Who Are You, Really?
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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.
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. And she said, distilled in these two words was the collective wisdom of the ancient Greeks, you know, those marbleized founders of democracy and poetry and And she said, if we wanted to heed their wisdom, we would need to know the self. And she was such a great teacher. And I took her words to heart. And I thought, yes, this is something I really want to do. So I spent the next three decades of my life trying various ways to get a handle on what's behind this lived experience that I'm going through.
And in college, I started reading deeply into psychology and philosophy. After college, I moved to Northern California and I started doing yoga and practicing meditation. I experimented with everything from psychedelics to... hiking naked in the wilderness to backpacking through Asia. I tried to seek out gurus and priests and Turkish rug sellers who often have a surprising amount of knowledge about spiritual matters. I was basically trying to do everything to click every box on the spiritual seekers bucket list. And it was a very enthusiastic and a very sincere desire to get at what was behind this experience of being.
I understand that at one point you felt that finding the right person to love would be a way of discovering who you really were.
Well, I think this was a big part of my feeling of discontentment was a lot of my own psychological instability at the time, which probably traced back to my own bumpy family life. And I had this very romantic idea that there was some perfect person out there who, if I could just meet that person, they would complete me. They would fulfill all of my needs and all of my longings, and they would provide me with that sense of psychological stability that would just anchor me.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:12
2
What does the Mirror of Erised symbolize in our search for self-knowledge?
0:12–8:14
3
How can we better understand our true selves?
8:14–15:07
4
What challenges arise in the pursuit of self-knowledge?
15:07–17:32
5
How does our upbringing shape our self-perception?
17:32–35:52
6
What role do societal expectations play in our identity?
35:52–1:08:34
7
How do our multiple selves interact in different contexts?
1:08:34–1:37:18