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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the enchanted world of Harry Potter, the young wizard discovers a mysterious artifact known as the Mirror of Erised.
Chapter 2: What does the Mirror of Erised symbolize in our search for self-knowledge?
Carved into its frame is a cryptic inscription. The words make no sense. You have to read them backward to reveal the mirror's true purpose. I show not your face, but your heart's desire. When young Harry looks in the mirror, he sees himself ensconced in the loving embrace of a family he never knew.
When his friend Ron gazes into the glass, he sees himself finally stepping out of the shadows and outshining others. The vision presented by the mirror of Erised is alluring, but treacherous. Albus Dumbledore, the wise headmaster of Harry's school, warns that men have wasted away in front of it, even gone mad.
The danger lies in the lure of a single perfect image, a vision of the self so captivating that viewers lose themselves in it. Many of us spend decades searching for a mirror of Erised. We ask ourselves, who am I really? What do I really want? These questions are the prelude to the thing we really desire.
Once I know who I am, once I know what I want, surely I will then know what will make me happy. This week on Hidden Brain, why the search for self-knowledge can feel like a mirage, and how to build ourselves a more accurate mirror. From our first days in school, we are taught that the goal of education is to know the world.
We go about mastering the laws of physics, the turning points of revolutions, the syntax of foreign languages. But we're also told there is a deeper requirement for a well-lived life, to know thyself. Acquiring self-knowledge is supremely important, but also very difficult. There's no textbook that's been written about you.
At the University of Chicago, Eric Oliver has long pondered what it would mean to have such a textbook. Eric Oliver, welcome to Hidden Brain.
It is great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.
Eric, I want to talk about your own journey of self-exploration. When you were in high school, a teacher whom you admired introduced you to the famous admonition by Socrates to know thyself. How did this advice land with you and your classmates?
It landed really well. I was having a very bumpy adolescence, as most adolescents experience, and really just unsure of who I was or where I was going. And I had this wonderful teacher, Mrs. Malone. And one day she wrote, know thyself on the blackboard.
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Chapter 3: How can we better understand our true selves?
Tell me what happened in that moment, Eric.
Well, I was standing on the sidewalk of a very, very busy street in New Jersey. And I'm standing there right on the curb. And I was just carrying around so much pain. And it occurred to me that, oh, all this pain would go away if I just stepped in front of the speeding truck that was coming towards me.
And then that impulse, I've never had an impulse like that before, scared the daylights out of me. because A, it was this kind of very strong, self-destructive impulse. And B, you know, getting run over by a garbage truck in central New Jersey seemed a truly humiliating way to go. So it was at that moment that I said, okay, I need to fix things.
And that's really when I started pursuing therapy in great detail.
I'm wondering, as you went through these decades trying to find yourself and finding yourself coming up short, what did you tell yourself? Did you just say, I'm looking in the wrong place or I haven't looked hard enough?
Well, I think in my 20s, like a lot of people, I was chasing this gold star illusion.
I thought, well, whatever dissatisfaction I'm having now, if I could just get that next gold star, so if I could just finish my PhD, if I could just get that great job, if I could just buy the perfect house, all of these things that we think are so important, then all of these problems and discontentment that I'm feeling will somehow or another just solve themselves and go away.
And what I was finding was just the opposite. The more I was going further down the path of this gold star trajectory, the worse I seemed to be doing.
Eric spent years trying to find himself in order to understand how to become happy and fulfilled. Eventually, he came to realize that the search was misguided. When we come back, the surprising reason Eric couldn't find the self he was looking for. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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Chapter 4: What challenges arise in the pursuit of self-knowledge?
And everything that we are is, in a lot of ways, an elaboration on these self-processes that started with Luca. And it gets even more complicated because once you start looking at your cellular structure, you begin to realize there is no single being there. For example, each of our cells contain mitochondria.
And mitochondria are interesting because they have an entirely different DNA than the DNA that programs for us. And so, in a lot of ways, we're an amalgamation of two different species at the cellular level. And then, of course, we're multicellular, so we're all of these cells coming together and carrying around also a microbiome with thousands of other species kind of living in and amongst us.
And even this sense of perception and consciousness that we have is really the orchestration of all of these cells coming together. And once you begin to appreciate that that's your physical reality, that that's what's behind this experience of being, you realize there's not really a single solitary I there. It's much more of a we.
It's also the case that I think when we think about ourselves, all of us have had the experience of wanting to be kind and good people, but then suddenly finding ourselves acting selfishly. We might want to be patient people, but then we find ourselves losing our temper. So it's almost as if we have these different cells inside us that have their own agendas.
It's exactly right. And one way to think about that is that your self is not a solitary thing. It's a process or more accurately, a set of processes. And these processes sometimes work together, but sometimes they work at cross purposes. So you have a cellular self, which is your cells metabolizing energy.
You have an animal self that's there making maps of reality and making predictions about what it thinks is gonna happen next. Of course, we humans have language. So we have this linguistic self where we've created culture and laws and morals and identities. And those are a big part of our self processes as well. And so a lot of these oftentimes are in conflict with one another.
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Chapter 5: How does our upbringing shape our self-perception?
Like what our animal self is either predicting or wanting or desiring may be very, very strongly at odds with what our linguistic self tells us we need to be doing at that moment.
You also talk about the tension between our higher cognitive faculties and some of our survival-based instincts, and how in some ways these tensions are compounded by modern life. Talk about the relationship we might have with food and how that's shaped both by ancient cues, but also ancient cues that are out of step with the modern world in which we live.
Right. So I have a real weakness. I feel about ice cream the way that Frederick the Great felt about tall Prussian soldiers. And sugar in particular just has me wrapped around its little crystalline finger. And I know sugar is bad for me. I want to be healthy. I see how it jangles my mood, but boy, I just crave it all the time. I just love it, especially late at night.
And that's when the ice cream cravings really hit like a freight train. And this is a lot of conflict for me. Like here I am in this experience of me, yet I'm torn between this just deep craving for ice cream and a mind that knows that, you know... Slim waist and chubby hubby just are not things that go together.
And so the big part of a lot of our self-processes are about negotiating these conflicts. And that craving for ice cream is situated in some deep biological signals in our brains about what sugar rewards for us. When we consume sugar, it's signaling to our brain, hey, this is a A lot of calories. This is a great thing for us to eat. And if we were in the wild, we would just be all over it.
And in a way, refined sugar hijacks our brains. And then we live in a consumeristic culture where we're just flooded in all of these things that hijack our neural systems. We can see this in our food. We can see this with the internet, which triggers all of these dopamine releases and keeps us coming back for more and more and more.
We can see it in just all the consumeristic pleasures that are offered to us in our modern capitalist society. And so all of these things are really taking our animal processes and and just hijacking them and pulling them out of whack. And so no wonder we often feel so torn apart and pulled in so many different directions.
Do you find your feet carrying you to the ice cream store even when your brain is telling you, turn around and walk away?
Oh, sure. I'm like, oh, honey, got to walk the dog again. My dog knows our neighborhood bodega very, very well.
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Chapter 6: What role do societal expectations play in our identity?
Right. And one of the things I do with the class is I give them a questionnaire and I ask them things like, you know, who are you or what are you? And they typically give me kind of pat answers. You know, I am a sister. I am a daughter. I am a student. And I try to say, well, let's start with that because you're not a sister to me. I'm your professor or you're not a student to your parents.
And we begin to see that a lot of the ways that we commonly think of as the singular parts of the self are really just conveniences. Or as I like to describe to them, we are not nouns, we are verbs. There's no part of us down to the molecular level, up to the cellular level, up to the psychological level that's static. We are beings of constant change and flow.
And so a big part of beginning to apprehend what's going on behind this feeling of being me is seeing what is it that's channeling this flow? How is it arising? Where is it out of balance? Where are blockages? How can I make it flow better?
I love the idea that we are not nouns but verbs. And that gets at the idea that it's not just that there are many of us within each of us, but there are many of us and these many selves are also constantly changing. So I don't want the same things I wanted 15 years ago. I'm probably not going to want the things I want today 15 years from now.
Right, and I think it goes to a misconception I had when I was young, which I thought, oh, if I could just get a handle on this self, like that it was this thing and I could master it, then everything would be fine. And the flip side of that was whenever I was feeling terrible about myself, I felt, well, if I'm this thing, I'm a flawed thing. I'm a bad thing.
If I'm feeling discomfort, it must be because I'm somehow or another broken. And when you let go of thinking of yourself as a thing and you begin to appreciate the far more subtle and difficult idea that you're a process, one of the great things about that is that you'll see these fixed conceptions of yourself begin to melt away.
And rather than being a broken thing, maybe you're just a slightly misaligned process. And the good news with that is that processes we can fix.
What does it mean to understand that we are a process? Can you give me a tangible feeling of what that means for an individual? Where do I take that and how do I run with it?
If you engage in a contemplative practice, as you begin to sort of quiet your mind down and open your consciousness up, what you begin to appreciate about your own physicality is that it always has this effervescence, that we are beings of energy.
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Chapter 7: How do our multiple selves interact in different contexts?
I got chills listening to it, and I'm a little bit emotional. What kind of stinks a little bit is that Yes, she showed so much resiliency, but none of that counts. There are so many things that just don't count. They're not being valued. They're not being... because they're not being measured, you know? And there's so much that she is showing the school system.
She's a actually able to withstand and the ways that she's able to draw connections between different cultures. And there's so much, there's so much she's brimming with so much potential, but because of her situation, her working memory is being overloaded. And so she's not able to like demonstrate in testing situations that that make huge demands on memory, what she's really capable of.
So my heart breaks in a really big way when I hear those kinds of stories. And I hear these kinds of stories all the time. So there's something really pervasive about this that we're maybe not talking about as openly in society as we should be. Hmm.
As we discussed in our last episode, Scott, as an intelligence researcher, you spend a lot of time studying the relationship between intelligence as measured by IQ tests and life outcomes. Can you talk a moment about that? What does the data tell us about the relationship between those two things?
Okay, so we talked earlier about how context matters, and depending on what we're trying to predict statistically, IQ has a stronger prediction and a less strong prediction.
So when it comes to the arts, for instance, and that's a wide swath of things from creative writing to visual arts to music performance, we've published papers showing a zero correlation with IQ and creative achievement in the arts.
Within the sciences, some fields show a much stronger correlation than others, fields that are very math-heavy, physics-heavy, really draw on what we're really talking about here is abstract reasoning ability, your ability to really generalize and think at this very abstract level, like philosophy is even correlated with IQ.
especially like logic form of philosophy, where you have to hold lots of things in your working memory and IQ matters for that kind of stuff. And so it really depends on what you're trying to predict. But even within those fields, you have so many exceptions.
I'm wondering if you think, Scott, that these tests are better used as a compass in that they give us directional guidance, but not really precision guidance.
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