Andrew Huberman: [INTRO THEME MUSIC]
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where w e discuss science and
science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor
of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is Dr. Maya Shankar. Dr. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist
who did her undergraduate training at Yale University, her PhD thesis as
a Rhodes Scholar, and a postdoctoral fellowship also in Cognitive
Science at Stanford University. Dr. Shankar also served as a senior
advisor to the White House, and she founded and served as the Chair of the
White House Behavioral Science team. Dr. Shankar is also the host of her
own podcast entitled A Slight Change of Plans . And indeed, Dr. Shankar herself is no stranger to
having to make major changes to one's life plans, as you'll learn today. Prior to all of those incredible
accomplishments that Dr. Shankar has achieved, she was a
student at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music, preparing her life to
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 Dr. 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? Dr. Shankar shares with us the research
on identity, goals, motivation, and plans, as well as many practical
tools to answer those key questions that guide us down either the correct
or incorrect trajectories in life. She shares with us, for instance,
how to assess on paper goals of the sort that you would see on a CV. So, which school, which job, which
salary, which spouse, etc., etc., and how to relate those to the deeper
feelings that relate to one's ability to 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 Dr. Shankar is essentially handing you a
science supported roadmap for how to determine and assess your identity and
goals and how one influences the other. That is, how your identity influences
your goals and how your goals influence 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
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And now for my discussion with Dr. Maya Shankar. Welcome. I'm so happy you're here. Maya Shankar: Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be here. Andrew Huberman: 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, etc. 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? Maya Shankar: 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, 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. So, identity, it can be about what you do. It can also be about what you believe
in the world, 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? 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. You were alluding to my
personal story, right? I started playing the violin when
I was a little kid, six years old, became absolutely obsessed, and for
the large part of my childhood, I was first and foremost a violinist. I mean, if I had met you, I'd be
like, hey, Andrew, I'm a violinist. And then the second up would be, I'm Maya. That's how tethered my identity
was to being a violinist. And then fast forward
to when I'm a teenager. I have these huge dreams of
going pro and becoming just, like, 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? Andrew Huberman: 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. 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. Maya Shankar: 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. 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. 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. 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 the narrative I tell myself about my life, I could still
find that same core underlying feature elsewhere, and I have been able to. 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, 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 if 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. 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? Andrew Huberman: I love that,
and I have so many questions. The first one relates back to
childhood identities and how we often can project onto children
what they are likely to become. I see that as mostly benevolent. You 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 within the occupation hierarchy. Like any parents, you wish for the
best possible life for your kids. But I can see 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 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 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah, no, 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. The imposed structures, t he 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 is 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. And it's unclear what that even
means in a metaphysical sense, I don't know what that would even mean. 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. 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. 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 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. 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? Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I used the word
essence without thinking too carefully about exactly what I meant, but what I
was 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
repetitive behaviors, as in nerdspeak, 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 mehs and hearing yum, yucks and mehs from our parents. That's good, that's bad, that's whatever. It's neutral. But at some point, I certainly have had
the experience and I've observed others, I think having the experience of feeling
something that's on a different dimension entirely, which is this notion of delight,
which is that it sort of fills your body with a sense of so much yum that it gives
you energy to do so much more of it in a way that is almost on a different plane. And 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. Maya Shankar: Sure, d o 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? Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Like the first time I went to New York
City as a six year old kid, I remember thinking, and I still feel every time I'm
there, I can't believe this place exists. It's like a 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 70s, there were some things like Times Square in the 70s. If anyone's seen that show, The Deuces
, it looked like that, especially as a young kid, it was kind of aversive. Maya Shankar: Yeah. Andrew Huberman: So it wasn't always
awed, 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-- Maya Shankar: --And awe, by the
way, I mean, it can be aversive. 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 satisfying
an awe-inspiring experience, and a lot of this work comes from Dacher
Keltner, professor at Berkeley, 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, but there's this sense of mystery and wonder at just how vast either the
physical apparatus is, 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, like for the first time
reading a book about how the mind works. I just remember marveling
at this organ and just being completely in awe of how it works. And then the second criteria for an
awe-inspiring experience, 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. But I absolutely remember my childhood
experience kind of mirroring your experience in New York, 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 Discman, which is how we
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. 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're getting at before where it's like it's 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. 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 the vastness can exist along a
temporal horizon and then the need for accommodation, which, you know, 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 is completely gone from the passage. And there was just something so simple
and magical about that realization. So, anyway, I resonate with
this kind of delight and awe experience that you describe. Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I'm
so glad you described it. That, 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 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 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 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-- Maya Shankar: --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. I'm never going to modify the notes on
the page, because obviously, I'm going to be faithful to what Beethoven wrote. Andrew Huberman: 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
t he neighbor's dogs howled. I was in the Suzuki method. I was so terrible at it that they
literally made me stop playing music just to protect the neighborhood. Maya Shankar: That's adorable. And 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,
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 Dwayne 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. Andrew Huberman: As a 15 year old? Maya Shankar: He just turned 16
by the time he got his sentence. Yeah, it was totally wild. Andrew Huberman: Brutal. Maya Shankar: 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. It felt like his imagination
was so limited to the talk about identity paralysis. I mean, 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 and had written this incredibly stirring poem
about the criminal justice system. And he goes by Dwayne, but what Dwayne
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 was so prolific. He wrote like a thousand 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've stumbled upon
a really important point, which is 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. Andrew Huberman: 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, but 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah. So I'm the youngest of four kids,
and kind of stereotypically, my three older siblings were total
math wizzes, they were, you know, taking the SAT when they were very
young because they were so talented. But I think one antagonist to some of
those cultural forces is that my mom, when she had grown up in India, had
felt very stifled by her environment. Like, as a young woman who was
very capable and very smart, I mean, she majored in physics. She was mostly 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 had met my dad
20 days prior to their 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
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 handwrite
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 have 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. 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 violins 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-size 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, Andrew, I
never to this day, I have a really hard time reading music. 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 learn entirely by ear. So I started with the Suzuki method,
which, as you know, is entirely by ear. And then I had an extremely 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 concertmaster,
like, hey, will you teach my daughter? And he's like, sure. Never taught anyone before,
but I'll give this a go. And so we just made
things up along the way. I mean, he would play stuff and I would
mimic it, and I would let my emotions and whatever innate musicality guide me. And eventually, 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 etudes. 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. Andrew Huberman: As many of you
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The intrinsic motivation part is so key. I've talked a few times before
on the podcast about this. I think of a 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. Maya Shankar: That's a high bar. Andrew Huberman: It's a high bar. Maya Shankar: I didn't have
any such role models that I was trying to be like in my family. [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it
turns out, but, exactly! And so I think that there's actually more
opportunity in kids leaning into, and 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 we're 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, 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah, I was still enjoying
myself around the time when I auditioned for Juilliard, in particular, because
of exactly what you said, which was that everything was kind of beating
my expectations and my parents' expectations up until this point. 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. 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, it's like, a bonus. So one story I love sharing
is about how I even got into Juilliard in the first place. 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 exposure
to the classical music sphere. 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 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 imagine what
it would have been like for Perlman to go in and out and Midori to go in and
out, Yo Yo Ma, li ke, 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 a lot
of other terrible things, mom, right? But I had a useful 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 going to happen. Andrew Huberman: Wild! Maya Shankar: Yeah, he tells me
he has what I refer to as a muted enthusiasm about my playing. Doesn't think I'm great, but, sees
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 and 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
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, like, okay,
you're prepared for this thing. We're going to get you
in front of this teacher. And that's a lesson I've
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 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 they said yes. And so 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 going to 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. Andrew Huberman: Amazing. 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 do the audition on the spot. I think a lot of kids and adults
would have thought, 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 that you're not one of
the main, oh, yeah, no, there's a whole other set of stories there. Maya Shankar: I love it. Andrew Huberman: But I'm curious. You're among very driven,
maybe even obsessive kids. Were they nice to one another? Do you recall the kid that was the best? Maya Shankar: Oh, yeah. Rachel Lee. Andrew Huberman: There you go. Isn't this incredible? Maya Shankar: Oh, my God. Andrew Huberman: We remember these names. Maya Shankar: Yeah. Total prodigy. I bristle when people say, 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. 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 Rosie , I did art classes. It was just really important
to both my parents. I think that we had just,
like, relatively normal lives. And I was studying alongside kids
who had literally left half their families behind in their home country,
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. Like, I was always looking around, being
like, I suck, and they're great, right? We talked about having a
self-critical personality-- Andrew Huberman: --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 turns
into a hierarchical thing, 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah, your
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 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, 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. And 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, like, really tough on myself. And that was a period of time
where I lost touch with what it is that I loved about music. And of course, there's an ebb and flow. I had magical experiences playing the
violin when I was a high schooler. But I just think if you were to do the
average of joy, like pre twelve and then post twelve, the average joy was
much higher before I became a teenager. Andrew Huberman: 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
literally in the building, I mean, I've got a Nobel prize winner below me. Like the people by me I've got
MacArthur award winners all over the place, like everywhere you turn, and
these people do other things, too. So also D1 athletes, and they've
got five kids, and all their kids seem to be doing great. Who are these people? And it becomes very important in that
environment to just shrink your spirits, like, what's one foot in front of you and
just keep going and not pay attention. But it's hard to do, not by way of
comparison, 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 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. Maya Shankar: Yes, exactly. Andrew Huberman: 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 producers,
rock and roll music producers of all. Maya Shankar: I loved that interview. Andrew Huberman: He talks about
the source, so there are so many different trails we could go down here. Just one thing, briefly, is I,
again, am completely miserable at music, but I once saw Itzhak 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 seat. I couldn't believe it. So great. In any event-- Maya Shankar: --I think, just one t
hing to your point, one reflection I've had, and this kind of goes back
to this question of identity, 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. You're benchmarking yourself,
as you said, like there's a benchmark, and where do I fall on
the continuum of mediocre to great? I don't know, and yesterday I had
a terrible performance, so that's going to set me back, etc., etc. I have found that when I re-anchor
myself to 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, 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, 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, just like you. I mean, I see the labor of love that
you put into the Huberman 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. But what I found is that if I really
relished the process of making the episode, 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 gives me a foundation
that feels really sturdy. Do you know what I mean? Andrew Huberman: Yeah, w ell, 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 refinding 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, absolutely. And that happened when you were how old? Maya Shankar: I was 15. Andrew Huberman: 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 re-created 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. 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 a nd then, if you would, could you link that up
to some of 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 work--. Maya Shankar: --And human connection. Yeah. In the days and weeks and months
and year after, I felt terrible. It was awful because I think, in my case,
also, when you're a kid who's really 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 defined 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. Andrew Huberman: I'm going
to interrupt you on purpose. I apologize. But at the same time, I'm not apologizing,
because 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. That, to me, was just. I will never forget that statement. I want to also thank you for it,
because that, to me, is perhaps the most profound way to describe an experience
of identity, is that your nervous system in your body isn't growing up with
something or alongside it, but that much like a relationship of a human
kind, humankind, that your body is actually developing around this object. Maya Shankar: It absolutely
developed around the ergonomics of playing the violin. So, 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 this 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. Like, my architecture was
defined by this instrument. And so it's left this indelible
imprint on me that will never go away. And I think that a lot of us
feel 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. It could be that you lost
your mojo or whatever. 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, you know, theoretical physicist. So he's an academic, and he said,
I think you should just read a lot. Just, like, read a bunch of stuff. And I was like, okay, I mean,
I'm supposed to be in China 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 I had a lot of time on my
hands because I wasn't in Shanghai. So I started perusing the bookshelf,
and then I came across this pop science book called the Language
Instinct by Stephen 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 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 are with three year olds, not like we sit down with them
and we're like, this is a gerund. This is a past participle, 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 neurolinguistics,
about syntax and semantics. 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. 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 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. It would not have had
the same impact on me. So, like, shout out to pop
science folks everywhere. Andrew Huberman: Thank you for saying,
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
"dumbing down" of things. But I'll tell you, rarely, if ever, does
somebody just wander into a university classroom and hear a lecture by accident. Maya Shankar: [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: I mean, maybe if your
mom was at the helm, they all would. So mom's everywhere, barge right in. But I think it's 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, I mean, they brought a lot
of people into the curiosity and delight that is science or music or... I think that the more positive,
benevolent, 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 think that there's a ton of foresight
in what you're describing that, picking up a book is now, you're also
now a PhD 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. Maya Shankar: 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? Andrew Huberman: Feynman. Richard Feynman. Maya Shankar: Yeah. Richard Feynman. Exactly. Andrew Huberman: 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. Maya Shankar: I don't know. Andrew Huberman: He said something
about birds and taxonomy and how it's less interesting than,
you know, quantum mechanics. Maya Shankar: 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, think about how
many lives you're changing through the show by trying to break down some
of these more complicated things 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. Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I do, too. And right back at you, because
you're doing it as well. And so we're all better off for it. So thank you. I'd like to take a quick break and
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to get 20% off. So I want to go back to this
injury, to summer at home, to discovery of something new. Was it at that point that you
realized the feeling of excitement that I'm getting from learning about
neurolinguistics and related topics is somehow similar to the excitement
that I was feeling about the violin, or maybe even superseded that excitement? I mean, 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah, I wouldn't say
that it 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. So 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. 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 there was curiosity, and
honestly, that was all I needed. That was the little seedling that I needed
to see if it could go somewhere more. I took that as a very strong signal. Like, I care to learn more
about this, and I don't care to learn about everything, right? And I remember perusing the course
book of my undergrad institution, and they had a cognitive science
major, which was awesome because not all schools had one at the time. It was 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. 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 selective major. It was selective. And so I freaked out, of course,
and had super impostor syndrome. It was like, I'm not going
to get into the program. But thankfully, I got in, and I think
that's where I was able to connect, like, this little seedling of curiosity
to the actual pursuit of the thing. 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. 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 really would only
accept seniors or juniors, and I was like, I'm a lowly freshman, but accept 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. Andrew Huberman: 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. "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." Maya Shankar: Oh, that's awesome. I hadn't heard that. Andrew Huberman: 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 endpoint. Right? I mean, that's one of 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, even as I'm describing it now, 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, asking the sorts of questions
that I hope everyone is asking. 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. Maya Shankar: 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. Andrew Huberman: How's
that working for you? Maya Shankar: Very well, even today. Okay. I'm a good disciple. [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: Well, I like
to think that people afford themselves some flexibility if
you got to run to the airport-- Maya Shankar: --60 to 90 minutes. Andrew Huberman: [LAUGHS] 60 and
90, or the occasional within 30 minutes if you have to, but nobody's
perfect, nor should we strive. Maya Shankar: I'm a student. I'm willing to update my habits,
but I'm a creature of habit. And there's a couple of reasons why
we, as humans, are scared of change. And I think one of them, which
is incredibly relatable, is that change is filled with a lot of
uncertainty, and we hate uncertainty. We will go to irrational
lengths to avoid uncertainty. So one of my favorite studies
coming out of cognitive sciences is one involving electric shocks. And what they found is that people are
far more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of getting an electric
shock 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. Andrew Huberman: Right. 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
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. 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah, we don't
like uncertainty, even though, again, the uncertainty is what
drives that dopamine first. And yet we bristle, certainly,
at that uncertainty. And so I definitely am like,
please, status quo, everyone, I would love the status quo. Even when the status quo has
been suboptimal, Andrew, I've been fine with the status quo. So part of it came from my desire
to figure out, okay, how is it... Like, A Slight Change of Plans , 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? One of the things that I realized I
learned from 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. 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, when we become a
little bit more open to the unbidden, to mystery, more open to awe-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, right? 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. And when we recognize and we
all fall prey to this illusion. 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, right? 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, right? Like, 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. 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. I think a lot of your listeners are
familiar with the research showing we're really bad cognitive forecasters, right? 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, that 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, 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 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. 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? Andrew Huberman: 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, etc. But, for instance, you remember
the name of this child prodigy-- Maya Shankar: --Rachel Lee. [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: Rachel Lee. [LAUGHS] 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-- Maya Shankar: --You mean Kellen Lindsay? [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: [LAUGHS] Yeah, perhaps
not kind to her, right, exactly. Maya Shankar: Were they nice to me? Not super nice, but it's okay. Andrew Huberman: Yeah. There's a lot of web searching
nowadays for what these people are up to now anyway. Not by me, anyway. I have a sister. We occasionally touch into this. She's doing great. Fortunately, 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. 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah. So there's two information asymmetries,
let's say, that we're trying to solve for, s o 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? Am I different? Do I have a different set of preferences? Do I care about different things? So, in the second category, become very
inquisitive about who you are over a longer time frame and assume that it's not
a static state when it comes to the first bucket, which is how do we develop a more
complete and 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, 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 edifying experiences go. It's through those conversations
that I almost see this mirror reflected back on me. Like, wow, I'm much more aware of
how I'm coming across to that person because they disagree with me about
something or they're not someone I would normally fraternize with. And it's just 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, I thought I grieved in a very particular kind of way. And then during COVID 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. 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. Andrew Huberman: 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 Karl Deisseroth, another
incredibly accomplished neuroscientist, happens to be a colleague of mine at
Stanford who, he's a psychiatrist, and he said, you know, we think we know how other
people feel, but we really have no idea how other people feel unless we ask them. In fact, most of the time we don't
even really know how we feel. We're not very good at
gauging our own emotions. So credit to Karl 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. Maya Shankar: 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 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 cultural climate that we're pushing ourselves so much towards
the space of, like, all that matters is authenticity and being yourself. First of all, sometimes
yourself isn't awesome. You might want to actually
optimize or change some things about yourself to be better. I think that's a good thing. And then, second, 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 be a lobbyist
for caring what other people think, just for a moment. Andrew Huberman: 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. Maya Shankar: Me too! Andrew Huberman: I think I was
raised in a culture, an academic culture, where feedback on lectures,
student feedback, was critical. I mean, it is important, I believe,
to be a selective filter, because 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 feedback was, "hated, unclear"... Maya Shankar: Exactly. Andrew Huberman: 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. 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 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 in a kind of a flat footed
stance where you could move either way. And I like that. This idea of, 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 direct feedback and
disagreement is great. Maya Shankar: Yeah. Andrew Huberman: 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 c an publish the paper. Maya Shankar: [LAUGHS] That is true. Andrew Huberman: I grew up in the
culture of skateboarding, where 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah, I think, every
endeavor that I pursue, I try to approach with a lot of humility. And I think if I were to describe, 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. Like, my husband Jimmy and I
really pride ourselves, 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. And if you can actually start to
value that, if you could start to see that as a virtuous quality. I think historically, 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, beige an update. 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. 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. Andrew Huberman: I am nodding
for those that are listening. I'm just nodding and
thinking 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 a 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 of 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. Maya Shankar: 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 where 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 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, right? 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 actively 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. 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. Third person versus first person. And actually, there's some really
interesting neuroscience research showing that when we view our
problems in ourselves from a third person perspective, neural activity
in areas associated with hostility and aggression actually decrease. And so that can be really helpful
when it comes to resolving interpersonal conflict or trying to
see where you might have been wrong. Andrew Huberman: I love these
examples because especially the one where one does it on their own,
it truly doesn't require anything. Maya Shankar: You can be the
introverted Andrew and still do this. You don't even have to go to the
party and then ghost everyone. Andrew Huberman: Yeah, well,
back then, there were no cell phones or smartphones, rather. But, yeah, it was a bit of ghosting. I can reset with small numbers of people
that I'm close to, but 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 from my
mother every once in a while. She's like, 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 that any son or child could give, which is, listen,
if something happened to me, someone like the police would contact you-- Maya Shankar: They'll let you know. [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: --or the hospital would
contact you, which is not reassuring. So, kids everywhere, call your parents. Maya Shankar: I know. J ust call your poor mother Andrew. Just call her a bit more, come on. [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: I know, I know. Well, still working on it. 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. I mean, you can't be online, and
I think everyone is pretty much online these days, without having
some policies for oneself and how you're going to deal with this stuff. How am I going to be a selective filter? I think knowing the ends of the continuum
like, 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 it might be true, it
might not be true what people are saying. Maya Shankar: And like you said, you
were talking about memory and how we tend to over weight 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
anytime I brain coded a comment as positive, I just skipped right past it. I was literally just searching
for the n egative stuff. Andrew Huberman: As if the
positive is generic and the negative is somehow genuine. Maya Shankar: Yes. And I had to make it 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. Andrew Huberman: 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 giving 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. Maya Shankar: Yeah. So when it comes to goals, I mean,
it's first important to recognize that there's two parts of a goal. 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. Let me talk about what this means. So an approach orientation would
be I want to eat healthier foods. Avoidance would be I want
to avoid unhealthy foods. 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. 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. When you frame something in terms
of avoidance, success is met with feelings of calm and relief. So kind of like a wipe the forehead. Like, thank goodness I avoided
that calamitous outcome. Or thank goodness I avoided
doing that really bad thing. Andrew Huberman: Back to neutral? Maya Shankar: 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. I want to avoid doing X,
I want to avoid doing Y. It's really hard to measure success. 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. And we do better when we can
measure success and failure. It's much easier to track the number
of times you approach a salad. You approach something that's healthy. And so, anyway, so it's really
interesting to see how, again, 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. So we were trying to motivate veterans
to sign up for an 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 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 on 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. Andrew Huberman: 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. Maya Shankar: And the scale
of the federal government. [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: Right. Big organizations. Hard to argue that things change
quickly in big organizations. Discussion for another time. But eligible versus earned. I mean, again, I come back to this
possibility that there's something about words like "earned" that invoke a verb
state within us that makes us more action oriented, similar to being able to see
ourselves in some landscape that can evoke delight or awe, as opposed to just seeing
the landscape that evokes delight or awe. Yeah, I'm really hung up on this because
I think one of the major challenges, it seems, for behavioral change is that most
people do wait for the stick, as opposed to feeling into the carrot, so to speak. I mean, all you have to do is look at
the enormous number of people who are struggling with health related issues for
which there's now a lot of active debate. Is it genetically determined? And setting all that aside, it's just
very clear that there are a number of behavioral things, sunlight, sleep,
exercise, social connection, nutrition among them, that there's no pill
for, there's no injection for, there is absolutely no replacement for. So getting people to change
their behavior is hard. Telling people that they're
capable sometimes helps, but doesn't seem sufficient. So what are some more of these verb
states that people you think can internalize that give them access
to the real sense of possibility and get them changing their behavior? Maya Shankar: Yeah, and
behavior change is very hard. I sometimes bristle at some of the hacks
that I see online because I'm like, I don't think there's a lot of evidence
that supports that this works, so, you know, what I'm sharing today is actually
backed by really high quality research. One of my friends and mentors, Ayelet
Fishbach, has done a lot of this work at the University of Chicago
on goal setting and motivation. A couple other things for people
to consider, and by the way, I love this space because I'm obsessed with
goals, so I love getting better at things, and I'm using all of these
insights in my own life, so it is truly a delight to get to share them. Okay, sidebar. Andrew Huberman: Important
sidebar, I would argue, because you live this stuff, right? You don't just research it, you live it. Maya Shankar: Yeah, it's totally
me-search or whatever they call it. So who sets the goal matters. So a lot of us work with coaches,
trainers, mentors, bosses. That's great. It's really, really helpful for people
in our lives to bring structure to our goals, to push us along, to motivate us. But when other people are setting
our goals, setting our targets for us, it undermines a really
valuable source of motivation, which is being in the driver's seat. We love steering our lives. We love feeling agency. We love recruiting our own agency
when it comes to achieving our goals. We talked about how people
will go to irrational lengths to avoid feeling uncertainty. People will also go to irrational
lengths to preserve their agency and control over a situation. So there's some really interesting
research that's come out just in the last few years showing that humans
prefer to use their judgment over an algorithm that they know performs
better than their judgment, but did not involve them, and they're much
more satisfied with the outcomes when it's them that's in the driver's seat. And so what this means, I think, in
everyday context, is not to do away with, like, trainers and coaches and whatnot. Every trainer and coach who's
listening, don't hate me. Okay? You're sticking around. But what they can do is they can
build something of a choice set into your day to day programming. So let's say that at work you have a
certain skill that you're trying to build. Ask for a set of options to choose from. Own the targets more, you will
see a boost in motivation. Let's say you're working
out with a trainer. They're like, it's leg day, okay, I'm
going to own some of my targets, right? Are we going to go
heavy hard on deadlifts? Are we going to go hard on squats? Whatever it is. And so build some agency into the
experience, because nothing supplants that kind of intrinsic drive and the feeling
that you own the success or the failure. Again, I think to your earlier point, what
we're really trying to do with some of these behavioral insights is capitalize
on our natural state as humans, right? Like, what drives us. And it turns out we really
love being in control. Well, why don't we monopolize on that
when it comes to our goal pursuit, right? So we're trying to figure out those
areas of psychology that we can leverage. Andrew Huberman: That's fantastic. The word agency is so key here, I think. And it explains that earlier
result, the shock experiment. People having agency over their
response to 100% of the time, at least it's giving them some sense
of control and mitigating it. Whereas when it's random, 50/50,
rather, when it's random, 50% of the trials, then even though the outcome
is better on the whole, it's perceived somehow as a reduction in agency. There's something
fundamental there, for sure. When I started my laboratory and there
was an additional pressure to publish papers, this was before getting tenure,
I used to ask students in postdocs when the paper would be ready, and then finally
I stopped asking and just said, why don't you tell me when the deadline is? And not a single one failed. Or rather, I should put it in the positive
light every single time they succeeded in beating their estimate because
they were in control of that endpoint. Maya Shankar: Love that. Andrew Huberman: So it was at times
challenging for me, but they set a date. And also, by the way, if they need
to extend that date outward, we did. That was their choice. They said they needed more time. The rule in science that I think applies
a lot of places is, I always like the phrase as fast as I carefully can. Because you don't want to rush. Maya Shankar: Absolutely. Andrew Huberman: But that sense
of agency, I like to think, translated to more joy for them. Certainly there was a lot of
productivity from them, and they might be listening to this. And so they can put in the comments
whether or not I'm telling the truth here. Maya Shankar: [LAUGHS] Andrew Huberman: Most of
them are professors now. Maya Shankar: Well, that
probably means they succeeded. Andrew Huberman: They
definitely succeeded. The question is whether or not
I had anything to do with it. My advisors always said the best
thing you could do is support your students in postdocs and
then just get out of their way. Because the really good
ones, you can't control them. You're just trying to not
screw things up for them. Maya Shankar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of intrinsic
motivation there. Andrew Huberman: I'm curious about
the difference between lone pursuits and group pursuits, because I know you
understand a lot about groups, and I want to make sure that we talk about
groupthink, although that has such a negative connotation, but the way that
we tend to kind of revert to the mean when it comes to our thinking and our
opinions and certainly our explanations of who's right and who's wrong when we
are in a collection of like-minded people. This could also be phrased
as, what are the dangers of being among like-minded people? And then we'll relate
that back to motivation. But what are the dangers of
being among like-minded people? Maya Shankar: Yeah, well, in the
context of goals and motivation, it can be very, very helpful to be in
the context of like-minded people. And the reason for that is we often
don't see failure up close when it comes to people pursuing their goals, but if
we are in the presence of people whose values we share, who have a similar
commitment to doing something, and we see up close that they sometimes have
those days where they fail, or we have the vulnerability to show when we've
failed, that can actually increase our resolve that the goals that we're
trying to achieve are actually possible. I think the danger of being in the
like-minded spaces is around how it limits your frame of mind, s o when it
comes to the ideas that you have, when it comes to the convictions you have
around your points of view, it can be very dangerous to only be in the echo chamber
again, because I want to give people strategies to challenge their way of
thinking without them having to socialize. For all the introverts out there,
I have a lot of compassion. I have introverted tendencies. So I get it. One helpful thought experiment you can use
when you feel like maybe you're spending a little bit too much time around people who
are just reinforcing whatever viewpoints you have, is to ask how your belief system
and your ideas and your opinions of things might have been different had you been
born during a different time period and in a different family or cultural landscape,
and what happens when it comes to our viewpoints is that they become so tethered
to our identities that we feel like if we were to jettison a certain belief or
value, we would be jettisoning ourselves, and that feels way too threatening. It's way too destabilizing
to engage in that. But the minute you imagine what it
would have been like to have been born in a different family, with a
different religious belief system, with a different value system, all of a sudden
you transport your same self, right? I'm still Maya, into this new environment,
and you start to see how non-precious some of your beliefs are, right? Maybe they don't have the sacred
quality that you thought that they did. And so you might be more open to changing
your mind, more open and receptive to challenging your own points of view if
you engage in that thought experiment. Andrew Huberman: I recall you discussing
a description of people watching a game of sport that involved bad calls. Maya Shankar: Yeah. Controversial referee calls. Andrew Huberman:
Controversial referee calls. Yeah. If you could share with us a little bit
about that result, because I find it really interesting, especially the part
where the experimenters can swap the identities of the teams in theory, and
then, well, basically what people come to realize is that our perception of
the outside world is strongly informed by the group that we see ourselves
in, and often to our own detriment. Maya Shankar: Absolutely. Yeah. So this is a study from the 1950s. And to your point, we tend to
think, okay, we're human beings. We're really enlightened, we're
making decisions, and we're engaging in judgments of things based
on data and evidence and facts. And surely my visual
system wouldn't lie to me. So whatever I perceive is going to be
true and a veridical representation of the world and, like, not true. Okay, a lot of our beliefs,
and these are strong beliefs. I mean, again, they're what we
believe to be fact about the world is informed by our group membership. So in this study, loyal fans of
two opposing football teams watched these controversial plays, so,
where the referee made a call, and they weren't quite certain if it
was like, in or out, let's say. And depending on your loyalty to the
team, to whatever sports team, whichever side you were on, you were much more
likely to favor calls that were made on your teams in your team's favor. And when you ask people coming out of a
study like this, it's not like, yes, I knew I was biased, like, I knew that I was
basing my judgment of these referee calls based on my affiliation and my love of
Team X or Team Y, you wouldn't think that. You'd think you were an arbiter
of truth in this situation. You're just recalling what
your visual system saw. And I think that shows how powerful
these social forces are, how powerful our group affiliations are, because it can
truly change the way that you see stuff. Of course, it can then transform
the way that you think about stuff. And so that, to me, is a powerful reminder
that when we are in disagreement with someone else and we just try to bombard
them with facts, I mean, you're a scientist, so if you're hearing someone
say something and you're like, oh, that's not accurate, that's not true. Your instinct probably says, but have
you heard about the 2017 study, the peer reviewed journal article from PubMed? But when you recognize that, actually
a large part of our belief system emerges from the groups that we
identify with, I think there's an inspiring lesson that comes from this. So we shouldn't be too disheartened by
the fact that this is true, but it helps round out our understanding of why it is
that people believe the things they do. And as a result, we have more
resources at hand to try to understand how we can change their minds. So, one of the guys that I interviewed
on my podcast, his name is Daryl Davis. He's a black jazz musician, and he was
confronted by a member of the Ku Klux Klan at one of his performances, and it led,
talk about a slight change of plans , I mean, he just went on a totally different
life path and ended up convincing dozens of people to leave white supremacy
groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. And when it comes to Daryl and his
approach, well, one, he recruited people's agencies, so he never implied to them,
oh, I'm trying to change your mind. He always says, like, I
didn't convince them, Maya. They convinced themselves
to change their mind. So he recruited their agency. But he also tried his absolute
hardest to not question their fundamental and underlying humanity. So he tried to understand, why
are you part of this group, this vile vitriolic group? And some people would share, well, you
know, it's a family tradition thing. My father was in the klan. My grandfather's in the klan. Look, none of this excuses
being in a hate group, okay? But at least it gave Daryl an
understanding of some of the factors that were pushing them towards
the group so that he might offer that sense of community, that
sense of belonging somewhere else, maybe outside of a hate group. But if he thought that he was actually
just fighting over facts, over whether African Americans should be treated equal
to everyone else, then he would have lost that argument, because he wasn't
even fighting with the right currency. What was relevant? It was the first episode of A Slight
Change of Plans we ever released and continues to be my favorite. Because what was so thrilling about
this interview is that the strategies Daryl used to convince people to
change their minds again of these deeply entrenched, horrific views were
totally corroborated by the science of how we change people's minds. So he used a lot of really effective
strategies, just intuitively, like, he's just a mastermind behavioral
scientist just by virtue of who he is. But he showed genuine curiosity for
why it is they believed what they did, which is, again, extremely hard. And I would not have had the equanimity
to show genuine curiosity for why someone is in the Ku Klux Klan. But he showed that curiosity. He increased his question
to statement ratio. So it's really important to ask
people a lot of questions, and then he would ask people a really important
question, which is, well, what, in theory, could change your mind? Like, what evidence would I have
to give you in order to change your mind about X, Y, or Z? And the reason that I love asking that
question is that it presupposes that someone ought to be willing to change
their mind in the face of new information. So this harkens back to the conversation
we were having earlier about the importance of having a malleable
state of mind and being willing to update in the face of new info. Now, if the person in response
says, literally nothing will change my mind, okay, well, then, you
know it's not worth your time to have the disagreement with them. But if they give you a little bit
and say, well, maybe I would change my mind on vaccines if you were to
tell me X, Y, or Z, maybe I would change my mind on immigration reform
if you were to tell me this or that. Now you have an in, right? But you do need to get them into
the state of mind where they think, yeah, I guess in theory, I could
change my mind about this thing that I feel absolutely resolute about. Andrew Huberman: I've never worked in
public policy, but I feel very strongly that where I see failures en masse of
public health policy or educational policy, almost always there seems to be a
failure of even interest in understanding what motivates the other side's position. And this actually gets me frustrated
to the point of being motivated, where it's like people are saying,
you're wrong, you're wrong. Know this, know that to the
point of it's almost maddening. And far more seldom do we see people
saying, okay, I'm in a third person myself, or I'm going to put myself
in the other person's shoes and say, why might they feel that way? Why would this person be listening
to this individual as opposed to this public health individual? And look, without taking any stance
on this, because it's a much bigger conversation than we want to have
right now, I could look at public health officials that just completely
failed to understand the other side's position and vice versa. And that to me just says
it's a communication failure. And I'll take this out of the COVID
pandemic discussion as it's normally had and say that one thing that we know
for sure is that in the 2020 to really 2022, but still 2023 landscape, there
were so many mental health concerns. Everybody, regardless of where
people were on the vaccine debate, mass debate, lockdown
debate, regardless of any of that, everyone's stress level was elevated. Maya Shankar: Absolutely. Andrew Huberman: And there were very,
very few top down from, at the level of government, discussions about
how to maintain circadian rhythm and sleep health, how to maintain
health in general in that landscape. And that, for me, was
just really shocking. It was also one of the reasons why
we launched the podcast, frankly, is that I really feel that the
tools were needed by everybody and should be zero cost to everybody. But what was clear is there was so much
pointing of fingers and name calling and violence even, that no one was saying,
like, why would people feel this way? Why would people trust these
sources as opposed to these sources? And we can only conclude if
we're good scientists that the landscape was ineffective, right? It was just ineffective. And it continues. I mean, if you have the desire to take
a reduction in dopamine by going on Twitter and following this back and forth
that continues today, it's pretty ugly. Still, none of it seems
really solution oriented. There are a few people out
there who are trying to make it solution oriented, but not really. And so I don't want to go
into the dark aspects here. But it does seem like this
willingness to take a look at why others might feel the opposite of
how we feel is a very rare quality. And this gentleman, Daryl,
what was his last name? Maya Shankar: Daryl Davis. Andrew Huberman: I think I've
seen a number of things with him. He's obviously extraordinary, but
we call him that because people like him are exceedingly rare. So what can we do to cultivate
that kind of mindset? Because I'm not pointing fingers
here, I mean, I think we all have this default tendency to gather evidence
the way that we gather evidence, draw conclusions, and then stand our ground. And I think it's detrimental to everyone. Maya Shankar: So you're making me
reflect on probably the greatest gift that being a cognitive
scientist has given me in my life. Obviously, it's fed my curiosity, it's
been a delight to study things and learn things, but the greatest gift it
has given me is empathy towards people. It is the greatest driver of human
empathy to learn how our minds work. And I don't know if there's
a substitute for that. Partly that's why I started A Slight
Change of Plans . We have story episodes where you hear from people like Daryl,
but I interview scientists from all over the world about their areas of expertise. And I genuinely believe that the more
we learn about how the mind works, the more we learn from my field of
cognitive science about how we make decisions, how we develop our attitudes
and beliefs about the world, how we come to be the people that we are, the
more we can bridge these empathy gaps. And it's been profound for me. I mean, I feel so lucky to
have been steeped in this literature for decades now. But my hope is to invite people into
the conversation, because the more you learn about why people are the way they
are, the more empathy you can extend. And the more, I'm not even saying you
need to extend an olive branch, I'm not saying that you need to compromise
your own belief system, but at least you see that there might be an entry
point, a reason to have a discussion with this person who believes things
that are completely different from you. And we talked about gratitude a bit. In this conversation, I feel immense
gratitude that I have a posture of empathy as I move around in this world,
because I have strong beliefs on things. I care a lot. I care about reducing human suffering. And then I meet someone who I think is pro
a policy that promotes human suffering. And of course, the visceral human
instinct is like, to hell with you and your viewpoint, this is
horrible, this is intolerable. But because I have this
cognitive science hat on. It allows me to walk around with
a slightly different viewpoint, and I really feel that I'm a
better person as a result of that. And I've heard from listeners of A Slight
Change of Plans when they listen to these science episodes, whether it's the science
of loneliness, the science of empathy, the science of meditation, I try to bring
this empathetic spin to understanding, again, neuroscience and psychology, they
have found that they are kinder to others. And so that's probably the best
feedback that I've ever received on the show, is like, people are like,
I'm a nicer person to other people now, especially the ones I don't agree with. Andrew Huberman: And presumably
to themselves as well. I know you've brought up the
topic of empathy as a way to prevent burnout, right? And here we're not just
talking about job burnout. We're talking about the burnout
that is inherent to any long term pursuit that's challenging,
raising kids, being in a family. What is the great Ram Das quote? Think you're enlightened? Go spend a week with your parents,
no matter how enlightened you are. I remind myself that I love my parents. I love my parents, but it's just a
completely different frame shift. But also kind to oneself. I mean, I think there's starting
to be some good neuroscience at the mechanistic level of empathy. Clearly, empathy is not the
default state for most people. It's something that we need to cultivate
as a practice and that we can cultivate as a practice along the lines of empathy. But also returning to a topic that
we opened today's discussion with. We build these narratives about ourselves
starting in adolescence, maybe even earlier and through our teen years,
and we have various experiences. But I'm curious how we can continue to
build narratives about ourselves and the role of narrative, the I statements, the I
am statements, and whether or not you and we should all spend some time doing this. I mean, these days people exercise
because we know it's good for us. I hope people get sunlight because they
know it's great for them that people perhaps have a meditation practice or a
therapy practice or a journaling practice. But how is it that we can continue to
evolve our narratives about self in a way that promotes some or all of the things
that we've been talking about today? Maya Shankar: Yeah. So empathy is really interesting because
I think we have a lot of misconceptions about it, and we have misconceptions
about how empathetic we actually are. I would argue people are more empathetic
than they think, and let me tell you why. So, this comes from research by
my friend Jamil Zaki at Stanford. There're three distinct types of empathy
a lot of people don't know about. So the first kind is emotional
empathy, and this is the one that feels very intuitive to most of us. So it's this visceral reaction I have. You tell me that you've
had a really hard time. My eyes start to well up. I can truly feel your pain, and
I just feel what you feel, okay? And that typically, is what people think
of when they think of empathy, period. They overlook two other types of empathy. The second type is
called cognitive empathy. This is the ability to accurately
diagnose what it is that's causing you distress in this moment, and what it is
that I could offer up to you to try to help ameliorate some of your suffering. The third kind is called empathic
concern, or it's known as compassion as well, which is the actual desire to
help, you desire to help another person. And what's so interesting about
these three types of empathy is that they don't correlate within people. You can be really high on the
emotional empathy scale, right? You can have tears streaming down
your face as you hear about your friend's divorce, but you might be
really bad at diagnosing what it is that's causing them distress. You might be really bad at actually
offering up a solution to their problem. Or you might lack the will. Like, if you're sociopathic, you might
just not have the will to help someone. And what's so interesting is that, I
think in our society, this relates back to identity and the labels we give ourselves. I think our society puts a huge premium
on emotional empathy, and we discount people who don't have that visceral
response, and we just immediately say, oh, they're not empathetic. And this happens from the time that
we're really little, by the way, like the kid who's crying on the playground,
comforting their friend, right? They're like, wow, that
kid's got a ton of empathy. My older kid doesn't seem to
really care about people, but they might excel in cognitive empathy. They might excel when it
comes to empathic concern. So one of the things I was talking
about with Jamil on A Slight Change of Plans , you know, maybe we ought to
think about empathy languages in the same way we think about love languages. People have different ways of
expressing their empathy, and we ought to value them equally. And that's been wonderful, because I
think even in the past, I would have had a really hard situation, and I go
to one of my friends, and they just seem like, a little bit more stoic. And I'm like, do you even give a shit? Why do you not care as
much as I want you to care? It turns out they're fantastic
at wanting to help me and understanding what's wrong with me. And I love the idea of giving a little
more love to those second two buckets, because I think it'll allow us to better
recruit more empathy from others and also to see ourselves differently,
maybe for those people out there who are like, I'm not a very empathetic person. You might actually be more
empathetic than you think. The second thing I wanted
to share is about burnout. So you talked a little bit about burnout. People who rate really high on the
emotional empathy scale tend to experience burnout at higher rates. So you can imagine healthcare workers,
first responders, essentially what you're doing when you feel emotional
empathy is you're carrying the burden of the other person's pain. So you can easily imagine
how that can deplete you. And I think the instinct that we have when
we're empathetic is to say, you know what? I'm just going to shut myself off. I had that experience in 2020. I was like, there's too much
bad stuff happening around me. Like, I prefer to just not feel things. Thank you very much. And so I tried to close myself
off from natural emotional reactions I would have to things. But what Jamil's research shows is
that you don't actually have to. If you cultivate cognitive empathy
and empathic concern, those can actually be protective against burnout. So you don't have to do away
with empathy altogether. You just have to shift gears and
be more selective about the kind of empathy that you're investing in. So I love this research because, again,
it just opens your mind up to this whole world of empathy that you might
have thought of as more as, like, the singular concept and allows there
to be a little bit more grace space. Andrew Huberman: I love the idea that
there are different categories of empathy. It will also arm me with a response,
if ever, hypothetically, someone says, I don't feel like you're
really feeling what I'm feeling, and therefore you're not empathic. To my experience, where I rate
on these scales isn't important. But this notion of cognitive empathy, I
think, is really important and probably one that most people haven't heard of. I certainly haven't heard of it,
but I like to think that it really does exist and that it's at least-- Maya Shankar: --And you
might have it in spades. Andrew Huberman: I don't know. You'd have to ask the people close to me. But that it is at least as important as
the emotional empathy before we conclude there is something that I unfortunately
pushed us past too quickly that I want to return to because I think it's something
that so many people care about and live with each day, which is this issue of
challenges with ongoing motivation. And forgive me for doing a
bit of an anachronism here. I'm sort of jumping back to this
because I realized that I pulled us off to another topic, but you've talked
about the middle problem before and it's too important to not return to. So tell us about the middle problem and
how we can overcome the middle problem. Maya Shankar: And before I do that,
do you mind if I give just a couple short strategies around goal setting? I just want to make sure
I round out that section. Andrew Huberman: Not only would
I not mind, I would be delighted. Maya Shankar: I just want to make
sure, again, I share the wisdom that's helped me so much in my personal life. Okay, I'll try to be fast. Andrew Huberman: Please take your time. Maya Shankar: But people have these goals
to reach, I got to get them out running. So the first is to make sure that you
are, so we've already talked about approach versus avoidant goals, right? We've talked about how who sets the goal
matters and how if it's you, it's better. If you have some ownership
over your targets. The third thing is to make sure that
you're setting goals when you're in the same psychological and physiological
state as the one you'll be in when you're actually pursuing the goal. Because we tend to have what is known
as this is, again, fishbox work. We tend to have empathy gaps between our
present day selves and our future selves. And that empathy gap can lead us to be
very compassionate towards 4:00 p.m. on Sunday watching TV Maya, and 6:00 a.m. Maya, who I hope is going to be at the
gym, like killing herself with a really high intensity interval set or whatnot. And so if it is 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, probably not the best
time for you to say, I'm going to go to the gym every day at 6:00 a.m. If you actually are at the gym at 6:00
a.m., and you are feeling viscerally the physiological pain, the psychological
pain of having gotten up really early to do the workout, then it's
reasonable for you to set that goal. But it's kind of the opposite
of, like they say, don't go to the supermarket hungry. Actually, in this situation, you want
to be in exactly the same physiological and psychological state you'll be
in when you're in goal pursuit. It'll make it much more likely
that you set reasonable goals and you actually reach them. The second thing that you might
want to think about is, so I don't know about you, Andrew, but I feel
like I'm a goal purist by nature. So when I set a goal, the minute I,
like, fall off even slightly, the goal is gone for me, and I'm like, I messed up. Let's start from the beginning. Let's start from scratch. I need a new goal. I've already messed up,
and it doesn't matter. So I feel like unless I achieve
perfection in achieving my goals, I get very frustrated and I just
fall off the wagon completely. So one thing that researchers have
shown is that it's really helpful to build in what's called an emergency
reserve into your goal setting, or slack is another way of putting it. So let's say I have a goal. I want to go to the gym
every single day this month. It's really important and helpful
to give yourself, and you're not going soft on yourself. I promise to give yourself, for
example, three get out of jail free cards, three days where, for
whatever reason, it's okay that you didn't go to the gym, you got sick. Maybe you have kids who got sick. You're just not feeling motivated. It doesn't really matter
what the reason is. You didn't go to the gym. But the important thing is that you're
still on track to achieving your goal, even if you missed those three days
because you built them into the system. The final thing I'll say about
setting the goal is to try to capitalize on a phenomenon
known as the fresh start effect. So this is work by my friend Katy Milkman. She's a professor at Wharton at
the University of Pennsylvania. So what she's found is that in our
lives, we have these big milestone moments where we break from the past
and we're entering a new future. This might be moving across the country. It could be getting a new job. It could be getting married. It could be whatever, okay? But one, it feels like a big change,
and that's a wonderful moment to try to introduce a new set of patterns
into your life, in part because again, you have a break in identity. But two, it's really easy to introduce
new habits when a lot of your environmental circumstances are different. So I take a new job. All of a sudden, I have
a new route to work. Probably a good idea to not introduce
a pastry stop every time I go to work, because I no longer am passing
by that bakery every morning. So you want to capitalize on
fresh starts of that kind. There's also more arbitrary fresh starts
that exist for all of us, and this is in the form of the first day of the year. So, of course, New Year's resolutions,
the first day of spring, even the first day of the week, can be very motivating
because we all like clean slates. We like wiping away the past. We like embarking on a new
future that's clean of failure and stumbling and whatnot. And so that can be a
really powerful motivator. Andrew Huberman: I love these
suggestions because I do think that we like a clean start. There's something to that. Who knows why? But I think it's a universal trait. And perhaps shortening the time domain
over which we think about our goals and success and failure could help. Like if you just say the clean
start is this afternoon, because this morning didn't go so well. Maya Shankar: Yeah, y ou don't have to
surrender the whole week just because you messed up on a Monday morning. Andrew Huberman: That's right. Maya Shankar: Yeah. Andrew Huberman: I'm sensing
the perfectionist in you. And I know that it's a continuum. Some people don't, I don't want to say
suffer from perfectionism, because I think it's a great attribute in certain
domains and can be challenging in others. But I love the idea of having a
little bit of grace with one's goals. And also what you said earlier of making
the carrot compelling and not so much focusing on just the stick, making the
carrot more compelling, so much there. What about the middle problem? Yeah, because I do think that people
do tend to go hard out the gate, as it were, and then people drop off. Maya Shankar: Yeah. So, yeah, all the stuff we talked about
so far has been around defining the goal. And now we need to think about how we
sustain our motivation to pursue the goal. And this can be super hard. Again, behavior change is
incredibly hard to sustain. So the middle problem. So the middle problem refers
to the fact that we don't have stable amounts of motivation
over the course of goal pursuit. We tend to have a boost in motivation
at the beginning of the pursuit. We all feel this viscerally, right? I've decided I'm going to do intermittent
fasting or I'm going to make sure I look at the sun every morning, the
first moment that I get up, or whatever the goal is on that first day, you
are so motivated to get it done right. In fact, the first few days, the first
few weeks, and then you experience a boost in motivation, a higher amount of
motivation towards the end of the goal. So we experience at the end of a goal
what's known as the goal gradient effect. So we tend to experience monotonic
increases in motivation the closer we are to the finish line. So we might even see it in
marathon runners, right? They're like, okay, I only
have this remaining part to go. I can expend all my energy now to
try to get over the finish line. There's a lull, though, in motivation
in the middle of goal pursuit, and that's something that we want to
get ahead of, we want to solve. For now, obviously, we
cannot eliminate middles. Mathematically impossible
to eliminate middles. So what do we do? Well, we do something that you already
alluded to, which is actually we shorten the time duration of our goals. So rather than setting an annual
goal, right, let's say that it's the new year, you're inspired to
try to make 2023 the best year ever. But the problem with that is when you
set an annual goal now, your middle is months long, so you're going to
experience that decrease in motivation for a healthy chunk of the year, which
is not ideal if you set a weekly goal. By contrast, all of a sudden, your
middle is a lot shorter, right? All of a sudden you're dealing with
like a few days, maybe a day or two. And so you want to be mindful
of the duration of the goal. Another thing that can help keep
motivation high is to do what my friend Katy Milkman calls temptation bundling. So this has, number one, been my
go to strategy for having done every unpleasant activity in my
life that I've had to do, okay? Folding laundry, doing the dishes. I actually really like working out
like you do, so I don't need as much motivation, but sometimes I still
need that for high intensity days. I do need the motivation to
do, like, the hard cardio. So to get on into working out in that way. So what is temptation bundling? You're pairing an unpleasant activity
like folding laundry, doing dishes, taking out the trash, with an immediately
rewarding, enjoyable activity that can be listening to your favorite podcasts,
which are, of course, the Huberman Lab, and A Slight Change of Plans .
Obviously, it could be listening to
your favorite pop music, but the really critical piece of the temptation bundling
is that you have to forgo the indulgence of enjoying that rewarding activity
in all other spaces of your life. So, for example, for me, I
feel like a good pop song. I have, like, 25 really good listens,
and then it kind of becomes old hat. So just, like, the excitement
of the song wears off a bit. So there have been times where I'll
be, like, cooking with my husband, and he's like, hey, why don't we
play, you love Casey Musgraves, why don't we play that album? And I'm like, no, that's an
album I can only listen to when I'm, like, lifting weights. Andrew Huberman: Maintain the potency. Maya Shankar: You have to
maintain the potency, right? You don't allow yourself to get the joy
and edification of the Huberman Lab when you're not taking a walk and getting
exposure to that morning sunlight. And it's such a simple strategy
when you think about it. But I have found myself looking forward
to really annoying tasks that I have to get done because I know I'm going
to get the enjoyment of something really fun that accompanies it. Andrew Huberman: Fantastic. Is it important that the thing that
one enjoys be done simultaneously? So folding laundry while watching
the Netflix thing or listening to a particular piece of music? Maya Shankar: Yeah, you want
them to coexist, because then again, you get that immediately. Most of the time, the things
that we lament doing have really positive long term outcomes. If I'm in the habit of keeping my house
clean, there's long term benefits. If I'm in the habit of
exercising or eating healthily, there's long term benefits. But I don't often feel
the rewards in real time. So what you're trying to do is
give yourself that rush of joy and excitement that accompanies the
immediately rewarding activity so that in your mind, even just, like
neurally, the two things are coexisting. Andrew Huberman: I love it because
it has such firm grounding in the neurobiology of reward and aversion
and how to overcome aversion. There's deep neuroscience around this, but
I've never heard it presented that way. So thank you for those incredibly clear
and actionable tools for motivation, because so many people struggle with that. Maya Shankar: Yeah. Andrew Huberman: And I
hear that all the time. Maya Shankar: And I think
you talked about aversion. And actually, this is really important. So when we think about returning to our
goals, which is often the hard thing. So you do it on a Monday, and you have
that same goal on a Tuesday, and then on a Wednesday, and on Thursday, and by
Thursday, you're kind of like, oh, my God, it was so hard the first few days. Do I really want to go back and
do the same workout on a Thursday? What's really helpful here to avoid some
of that aversion is to be mindful of the way in which our minds process memories. So when we reflect back on how much we
enjoyed or didn't enjoy an experience, we don't give equal weight to every moment. Each moment doesn't get uniform weight. Instead, we tend to give more weight to
what's called the peak of the experience. So the experience that was most
emotionally intense, the part of the experience that was the most emotionally
intense, and the end of the experience. So this is work done by Nobel
laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator, Amos Tversky. So the peak end rule
is what this is called. So you put a lot of weight on, again,
that really emotionally intense moment of the experience and the end. Now, researchers have studied this in the
context of lots of unpleasant activities. So in some studies, people are forced to
submerge their hands in ice cold water, or they looked at colonoscopies, for
example, and how unpleasant those are. And what they found is that
this is so interesting. Okay, I'm nerding out a little bit because
I just think that this field is so cool. Andrew Huberman: Nerding
out isn't just tolerated. It is encouraged on this podcast, Maya Shankar: I'm having a
moment with cognitive science. But this is such cool
research, because what these researchers did, it's so clever. If you elongate the unpleasant experience
by a couple of minutes, let's say, so, the hands in freezing cold ice water or
the colonoscopy, but you make those last few minutes of the unpleasant experience
slightly less unpleasant than the end of the experience would otherwise have been. Right, had you just ended the colonoscopy
procedure as planned, had you just taken the hands right out of the ice bucket by,
for example, increasing the temperature of the water by a degree, or use your
imagination, whatever the equivalent. Andrew Huberman: How can
you make a colonoscopy less? Maya Shankar: [LAUGHS] There are
mechanisms by which the pain can be less. Andrew Huberman: [LAUGHS]
Physicians everywhere know them, but we are oblivious to them. Maya Shankar: Anyway, you guys can
do the mental work of figuring out what the equivalent is on Google. What they find is that people look
back on the experience more favorably. They have a more positive
impression of the experience. Now, again, this is what's so
miraculous about this finding. The overall duration of the unpleasant
experience has been extended. There are more minutes of
overall suffering, right? But the last few minutes are less bad
than they would have been otherwise. And so people are, they view
the experience more favorably. In the case of the colonoscopies,
they were actually more likely to return for follow up visits,
for their annual checkups. And so what does this mean in daily life? Well, what it can mean is, let's say you
are literally killing yourself at the gym. You have the hardest workout
that you've ever had. Tack on a few minutes to the end of
the workout that are still unpleasant, so you're still coding them as being
part of the unpleasant working out experience, but are a little bit less
intense and less painful than the workout end would have been otherwise,
you might be more likely to return and actually do the hard workout. Andrew Huberman: Can we also
say if somebody really enjoys their training, that the opposite
would be effective as well? That perhaps if they really want to push
it hard at the end, because that's the sensation that they particularly enjoy,
that that could serve, presumably, the memory systems and the reward systems
of the brain such that they are more likely to return to the workout again. Maya Shankar: Absolutely. You raise a fantastic point, which
is when we talk about enjoyment in these contexts, it is all subjective. So I actually kind of love the
feeling like, I'm going to die, because my heart is racing. So, I mean, for whatever reason, I'm
just wired to love exercise, right. And I love a heart
strength training workout. And so for me, what enjoyment might
look like at the end is really intense. Right. That might be what brings me back. But in other domains, absolutely
not, like the colonoscopy situation. I do not want that to be
an unpleasant experience. And so there are lots of other domains
in life where if you just tack on a few of the few minutes onto something
that's really tedious or really hard or really painful, it can make you
more likely to commit to it later. But it's an excellent point. In all of these studies, you have to
consider who the person is and what their natural psychology is like. And for everyone listening, you
want to tailor these recommendations to who you are as a person. Andrew Huberman: Well, there are
certain life demands that I find incredibly aversive, so I'm going
to use this approach for those. I'm also going to use them in the
context of things I really enjoy. Because if one has the opportunity, I
believe, to further reinforce the things that bring us joy, why wouldn't we? Maya Shankar: Absolutely. Andrew Huberman:
Fantastic recommendations. Listen, I could ask you 1,000
more questions, and my hope is that you'll come back-- Maya Shankar: --I'd love to-- Andrew Huberman: --so that I can
ask you those 1,000+ more questions. I have to say, it is exceedingly rare
that I talk to somebody either on the podcast or elsewhere, frankly, in
my life, that has such an incredibly wide breadth of knowledge and yet has
so much depth of knowledge as well. It's clear that your many experiences
through music and cognitive science, podcasting, and by the way, we're
going to provide links to your podcast in the show note captions so that
people can hear more from you as they should, and also your work in policy. You've put yourself in a lot
of different domains, and I think that itself is inspiring. And whether or not it's by way
of curiosity, human connection, or both, presumably it's both
and many other things as well. I know I speak on behalf
of many, many people. I just say thank you so much for
doing the work that you do, for continuing along these pursuits. I'm excited to hear where it might
evolve in the future still, and frankly, just for being you, because
it's clear that your enthusiasm, your curiosity, and your generosity
with useful information is immense. So thank you ever so much. Maya Shankar: Well, that's so gracious
and kind of you to say, Andrew. And these conversations, like the one we
just had, I mean, it's why I do the work. It's so much fun and so interesting, and
you've given me so much food for thought. It really was a conversation, not an
interview, and that's such a gift. And so I just feel gratitude that
I can share my body of work and all the insights I've learned along
the way with your listeners, and I really hope it's helpful to them. Andrew Huberman: It certainly is, and
it's been an honor to have you here. So let's do it again. Maya Shankar: Yes, let's do it again. Thanks so much. Andrew Huberman: Thank you. Thank you for joining me for
today's discussion about identity and goals and motivation with Dr. Maya Shankar. If you're learning from and or
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