Maya Shankar

speaker

1,518 appearances 8 recordings 7 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 5 Jul

Maya Shankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.

Appearances

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The Genius Life · 542: The Science of Navigating Change, Grief, and Uncertainty | Maya Shankar, PhD · 14 Jan 2026 podcast

Oh, if you go to this section of the bookstore, you'll find other people who've lost their jobs.

Oh, your mom is dealing with dementia.

Here's a support group for kids who have parents who are going through dementia.

And there's some value in that.

But as a cognitive scientist, my goal is to show that there's actually something so universal about the change experience that we can learn just as much from people whose stories look nothing like ours.

And

there's actually a profound amount we can learn from those stories.

And so my hope is that when readers engage with any of the stories in The Other Side of Change, they think to themselves, oh, wow, I didn't think I had anything in common with this person.

But then four pages in, they realize,

well, actually the problem statement's the same.

We're both bristling at the world's unfairness.

We're both grieving the loss of the futures that we thought were once available to us.

We're both mourning the past because a secret has been revealed to us and it's changed our whole understanding of our family.

We're both struggling with our self-identity because who are we in the face of this change?

Well, the problem statement's the same, then maybe the solution set is gonna look quite similar too.

Well, also, I want to make sure I don't romanticize the stories either.

I mean, everyone went through a hell of a time.

Because one thing that was so important to me is to truly and accurately reflect people's stories as unvarnished as they might appear.

Because you can read a feel-good story, but the next day you think, that has no relevance to my life because that's not my lived experience.

It felt good, but what am I supposed to learn from that?

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