Michael Norton

speaker

351 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 8 Aug

Michael Norton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · Why Rituals Are So Important & Healthy Living Made Simple – SYSK Choice · 11 Apr 2026 podcast

You know, people really want to make sure they have time to enact those rituals that matter to them.

If you look very broadly at the function of rituals, it's sometimes the case that we are enacting a ritual with some goal in mind, and sometimes we actually achieve that goal, but at other times we're enacting a ritual and it ends up actually helping in a different way.

So one example of this that I find very interesting are rain dances, rain rituals.

In cultures where there's drought, many independent times humans have come up with the idea of some sort of dance or ritual to try to encourage rain.

Now, we know that it is unlike we at least we have no evidence that our movements on the ground will cause it to rain.

So why would so many cultures engage in these sorts of activities?

And of course, one reason is that in times of drought, what happens is social conflict starts to happen with scarce resources.

I don't take care of you.

You don't take care of me.

And the kind of fabric starts to fray of our society.

When you engage in these rituals together, what you're saying is we have a shared history together.

We are a people.

And by the way, people have been doing this for hundreds and thousands of years, and they got through it also.

So maybe we can get through it as well.

So you can see that they're trying to make it rain, and that's probably not going to work.

But by enacting these rituals, they're actually accomplishing an incredibly important goal, which is making sure that we stay together rather than drift apart.

It's so interesting to think about the inside, the ritual versus observing the ritual, whether the experience is the same or not.

In fact, if you think about as a social scientist, if I observe.

a religious ceremony, I'm Irish Catholic, so if I observe a Catholic mass,

everyone in the church is engaged in the exact same actions.

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