheses and you do that until you die. But exactly. And that can be a little bit dark. But when you think about it as a journey, that it's just so much fun along the way if you're just really interested in knowing what the answers are without getting too attached to the answers, it just feels like it. Just even as I'm describing a now. It's like they just can just fill fill you up and it provides more energy for the next round. And the next round. And that really came through in your description of
Besides, I also find it interesting that you couldn't read sheet music at least not very well. You were so deeply immersed in an Endeavor violin playing, that is not of verbal language. And then you went into a field that's about in or initially your you were sparked an interest in a field through an understanding of verbal language. And earlier, you said that the thing that Bridges the violin and this, what came next as a passion and pursued?
Was this desire for human connection. At what point did you realize that? And and here I just, I do want to emphasize that what we're talking about your story. I hope I can only imagine that people are starting to think about, you know, what are the the intrinsic points of motivation for what they're doing and what they've done, you know, asking the sorts of questions that I hope everyone is asking like, you know what, what is it really that motivates me to love this and to see a place for myself in that.
Because those are ultimately, I think the questions that that everyone should and can
ask. Yeah. I it took me a really long time. It's actually only been in the last few years that I've discovered this, I discovered this as a result of, creating a slight change of plans. So I might desire to create the show came from a very personal place, which is that I'm terrified of change. So, even though I've had these formative experiences with change, I'm a creature of habit.
I'm willing to change my habits for example, I now take caffeine 90 minutes after I get up very well in today. Okay, I'm good, I'm good disciple.
Well, there should, I like to think that I like to think that people afford themselves, some flexibility, if you got to run to the airport. 1969 your the occasional you know you know within 30 minutes if you have to but nobody's perfect nor should
respond students. I'm really not think they have this but I'm a creature of habit and I there's a couple reasons why we as
Is are scared of change, and I think one of them which is incredibly, relatable, is that change is filled with a lot of uncertainty. And we hate uncertainty. We will go to irrational, lengths to avoid uncertainty. So, one of my favorite studies coming out of cognitive Sciences, is one involving electric shocks. And what they found is, that people are far more stressed, when they're told they have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock, then when they're told, they have a 100
Percent chance of getting an electric shock so we would rather be sure certain that a bad thing is going to happen. Then to have to deal with any feelings of uncertainty and ambiguity at that
result. I love that you brought up that result. It still is, but we'll during to me because if you think about it, 100% trial to trial shock, you'd means you just you have to take on the okay. Bring it just just bring it on kind of mentality but if you did that for
Trial and then half of the trials. You don't get shocked. You'd get the the we know there's a dopamine release from the lack of punishment so the strategy ideal strategy is the same and yet somehow people are averse to the
uncertainty. Yeah. We just yeah we don't like uncertainty even though again the uncertainty is what drives that dopamine first, right? And and yet we bristle certainly at that at that uncertainty. And so I I definitely am like please status quo, everyone.
I would love the status quo even when the status quo has been suboptimal, Andrew, I've been fine with the status quo, so part of it came from my desire to figure out. Okay, how is it like a slight change of plans, right? Mary's science and storytelling to help us figure out strategies for better managing change. So I wanted to figure out, how are people coming to terms with uncertainty and one of the things that I realized I learned, from my guests, on my show, and also, the scientist is, there's this concept called cognitive closure, and it is the need to
I've at Clear definitive answers to things. Okay, it's basically the opposite of this open-ended curiosity that you just described which is of cognitive closure, you have a need to. You you aren't indifferent towards what the answers are. You aren't indifferent towards. What the questions are you care about everything you care about micromanaging. Every part of the Curious process from point A to point B and there's a lot of research showing that when we reduce our need for cognitive closure, right? When we come a little bit more.
Or open to the unbidden, right? Like to mystery more open to all inspiring experiences. We can experience huge boost in well-being and we can become a lot more resilient in the face of change. So that's something that I'm working on which is like, okay, maybe I can reduce my need for cognitive closure and the other thing that I am starting to appreciate is one reason that we kind of we get changed wrong and we
Fear it more than we should is that when we anticipate, what a change, will be like in the future. We tend to imagine how our present-day cells will respond to that future change, right? So it's almost like a magic mirror, it's Maya and present-day going through this mirror comes out the other side. Two years from now. She's the one who's overcoming the challenges of a diagnosis or some other life change. And what we forget is that the big changes in our lives can
change is in pretty profound ways, right? And when we recognize and we all fall prey to the solution, so it's called the end of History illusion. So this is work by Dan Gilbert. Basically what it says is we fully acknowledge that we've changed considerably in the past. So you think back to your skateboard days, right? I think back to my high school days and I think, oh, my gosh, of course, I've changed like, I would be embarrassed to listen to any interview. I gave when I was, when I was younger, right? Like, what were the thoughts? I was even thinking,
So we will see it. Absolutely. We were totally different 10 years ago, 20 years ago. But when it comes to thinking about the future and projecting into the future, we are absolutely convinced that who we are right now in this moment is the person that's here to stay and that can lead us astray when it comes to thinking about how we will respond to change. Because we forget that, there's actually a lot of wiggle room around, who we become. And to your point, I mean, I love the point you made about curiosity what that means is
We want to be curious, not just about the things we do. We want to be curious about ourselves one. Huge lesson that I've learned from the interviews that I've had on a slight change of plans is that I need to constantly be auditing myself through my change experience to figure out how I have changed. Because when we experience change, it doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? So let's say, I get a promotion or I enter into a relationship or I leave a relationship or some other again.
Narrow, slice of my life is altered. We can think of that change is happening in a vacuum, right? As being confined to just the unique area of our life that that little that change existing. But of course, we are incredibly complex creatures are a psychology is incredibly complex. We live in these remarkably complex ecosystems change in one area of our life. Will inevitably have spillover effects into all other parts of our lives in ways that are extremely hard to predict. And so you know we I think a lot of your listeners,
A familiar with the research showing. We're really bad cognitive forecasters, right? Were bad at predicting. What's going to make us? Happy? What's going to make us sad? How long were going to be sad? How long we're going to be happy? Well, one of the reasons for that is that we forget that we are a dynamic entity that might change as well. Write that are preferences might change our choice, that's my change. We might change in these really profound ways that we don't realize and I think there's an inspiring message coming out of this which is one like what we're capable of.
right now really might not be what we're capable of later and what I found in my own experience is that
You know, when it comes to our, it's interesting when it comes to our self perception because we have a first person perspective on who we are. We tend to think that we have a very comprehensive like, veridical understanding of who we are, right? Like I have a pretty good grasp of who I'm I am and what I'm capable of and what I value and and what my identity is. But the reality is that, that understanding is based on the random set of data points that I've happened to collect over the course of my lifetime based on the
An inset, it experiences and opportunities and failures, and successes that I've happen to have.
Right. And if I'm not mistaken, there's a salience to the negative experiences often for reasons that make sense according to nervous systems that want to keep us safe etcetera. But for instance, you remember the name of this child prodigy, riruka Rachel Leigh my sister still talks about I won't say their names because we know that these people are still around. Fortunately, the names of some of
Of the the girls in junior high school that were particularly popular and perhaps not be kind. You have perhaps not kind of hurt, right?
Exactly. We're having a nice to meet a super nice, but it's
okay. Yeah, there's a lot of web searching nowadays for what these people are up to now. Anyway, that not by me, this is a anyway, I have a sister, we occasionally touch him to this, she's doing great. Fortunately. So yeah, there's a, there's a salience to the negative experiences, but I think what,
Hearing that I totally agree with is that we'd like to think that we have completer at least adequate self-knowledge, but that we likely don't. And and so what are some of the ways that we can get better data on ourselves in ways that can help us is that through the application of mentorship? Is it asking people for an honest assessment of us with a, of course, their willingness to hear what they have to say.
Where, what are some of the that I love zero-cost behavioral? But what are some of the zero cost behavioral sources that people have around them in order to ask these what I think are really fundamental questions? Yeah, so there's true. There's two information asymmetries. Let's say that we're trying to solve for it, right? So two areas where we might not have full knowledge of who we are for one of two reasons. So, one is that
We have an incomplete understanding of who we are, just based on the random set of experiences and the second is that going through this big change actually Alters Us in some way. Okay? So if we're trying to solve for the, I think the second problem is actually easier to solve for in that we often. Just don't even know to look inwards during a big change to see how we've changed because we think, oh, I'll just pay attention to how I'm performing at work because that was the new variable that was thrown into my life. And we forget to evaluate other parts of our lives. Like what impact has it had on my
Listen, check. What impact has it had on my overall, well-being? Right? Am I different do I have a different set of preferences? Do I care about different things? So in the second category become, very inquisitive about who you are over a longer time frame and assume that it's not a static State when it comes to the first bucket, which is how do we develop a more complete and Rich, a richer understanding of self. I think it's actually about surrounding yourself with a diverse set of people people that you wouldn't naturally gravitate towards, I think the solves
or a bunch of social ills, which is that, again, we tend to live in our silos, right? And we're really averse to talking to people who have different points of view. But I will tell you, at times, I've learned the most about myself. I've learned the most about my weaknesses, and sometimes my strengths from talking with someone that idea mentally disagree with, and it's a really hard thing to do, it's very painful, but in terms of like edifying experiences go, it's through those conversations that I almost see. This like me reflected back on me, right? Like, wow.
Much more aware of how I'm coming across to that person because they disagree with me about something or they're not someone I would normally fraternize with and it's just bread, more self-awareness in me. And so I would encourage people to actually seek out Connections in uncomfortable spaces because that will allow you to fill in at least some of the gas. Now, some of the gaps will truly only be revealed to you because of Life Experiences, so I'm thinking in my own life. So I thought I grieved in a very particular kind of way
Then during covid, my husband and I experienced multiple pregnancy losses with our surrogate. And I found myself breathing in a way that was completely foreign to me. I don't think talking to anyone would have revealed to me that I was going to grieve In This Very in this way. Where you usually, I would reach out to people and I would want to stay connected and I became so shut off and closed off. And I didn't want to talk to anyone four days after the losses. I was so disoriented there. I learned oh actually you can respond into diverse set of ways to greet, right?
Don't have a singular experience with grief, but I might have only learned that from the actual experience of confronting it that said, I do think there's a lot of value in trying to fill in gaps in knowledge or a self-awareness through these more, you know, quotidian conversations. You have with people
love, love. Love what you said about deliberately placing oneself into environments where we receive critical feedback from people that we view as quite disparate from us at least in terms of
Our experience of them, you know, it's very, it was the great called icer off another. Incredibly accomplished neuroscientists happens to be a colleague of mine at Stanford, who is a psychiatrist. And he said, you know, we think we know how other people feel, but we really have no idea how other people feel. Unless we ask them. In fact, most of the time, we don't even really know how we feel. You know, we're not very good at gauging, our own emotions. So credit to Carl for making that statement, but with that said,
I think getting a sense of how other people see us and disagreement in particular, can be incredibly informative. I just want to say one other point on this, which is I think getting feedback from others. Almost gets a bad rap these days in society because it's like you should only care about who you are inside who you'd know yourself to be. And I'm like, dude, we are social creatures. That absolutely matters how I come off to others. I mean, I think that should be a huge, a huge part of my self-identity. Should be how I impact others.
And I I think we should be Shameless about integrating that into our understanding of self. If I feel like I'm an excellent person inside and I'm regularly wounding the people around me that matters that's relevant to how I see myself. And so I do worry sometimes at the current, the current cultural climate that we're pushing ourselves so much towards the space of like all that matters is authenticity and being yourself. First of all sometimes yourself isn't awesome. You might want to actually optimize your like change. Some things about yourself to be better. I think that's a good thing.
And then second you you it's okay to care what other people think. Usually, they're great, barometers of things that you might not be aware of, in terms of the impact you're having. So it was kind of like be a lobbyist for caring what other people think just for a
moment? Yeah, I agree. This is one of the reasons why I say at the end of every episode that I do, read all the comments on YouTube. You know, I think I was raised in a culture and academic culture where feedback on lectures. You know, student feedback was critical. I mean, it is important. I believe to be a
Filter because, you know, when in the old days will say, there was an opportunity to map the statements to the grade that the student received, you can no longer do this. So you would often see that some of the worst, you know, some of the worst feedback we
got.
Exactly. And then you look at their grade and he'd say well okay this helps explain and yet it was also important to understand where that could have represented some failings on my part. Yeah and a classroom is but one
Environment. I think the online environment is where this gets tricky because of the way that we all differ in our capacity to receive critical feedback and sometimes the harshness of one form of feedback, sends people, you know, feeling, you know, back on their heels or feeling, you know, even ego or emotionally injured in ways that they actually feel so traumatic. And I think that's part of the problem is that, we don't really have a way to
Age when we know inappropriate, when we see it, we know appropriate when we see it but all the stuff in between because it's on a Continuum really is is where it gets tricky. I certainly think integrating the possibility that somebody might be right. What is it that they say in certain forms of personal developments? Like, you know, somebody's coming at you with an argument about you, the best state of mind you could have is you might be right? Because that lets you hold your ground a bit. It still maintains the boundary but you're not saying you're right.
Right? And you're not saying you're wrong, you're sort of on your in a kind of a flat-footed stance where you could move either way, and I like that. This idea, well, they might be right. And then you can say know where your yes. But in any case, I just want to throw up both hands and and and as many votes as I can, as one individual to say, yes I totally agree more. More direct feedback and disagreement is great. Yeah, it's wonderful. And I think in science you're used to
Saying harsh things about your work, until they eventually say, okay, you can publish the paper, I grew up in the culture of skateboarding. We're like, nothing is good enough and then occasionally, something's good. And in the landscape of podcasting, I think the comment section is a great way to get feedback and that's why I continue to encourage feedback. It sounds like you do as
well. I think you know I tried to just every Endeavor that I pursue I try to approach with a lot of humility and I think if I were to describe, you know, at work, right? I
This team and I think if you were to ask people what my defining trait is as a leader, it's actually not like strong convictions, it's actually a willingness to update her opinions on things, her beliefs systems her strategy based on incoming information. I really, really pride myself on having a flexible mindset about stuff and not being stubborn. This is true in my marriage, right? Like my husband Jimmy. And I really pride ourselves in like, you know, saying you know what, based on what you just shared.
Changing my mind, like, you're right and I'm wrong, right? And if you can actually start to value that if you could start to see that as a virtuous quality, I think historically, right? When we think about leadership, we thought about people who having our incredibly Resolute in their convictions, but that doesn't allow the space to again, Bayesian update, you know, update your mindset. When you get new information, or you realize that you are in some way in terms of the logic that you used or what have you. And I've been extremely
Intentional in every sphere that I worked in to have this very open mind and to be very open to critical feedback it does not mean that I take every piece of feedback, okay. Obviously I have some criteria used to decide whether it's meaningful feedback or it's not meaningful feedback, right? But the locus of my pride is not in have it being right or having the strong conviction. It is actually in my willingness to have a more Dynamic state
Of mine regarding lots of issues. Maybe, that's maybe that's just what it means to be a scientist, right? Look, you have to be willing to update in the face of new information
nodding for those are listening. I'm just nodding and thinking. Yes, yes, and more, yes, because I think that we all need more of that as individuals, and if we can't get it from our work, setting or group setting, sometimes asking a friend can be extremely useful. I have a friend. He happens to be a professor to University back East. I won't embarrass him by
by disclosing where he's at, but I recall as a junior faculty member because he knows me, well, he's a few years behind me in our career trajectories, but asking him, for an honest assessment, I asked for the most brutally honest, assessment me that he could give and some of its tongue. Some of its tongue, he was a relating, some ways, in which I show up as a friend and I'm super present than I have. This tendency, I'm pretty introverted, I'll disappear for long periods of time in college. They call be dark because I show up at parties, I be there and then I would disappear for like two weeks and just be in my books. Say hi to
We'll just keep going, you know, sort of in and out of connection. I've worked hard to change that over the years, I think I have. But who knows, in any event, a friend who knows us well that you insist on. Don't give me any compliments, you know. Just give me the harsh stuff that can be very
useful and that reminds me of some research by Ethan cross. So he looks at how we can tame our mental chatter and if you don't have the friend available to you, there is a
Really easy distancing technique that you can use when you're in the throes of a problem, or you are trying to actively reframe something, or maybe see where your blind spots are and that's by thinking about your problem, from a third-person perspective, versus a first-person perspective. So you play the role of someone who's giving advice to a friend in your head, but that friend is actually you, and it actually promotes some degree of objectivity and like, emotional distance from that again, that that fuzzy hazy said a few
Things that you have around the emotion, right? You're trying to like, get rid of that piece so that you can bring a slightly more sober recommendation that situation so that can be really helpful. And then the other thing to do is I think when we are, when we're facing challenges, when we're going through a hard time, we do have an instinct to want to vent, right? And again, in this era of vulnerability and whatnot, we're told, I guess share everything that's on your mind. It can actually be counterproductive to vent. And the reason for that is that when you're venting about a hard situation,
That you're going through or something that you're frustrated about with yourself. Typically, the person you've invited into the conversation there, a nice empathetic person, they want to make you feel better. And so what do they do? They offer emotional bomb in the situation. They're like, oh my God, that does sound terrible. You were so wronged. I'm so sorry. You went through that instead of playing the role of what you think, calls like a cognitive advisor, which is actively trying to challenge The Narrative, you're telling about your situation actively trying to get
To question, whether the way you're portraying the situation is accurate and actually trying to get you to reframe aspects of the situation. And so, when we think about venting, when it comes to again, filling in those blind spots about ourselves, you might want to tell your friend at the outset like your you even said lay off the, the nice stuff. I just want to hear the hard stuff you want. You want to tell your friend of the beginning. Look, I'm having this challenge with my colleague at work. For this guy at the gym is giving me a really tough time. I don't know what's going on. I'm going to have. Here's the
Here's the situation rather than trying to make me feel better about the situation. I want you to actively find holes, poked holes, and the way that I'm thinking about this thing so that I can try and find some reframing strategies to see the situation from a different vantage point. So these are all called distancing techniques, right? Third person versus first person and actually there's some really interesting Neuroscience research showing that when we view our problems in ourselves from a third-person perspective, neural activity in areas associated with
Hostility and aggression, actually decrease. And so that can be really helpful when it comes to resolving, interpersonal conflict or trying to see where you might have been wrong,
I love these examples because especially the one, where one does it on their own. They truly doesn't require
anything, except it was introverted. Andrew, do this. You don't even have to go to the party and then ghost
everyone. Yeah, well, I don't, yeah, back then, it would have been, there were no cell phones but they're smart phones rather. But it, yeah, it was a bit of ghosting. I was just my, I can reset with small numbers.
As of people that I'm close to. But, you know, I found at that time of need to go into an isolated space to do what I need to do to reset myself. And but I realize there are certain forms of communication. There are still required like I'm alive, you know, I still get this, I still got this from my mother, everyone swamps like, you know, if you don't reach out and not only do I not know what's happening with you, but I also don't know if you're okay. And I'm think I'm a grown, man. Of course, I want fun. And I, and then I, of course, use the worst possible response that any sun or
Could give, which is listen, if something happened to me like someone like, the police would contact you or the hospital ganja which is not reassuring. So kids everywhere, call your parents mother. Andrew, I know, I know collar of it Morgan on still working on it. It is a work in progress, venting. So glad that you brought this up, you know, I think that there are these buzzwords now, you know, authenticity. You know, I do think that there are certain forms of
Unification that, that can be injurious to people. And yet, I think having some internal buffers to that all that incoming stuff. I mean, it is important. I mean, you can't be online and I think everyone is pretty much online these days without having some policies for oneself and how you're going to deal with this stuff. How am I going to be a selective filter? I think knowing the ends of the Continuum like you know this is clearly benevolent kind discourse. This is
Clearly bad. I'm gonna block this or get rid of it but then within that middle range, having some rules and policies for how to filter it, either. By time of day that you look at it or getting input but considering the, you know, it might be true. It might not be true. Yeah. What people are saying
and like you said, you know, you were talking about memory and how we tend to overweight negative experiences and I did find myself like so I gave the speech and it was posted and I was looking at the comments and
and I literally like, anytime I bring coated a comment as positive, I just skipped right past it. I was, I was literally just searching for the negative stuff
as if it's as if the positive is generic and the negative is, is somehow
genuine. Yes. And I had to make it a mental. I'd make a mental note, hey, it's okay to marinate in the messages. That are saying that this really help them in some way. And they really enjoyed the thing. And that it would again for self-critical people. I think it takes an extra step to remind yourself to also read the good.
And to allow that stuff to count to.
Well, we did an episode on gratitude and one of the big surprises that came to me in researching for that episode, was that the best evidence for gratitude having positive effects on neural? Circuitry neurochemistry comes from when we receive gratitude as opposed to give gratitude, this is what's often lost in the discussion about graduate so all the more incentive to give gratitude and and to be aware of when it's coming your way and internalized it there is a small cat.
Degree of people out there. I think, hopefully small that. So bask in positive feedback that it amplifies their narcissism, but it's clear that you are not one of those people. So, 0, 0, minus 1 risk of that happening. I want to talk a little bit about goals as it relates to motivation. Because you've done, you've done a lot of important work. And, and what I consider is organization of this like,
What would otherwise be a pretty complex space? You know, what is more important to most people than being motivated and focused and excited? Hopefully on on Endeavors that they enjoy and that it's buyer to light, but tell us about what cannot just initiate. But what can sustain motivation? Because we talked about the dopamine system on this podcast many times before, but that's a pretty reductionist way to look at it. And you have a different perspective that I have really benefited from learning a bit
about
Yeah. So when it comes to goals, I mean, its first important to recognize that there's two parts of a goal. Okay? So there's the way that we Define the goal and then there's the way that we pursue the goal and I think we tend to overlook the first category, how we Define the goal? Because often times, our goals seem like they should be so obvious to us, right? I want to lose weight, I want to avoid sleeping late, so that I get a good night sleep. I want to build muscle mass, right? Like, these are things that just seem like, they should just be intuitive, right? But
What research in Behavioral Science shows is that not all gold frames are made equal. In fact, really small tweaks, to the way that we frame our goals can have an outsized impact on whether or not we're successful at reaching that goal. So, one such framing is whether you frame your goals, in terms of an approach orientation or an avoidance orientation. Let me talk about what this means. So, an approach orientation would be, I want to eat healthier foods, right? Avoidance, would be
B, I want to avoid unhealthy Foods. Okay. So in the context of say, your social life approach should be. I want to be in a relationship. I want to enter a relationship. Avoidance would be. I want to avoid feeling loneliness. Okay. I want to avoid feeling isolated.
Now, the reason why these two frames are important to consider is that they can have a different impact on our motivational States. And they can also have a different impact on the emotional response that we have to success and failure in these domains. So, what we tend to find is that when you frame something in an approach orientation way when you succeed that success is met with feelings of Pride and accomplishment, we find that
It leads to a boost in motivation, boost endurance, it first boost perseverance. Okay? When you frame something in terms of avoidance, success is met with feelings of calm and relief. So kind of like a white, the forehead like, thank goodness. I avoided that calamitous outcome or thank goodness. I avoided doing that really bad thing back to neutral. Yeah, exactly. And so it is fine to frame goals in terms of avoidance. And actually, sometimes it's just personality dependent, like some people are more driven.
By fear or they need a lot more urgency to drive them. But it is important to know that the approach orientation is on average more motivating and so you might want to think of reframing your goal in terms of approach versus avoidant. The other advantage to approach is that when you frame something is avoidant, right? I want to avoid doing X. I want to avoid doing why it's really hard to measure success, right? It's like, are you really tracking every time you're tempted by the chocolate chip cookie? And you don't actually
Eat it. That's really hard to measure, right? And we do better, when we can measure success and failure, right? It's much easier to track the number of times you approach a salad, right? You approach something that's healthy. And so anyway, so it's really interesting to see how they got these really subtle shift and we see this across this, the board and Behavioral Science can have such a big impact on behavior and on this framing thing, I'll just share one little anecdote from my time working in government. So we were trying to motivate
veterans to sign up for a employment and educational assistance program. So, this is after their years of service and this is a really important benefit that the government offers for free. Because the transition from military to civilian life can be very fraught with a lot of psychological and physical obstacles obstacles. And so, I remember the Department of Veterans Affairs. They had almost no money to fund a marketing program around this. They said Maya and team. We've got one email that we're going to send to that.
Have at it but that's all we're working with and my teammates and I ended up changing just one word in this email message. Instead of telling vets that they were eligible for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service and that one word change LED to a 9% increase in access to the benefit. And it's it's based in a psychological principle called the endowment effect forces that we value things more when we own them or in this case of earned.
Them. And so I shared this example only to say, like that is such a small change, right? But we just know that. Again, these small little tweaks in the way that we talk to ourselves a way that we frame. Our goals can have a really big impact on our behavior.
I'm fascinated by that result some people hearing it might think. Okay, nine percent is that really that great, but we're talking about a one word change and I'm
and the scale of the federal government, right? So nice
big, big organizations hard hard, too hard, too.
Argue that things change quickly in big organizations a discussion for another time but eligible versus earned. I mean again I come back to this possibility that there's something about words like learned that invoke a verb state within us that makes us more action-oriented, similar to being able to see ourselves in some landscape that can evoke Delight or all as opposed to just sing.
The landscape that evokes Delight or aw? Yeah, I'm really hung up on this because I think one of the major challenges it seems for Behavioral change. Is that? Most people do wait for the stick as opposed to feeling into the carrot so to speak. I mean, all you have to do is look at the enormous number of people who are struggling with health related issues for which there's not a lot of active debate, is that
Actually determined or etcetera and setting all that aside. It's just very clear that there a number of Behavioral things sunlight sleep, exercise Social connection nutrition among among them that there's no pill for. There's no injection for, there's absolutely no replacement for so getting people to change their behavior as hard. Yes. Telling people that they're capable sometimes helps but doesn't seem sufficient. So what what are some?
More of these verb states that people. You think can internalize that? Give them access to the real sense of possibility and get them changing their behavior.
Yeah, and behavior change is very hard. I sometimes bristle at some of the like hacks that I see online because I'm like, I don't think there's a lot of evidence that supports that this work. So you know what I'm sharing today is actually backed by really high quality research. One of my friends and mentors ayelet fishbach is it.
Out of this work at the University of Chicago, on goal, setting and motivation, a couple other things for people to consider. And by the way, I love this face because I'm obsessed with goals, right? So I love getting better at things and I'm using all of these insights in my own life. So it is truly a delight to get to share them. Okay? Cyborg
important sidebar, I would argue because you let you live this, right? You don't just research it, you
live it? Yes. It's totally me search or whatever they call it. So who sets the goal matters. So a lot of
of us work with coaches trainers, mentors bosses, that's great. It's really, really helpful for people in our lives to bring structure to our goals to push us along to motivate us. But when other people are setting our goals setting, our targets for us, it undermines a really valuable source of motivation, which is being in the driver's seat. We love steering in our lives. We love feeling agency. We love recruiting our own agency.
It comes to achieving our goals and so and and, you know, we talked about how people will go to irrational lengths to avoid feeling uncertainty. He will also go to a rational lengths to preserve their agency and control over a situation. So there's some really interesting research that's come out just in the last few years showing that humans prefer to use their judgment over an algorithm that they know performs better than their judgment but did not involve that okay and they're much more satisfied with the outcome.
Um's what it is them? That's in the driver's seat, right? And so, what this means, I think, in everyday context, is not to do away with like trainers and coaches, and whatnot, every trainer and Coach says, listening, don't hate me, okay? You're you're sticking around, but what they can do is they can build some, something of a choice set into your day-to-day programming, right? So let's say that it worked. You have a certain skill that you're trying to build, ask for a set of options to choose from own the targets more. You will see a boost in motivation.
Let's say you're working out with a trainer there, like its leg day. Okay, I'm going to own some my targets, right? Are we going to go heavy hard on deadlifts? Or gonna go hard on squats, whatever it is. And so build some agency into the experience because nothing supplants that kind of intrinsic drive and the feeling that you own the success or the failure that again, I think to your earlier point where we're really trying to do with some of these behavioral insights is capitalized on our Natural State as humans. Right? Like
What drives us and it turns out we really love being in control. Well why don't we monopolize on that when it comes to our goal Pursuit, right? So we're trying to figure out those areas of psychology that we can leverage this. Fantastic, the word agency is so key here, I think Canada explains that earlier result. The shock experiment people having agency over 100 that their response to 100% of the time. You know, at least it's giving them some sense of control and mitigating it. Whereas, when if, when it's a
I'm 50/50. Yeah for rather when it's random 50% of the trials then even though the outcome is better on the whole, it's a it's perceived somehow as a reduction in agency, there's something fundamental there for sure when I started my laboratory and it there was an additional pressure to publish papers. This is before getting tenure, I used to ask students and postdocs when the paper would be ready and then finally I stopped asking and just
Said, why don't you tell me when the deadline is yes and not a single one failed or rather. I should put it in a positive light every single time they succeeded in beating their estimate because they were in control of that endpoint. So it was at times challenging for me you know but they set a date and then if and also by the way they need to extend that data outward, we did that was their choice. They said they need more time, the rule in science that I think
As a lot of places I always like the phrase as fast as I carefully can because you don't want to rush. Absolutely but but that sense of agency I like to think translated to more joy for them. It certainly there was a lot of productivity from them and if there might be listening to this and so they can put in the comments whether or not, I'm telling the truth here, they're all most of them are professors now, so that's probably means they succeeded. Please include the question is whether or not I had anything to do with it. My advisor is always said, you know, the best thing you could do is support
support your students and postdocs and then just get out of their way. Yeah, because the really good ones are, you can't control them. You're just you're just trying to not screw things up for them. Yeah, I'll give you a lot of intrinsic motivation. They're curious about the difference between loan, Pursuits and group for suits because I know you understand a lot about groups and I want to make sure that we talked about groupthink, although that has such a negative connotation. But the way that we tend to kind of revert,
The mean when it comes to our thinking and our opinions and certainly our explanations of who's right? And who's wrong when we are in a collection of like-minded people? Yeah, this could also be, you know, phrase as what are the dangers of being among like-minded people and then will relate that back to motivation. But what are the dangers of being among like-minded
people? Yeah, I mean well in the context of goals and motivation, it can be very, very helpful to be in the context of like-minded people. And the reason for
For that is we often don't see failure up close when it comes to people pursuing their goals but if we are in the presence of people whose values we share, who have a similar commitment to doing something and we see up close that they sometimes have those days where they fail or we have the vulnerability to show when we failed that can actually increase our resolve that the goals that we're trying to achieve are actually possible. Okay. I think the danger of being in the, the like-minded spaces is around how it limits your frame of mind, right? So when it comes to the ideas that you have,
It comes to the convictions, you have around your points of view. It can be very dangerous to only be in the in the Echo chamber and again because I want to give people strategies to challenge their way of thinking without them having to socialize for all the introverts out there. A lot of compassion. I have I've introverted Tendencies so I get it one helpful thought experiment, you can use when you feel like, maybe you're spending a little bit too much time around people who are just reinforcing whatever viewpoints you have is to ask how your belief system in your eye.
Your ideas and your opinions of things might have been different had, you been born during a different time period and in a different family or cultural landscape. And what happens when it comes to our viewpoints is that they become. So Tethered to our identities that we feel like if we were to jettison a certain belief or value, we would be jettisoning ourselves and that feels way too threatening its way to destabilizing to engage in that. But the minute you imagine what it would have been like to be able to have been born in a different family.
Different religious belief system with a different value system. All of a sudden, you transport your same self, right? I'm still Maya into this new environment and you start to see how non-precious some of your beliefs are right. Maybe they don't have the sacred quality that you thought that they did. And so you might be more open to changing your mind more open and receptive to challenging your own points of view. If you engage in that pot experiment,
I recall you discussing a description of people watching
in a game of sport that involved bad calls. Yeah. A controversial referee, controversial referee calls. You have, you could share with us a little bit about that result because I find it really interesting, especially the part where the experimenters can swap the identities of the teams in theory and then. Well, basically what people come to realize is that our perception of the outside world is strongly informed by the group that we see ourselves in an oft.
Our own detriment.
Absolutely. Yeah. So this is a study from the 1950s and to your point. You know, we tend to think okay. We're human beings were really enlightened were making decisions and we're engaging in judgments of things, Based on data and evidence and facts and you know, Shirley my visual system wouldn't lie to me. So, whatever I perceive is going to be true and vertical vertical representation of the world and like not true. Okay? A lot of our beliefs and these are these are strong.
Beliefs. I mean, again there what we believe to be fact about the world is informed by our group membership. So in this study, loyal fans of two opposing football teams, watch these controversial plays, right? So we're the referee made a call and they weren't quite certain. If it was like in or out, let's say, and depending on your loyalty to the team, to whatever sports team, right? Whichever side you were on, you're much more likely to favor calls that were made on your teams.
And you're in your team's favor and you know you ask people coming out of a study like this, it's not like, yep, I knew I was biased. Like I knew that I was basing, my judgment of these referee calls based on my affiliation and my love of Team X or team. Why you wouldn't think that you think you were an Arbiter of Truth in the situation you're just recalling what your visual system saw. And I think that shows how powerful these social forces are how powerful our group affiliations are because it
Truly change the way that you see stuff, right? Of course it can. Then transform the way that you think about stuff. And so that to me is a powerful reminder that when we are in disagreement with someone else and we just try to bombard them with facts, right? I mean like you're a scientist, right? So if you're hearing someone say something and you're like, oh that's not, that's not accurate. That's not true. You're Your Instinct. Probably say, but have you heard about the 2017 study the peer-reviewed journal article that from PubMed? That does that right? And but when
Recognize that actually a large part of our belief system emerges from the groups that we identify with it. I think there's there's an inspiring lesson that comes from that. So we shouldn't be too disheartened by the fact that this is true, but it helps round out our understanding of why it is that people believe the things they do. And as a result, we have more resources at hand to try to understand how we can change their minds, right? So one of the guys that I interviewed on my podcast, his name is Darrell Davis. He's a black jazz musician.
And and he was confronted by a member of the Ku Klux Klan at one of his performances and it led talk about a slight change of plans. I mean he just went on a totally different life path and ended up, convincing dozens of people to leave white supremacy groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. And you know when it when it comes to Darryl and his approach will one, he recruited people's agency so he never implied to them. Oh, I'm trying to change your mind. He inspires you
Says like I didn't convince the Maya, they convince themselves to change their mind, so he recruited their agency. But he also tried his absolute hardest to not question their fundamental and underlying Humanity, right? So he tried to understand like why are you part of this group this vile vitriolic group and some people would share? Well, you know, it's a family tradition thing, my father was in the clan, my grandfather's in the clan look, none of this excuses being in a hate group, okay? But at least
Least gave Daryl and understanding of some of the factors that were pushing them towards the group, so that he might offer that sense of community that sense of belonging somewhere else, maybe outside of a hate group, right? But if he thought that he was actually just fighting over facts over, whether African Americans, should be treated equal to everyone else. Then he would have lost that argument because he wasn't even fighting with the right currency. Right, what was relevant. So, what was so this is my it
First episode of a slight change of plans. We ever released and continues to be my favorite because what was so thrilling about this interview? Is that the strategies Daryl used to convince people to change their minds again if these deeply entrenched horrific views, we're totally corroborated by the science of how we change people's minds. So he did, he's a lot of really effective strategies just intuitively like he's just a mastermind behavioral scientist, just by virtue of who he is, but he showed genuine curiosity for. Why it is? They believe
They did which is again extremely hard and I would not have had the Equanimity to show genuine curiosity for why someone is in the Ku Klux Klan. But he showed that Curiosity he increased the his question to statement ratio. So it's really important to ask people a lot of questions and then and then he would ask people a really important question which is well what in theory could change your mind, like what evidence would I have to give you in order to change your mind about X, Y or Z, and the reason that I love
The asking that question is that it presupposes that someone ought to be willing to change their mind in the face of new information. So this Harkens back to the conversation. We were having earlier about the importance of having a malleable state of mind and being willing to update in the face of new info. Now, if the person responds says, literally nothing will change my mind. Okay. Well then you know it's not worth your time to have a disagreement with them, but if they give you a little bit and say, well maybe I would change my mind on vaccines. If you were to tell me X Y or Z, maybe I would change my mind's on my mind on immigration.
Ian reform. If you were to tell me, you know this or that now you have an in right. But you do need to get them into the State of Mind where they think. Yeah. I guess in theory, I could change my mind about this thing that I feel absolutely Resolute about. I've never worked in public policy, but I feel very strongly that where I see failures and mass of, you know, Public Health policy or educational policy,
Almost always. There seems to be a failure of even interest in understanding. What motivates the other side's position. And this is where I just this actually gets me frustrated to the point of motivated where it's like, people are saying you're wrong, you're wrong. No, this no that to the point of it's almost maddening and far more seldom. Do we see people saying you know? Okay I'm going to third person myself, or I'm going to put myself in the
Other person's shoes and say like you, why might they feel that way? Why would this person be listening to this individual as opposed to this public health individual and look, you know, without taking any stance on this, because it's a much bigger conversation than we want to have right now. I could look at Public Health officials that just completely failed to understand the other side's position and vice versa. And that to me just says it's a communication failure.
I'll take this out of the covid pandemic discussion as it's normally had and say that you know, one thing that we know for sure is that in the 2022, really 2022, but still 2023 landscape. There were so many mental health concerns. Right, everybody, right? Regardless of where people were on the vaccine debate, last debate, lockdown debate, regardless of any of that, everyone stress level was elevated. Absolutely. And there were very, very few
Top down from at the level of governments discussions, about how to maintain circadian rhythm and sleep Health, how to maintain Health in general in that landscape. And that for me was just really shocking. It was also one of the reasons why we launched the podcast frankly is that I really feel that the tools were needed by everybody and should be zero cost to everybody. But what was clear is there was so much pointing of fingers and name-calling and violence, even that no one was
Like why would people feel this way? Why would people trust these sources as opposed to these sources? And we can only conclude if we're good scientists that that the landscape was ineffective, right? It's just in effect, and it continues. I mean, if you go, if you have the, the desire to take a reduction in dopamine by going on, Twitter and following this back and forth the continues today. It's it's pretty ugly, still, none of it seems really solution-oriented. There are few people out there who are trying to make it solution oriented
But not really. And so I don't want to go into the dark aspects here, but, but it does seem like this willingness to take a look at why others might feel the opposite of how we feel, is a very rare quality. And this gentleman Darrell what was his last Terrell Davis? I think I've seen a number of things with him. It's I mean he's obviously extraordinary but we call him that because people like him or exceedingly rare. So what can we do to
That kind of mindset. Yeah, because I'm not pointing fingers here. I mean I think we all have this default tendency to gather evidence the way that we gather evidence draw conclusions and then stand our ground and I think it's detrimental, it's all to
everyone. So you're making me reflect on, probably the greatest gift that being a cognitive scientist has given me in my life. Obviously, it's been my curiosity. It's been a delight to study things and learn things, but the greatest gift it is given me is empathy.
Towards people. It is the greatest driver of human empathy to learn how our minds work. And I don't know if there's a substitute for that partly. That's why I started a slight change of plans. We have story episodes where you hear from people like Daryl, but I interview scientists from all over the world about their areas of expertise, and I genuinely believe that the more we learn about how the mind works. The more we learn from my field of cognitive science about how we make decisions, how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world, how
Come to be the people that we are the more we can Bridge. These empty gaps and it's been profound for me. I mean, I feel so lucky to have been steeped in this literature for decades. Now, my hope is to invite people into the conversation because the more you learn about why people are the way they are, the more empathy you can extend. And the more not even saying you got it, you need to extend an olive branch, not saying that you need to compromise your own belief system. But at least you see that, there might be an entry point.
A reason to have a discussion with this person who believes things that are completely different from you and I we talked about gratitude a bit in this conversation. I feel immense gratitude that I have a posture of empathy as I move around in this world because I regular I mean I have I have strong beliefs on things. I care a lot, I care about reducing human suffering and then I meet someone who I think is proa policy that promotes human suffering. And of course the visceral human instinct is like to hell with you and your Viewpoint. This is horrible. This is intolerable.
But because I had this cognitive science hat on. It allows me to walk around with a slightly different view point, and I really feel that I'm a better person as a result of that. And I've heard from listeners of a slight change of plans. When they listen to these science episodes, whether it's the science of loneliness, the science of empathy, the science of meditation. Like we're I try to bring this empathetic spin to understanding again, neuroscience and psychology. They have found that they are kinder to others. And so,
That's, that's probably the best feedback that I've ever received on the show. Is like, people are like, I'm a nicer person to other people. Now, especially the ones, I don't agree with
and presumably to themselves as well. I mean, I know you've brought up the topic of empathy as a way to prevent burnout, right, that, and here, we're not just talking about Job, burnout. We're talking about the burnout that is inherent to, like, any long-term Pursuit? That's challenging raising kids being in a family. What is the great ramdas quote? You know, think you're enlightened.
Go spend a week with your parents, you know, that, you know, like no matter how enlightened you are. It's like, you know, like that's always shot. I remind myself that I love my parents. I love my parents, but when, you know, you just just a completely different paradigm shift. So it also kind of oneself. I mean, I think there's starting to be some good neuroscience at the mechanistic level of empathy. Clearly it empathy is not the default state for most people. It's something that we need to cultivate as a practice.
And that we can cultivate as a practice along the lines of empathy. But also returning to a topic that we open today's discussion with, you know, we build these narratives about ourselves starting in adolescence maybe even earlier. Yeah, and through our teen years and we have various experiences but I'm curious how we can continue to build narratives about ourselves and the role of narrative, you know, that the I statements the I am statements and whether or not you
And we should all spend some time doing this. I mean these days, you know, people exercise because we know it's good for us, I hope people get sunlight because they know it's great for them that people perhaps have a meditation practice or therapy practice or a journaling practice. But how is it that we can continue to evolve our narratives about self in a way that promotes some or all of the things that we've been talking about today.
Yeah. So empathy is really interesting because I think we have a lot of misconceptions about it and we have
misconceptions about how pathetic we actually are. I would argue people are more empathetic than they think and let me tell you why. So, this comes from research by my friend, Jimmy Ozaki at Stanford, there's three distinct types of empathy. Lot of people don't know about. So the first kind is emotional empathy and this is the one that feels very intuitive to most of us. So it's this visceral reaction. I have you tell me that you've had a really hard time. My eyes start to well up I start, I can truly feel your pain and I just feel
What you feel. Okay. And that typically is the is what people think of when they think of empathy period they overlooked to other types of empathy. The second type is called cognitive empathy. This is the ability to accurately diagnose what it is, that's causing you distress in this moment and what it is that I could offer up to you to try to help ameliorate some of your suffering. The Third Kind is called empathic concern, or it's known as compassion as well.
Which is the actual desire to help you desire to help another person. And what's so interesting about these three types of empathy is that they don't correlate with in people, you can be really high in the emotional empathy scale, right? You can have tears streaming down your face as you hear about your friends divorce, but you might be really bad at diagnosing. What it is? That's causing them to stress. You might be really bad at actually offering up a solution to their problem or you might lack the will, right? Like if you're sociopathy, you might just not have the
Able to help someone, right? And what's so interesting, is that I think in our society and this relates back to Identity and the labels, we give ourselves. I think, our society puts a huge premium on emotional empathy, and we discount people who don't have that visceral response and we just immediately say, oh, they're not empathetic. And this happens from the time that we're really little, by the way, like the kid who's crying on the playground comforting, their friend right there. Like, wow, that kids got a ton of empathy. Of my older kid doesn't seem to really care about
People, but they might excel in cognitive empathy. They might Excel when it comes to compassionate empathic concern. So one of the things I was talking about with Jamil on a slight change of plans is, you know, maybe we ought to think about empathy languages and the same way we think about love languages, people have different ways of expressing their empathy and we ought to Value them equally and that's been wonderful because I think even in the past like I would have had a really hard situation. I go to one of my friends and they just seem like a little bit
Stoic and I'm like you even give a shit like why do you not care as much as I want you to care? It turns out they're fantastic at wanting to help me and understanding what's wrong with me and I love the idea of giving a little more love to those second two buckets. Because I think it'll allow us to better recruit more empathy from others and also to see ourselves differently to maybe for those people out there who are like I'm not a very empathetic person. You might actually be more empathetic than you think. The second thing I wanted to share is about burnout, right? So you talked a little bit about
About burnout, people who rate really high on the emotional empathy scale, tend to experience burnout at higher rate. So you can imagine health care workers. First Responders essentially what you're doing when you feel emotional empathy is your you're carrying the burden of the other person's pain so you can easily imagine how that can deplete you. And I think the Instinct that we have when we're empathetic is to say, you know what, I'm just going to shut myself off. I had that experience in 2020. I was like there's too much bad stuff happening around me like I prefer to just not feel.
Thank you very much. And so I tried to close myself off from natural emotional reactions. I would have two things but what Jim meals research shows is that you don't actually have to if you cultivate cognitive empathy and empathic concern, those can actually be protective against burn out. So you don't have to do away with empathy altogether. You just have to shift gears and be more selective about the kind of empathy that you're investing in. So I Love This research, could get it just like opens your mind up to this whole world.
Of empathy that you might have thought of as more. That's like the singular concept and allows there to be a little bit more grace face.
I love the idea that there are different categories of empathy, it will also arm me with a response with ever hypothetically, someone says, I don't feel like you're really feeling what I'm feeling and therefore, you're not empathic to my experience. I where I rate on these scales isn't important but this notion of cognitive empathy. I think it's really important in probably one that most people haven't heard of, I certainly haven't heard of it.
But I like to think that it really does exist and that it's at
least you might have it in Spades.
I don't know, but you'd have to ask the people close to me, but but that it is, at least as important as the emotional empathy. Before we conclude, there is something that I unfortunately pushed us past too quickly that I want to return to because I think it's something that so many people care about and live with each day which is this issue of challenges with ongoing motivation and forgive me for for now.
Bit of an anachronism here. I'm sure jumping back to this because I realized that I pulled us off to another topic. But you've talked about the middle problem before and it's and it's too important to to not return to. Yeah. So tell us about the middle problem and how we can overcome the middle
Pro and and before I do that, do you mind if I give just a couple short strategies around goal-setting, I just want to make sure I round out that
section. Not only would I not mind? I would be delighted.
I just want to make sure again. I share, share, share the wisdom. That's helped me so much.
My personal life. Okay. So and I'll try to be fast. So the first is take your time. Yeah, but people have these goals to reach, right? I gotta get them, got them out running. So the first is to make sure that you are. So we already talked about approach versus avoidant goals, right? We talked about how who sets the goal matters and how if it's you it's better right? If you have some ownership over your targets, the third thing is to make sure that you're setting goals when you're in the same psychological and physiological state.
Eight as the one you'll be in when you're actually pursuing the goal because we tend to have what are known as this is. Again, I let Fish Box where we tend to have empathy gaps between our present-day selves and our future cells. And that empathy Gap can lead us to be very compassionate towards 4:00 p.m. on Sunday watching TV Maya, right and 6 a.m. Maya who I hope is going to be at the gym. Like, you know, killing herself with a really high intensity intervals, set or whatnot. And so,
If it is 4 p.m. on Sunday, probably not the best time for you to say, I'm going to go to the gym everyday 6:00 a.m. if you actually are at the gym at 6 a.m. and you are feeling viscerally. The physiological pain, the psychological pain of having gotten up really early to do the workout, then it's reasonable for you to set that goal, but it's kind of the opposite of like they say like don't go to the supermarket hungry, right? Actually this situation you want to be in exactly the same physiological and psychological State, you'll be in when you're in goal Pursuit. It'll make it much more.
Likely that you set reasonable goals and you actually reach them. The second thing that you might want to think about is so I don't know about you Andrew, but I feel like I'm a goal purest by Nature. So when I set a goal, the minute, I like fall off even slightly. The goal is gone for me, okay? And I'm, like, I messed up like, let's start from the beginning. Let's start from scratch. I need a new goal. Like, I've already I've already messed up, and it doesn't matter. So I feel like unless I, I achieve perfection in achieving my goals, I get
We frustrated and I just fall off the wagon completely. So one thing that researchers have shown is that it's really helpful to build in what's called an emergency Reserve into your goal setting early slack is another way of putting it. So let's say I have a goal. I want to go to the gym every single day this month.
It's really important and helpful to give yourself and you're not going soft on yourself. I promise to give yourself for example, three get-out-of-jail-free cards, three days where for whatever reason, it's okay that you didn't go to the gym, you got sick, maybe of kids who got sick, you're just not feeling motivated, it doesn't really matter. What the reason is, you didn't go to the gym, but the important thing is that you're still on track to achieving your goal, even if you miss those three days because you built them into the system, okay? The final thing I'll say about
Setting. The goal is to try to capitalize on a phenomenon known as the Fresh Start effect. So this is work by my friend Katie Milkman, she's a professor at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania so which he's found, is that in our lives, we have these big milestone moments where we break from the past and we're entering a new future, okay? This might be moving across. The country could be getting a new job. It could be getting married. It could be whatever. Okay, but it feels like a big change and
That's a wonderful moment to try to introduce a new set of patterns into your life in part because again, you have a break-in identity but to it's really easy to introduce new habits when a lot of your environmental circumstances are different. So I take a new job, all of a sudden, I have a new route to work, probably a good idea to not introduce a pastry, stop every time I go to work because I no longer and passing by that Bakery every morning. So you want to capitalize on Fresh Starts of that?
Kind, there's also more arbitrary Fresh Starts that exists for all of us and this is in the form of the first day of the year. So of course, New Year's resolutions the first day of spring. Even the first day of the week can be very motivating because we all like clean slates. We like wiping away the past, we like embarking on a new future that's that's clean of failure, and stumbling and whatnot and so that could be really powerful motivator.
I love these suggestions because I do think that we like a clean start, there's something to
That who knows why? But I think it's it's a universal trait and perhaps shortening the time domain over which we think about our goals and success and failure could help. Like they just say, you know, the clean start is this afternoon because this morning wasn't, you know, didn't go so
well. Yeah, you know, I'm Just Surrender the whole week just because you messed up on a Monday morning. That's right.
Yeah, I'm sensing the perfectionist in you and I know that there's, it's a Continuum, you know, some people don't know what they suffer from perfectionism because I think it's a great
Eight attribute in certain domains and can be challenging and others. But I love the idea of having a little bit of Grace with ones goals, and also what you said earlier of making the carrot compelling, you know, and not so much focusing on just the stick, making the carrot more compelling so much there, what about the middle problem? Yes, because I do think that people do tend to go go.
Right out the gate as it were and then people drop off. Yeah,
so yeah, all the stuff we talked about so far has been around to finding the goal. And now we need to think about how we sustain our motivation, to pursue the goal, and this can be super hard again. Behavior change is a credibly incredibly hard to sustain. So the middle problem. So, middle problem refers to the fact that we don't have stable amounts of motivation over the course of gold Pursuit.
We tend to have a boost and motivation at the beginning of the pursuit. We all feel this viscerally, right. I've decided I'm going to do intermittent fasting or I'm going to make sure I look at, you know, the Sun every morning, the first moment that I get up or we'll, whatever the goal is and that first day you are so motivated to get it done, right? In fact the first few days the first few weeks and then you experience a boost and motivation a higher amount of motivation towards the end of the goal. So we experienced at the end of a goal, what's known as the goal gradient effect. So we tend to experience
The tonic increases in motivation, the closer. We are to the finish line. So we might even see a marathon runners right there. Like, okay, I only have this remaining part to go. I can expend all my energy. Now, to try to get over the finish line. There's a lull though in motivation, in the middle of goal Pursuit and that's something that we want to get ahead of. We want to solve for now. Obviously, we cannot eliminate middles mathematically impossible to eliminate middles. So what do we do? When we do something that you already alluded to, which is actually, we shorten the time duration of our
Goals so rather than setting an annual goal, right, let's say that it's the new year, you're inspired to try to make 2023 the best year ever. But what the problem with that is when you send an annual goal. Now, your middle is months-long, so you're going to experience that decrease in motivation for a healthy chunk of the year, which is not ideal. If you set a weekly goal by contrast, all of a sudden you're middles a lot shorter, right? All of a sudden you're dealing with like a few days, maybe a day or two. And so you want to be mindful of the dirt.
Mission of the goal. Another thing that can help keep motivation high is to do what? My friend Katie Milkman calls Temptation bundling. So this is number one been the my go-to strategy for having done every unpleasant activity in my life that I've had to do, okay, folding laundry doing the dishes. I actually really like working out like you do. So I don't need as much motivation but sometimes I still need the for high-intensity days. I do need the motivation to do like that the hard cardio. So to get on get on.
Into working out in that way. So what is Temptation? Bundling your pairing and unpleasant activity, like folding laundry, doing dishes taking out the trash with an immediately rewarding enjoyable activity. That can be listening to your favorite podcasts. Which are, of course, the huberman lab and a slight change of plans. Obviously, it could be listening to your favorite pop music but the really critical piece of the Temptation bundling is that you have to forego the Indulgence of enjoying
That rewarding activity in all other spaces of your life. So for example, for me, I feel like a good pop song. I have like 25 really good listens and then it kind of becomes old hat. So just like you know, the excitement of the song wears off a bit. So there have been times where I'll be like cooking with my husband and he's like, hey why don't we play? You know, you love Kacey Musgraves. Why do we play that album? And I'm like, no, no, that's it. All of my can only listen to you. When I'm like, lifting weights, maintain the potency
To maintain the potency, right? You don't allow yourself to get the joint edification of the huberman lab, when you're not taking a walk and getting exposure to that morning sunlight. And you know, it's such a simple strategy when you think about it. But I have found myself looking forward to really annoying tasks that I have to get done because I know I'm going to get the enjoyment of something really fun that accompanies
it fantastic. Is it important? That the thing that one enjoys be done simultaneously. Yeah folding laundry.
While watching the Netflix thing or listening to a particular piece of
music. Yeah. You want them to coexist because then again you get that immediately or most of the time. The things that we lament doing have really positive long-term outcomes, right? If I'm you know in the habit of keeping my house clean, there's long-term benefits of them habit of exercising or eating healthily. There's long-term benefits, but I don't often feel the rewards in real-time. So what you're trying to do is give yourself that Rush of joy and excitement that accompanies the immediately rewarding activity so that in
Your mind even just like Neroli the two things are coexisting.
I love it because it has such firm grounding in the neurobiology of reward and aversion and how to overcome a version. There's deep Neuroscience around this but I've never heard it presented that way. So thank you for those incredibly clear and actionable tools for motivation because so many people struggle with that. Yeah and I hear that all the time
and I think you know you talked about a version and actually this is really important. So when we think about returning to
Our goals, which is often the hard thing. So you do it on a Monday and you have that same goal on a Tuesday and then on Wednesday on Thursday, and by Thursday you're kind of like, oh my God, it was so hard. The first few days, do I really want to go back and do that? Do the same work out on a Thursday. What's really helpful here to avoid? Some of that aversion is to be mindful of the the way in which our minds process memories. So when we reflect back on how much we enjoyed, or didn't enjoy an experience, we don't give equal weight to every
Aunt, each moment get uniform. Wait instead we tend to give more weight to What's called the peak of the experience. So the experience that was most emotionally intense, the part of the experience. That was the most emotionally intense and the end of the experience. So this is a this is work done by Nobel Laureate common Daniel Kahneman and and his collaborator Amos tversky. So the cheek and Rule is what this is called. So you put a lot of weight on again that really emotionally intense moment of the experience and the end now.
Now, researchers have studied this in the context of lots of unpleasant activities. So in some studies, people are forced to plunge submerge their hands and like ice cold water or they looked at colonoscopies. For example, how unpleasant those are and what they found is that this is so interesting. So,
Okay, I'm nerding out a little bit because I just like think that this field is so cool. Okay, so
just nerding out isn't just tolerated it is encouraged on this
podcast. I'm having a moment with cognitive science but this is such a cool research because what these researchers did? It's so clever if you elongate the unpleasant experience by a couple minutes. Let's say so the hands and freezing cold, ice water or the colonoscopy, but you make those last few minutes of the unpleasant experience slightly less unpleasant.
Isn't then the end of the experience, would otherwise have been, right? Had you just ended the colonoscopy procedure as planned. Had, you just taken the hands right out of the ice bucket by, for example, increasing the temperature of the water by a degree, or use your imaginations, whatever they could argue in your colonoscopy less. There are mechanisms by which the pain can be less
Physicians everywhere, know them but we're where we are. We are oblivious to them.
Any way you guys could do the metal work of figuring out with you.
Well, I'm Google on Google what they find is that people look back on the experience more favorably. They have a more positive impression of the experience. Now again this is what's so miraculous about this, finding the overall duration of the unpleasant experience has been extended. There are more minutes of overall suffering right but the last few minutes are less bad than they would have been otherwise and so people are the youth experience more favorably.
We in the case of the colonoscopies, they were actually more likely to return for follow-up visits for their annual checkups. And so, what does this mean in daily life? What it can mean, is, let's say you're like, literally killing yourself at the gym. Okay, you have the hardest workout that you've ever had tack on a few minutes to the end of the workout that are still unpleasant. So you're still coding, it coding them as being part of the unpleasant working out experience, but are a little bit, less intense and less painful than the work out and would have been, otherwise,
You might be more likely to return and actually do the hard work out.
Can we also say if somebody really enjoys their training that the opposite would be effective as well that perhaps if they really want to push it hard at the end because that's the Sensation that they particularly enjoy that that could serve. Presumably the memory systems in the reward systems of the brain. Such that they were more likely to return to the work out a
capsule. You raised a fantastic point which is when we talk about enjoyment in these contexts, it is all subjective. So I actually kind of love the feeling
I'm like, I'm going to die because my heart is it's a racing. So, I mean forever, he said I'm just wired to love exercise, right? And I love a hard strength training workout, right? And so, for me, what enjoyment might look like? At the end is like, really, really, really intense, right? That might be what brings me back, but in other domains, absolutely not like, colonoscopy situation. I do not want this to be an unpleasant experience. And so there are lots of other domains in life where if you just tack on a few of the few minutes on to something, that's really
DS or really hard or really painful. It can be a few more likely to commit to it later. But it's an excellent point in all of these studies. It you have to consider who the person is and what their natural psychology is like in for everyone listening, you want to tailor these recommendations to who you are as a
person. Well, there are certain life demands that I find incredibly aversive. So, I'm going to use this approach for those. I'm also going to use them in the context of things I really enjoy. Because if one has the opportunity, I believe to further reinforce
It's the things that bring us joy. Why wouldn't we absolutely fantastic recommendations? So now I could ask you a thousand more questions and my hope is that you'll come back so that I can ask those thousand plus more questions. I have to say it is exceedingly rare that I talked to somebody either on the podcast or elsewhere, frankly, in my life that has such a incredibly wide breadth of knowledge and yet has so much depth of knowledge as well. It's
Sure that your many experiences through music and cognitive science podcasting. And by the way, we're going to provide links to your podcast in the show notes caption so that people can hear more from you and as they should and also your work in policy. I mean, you've put yourself in a lot of different domains and I think that itself is inspiring and whether or not it's by way of curiosity human connection or both presumably. It's both and many other things as well. I know, I speak on behalf of many, many people are just so, you know,
Thank you so much for doing the work that you do for continuing along these Pursuits. I'm excited to hear where it might evolve in the future still and frankly, just for being you because it's clear that your enthusiasm your curiosity and your generosity with useful information is immense. So, thank you ever so
much. It's so gracious and kind of you to say Andrew and these these conversations, like the one we just had. I mean, that's why I do the work, it's so much fun and so interesting. And
Given me so much food for thought, it really was a conversation, not an interview, and that's such a gift. And so, I just feel gratitude that I can share my body of work and all the insights. I've learned along the way with, with your listeners, and I really hope it's helpful to
them. It certainly is, and that it's been an honor to have you here. So let's do it again.
Yes, let's do it again. Thanks so much. Thank you,
thank you for joining me. For today's discussion, about identity, and goals and motivation with dr. Maya Shankar, if you're learning from, and, or enjoying this podcast,
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