Maya Shankar

I instinctively just wanted to blame myself for this.

Oh my God, should we not have ordered the six week ultrasound?

Even though I'm a scientist, my brain wasn't being rational in those moments, you know, because you feel like you're a failure in some way.

And I'm so resonate with that emotional space.

It's so interesting.

When I look back on that time, it taught me such a valuable lesson.

You know, we talked about belief systems and, um,

Part of my journey in this space has actually been revisiting beliefs that I've carried from childhood that were worthy of revision, that I never thought to examine or evaluate.

So in everyday life, we're not waking up every morning thinking,

What belief or idea should I reconsider today?

We're busy.

We have wives.

We have responsibilities.

And it's easy to think that the things that we believe to be true about the world are based on deliberate conscious reasoning.

But of course, the large majority aren't.

They're based on

childhood influences, pop culture, what society told us, what a teacher told us, what a friend told us.

Our belief systems are shaped by so many forces and influences that don't actually always reflect the truth or how we would have arrived at our beliefs had we, again, sat down with a piece of paper and written down arguments for believing X or Y. And

One of the stories in my book, actually, it's about a woman named Ingrid, who feels a lot of shame around her family's heritage, around the indigenous practices that they engaged in.

And she actually has a biking accident that leaves her with amnesia.