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.

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

So...

There is a lot of brokenness in this book, and I think that's what makes it real, and that's what makes the people relatable.

I think one of the biggest lessons that I've learned about why change is so scary is that it does threaten our self-identity.

And that was a big aha moment for me because I had wondered why in my own life during times of transition, I didn't feel whole.

And I would try to rationalize my way out of the change, but there was something that felt like...

that did feel broken within me.

And to give you a concrete example, as a little kid, I was an aspiring concert violinist.

So when I was nine, I started studying at Juilliard.

When I was a teenager, the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman invited me to be his private student.

I was on the up and up and I was hoping to become a professional.

And everything was going according to plan until one morning when I was 15, I overstretched my finger on a single note

I heard a popping sound.

I had done damage to my tendons.

And over time, you know, despite all of my denial and recalcitrance as a teenager and the fact that I did not want to accept reality as it was, so I kept playing through pain and had surgeries and injections and all sorts of alternative therapies, I just didn't heal.

And so doctors told me that this was a career-ending injury.

uh tearing damaging yeah and so derailed your concert violinist career yeah and you know 15 sounds really young but when you've been single-mindedly committed to a pursuit from the time you're six years old it feels like a big ass deal yeah

You know, you and as exactly as I was saying earlier, I don't think I understood how much the violin meant to me until I lost it.

And so what I there was something so peculiar about my grief, Max, which is and I didn't have this insight in the moment.

I'm just reflecting to you now.

I remember grieving not just the loss of the violin, but also the loss of myself in this really foundational way.

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