How do I know what my future self wants? (w/ Shankar Vedantam)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Something that I've been thinking about a lot and talking about with friends recently is this feeling that I have that I'm not the same person that I used to be, but I'm not quite sure who I'm going to become. That I'm kind of in between versions of myself.

It's hard to put into words exactly what that feeling is, but I think a lot of us have this sense that so much has happened in the broader world over the past few years. And also internally, there's been all these changes and adaptations we've had to make, and at least for myself, I just feel like I'm not the same as I used to be.

It's a hard thing to put into words, exactly. It's hard to articulate. That's why I was so happy when I came across this talk by Shankar Vedantam, the journalist and host of Hidden Brain. In his talk, he discusses exactly this feeling, and as a metaphor and a jumping off point, he uses the Ship of Theseus, which is a famous thought experiment that asks whether, if you replace all the individual pieces of a ship, whether that is still the same vessel, or whether it's something else entirely. Okay, here's a clip from Shankar's TED Talk where he's unpacking that question.

[00:01:11] Shankar Vedantam:
The people you were 10 years ago are not the people you are today. Biologically, you have become a different person. But I believe something much more profound happens at a psychological level. Because you could argue a ship is not just a collection of planks, a body is not just a collection of cells, it's the organization of the planks that makes the ship.

It's the organization of the cells that make the body. If you preserve the organization, even if you swap planks in, in and out, or cells in and out, you still have the ship, you still have the same body. But at a psychological level, each new layer that's put down is not identical to the one that came before it.

The famous plasticity of the brain that we've all heard so much about means that on an ongoing basis, you are constantly becoming a new person. This has profound consequences for so many different aspects of our lives. You know, I have the illusion that 12 year old Shankar who wanted to be a soccer star and 52 year old Shankar, who is the podcast host and 82 year old Shankar, who will hopefully be living one day on a beautiful beach, that these are all the same person. Is that really true?

[00:02:30] Chris Duffy:
We're going to talk with Shankar all about those questions of identity and so much more. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

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[00:02:48] Chris Duffy:
Today we're talking with Shankar Vedantam about identity, self, and the hidden ways in which our perceptions of the world are shaped.

[00:02:55] Shankar Vedantam:
Hi, I'm Shankar Vedantam. I'm the host of the podcast and radio show Hidden Brain, and I have a longstanding fascination with everything it means to be human.

[00:03:07] Chris Duffy:
So Shankar, I want to talk about first the idea of the hidden brain, because that's the, the title of the podcast and radio show. It's also the title of a book you wrote. So, um, talk to me about why you like the term, the “hidden brain”, which you describe in your book as something that you've kind of come to use as a, a catch all for a broad variety of psychological and neurological phenomena.

[00:03:28] Shankar Vedantam:
Sure. Um, you know, there's a joke in psychology and in the social sciences that a lot of researchers don't do research. They do me-search.

[00:03:36] Chris Duffy:
Uh-huh.

[00:03:36] Shankar Vedantam:
And I think to some extent that's true of me as well. And when it comes to the hidden brain, Chris, um, I think of myself as being a very conscious and rational and intentional person. And so if you ask me, you know, why I like this political candidate rather than that, or why I prefer this movie to that, or this book to that, I will come up with what I think is a logical and rational answer.

About 20 years ago, you know, I started digging into the psychological research that showed in all kinds of ways, our minds work outside of our conscious awareness. Significant portions of our minds are in fact hidden from us. You know, you and I have no real understanding of how our brains are telling our hearts to beat, but there are other aspects of the hidden brain that are accessible if we focus on them.

And sometimes we just don't pay attention to some of these dimensions. And I was trying to find a catch-all term that described the range of these mental activities. And I stumbled on what in some ways is both the simplest, but I think the most elegant way to describe this range of brain processes. And I call it the hidden brain.

[00:04:37] Chris Duffy:
It’s, it’s interesting to think about the, the body piece of this because it's not, uh, totally sealed off. Some, sometimes it's porous, right? Like we can think about our breathing and kind of take over and we can control our breath. But most of the time we're not thinking, “Breathe in, breathe out.” But when you do, there is a moment where you can take control. So there is a little bit of a porous boundary between the conscious brain and the hidden brain.

[00:05:00] Shankar Vedantam:
That’s right. So in some ways, Chris, I think it depends on the domain that we're talking about. I think there, are in fact, some domains that are permanently sealed off from conscious awareness. No matter how hard you try and figure out how your brain is processing visual images, you really have no understanding of the neural wizardry that allows you to see. Now you can certainly decide what you're going to pay attention to. You can turn your eyes this way and that way, or you can turn your head this way and that way and you can decide what to look at. But the neural mechanisms by which the brain produces vision are so, are permanently sealed off from conscious introspection. So there are some domains of the hidden brain that in fact are completely elusive to us, and others are accessible through effort. But I think it depends on the domain.

[00:05:42] Chris Duffy:
You have such a, a kind of brilliant joke, moment, explanation in the book that I love. It was so delightful where you're talking about how reading is a great example. Of once we have learned how to read, we just process.

We don't think about it. And then you, you give the example of you didn't even realize that there was a deliberate typo in the last sentence because your brain just fills in what that word is supposed to be spelled like. And then I went back and was like, “Wait a second. There is a typo there.” It, it was a delightful little, uh, Easter egg that you put in there. I really appreciated that.

[00:06:09] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah. So that actually points to another very, very interesting domain of activities, because there are some things that are intensely conscious when we are first learning to do them, and then slowly over time they become unconscious. So when you're first learning to ride a bike or you're learning a new language, you have to devote every ounce of your conscious attention to staying balanced on the bike or to getting the right grammar in your sentence.

But gradually as you get skillful at doing it, you eventually forget what it is that you're doing. In fact, when you're riding a bike, if you've been riding a bike for a few years, you no longer remember that you're riding a bike. You're focused on something else. You're focused on where you're going to go.

Maybe you're having a conversation with a friend. And the same thing is true for language. It basically moves outside of the conscious brain into the domain of the hidden brain. Now, this is a very, very useful skill for us most of the time because it allows us to essentially run much of our lives on autopilot.

The parts of our lives that we are very good at doing already get outsourced, in some ways, to the hidden brain. So we don't have to think about it. The problem is that sometimes we outsource this autopilot function to really important domains of our lives. When we're making judgments about other people, for example, or we are interviewing someone for a job. At times like that, you definitely don't want to be running the plane on autopilot. You want to have the controls in your hand.

[00:07:27] Chris Duffy:
So I want to dive really deeply into this, because this is something that I find so fascinating about so much of your work, your book, your podcast, and, and your TED talk. They all really focus on the many ways that we struggle to understand ourselves. And yet, so many people, most people, feel like they really do understand themselves. So how do you think about that discrepancy where our, our conscious brain can kind of reverse engineer an explanation for why we're behaving the way we behave?

[00:07:55] Shankar Vedantam:
The helpful place to start, I think, is to ask why we have a brain in the first place. We weren't given brains because someone said, “Wouldn't it be cool to have these animals be able to think about all these interesting thoughts and write books and, and record podcasts?”

That’s, that’s not the reason we have brains. Our brains really involved over a process of millions of years of evolution to solve problems involving survival, reproduction, and everyday thriving, you know, everyday life. And so the things the brain are, is good at doing and the things that come intuitively to the brain are usually the things that are connected in some ways to survival or reproduction or sort of regular things that we have to do every day. To remind the brain on a regular basis that, in fact, you don't know as much as you think you know. You know… So social scientists have uncovered this mountain of activities of the brain does that, in fact, people are not aware of and the brain is very, very careful in allocating its resources, allocating its energy to the things that actually matter.

So, you're asking an important question. Why is it that our brains have so many limitations, so many blind spots, but most of us go through life blithely without even thinking about these blind spots? And the reason is, for most of life, in fact, it's not functional to think about your blind spots. For most of life, in fact, it's helpful to focus on what's right in front of you. When you have a tiger leaping out from behind a bush, it's not useful to spend time thinking, you know, “How is my brain processing the visual image of the tiger? You know, how is a retina processing these images and sending up signals through the optic nerve?” At that point, all you need to do is get the hell out of the way of the tiger and make sure you don't get eaten.

We are the descendants of our ancestors, of course, but the brains that we carry around are the, are the result of what happened in our ancestral environments. And there was really no functional advantage to reminding our ancestors about the limitations of their brains. Because in fact, they were confronting so many other limitations in their daily lives, so many other challenges of survival.

[00:09:52] Chris Duffy:
So how do you personally think about using your conscious brain and your hidden brain in your day to day life? What, what purpose do they both serve for you?

[00:09:59] Shankar Vedantam:
I think in our modern world, it plays a very, very important role and, andI’ll tell you why. So most of us, certainly I think most people listening to this podcast, are probably not struggling with the questions of life and death and survival that our ancestors were dealing with, you know, many hundreds of thousands of years ago.

For most people, listening to a podcast means that you have some leisure time. You have time to engage yourself in interesting pursuits. And so you're basically past the stage where survival, you know, day to day survival is as essential to you. Secondly, many of us now are engaged with other humans in ways that our ancestral brains could never have conceived of, right?

So in our ancestral environments, we might have been around, you know, 100 other people or 150 other people in small, in small groups. Now we're connected to people who live halfway around the world. We can have instantaneous conversations with people who live thousands and thousands of miles away. And in some ways, our Stone Age brains have not caught up with the challenges and demands of our modern information age.

And that's why it becomes so important to understand when the Stone Age brain is influencing what we need to do in very important situations that we confront today. How do we make hiring decisions? How do we make firing decisions? Who do we promote? Who do we select to be on a podcast? Who we, who do we reject from being on a podcast? These are really important questions that have huge stakes for other people. And if we're not aware of how our hidden brains can be influencing us, we can end up making judgments and decisions that harm ourselves and harm other people too.

[00:11:33] Chris Duffy:
I guess to give an example for myself, how I, how I've been thinking about this, because I've kind of come to the conclusion that maybe what I need to do in order to live up more towards the, the self that I want to be—the conscious self—is to put in place systems so that I'm not thinking about like, “Am I making this decision?” But instead putting a system in place that, for example, when it comes to, like you said, booking podcast guests, the team that works on this podcast, that we have a system where it's not just one person and there's a lot, there's all the pieces that are getting examined so that I don't just think like, “Sure, we've got good representation of topics and people on the show,” but instead there's some sort of external accountability. Because it's easy to feel like you've accomplished something when you haven't actually accomplished that thing.

[00:12:16] Shankar Vedantam:
Yes, I think in some ways, I think it makes excellent sense to install guardrails around our behavior. We have a sense that, you know, I, I have some kind of a measurement or metric system that tells me I'm staying on track. We expect this of any important system, right? If you're flying a passenger plane today with, you know, 700 passengers on board, you don't expect the pilot to just look out the window and say, “Okay, I think I'm going to land right now.”

You expect the pilot's going to follow a whole set of rules and procedures that the pilot has internalized and learned and that have been mastered over many, many years. And the same thing is true in some ways when we are flying our own planes. When we are flying the planes of our own lives, it helps to have systems, checklists, guidelines to protect us in some ways from our own hidden errors.

[00:13:00] Chris Duffy:
As someone who thinks about this a lot professionally, has that bled over into the way that you live your day to day life, like when you're at the grocery store or when you're, uh, thinking about where to go on vacation or, or any of the, like, day to day decisions that you might be making, um, do you think about them differently as a result of your understanding of unconscious processes?

[00:13:17] Shankar Vedantam:
I've realized, for example, how powerful the autopilot function is in our lives. Um, you know, when you wake up in the morning and you shuffle out of bed and go to the bathroom and brush your teeth, how much of this are you actually thinking about? Are you thinking about how you get out of bed? Are you thinking about standing up and how you balance? Are you thinking about reaching for the toothbrush, opening toothpaste on the toothbrush, or brushing your teeth? All of these things happen by autopilot.

So, yes, I think in my daily life, I ask myself constantly, you know, how much of this decision, how much of this perception, how much of this observation I am making… Is that the result of what I actually think and feel? Or is it the result of the hidden brain at play?

[00:13:57] Chris Duffy:
One thing that I've thought about with the hidden brain in, in preparing for this episode of the show and, and going back through your work is the idea that, you know, if you tell someone that you love them—

[00:14:08] Shankar Vedantam:
Yep.

[00:14:08] Chris Duffy:
What you want is for that person to right away tell them—tell you that they love you too and to, to express that genuinely.

[00:14:14] Shankar Vedantam:
Yes.

[00:14:14] Chris Duffy:
What you don't want is for them to go through some sort of logical decision-making conscious process of being like, “Well, I'm weighing the pros and cons. And I guess you have proved yourself worthy of love.” That, that would be horrendous.

But the flip side is, you know, if if someone comes in for a job and you have an instinctive reaction based on their gender or their presentation or their racial background—

[00:14:35] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:35] Chris Duffy:
You don't want that to be, you want that to be overcome by your, your conscious mind. So it, it, it totally has both of the sides in, in, and I think we all, even if we don't know that when we first hear it, I think we all have this intuitive sense that we wouldn't want it to be all conscious or all unconscious.We really do need this balance between the two.

[00:14:52] Shankar Vedantam:
Yes. And I love your, your analogy here, because in some ways I think because our brains come programmed to recognize mates or friends and make these quick judgments of who we like and who we dislike, and in our evolutionary past, it was very functional for us to make those quick judgments.

You know, it was important for us to say, “This person is going to be a friend, this person is going to be a foe.” And it was less important that we were right and more important that we were quick. And that's why our brains are so quick at making these intuitive judgments about other people. In the modern world we live in, in fact, it's more important to be right than it is to be quick, and that's why it's important to slow down and actually ask, “Where is this judgment coming from?”

There's been a lot of research that looks at, for example, the role of job interviews, uh, which are still so completely ubiquitous. I mean, I run a company and I've done job interviews, but the research shows that job interviews in general are often not a good guide to who you should hire at a company.

And that's because it's inescapable that when we talk to someone for 15 minutes, you and I have been talking now for a few minutes, Chris. It's inescapable for us to draw conclusions about each other, to say, “This is a person I like. This is a person I get along with. This is a fluid conversation. This is an awkward conversation.”
These things happen almost unconsciously to us. And if we're making judgments about whether someone's going to be good at a job or not based on an interview, what we're really deciding is: is this person someone I'd like to have lunch with? But you might not really be able to find out is this someone who can actually do the job consistently, reliably over a period of many months or years.

[00:16:24] Chris Duffy:
Something that I, I really want to talk to you about is in the introduction to the book, The Hidden Brain, you say, a vast gulf had grown between what experts were learning about the mind and what most people believed. Your book came out in 2010. Uh, I’m curious. As someone who does a lot of public facing work, trying to get people to understand these things, how do you think that gulf has changed in the decade plus since the book came out?

[00:16:48] Shankar Vedantam:
That's a really wonderful question. And I think the gulf may have closed a little bit because I think there's so much work right now talking about this kind of experimental work and its findings. And I think more people are aware of it. It's also fair, I think, to say that some of the gulf exists because of the architecture of our brains.

And we, we’ve discussed this before, which is in some ways our brains are not designed to pay attention to things that are happening in the hidden brain. They're just simply not designed to do that. And so it takes conscious effort, uh, to be able to pay attention to things that lie outside of conscious awareness.

I mean, I find this all the time with my podcast. I'm producing the podcast. I'm involved in the creation of every podcast, you know, I'm involved with writing every line or editing every line or thinking about every line that’s in the podcast. And so I'm deeply enmeshed in the ideas that we're discussing. And yet I find myself constantly forgetting insights and ideas from my own show. I’ll find myself being impatient in a situation; I’ll find myself getting upset in a situatio; I'll find myself getting angry over something trivial. And it takes me a second to sort of realize, “Hey, I did a podcast episode about that. And here's what's actually happening inside my own brain.”

And the important thing here, Chris, is there is a gap between insight and action. So it's one thing to sort of know intellectually that this is how our brains work. It's another thing entirely to actually operationalize this and to act on that knowledge. I find that I struggle with that all the time myself. The gulf between what I know and what I do is very, very vast. And so in some ways, I have a great deal of compassion, you know, for other people who have the same cult. You know, it, it comes from recognizing myself in them.

[00:18:27] Chris Duffy:
I live every day in that gulf. I'll tell you what. I, I, I have, uh, a large number of friends who keep me very accountable by when I do something that is, you know, squarely not in that, not in the, where it should be. They go, “And you host the podcast. What's your podcast called again? How to Be a Better Human. Oh, fascinating.”

Okay. We're going to take a quick break, but we will be right back after these messages.

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[00:19:01] Chris Duffy:
Today we're talking with Shankar Vedantam about the hidden ways in which our assumptions and default patterns can affect the course of our lives. And one of the big pieces that I find so fascinating that Shankar talks about is this paradox that we feel like we know ourselves really, really well, and yet we can't know who we will be in the future. Here's another clip from his TED talk where he's exploring that idea.

[00:19:23] Shankar Vedantam:
All of us spend so much of our lives trying to make our future selves happy. We don't stop to ask, “Is it possible that in 20 or 30 years, our future selves are going to look back at us with bewilderment, with resentment?” That our future selves will ask us, “What made you possibly think that that is what I would want?”

If you accept the idea that you're going to be a different person in 30 years time, you should play an active role crafting the person you are going to become. You should be the curator of your future self. You should be the architect of your future self.

[00:19:58] Chris Duffy:
Shankar, that was a clip from your TED talk, which is about the unknowability of our future selves. And, and that's an idea that I found to be really eye opening. It was not something that I had ever thought about before. So how did you first get interested in these questions?

[00:20:10] Shankar Vedantam:
The origin for this grew out of a research study that was conducted by Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson and Jordi Quoidbach some years ago, where they asked people at different ages, “How much do you think you've changed in the last 10 years? And how much do you think you're going to change in the next 10 years?” And what they found is that at every life stage, when people were 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 and 70, at every life stage, people said, “I've changed a lot in the last 10 years, but I don't expect to change very much in the next 10 years.”

Now, of course, this is obviously a paradox because 30 year olds think that they've changed a lot, but they're not going to change very much from now. 40 year olds know they have changed a great deal from the time they were 30, but they think they're not going to change anymore and so on and so forth.

And so there's a mystery here. Why is it that when we look back, we can see enormous changes, but when we look forward, we imagine it's going to be more of the same? I think all of us can see examples in our own lives when this is the case, but I think there are many situations where we're not even aware of the ways in which we are changing, you know?

So we look back and say, you know, “Maybe I'm kind of the same person. I have the same values as I did 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago.” But very few of us are writing down our thoughts and beliefs, you know, at age 20, at age 30, at age 40, and comparing them and saying, “Am I really the same person? Do I actually have the same beliefs?”

And when you do that, when you actually go through the process and the exercise of changing or sort of measuring how much you've changed, you will actually recognize how much you're actually changing even outside of conscious awareness.

[00:21:42] Chris Duffy:
One of the challenges is that we all have to make decisions about our futures all the time in the present, right?

[00:21:47] Shankar Vendantam:
Yes.

[00:21:47] Chris Duffy:
Whether it's picking a major in college, whether it's, you know, starting a relationship, getting married, starting careers.

[00:21:53] Shankar Vedantam:
Yes.

[00:21:53] Chris Duffy:
So how do we balance the idea that our future self is a stranger versus the reality that we have to make choices that will affect that stranger right now?

[00:22:04] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah. So this is a really interesting and profound question, because of course, the simple or straightforward answer to that is I'm going to tell my future self who to be. And I've heard variations on this from friends who basically say, you know, “I want to be person X and I am going to try and live into that person. I'm going to try and become that person. And I have a vision of who person X needs to be. And I want to make sure that I become that person.”

Now, what that forgets is that the vision you have for person X is the vision that you have today. That vision is not going to be the same thing 10 years from now. 10 years from now, you might visualize becoming a different person in the future. So there's a real tension here because if we don't appreciate that we are not going to be the same person, we might not have the same, you know, interest, the same avocations, the same values to some extent.
You know, how are we going to plan for the people we're going to become? Because you're absolutely right, Chris. In daily life, we have to make a number of decisions that shape the future person we're going to become. Certainly at a very, you know, trivial and obvious level. You know, if you eat a lot of unhealthy food, you're going to shape, the person you're going to become ten years from now, that person's going to be unhealthy. If, you don't save enough for retirement, you know, you're not going to have enough money in retirement. So there's the very obvious ways in which we understand that the choices we make today are going to shape our future selves. But the question you're raising is such a profound question because I think many of us focus too much on what I call navigation and too little on what I call pathfinding.

Uh, so here's the analogy. Let's say you get in the car. I live in Washington, D. C., and I decide, you know, I want to go to the Empire State Building in New York City. And so I punch up, uh, the Empire State Building in my, in my, in my app on my phone, and my phone says, “OK, here's what you have to do. You have to take, uh, Route 95 and, and drive up to New York, and here are the exits, and here's how you go through the various tunnels, and there you'll end up at the Empire State Building.”

Now let me give you a scenario, too. I get in my car, and I tell my GPS, “OK, I want to go,” and the GPS says, “Where do you want to go?” And I say, “I don't know.” That is a much more difficult problem to solve because it's not just a problem of navigation. It's a problem that I don't know where I'm actually going.

And I think many people are so terrified at that second question that they transform the second question into the first question. So instead of asking, “Where am I going? What is it I want to do? Who do I want to become?” They focus on much narrower goals. They basically say, “All right, everyone else is driving to the Empire State building. Let me drive to the Empire State Building, too. Everyone else says the Empire State building is the best place to get to. Let me navigate there as well.” So we use others as guides to our own behavior. But of course, that only solves the problem of navigation. It does not solve the problem of pathfinding.

Now, the question then becomes, if you don't know who you're going to be, how can you possibly know where you're going to go? And the answer, the terrifying answer is you don't. In fact, you cannot know where you actually want to go. That is something that is discovered only as you, as you grow and as you change and as life sort of unfolds.

And so the solution to the problem of pathfinding is not paralysis. You don't sit in the car and say, “All right, I don't know where to go. And so I'm just gonna sit in the car and not go anywhere.” The answer really is you start going in one direction, and you see how that direction fits with you, your temperament, your values, and then you course correct, and then you course correct again, and then you course correct again. And in fact, all of life is really nothing more than an endless series of course corrections.

[00:25:34] Chris Duffy:
It also makes me think that we have these narratives that we tell ourselves about who we are. One of the things that you've talked about is trying new things and, and putting ourselves out for novel experiences so that we can give ourselves, our future selves, the gift of potentially going in new directions that they can experience.

[00:25:52] Shankar Vedantam:
Right. If you actually accept the idea that you are going to be a different person in the future, that what you want in 20 or 30 years is not what you want today, then one of the things you might actually want to do is say, “Let me give that future self lots of different options.” So I'm gonna try this hobby and that avocation. Maybe I'll try this job and that job. Maybe I'll try living in one city and then I'll live in another city.

Curiosity is the engine by which we discover who our future selves are going to be. And if we lack curiosity, if we lack the willingness to go out and try things that are outside our comfort zones, we're never going to discover the kind of people we might become.

[00:26:30] Chris Duffy:
In practical terms, if someone is listening and they want to be a good architect of their future self, if they want to cultivate creativity and they want to study pathfinding as well as navigation, what are some things that you would suggest that they do today?

[00:26:43] Shankar Vedantam:
So there are a couple of things that I might suggest, Chris, and, and one of them is really think about times in your life when you forget yourself when you're doing something. You’re, you’re doing something and you're so engrossed in it, you're so engaged in what you're doing that you forget that you are the one who's actually doing it. That, in fact, the work, the task, the job becomes bigger than you. Ask yourself when that's true. That could be true when you're a parent. It could be true when you're playing sports. It could be true when you're doing a job.

I feel I have the great good fortune in my life of having discovered something where much of the time as I'm working, I'm not aware that I'm working. I'm not even aware that it's me who is doing the work. And I think when you discover something like that, you've discovered something really important about yourself.

So one clue to who you might want to be and the kind of work you might want to do is ask yourself, “What are the situations in which I forget myself?” There's a lovely poem that W.H. Auden wrote, uh, many years ago where he says, you know, “You do not have to see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation. You only have to watch his eyes.”

And the idea really is that when you're engrossed in something, you're so wrapped up in it that the rest of the world simply vanishes away, and the rest of the world is not just the rest of the world. The rest of the world is you. You vanish away because the thing that you're doing becomes more important and more beautiful than anything that any concerns or, or narrow worries that you might have about yourself.

The other question to ask yourself is: what are my values? What are the kind, what are the kinds of things that I do that make me proud of myself? When I look back at my life, what are the things that I have done that make me say, “I wish I had done something different?” Or what are the things that I have done that make me say, “You know, that made me feel really good.”

And when I look back at that point in my life, I look back on that point with pride. I look back on that activity or the thing I did or the person I helped with pride. Recognizing when you have that warm glow about yourself is also an indication, I think, of where your values are, what your heart is, and that's going to be different for different people.

There’s gonna be some, there’s going to be one person who says, you know, “I'm playing basketball and I look back on that moment with great fondness.” And there's going to be somebody else who says, “When I did that work in the soup kitchen, I just had this warm glow as I went through the entire weekend.” And what these are telling you in some ways, is they're telling you about yourself.

And, and perhaps the larger lesson from both these ideas is that we don't pay enough attention to ourselves as we go through life. And this is an odd thing to say, because lots of us, of course, pay intense attention to ourselves. We look at ourselves in the mirror, and we groom ourselves, and we wear the right clothes.

But what I mean is, we're not paying attention to how we're thinking, to how we're feeling. And if we did, we would actually notice times in our lives when we forget who we are, we would notice times in our lives when we feel proud of what we did. And we would notice times in our life when we feel ashamed of what we did. All of these things are very powerful guides to becoming the person that you could be.

[00:29:36] Chris Duffy:
And the idea that we don't know our future self, that that is an unknowable person to us. It, it’s not just about finding fulfillment in, you know, your career or your hobbies or the things that you do. It also can come with some very serious and, and, in some cases, life or death circumstances. You talk in the talk about how, uh, one thing that we do for our future selves is making decisions about medical choices, like a living will, or, um, you know, decisions about do not resuscitate. Those types of things and how those are important to make and to think through. But we also have to realize that they may change, which is a, a challenging thing to think of in a high stakes situation like that.

[00:30:18] Shankar Vedantam:
What I'm saying is that I think we should make plans for those future selves with some element of humility, of understanding that when you're age 25 and you're filling out, uh, an advanced directive for yourself, if you don't revisit that advanced directive when you're 35 or 45 or 55, and then finally someone is looking at that advanced directive when you're age 85, the 25 year old self who wrote that advance directive may have nothing in common with that 85 year old person.

You might as well have a stranger who's making that advance directive for you. So really the, the moral of the story here is, is not so much that we shouldn't try and make plans for our future selves, but we should revisit those plans with some regularity to actually say, “Is this still how I feel?” And then of course there is the larger element of humility, which is to accept that when we are in certain situations in the future, we may not feel the way we do now when we are in that future situation.

So it's one thing when you're 25 and, and you say, you know, “I care so much more about quality of life than quantity of life that, you know, if I had a life threatening illness and I had very poor quality of life, I really wouldn't want to continue my life at all.” Well, that's the way you might feel today. That might not be the way you feel when you actually have a life threatening illness and you have the choice of living for another three months or another three weeks. Those three weeks or those three months could be very important to you at that stage.

The simplest way to think about this is, you know, imagine a time when you were four or five years old and someone took away a piece of candy from you and you felt, “Oh my God, the world is going to end. This is the most horrendous thing that's happened. My, my sister got the candy and I didn't get the candy and life is so unfair and the world is a terrible place.” And of course, we look back at a moment like that today and we laugh. And we laugh because we recognize that what happened then was actually trivial.

And what's really happened in this process is that we have become different people. One of the things that our brains come equipped with is an immense capacity for adaptation. Because in some ways, our brains are masters at basically saying, “What's the world in which I find myself and how do I adapt to this world?”

[00:32:26] Chris Duffy:
It’s interesting to think about the, um, the babies and the young children as well, because, you know, something that we always laugh about, I think, is when you ask a, a little kid, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And they give, you know, a wild answer, right? Like I want to be an astronaut or I wanted to be a marine biologist.

[00:32:39] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah.

[00:32:39] Chris Duffy:
And we don't, we don't assume that that child now knows for sure that they are absolutely going to be those things. I mean, I have a friend whose child said, “I want to be a dump truck when I grow up,” which is a perfect answer when you're a kid and yet not a totally viable career for an adult, but we don't assume that like the, the five or seven year old self knows what the future self will actually do.

[00:33:00] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah.

[00:33:00] Chris Duffy:
And we're fine understanding that we're going to change our, our career goals and our desires and what we love and care about.

[00:33:06] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah.

[00:33:06] Chris Duffy:
Um, but as we get older, it seems like we, um, give ourselves less permission to do that, even though it is still happening.

[00:33:13] Shankar Vedantam:
It is still happening. Yes. And I think that is actually a profound insight, which is that all of us can look back at our four year old selves and laugh at the things that we thought were important then that we realize are not important now. But that same insight we often don't bring to the things that we think of as life or death situations today. You know, in 30 years time, we might well be laughing at those too.

[00:33:34] Chris Duffy:
We’ve been talking about this unknowability of a future self as a, as an individual. But it occurs to me that it's also something that really affects relationships, um, whether they’re family or romantic or parent-child.

Um, because, you know, one of the things that I think is a very common phrase to hear when you're having a fight or when you're having a, uh, a disagreement is, “You always do this. This is so like you,” right? Like that is kind of the classic, ugh“we're having a fight” thing to say.

[00:34:02] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah.

[00:34:02] Chris Duffy:
And yet knowing that we are not going to be the same person means that also the person who we are with won't be the same person. And I think it can be hard to give that same grace to someone else. To, to understand that when we say, “You always do this,” that's actually not true. It's probably not true even in the moment, but it's certainly not true in the future that they will always be like that.

[00:34:25] Shankar Vedantam:
Yeah, I, I think that's actually a really profound observation, which is in some ways, you know, we, I think, want to preserve for ourselves the ability to change in ways that we think are going to be good for us, right? But I think you're absolutely right. We actually fail to give other people the grace to change. Um, you know sometimes we we we get upset at people because we say, you know, “You were like this ten years ago. Why are you like this today?”

But we're not taking into account that we may have been different people 10 years ago, and we are different people today. And I think that's a very profound insight that you had here, Chris, which is that we want to give ourselves the license to become different people, but we're often reluctant to give other people that same license too. But the same grace that I think we demand is the same grace that we should offer others.

[00:35:11] Chris Duffy:
It has sincerely been such a pleasure talking to you. I, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this conversation and how much you've given me to think about. I'm sure everyone listening has so many things that they can think about and mull over and, and put into place in their own lives as well.

Shankar Vedantam, thank you so much for being on the show and thank you for the work that you do to help us all understand ourselves and our hidden brains. It's, it's been a real pleasure.

[00:35:32] Shankar Vedantam:
It’s been an honor and a privilege, Chris. Thank you.

[00:35:37] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Shankar Vedantam. He is the host of the fantastic podcast Hidden Brain, and he's the author of the books The Hidden Brain and Useful Delusions. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and upcoming live shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniella Balarezo, Chloe Shasha Brooks, and Banban Cheng, who can't hide how great their brains are.

Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who frequently let me know the truth about my own delusions, both useful and otherwise.

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