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A

Welcome to the Huberman Lab 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 doctor Maya Shankar. Doctor 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 University. Doctor 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. Doctor Shankar is also the host of her own podcast entitled a slight change of plans. And indeed, Doctor 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 Doctor Shankara has achieved, she was a student at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music, preparing her life to become a professional concert violinist. But as you'll 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 talk about today. We talk about identity. Not just Doctor Shankar's prior and current identities, but of course, your identity. We pose 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? Doctor 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, etcetera, etcetera, and how to relate those to the deeper feelings that relate to one's ability to continually pursue a given goal, knowing that it's the right goal for us. We also talk 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 Doctor Shankar is essentially handing you a science supported roadmap for how to determine and assess your ideas, 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 element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium, the so called electrolytes, and no sugar, salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement. That's lmnt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelement lmnt.com Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, Nidra sessions, and NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app, turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try, and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga nidra and something similar to it called non sleep, deep rest, or NSDR, I can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor Maya Shankar. Welcome. I'm so happy you're here.

B

Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be here.

A

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 I'd like to divide it into two segments. The first is how we form an identity. And we'll get into your story in, I hope, a bit or more of detail. But when we're 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, et cetera. 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?

B

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, where 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 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 oftentimes when people experience identity foreclosure, they have to take a lot of active steps to overcome whatever biases or limitations they experienced as a young person, given what they were projected to do or believe, right? So identity, you know, it can be about what you do. It can also be about what you believe in the world, right? And so a lot of those belief systems are also passed down. 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 ask 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 kind of mindset is that we end up anchoring our identities very firmly to what it is that we do. And I certainly you were alluding to my personal story, right? 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 being a violinist. And then fast forward to when I'm a teenager. You know, I have these huge dreams of going pro and becoming. 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 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 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 with change about how it is that I should define myself. And for what it's worth, I don't think our desire as humans, to have identities is going anywhere, we're not going to be able to dispose of identities, and we shouldn't, because our self identities bring us so much meaning and purpose in our lives. Right. You're a podcaster. I'm a podcaster. You're a scientist. I'm a scientist. These things are actually really helpful and motivating. So we don't want to do away with identities altogether, but what 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 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 loved 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 you're little to have the ability to inspire new 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 feature elsewhere, and I have been able to. Right. I found it as an academic, as a cognitive scientist who studies the science of connection and emotion. I've seen that connection play out 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, they're in the throes of change, and they're feeling destabilized by that threat to identity, 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 can you find the expression of that elsewhere?

A

I love that. 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 observe a child playing with trucks in the sandbox, and we say, oh, they're going to become a contractor. We tend to project roles that are fairly high up the within occupation hierarchy. Right. 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 the fact that when we are adolescents and teens, there's a tendency to ask questions about identity, like, who am I? I mean, I don't know many 40 year olds that say, who am I? At one's core, one's essence, and we might change careers, change relationships, change geographies, 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 self, of who am I? And teenagers are notorious for trying on different uniforms, different friend groups, different behaviors as a way to sort that out, sometimes in ways that support them, and then 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.

B

Yeah, that's really interesting, and it's also something I'm very curious about. I mean, we know from neuroscience research that there are significant changes that the brain undergoes during puberty and other periods of adolescence. 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. Right. 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, who 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 face, because you said this one word that really caught my attention, which was, what's my essence? And 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 young children and adults showing that we really believe that people do have these essences. Right. And unclear what that even means in a metaphysical sense, I don't know what that would even mean. But I think that the challenge in believing that we have essences is that it leads us to believe that there are these truly immutable states about ourselves that we're 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 failed at 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, maybe all we are 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. Probably a lot of people listening to your podcast are self critical. I'm a very self critical person. We listen to this because we want to improve. 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 of self. 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 immutable. I don't know if you resonate with this notion of the desire to feel that we have essences.

A

Yeah, I use the word essence without thinking too carefully about exactly what I meant. But what I trying to say when I said essence is 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 once said. And I totally subscribe to the fact that neural circuits in the brain basically divide our sensory experience along the dimensions of yum yuck and meh. There's not a lot of in between, because the circuits ultimately have to drive either forward movement toward more right appetitive behaviors, as in nerds speak, or aversive leaning out. I don't want that. Or just kind of a neutral response. A yum yuck and meh seems to be the trinary response. And there is this component of childhood, I think, where we are foraging naturally, using our senses, experiencing yum yucks and mez and hearing yum yucks and mez from our parents. That's good, that's bad, 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 I'm not trying to be spiritual or metaphysical about it, but it feels distinctly different. And I don't know what it represents, but I think that's that piece that perhaps even as a scientist, I don't really need to assign a neural circuit to.

B

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 a feeling of awe?

A

Yeah. The first time I went to New York City as a six year old, kidde, I. I remember thinking, and I still feel every time I'm there. I can't believe this place exists. It's like a human tropical reef. Like everywhere you look, there's life. So that was awe and delight. Although I saw some things. This was New York in the seventies, and there were some things, like Times Square in the seventies, if anyone's seen that show, the deuces. I mean, it's like it looked like that. It was. Especially as a young kid, it was kind of aversive.

B

Yeah.

A

So it wasn't always odd, but the delight for me was in learning and certain animals and certain things for you as the violin. And I want to make sure that I.

B

And odd, by the way, I mean, it can be aversive. Right? So awe isn't necessarily, I think, in the western world, we think of awe inspiring experiences as having a positive emotional valence, but they can also have a negative emotional valence. So the two criteria for a satisfying and awe inspiring experience, and a lot of this work comes from Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley. Yeah. Is one, there should be some element of perceived vastness. This is all 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 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 awe when we feel the delight of a new scientific discovery. Right. Or in my case, 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, which I think might have been met as well 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 awe, we need to assimilate this new information with our existing model because it challenges it in some way. And it actually leads us to have more open minds because we realize, wait a second, I have this existing vision of 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 of 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 twelve years old or maybe eleven years old. I was at a summer music camp. It was late at night. I had my disc man, which is how he listened to things back in the day. I recall I had a cd in there. It was the Beethoven violin concerto by Anne Sophie Mutter. And 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 transcendent. 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 were getting at before, where it's like, it's just this altered state of mind. And the language I've used since to code that experience is that it was an awe inspiring experience, because I think both things happened right. I was impressed by the vastness of the experience. It also sent me through time in this interesting way, back to the time of Beethoven. So vastness can exist along a temporal horizon, and then the need for accommodation, which was, I didn't study 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 stream 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 this kind of delight in awe experience that you described.

A

Yeah, I'm so glad you described 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, well, then I went into skateboarding and that whole landscape, and then eventually into neuroscience. The difference between the New York experience of awe and I do think that's what it was, and biology, animals, and eventually neuroscience, 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 awe, 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 awe. But I didn't see myself having any kind of verb state within it that would change it or alter it how it is, or for me. Whereas with music, for you or, I think, neuroscience, when I realized that you could do 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. And so I think there's something about 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, and this wouldn't have been me, who sees a game of soccer or football or baseball or watches the Olympics and goes, 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. And I'm fascinated. A friend of mine who's a trauma therapist, he's not a neuroscientist, he always says, nouns are just very slow verbs, but verbs are far more exciting because they create this anticipatory activity. Anyway, no, I love.

B

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, I'm never going to modify the notes on the page because obviously I'm going to be faithful to what Beethoven wrote.

A

This is what made you a great musician and me, by the way, I was a failed violinist. They pulled me out of it because the neighbor's dogs howled. I was in Suzuki method. I was so terrible at it that they literally made me stop playing music just to protect the neighborhood.

B

That's adorable. And, I mean, we'll talk about the science of quitting, maybe later, but that was a great choice for you. 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 did, 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 a place for yourself, I mean, that takes an awe inspiring experience. And then actually, there's a translation process where you become something bigger than what you thought you could be. And actually, it's so interesting you mentioned this, Andrew, because I've been chatting recently with a guy named Reginald Duane Betts, and he spent nine years in prison, and he's now an 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 15 year old, he just turned 16 by the time he got his sentence. Yeah, it was totally wild, brutal. And he actually talks about the fact that 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 had 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 read a poem by Etheridge. Knight, who had also spent time in prison, had written this incredibly stirring poem about the criminal justice system. And he goes by Duane. But what Duane shared with me is he said I was awe 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 he wrote, I mean, he was so prolific. He wrote like 1000 poems in the year after he stumbled upon this book. And he ended up winning the MacArthur Genius award. He went to Yale Law School. I mean, he's just crushed it ever since. But I think you stumbled upon a really important point, which is awe. There's a fascinating science of awe and all the benefits it 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 a wonderful way to think about it.

A

Yeah. When we see ourselves entering the sphere of experience that is evoking awe, I do think something about it converts to this delight. Although I have to acknowledge that language is insufficient to describe a lot of what we're referring to. Right. Even the most reductionist language of biology can't grab the higher order emotions and complexity. Not 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 lyrics very easily and I love music. And I love classical music as well as other forms of music. Zero musical talent. You, on the other hand, got quite good at violin. It was interesting for me to learn that the violin was a bit of a rebellious choice for you, given 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 pressured to be a scientist or something else? And being a musician, was that initially looked at as a route to poverty or a bad choice, or were your parents a bit more cautious? Like, oh, okay, that's great, but maybe make that a supplement to your other studies and pursuits.

B

Yeah. So I'm the youngest of four kids, and kind of stereotypically, my three older siblings were total math whizzes. They were taking the sat when they were very young. Cause 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, had felt very stifled by her environment. Like, as a young woman who is very capable and very smart. I mean, she majored in physics. She was mostly, you know, kept to 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'd met my dad 20 days prior there getting married. So it was an arranged meeting, and my dad is doing his postdoc at Harvard in physics at the Society of fellows, and my mom just joins him after a winter break in the dorm. And everyone's like, hey, man, how was your break? And there's like, I went snowboarding, and I went, whatever, to Tahoe. And my dad's like, I got married. And so this new couple arrives, and I. 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 could 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 had two older brothers, and I have an older sister, especially her girls. She said, you can do whatever you want. I'm going to give you lay 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 otherwise. And so she was really hell bent on making sure that we kids were able to, I think they were. I mean, my 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 six, my mom brought down my grandmother's violin from the attic. So my grandmother had played indian classical music. So that's where you're sitting cross legged on the floor, and your violin's facing the ground. It's a very different style of music. But as, like, a parting gift, my grandmother had 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 violin 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 at 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 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, awesome, 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 asked the concert master, 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 practice their scales every day and practice a two s. 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 many barriers to actually enjoying the fun parts, which are 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 helped me cultivate a much more natural love of the instrument.

A

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic greens. Athletic greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens, and the reason I still take athletic greens once or usually twice a day, is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics in athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and it tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, etcetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D, three, k, two. Again, that's athleticgreens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D three, k two the intrinsic motivation part is so key. I've talked a few times before on the podcast about this I think now famous study that was done at Bing 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 removed the rewards. And the essential takeaway is that receiving rewards for something that a child was initially intrinsically motivated to do undermines some of that intrinsic motivation. So I have to wonder whether or not the fact that your parents neither encouraged nor discouraged your violin playing might have allowed you to fully express and lean into your intrinsic motivation as opposed to, for instance, in my case, we are distantly related, not closely related, but there is a great violinist by the name of Bronislav 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 couple of practices, I was convinced that there was no way I was going to live up to it, and I quit.

B

That's a high bar, man.

A

It's a high bar. It's a high bar.

B

I didn't have any such role models that I was trying to be like in my family.

A

Yeah, it turns out I'm.

B

But.

A

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. I worry about that today so much with social media and with video games, where in 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 then we start measuring ourselves against metrics that are not about the experience. That said, your parents, whatever they did worked out well enough that you became very proficient. Right. You succeeded in getting into Juilliard, which is, at least from my understanding, is 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 were you still enjoying yourself up until the point where you had this injury? That we'll also talk about.

B

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 up until 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? And so it's not also a one time experience, but there was a thrilling aspect to my musical life when I was young, which was, again, everything kind of felt like bonus. So one story I love sharing is about how I even got into juilliard in the first place. My parents. So my dad's a theoretical physicist, as you mentioned. My mom helps immigrants get green cards to study in this country. Neither of them had experience 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 be tiger parents in this domain, because they lack the connections and, 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 connect me with the right resources. And so one weekend, we were in New York, awe inspiring New York, and I had my violin with me because I had another audition, and we were just walking by Juilliard, the 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 Perlman to go in and out and Midori to go in and out. It was just yo yo ma, right? Like, it's so exciting. And as we're passing the entrance, my mom looks at me and says, hey, why don't we just go in? And I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, let's just go in. 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 that 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 a top teacher at Juilliard, asks if we can get an introduction within an hour. I'm auditioning for this teacher on the spot. Right. No idea that this was gonna happen.

A

Wild.

B

Yeah. He tells me he has what I refer to as a muted enthusiasm about my playing. Doesn't think I'm great, but, see, something he told me later, he liked my personality, 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 auditioned today. However, I take residence 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 your first scale in your first etude, which you will need to pass the Juilliard audition and also maybe, hopefully get you to 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 to figure out a path from point a to point b, she really just created a plate for me and said, okay, you're prepared for this thing. We're going to get you in front of this teacher. And that's a lesson I used 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 job that I wanted, which was to be a practitioner of behavioral science, did not exist. And so I sent cold emails and I pitched 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've 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. I mean, 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 and to see how amazing the aftermath can be. And that's what I got to experience as a young kid, amazing.

A

And so let's all express some thanks to your mom 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 also to integrate the feedback. And then I'm curious about this camp. 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 can get by for a few days before they realize you're not one of them. Oh, yeah, no, there's a whole other set of stories there. I love it. But I'm curious, you know, you're among very driven, maybe even obsessive kids. Were they nice to one another? Do you recall the kid that was the best?

B

Oh, yeah. Rachel Lee.

A

There you go. Isn't this incredible?

B

Oh, my God.

A

We remember these names.

B

Yeah. Total prodigy. I bristle when people say, like, oh, my. Like, I. 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 awe inspiring. I'm like, how is it that music comes so effortlessly to Rachel? 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 deriving 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 auditioned for the school play. Really rosy. I did art classes. Like, it was just really important to both my parents. I think that we had just relatively normal lives, and I was studying alongside kids who had literally left half their families behind in their home country, had moved with one parent to a studio apartment in Manhattan or in Colorado for this camp, and were devoting their entire lives to this pursuit. And so I felt like I was a super envious kid. I was always looking around, being like, I suck, and they're great, right? We talked about having a self critical personality.

A

I think a lot of kids feel that way. I think at that age, and this sometimes extends into adulthood. We have this tendency to try and find benchmarks of where we are. And sometimes that spell turns into a hierarchical, sometimes very lateralized. But trying to figure out where you are in the landscape of things, it just seems like it's fundamental to the teenage experience.

B

The universe shrinks, too, right? So 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 happened when I became a teenager. The first is that my violin life just started to speed forward. So Itzhak Perlman invited me to be his private violin student. You know, considered 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 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 years, when I was the least happy as a violinist. So I described to you earlier that incredibly awe 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. 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, we're all in this highly narcissistic state of mind. We're consumed with ourselves and how we feel. And I just felt like I gave some of my worst performances when I was a teenager. I often found, to your point about these pressure cooker environments. My best performances were actually just to the public. My worst performances were when I was in my little studio, having to play for my peers. That just sapped all the joy out for me, because I was just really tough on myself. That was a period of time where I lost touch with what it is that I loved about music. 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 twelve and then post twelve, the average joy was much higher before I became a teenager.

A

Yeah, 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 what we're doing. But if we keep going and we can reframe what those external rewards are, 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 delight as something that wells up in us 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. 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 buying MacArthur award winners all over the place, like everywhere you turn. And these people do other things, too. So they're like, oh, and then also d one 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 1ft in front of you and just keep going and not pay attention. But it's hard to do. Not by way of comparison, because I actually get excited about being immersed in a group 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 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, and it's a tough thing. It's hard for us to develop much in isolation, and it's also hard for us to stay connected to the source.

B

Yes, the source, as it were. Exactly.

A

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 producer, rock and roll music producer. He talks about the source. 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 Itzak Perlman 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 it 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 class C. I couldn't believe it. So, in any event, I think just.

B

One thing to your point, one reflection I've had, 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 world through a comparative lens. Right. You're 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 had a terrible performance, so that's going to set me back, et cetera, et cetera. 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 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 in my current life. As a cognitive scientist, as a podcaster, like, you just can't take those from me. No one can take that joy from me. And it feels protective in a really important way, which is, for example, I mean, I pour. 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 so much time and energy and thoughtfulness and love into making a slight change of plans. But at the end of the day, when you put the episode out into the world, 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 gives me a foundation that feels really sturdy. Do you know what I mean? It's just.

A

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, the desire for progress through effort and through focus. Those are music. They're not music irrelevant, but they're music independent. And that actually brings me to a very important component of your work. And your life arc, which is this notion of recreating and refining identity in new endeavors. So, if I understand correctly, and hopefully you'll embellish on this, you had the unfortunate, perhaps unfortunate 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.

B

Absolutely.

A

And that happened when you were how old?

B

I was 15.

A

So given how much of your identity and energy was put into violin, that must have been devastating. And yet you've obviously, I don't want to 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 of occupation or hobby or behavior, or perhaps relationship. Right. Relationships end sometimes by decision, death or otherwise, 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 were 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 as 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 truly indomitable, that just cannot go away. Like, your drive for curiosity and hard.

B

Work and human connection. Yeah. Yeah. 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 had to find who I was. And so I felt a dampening of some of my more organic traits. Like, I was less curious for a long time.

A

I'm gonna interrupt you on purpose. I apologize, but at the same time, I'm not apologizing. Cause there was something that you said in a prior discussion that just keeps ringing in my mind, which is that your body and your nervous system actually grew up around the violin.

B

Yes.

A

Like, that, to me, was just. I will never forget that statement. I wanna also thank you for it. That, to me, is perhaps the most profound way to describe an experience of identity, is that your nervous system and your body isn't growing up with something or alongside it, but that much like a relationship of a human kind, human, human kind, that your body is actually developing around this object.

B

It absolutely developed around the ergonomics of playing the violin. To this day, my right shoulder is slightly elevated relative to my left because of all the hours I spent doing this. It makes strength training really annoying because 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 undeniable. It's left this indelible. You know, it's 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 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 meaning and so much purpose and so much energy in life no longer exists. And so I think 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, 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 this summer touring with my classmates. I am at home in Connecticut with my parents, perusing their bookshelf. So, like, slightly less cool summer situation. But, you know, I had a lot of time on my hands. Cause 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 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 I just 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 behind the scenes that gives rise to language, my mind was truly blown. I was like, wow. I never thought about it. It's not like we with three year olds, not like we sit down with them. We're like, this is a gerund. This is a past particip, whatever. They just learn because they have these kind of light switches in their brain that are activated on and off depending on what language they're learning. And it was so fascinating to learn about language development, about neuro linguistics, about syntax and semantics. And so I just remember thinking, language is fascinating. Cognition is fascinating. And I'm also now wondering about all these other systems that are in place. Right? So this is what's involved in language. What's involved in the complex math equations our dads do, right? Like, what's involved in, what's the mental processing behind a new discovery or an insight or an 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, Andrew. I love that we have this connection. You said when you learned about neurobiology and neuroscience, you saw that there was a place 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 thrilling to learn about the thing, right? I would never have gotten the same experience had 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 science folks everywhere.

A

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 I think it's. I actually, I'll go a step further, and I'll do this so that you don't have to. And 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 they're accurate, and they're making an attempt to educate and draw people in from all sectors. Amen to that. I just can't hear a counterargument in my head or elsewhere where that's not one of the best things that people can do. So regardless of people's motivations for picking them up in the first place, 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 flesh out those professions with the greatest number of diverse minds who are going to have the best ideas. I mean, it's really, I think that there's a ton of foresight in what you're describing that, you know, picking up a book is now what, you're also now a PhD, I mean, in cognitive science. And you did your postdoc at Stanford. I mean, you're a scientist, presumably because you went into the bookshelf and picked up that book.

B

Yeah, 100%. And I think it was also role modeled 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, if you can figure out a way to communicate about theoretical physics to a general audience, I mean, wow, that's a masterful pursuit, right?

A

Well, Feynman. Richard Feynman.

B

Yeah, Richard Feynman. Exactly.

A

No one really knows what Feynman did for his Nobel Prize work, except physicists. You know that most people, you ask them, what was Feynman's Nobel for? And they're like, I don't know. I don't know. He said something about birds and taxonomy and how it's less interesting than quantum mechanics. Yeah.

B

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 part of my job 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, in the Department of Defense, Department of Education. And that same translation process was part of that effort, too. And 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, 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, which is the currency that academic institutions care about. And so I see it as just like a public good, what they're doing.

A

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. 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 realized, ah, the feeling of excitement that I'm getting from learning about neuro linguistics and related topics is somehow similar to the excitement that I was feeling about the violin, or maybe even superseded that excitement? I mean, at what point were you able to make the pivot with confidence that this is the new trajectory? 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 ceased to keep up or they had an injury or something, their identity stayed 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.

B

Yeah, I wouldn't say that it's superseded the excitement that I had with the violin. I would say the quality of 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 experienced the first time around. And I think that's a really high bar, and sometimes it's more of an apples and oranges type situation. With the violin, there was a really deep sensory aspect to the experience. I mean, I felt things, 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 very visceral feeling of, like, this is so beautiful and awesome, and I love it. With the cognitive science stuff, my intellectual brain was delighted, and it's just like a different expression of passion. Right? 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 compromised 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, three 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. 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 a very new major. It's 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. But that was when I thought, ooh, I can at least see if I can get into this major. I remember it was like a selected major. It was selective. And so I freaked out, of course, and had super imposter syndrome. It was like, I'm not going to get into 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 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? Like, 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 style, barging into classes that, like, really would only accept, you know, seniors or juniors. And I was like, I'm a fresh, lowly 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.

A

I love your description 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. 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, but I think it was, you know, the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

B

Oh, that's awesome. I hadn't heard that.

A

Yeah, I believe it was Dorothy Parker, sometimes misattributed to Agatha Christie, but I think it was Dorothy Parker. And what I love about it is that there's something about curiosity, that when it's genuine, it's self amplifying. It's an upward spiral, because there is no end point. Right. I mean, that's one of the. The things that you learn early in science is you learn, you test hypotheses, you get answers, and you get more questions, and you form hypotheses, and you do that until you die, basically. And they 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 it now, it's like they just can just 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 cognitive science. 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, or initially, 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 what came next as a passion and pursuit was this desire for human connection. At what point did you realize that? And here I do want to emphasize that while we're talking about your story, I hope, I can only imagine that people are starting to think about what are 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 everyone should and can ask.

B

Yeah, 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 my 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.

A

How's that working for you?

B

Very well, even today. Okay. I'm a good disciple.

A

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, 60 to 90, or the occasional, you know, you know, within 30 minutes, if you. If you have to. But nobody's perfect, nor should we strive.

B

Students. I'm willing to update my habits, but I'm a creature of habit, and I. There's a couple reasons why we, as humans, are scared of change. And I think one of them, which is incredibly relatable, is that I. 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 than when they're told they have a 100% chance of getting an electric shock. So we would rather be sure, certain that a bad thing is going to happen than to have to deal with any feelings of uncertainty and ambiguity. Right.

A

That result. I love that you brought up that result. It still is bewildering to me, because if you think about it, 100% trial to trial shock means you just. You have to take on the okay, bring it. Just bring it on kind of mentality. But if you did that for every trial and then half of the trials, you don't get shocked. You'd get the. We know there's a dopamine release from the lack of punishment. So the ideal strategy is the same, and yet somehow, people are averse to the uncertainty.

B

Yeah, we just. We don't like uncertainty, even though, again, the uncertainty is what drives that dopamine first. Right. And yet we bristle, certainly, at that uncertainty. And so I definitely am like, please, status quo. Everyone 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. It marries 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. The guests on my show and also the scientists, is there's this concept called cognitive closure, and it is the need to arrive at clear, definitive answers to things. Okay? It's basically the opposite of this open ended curiosity that you just described, which is with cognitive closure, you have a need to. 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 become a little bit more open to the unbidden, right. Like, to mystery, more open to all inspiring experiences, we can experience huge boosts 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 get change wrong and we maybe 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 selves will respond to that future change. So it's almost like a magic mirror. It's Maya in 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 us in pretty profound ways. Right? And when we recognize and we all fall prey to this illusion. So it's called the end of history illusion. So this is work by Dan Gilbert. And basically what it says is we fully acknowledge that we've changed considerably in the past. So you think back to your skateboard days. I think back to my high school days, and I think, oh, my gosh, of course I've changed. I would be embarrassed to listen to any interview I gave when I was younger. What were the thoughts I was even thinking? So we will see it. Absolutely. We were totally different ten 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 as happening in a vacuum, right, as being confined to just the unique area of our life that change exists in. But, of course, we are incredibly complex creatures. Our 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 I think a lot of your listeners are familiar with the research showing we're really bad cognitive forecasters. We're bad at predicting what's going to make us happy, what's going to make us sad, how long we're 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, that our preferences might change, our choice sets might change. We might change in these really profound ways that we don't realize. 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 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, veridical understanding of who we are. Right. Like, I have a pretty good grasp of who I, Maya, am and what I'm capable of and what I value 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 random set of experiences and opportunities and failures and successes that I've happened to have. Right.

A

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, et cetera. But for instance, you remember the name of this child prodigy, Rachel Lee. Rachel Lee, 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 the girls in junior high school that were particularly popular and perhaps not.

B

You mean Helen Lindsay?

A

Yeah. Perhaps not kind to her, right, exactly. Perhaps.

B

Were they nice to me? Not super nice, but it's okay.

A

Yeah. There's a lot of web searching nowadays for what these people are up to now anyway. Not by me. This is why I have a sister. We occasionally touch into this. She's doing great, fortunately. So, yeah, there's a salience to the negative experiences. But I think what I'm hearing, and I totally agree with, is that we'd like to think that we have complete or at least adequate self knowledge, but that we likely don't. 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, of course, the willingness to hear what they have to say? What are some of the. 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?

B

Yeah. So there's two information asymmetries, let's say that we're trying to solve for. 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 this had on my relationship? What impact has this 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 timeframe 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 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 this solves for 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 I vehemently 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, mirror reflected back on me. Right? Like, wow, I'm much more aware of how I'm coming across to that person because they disagree with me about something or I. They're not someone I would normally fraternize with. And it's just bred 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 gaps. 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. And then during my husband and I experienced multiple pregnancy losses with our surrogate and I found myself grieving 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 way. Where 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 for days after the losses. I was so disoriented there. I learned, oh, actually, you can respond in a diverse set of ways to grief, right? Like, you 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 self awareness through these more quotidian conversations you have with people.

A

I 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. It was the great Carl Dyseroth. Another incredibly accomplished neuroscientist, happens to be a colleague of mine at Stanford, who, he's a psychiatrist, and he said, 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.

B

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 know yourself to be. And I'm like, dude, we are social creatures. It absolutely matters how I come off to others. I mean, I think that should be a huge part of my self identity, should be how I impact others. And 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 with 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. I mean, first of all, sometimes yourself isn't awesome. You might want to actually optimize, 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 I just want to, like, be a lobbyist for caring what other people think just for a moment.

A

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, an academic culture, where feedback on lectures, you know, student feedback was critical. I mean, it is important, I believe, to be a selective filter because, you know, when in the old days, we'll 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 was, hey, Professor Huberman. Exactly. And then you'd look at their grade and you'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.

B

Yeah.

A

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 feeling back on their heels or feeling even ego or emotionally injured in ways that they actually feel is traumatic. And I think that's part of the problem, is that we don't really have a way to gauge, I mean, 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 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 if 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 a boundary. But you're not saying you're right, and you're not saying you're wrong. You're sort of on. You're 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 could say no or yes. But in any case, I just want to throw up both hands and as many votes as I can, as one individual to say yes, I totally agree. More directly, feedback and disagreement is great. Yeah, it's wonderful. And I think in science, you're used to people saying harsh things about your work until they eventually say, okay, you can publish the paper.

B

That is true.

A

I grew up in the culture of skateboarding, where, like, nothing's 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.

B

Yeah, I think, you know, I try 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 lead 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 belief 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 on, like, you know, saying, you know what? Based on what you just shared, I'm 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've thought about people who are 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 erred 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've 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 I use to decide whether it's meaningful feedback or it's not meaningful feedback. Right. But the locus of my pride is not in being right or having the strong conviction. It is actually in my willingness to have a more dynamic state of mind regarding lots of issues. Maybe that's just what it means to be a scientist. Right? Like, you have to be willing to update in the face of new information.

A

I am nodding for those that 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 at university back east. I won't embarrass him 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 it stung. Some of it stung. He was relating some ways in which I show up as a friend and I'm super present. Then I have this tendency. I'm pretty introverted. I'll disappear for long periods of time. In college, they called me dart because I'd show up at parties. I'd be there, and then I would disappear for, like, two weeks and just be in my books, say hi to people and just keep going 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. All right, don't give me any compliments. Just give me the harsh stuff that can be very useful.

B

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, again, that fuzzy, hazy set of feelings that you have around the emotion. You're trying to get rid of that piece so that you can bring a slightly more sober recommendation to the situation. So that can be really helpful. And then the other thing to do is, I think, when we're facing challenges, when we're going through a hard time, we do have an instinct to want to vent again. In this era of vulnerability and whatnot, we're told, like, yes, 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, they're a nice, empathetic person. They want to make you feel better. And so what do they do? They offer emotional balm 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 Ethan calls, like, a cognitive advisor, which is actively trying to challenge the narrative you're telling about your situation, actively trying to get you 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, you even said, lay off the nice stuff. I just want to hear the hard stuff you want to tell your friend at the beginning. Look, I'm having this challenge with my colleague at work where 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 situation. Rather than trying to make me feel better about the situation, I want you to actively find holes, poke holes in 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. That can be really helpful when it comes to resolving interpersonal conflict or trying to. To see where you might have been wrong.

A

I love these examples because especially the one where one does it on their own, it truly doesn't require anything.

B

You can be the introverted Andrew and still do this. You don't even have to go to the party and then ghost everyone.

A

Yeah, well, I don't. Yeah, back then, it would have been there were no cell phones, but there were smartphones, rather. But, yeah, it was a bit of ghosting. It was just, I can reset with small numbers of people that I'm close to. But, you know, I found at that time a need to go into an isolated space to do what I need to do to reset myself. But I realized there are certain forms of communication that are still required. Like, I'm alive. I still get this. I still get this from my mother every once in a while. She's like, you know, if you don't reach out, not only do I not know what's happening with you, but I also don't know if you're okay. And I'm thinking, I'm a grown man, of course I'm fine. And then I, of course, use the worst possible response at any son or child could give, which is, listen, if something happened to me, like someone like the police would contact you or the hospital would contact, which is not reassuring. So kids everywhere. Call your parents.

B

Her poor mother, Andrew.

A

I know, I know.

B

Just call her a bit more. Come on.

A

Still working on it. I'm just teasing. It is a work in progress venting. I'm so glad that you brought this up. I think that there are these buzzwords now. Authenticity. I do think that there are certain forms of communication that can be injurious to people, and yet I think having some internal buffers to all that incoming stuff is important. 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 going to 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, right? What people are saying.

B

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 this speech and it was posted, and I was looking at the comments, and I literally, like, anytime my brain coded a comment as positive, I just skipped right past it. I was literally just searching for the.

A

Negative stuff, as if the positive is generic and the negative is somehow genuine.

B

Yes. And I had to make it a mental. I had to make a mental note. Hey, it's okay to marinate in the messages that are saying that this really helped them in some way and they really enjoyed the thing. Again, for self critical people, I think it takes an extra step to remind yourself to also read the good stuff and to allow that stuff to count too.

A

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 gratitude. So all the more incentive to give gratitude and to be aware of when it's coming your way and internalize it. There is a small category 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 zero minus one risk of that happening. I want to talk a little bit about goals as it relates to motivation, because you've done a lot of important work. And what I consider is organization of this, what would otherwise be a pretty complex space. What is more important to most people than being motivated and focused and excited? Hopefully on endeavors that they enjoy and that inspire delight. But tell us about what can not just initiate, but what can sustain motivation. Because we've 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've really benefited from learning a bit about.

B

Yeah. So when it comes to goals, I mean, it's 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 oftentimes 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's 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 and behavioral science shows is that not all goal 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. So let me talk about what this means. So an approach orientation would be, I want to eat healthier foods. Right? Avoidance would be, I want to avoid unhealthy foods. Okay? So in the context of, say, your social life approach would 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, it boosts endurance, it boosts perseverance. Ok. When you frame something in terms of avoidance, success is met with feelings of calm and relief. So kind of like a. Ooh, wipe the forehead. Like, thank goodness I avoided that calamitous outcome. Or thank goodness I avoided doing that really bad thing.

A

Back to neutral.

B

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 as avoidant. Right. I want to avoid doing x, I want to avoid doing y. 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 get this really subtle shift. And we see this across the board in 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. 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. 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 vets and, like, 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 based in a psychological principle called the endowment effect, which says that we value things more when we own them or in this case, have 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, the way that we frame our goals, can have a really big impact on our behavior.

A

I'm fascinated by that result. Some people hearing it might think, okay, 9%. Is that really that great? But we're talking about a one word change.

B

And the scale of the federal government. Right?