Emily Falk

Like I could say to you, would you rather have $5 or would you rather snuggle with a puppy?

And you could choose whether you'd be willing to pay $5 to snuggle with a puppy or not.

And you can probably come up with an answer depending on how you feel about puppies and, you know, how flush you're feeling.

they're essentially far away from us in some way.

We can't imagine them as vividly.

And we can't imagine things as vividly when we think about things that are far off in the future, like, for example, a long-term health benefit of what I choose to eat today or whether I choose to get exercise is offset by how nice it would feel to stay and watch another show or eat something delicious that is available to me right now.

And likewise, those same kinds of abstract tradeoffs come into play when we think about other kinds of shoulds, like I should care about what's happening globally to people who are suffering in other parts of the world.

But when that's abstract and, you know, we know statistics about people that are, you

That's maybe less salient than we hear specific stories about the suffering of a particular individual or even better when we get to know people whose lives are impacted by particular policies or decisions that are being made.

Yeah, the social relevance system is a set of brain regions that help us understand what other people think and feel.

And so you might also hear scientists refer to a theory of mind system or a mentalizing system that helps us think about other people's thoughts and feelings.

And this social relevance system can help us connect and coordinate with other people.

And it also shapes the decisions that we make, like it keeps us aligned with other people.

It can help keep us on trends, but it can also do harmful things like maybe diluting us into resharing a false social media post.

Yeah.

So before the story I'm about to tell you, I had really never thought very much about Benedict Cumberbatch.

I mean, I think if I saw him and I thought anything, it was like,

There's a guy like he's a pretty average looking guy.

And then my friend Rebecca gave me a book called This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, in which an Australian author, Tabitha Carvan, spends a few hundred pages talking about how amazing Benedict Cumberbatch is.

She thinks he's incredibly attractive.