Michael Norton

We still rely on those for a lot.

But we also can come from the ground up and make up our own.

solitary some are and then some are with the goal of connecting so we use them you know to calm myself down for example if i have to go give a presentation but teams also will use rituals for example before a big sports match a soccer team or a football team will have their own rituals and there what they're trying to do is actually bond together so again interestingly we use them in very different ways in different aspects of our lives

know rafael nadal can stand uh in public and do his unusual pre-serve rituals on television and we think nothing of it for ourselves we're sort of aware that we shouldn't do that in front of a crowd because they might say something is wrong with mike and so we do in fact often do them privately i mentioned going into the bathroom

to psych yourself up in the mirror, one of the first thing you do when you go in there is check under the stall to make sure nobody's in there so that you can talk to yourself in the way that you need to talk to yourself.

So we have this sense of my rituals are private to me.

At the same time, there are many rituals that by their nature occur in a group.

So if you think of family rituals in the US, you might think of Thanksgiving as a kind of a classic family ritual.

there we all know what thanksgiving is there's some sort of turkey involved and the family gets together but even there people are choosing their own pies they're choosing what time they eat they're making it their own and imbuing it with their own traditions so you see often people pulling from history and tradition

pulling in some of their own creations.

And then, as you said, sometimes those then get passed down.

So the rituals that I do at Thanksgiving with my family, my daughter may very well do some of those with her family if she chooses to have kids, you know, in 30 years.

The earliest known text Gilgamesh actually has rituals in it.

So from the very first time that we can see people recording things, we see that people are reporting on their rituals.

And in fact, if you think about with archeology, how we identify that a group of people had a culture,

it's very often we look to see if they bury people ceremonially or not so dinosaurs the bones are just all over the place we know that dinosaurs did not have funerals for each other there's no pattern to it but with humans even thousands and thousands of years ago we see them burying people very carefully with treasured objects

and with care and that tells us really that that was a very early ritual and that means that that was a culture or that was a group that mattered to each other they do go very back very far back and they are very deeply embedded in human psychology but are rituals also inherent in other creatures

The experts are mixed on that for sure.

The closest species that many people believe have rituals are elephants who have what appear to be mourning or grieving rituals.

Not all elephants do this, but if you observe some elephant groups, they will when one of the elephants dies, they will mourn in a sense.