The Story of Stories

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Two thousand years ago, in ancient Greece, a local ruler had a problem. He suspected his new crown wasn't made of solid gold, but he couldn't prove it. So he asked the kingdom's most famous mathematician, Archimedes, to investigate. While pondering the puzzle, Archimedes took a bath. He filled the tub to the brim, and as he stepped in, the water overflowed. Archimedes had a flash of insight. The water that spilled out of the bath reflected the volume of his own body. He realized that if he put the crown into water, he could measure its volume by seeing how much water was displaced. He could use this to tell the difference between a crown made of pure gold and one that had impurities.

1:01He was so excited with his discovery that he leaped out of the tub and ran naked through the streets shouting, Eureka! Eureka! Which is Greek for, I found it! I found it! The famous story of the Eureka moment may or may not have happened. It was written 200 years after Archimedes died. But it says something profound about our minds. It was written 200 years after Archimedes died. But it says something profound about our minds. A good explanation gives us pleasure. And when we cannot come up with a good explanation, we feel dissatisfied. Something in the human mind yearns to make sense of the world. Some researchers think this sense-making drive is a basic human impulse, no different than thirst or hunger.

1:56This week on Hidden Brain, why our minds seek to explain the world and how the stories we tell ourselves can lead to discovery, delight and disaster. comes from Pacific Life Insurance. You make promises throughout your life. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has been helping you keep them by protecting those who matter most. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you create a more confident financial future. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Pfizer. If your brain still remembers how to use a card catalog or find a number in a phone book, then remember this. RSV can be a serious respiratory

3:00virus, especially if you're over 50 with certain health conditions or over 75. There's no prescription treatment, but one dose of a vaccine can help protect you. Find out more at PfizerForAll.com. Pfizer, outdo yesterday. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Dell. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box, the Dell XPS 13 laptop. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet, with a long battery life, beautiful design, and powerful performance with Intel Core processors. Find perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, and flexible financing. Head to dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals. Why is my friend late? How does nuclear fission work? What exactly is happening when I sneeze?

4:05Human beings have an endless number of questions. At Princeton University, psychologist Tanya Lombroso is interested in why we come up with all these questions and how our drive to make sense of the world reveals something fundamental about our minds. Tanya Lombroso, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me. Tanya, I want to start with a personal mystery you once encountered in your own life. Your toddler returned home from preschool one day wearing different pants than the ones she wore in the morning. Tell me how the rest of this mystery unfolded. So that observation in itself wasn't so surprising. Toddlers have accidents of all kinds all the time. And so it was pretty familiar that you might have different pants because your potty

4:51training child might have had an accident. But at this point, my toddler had been very well potty trained for months and hadn't had an accident. And so on Monday, this was a little surprising. But it was even more surprising when we went back to pick her up on Tuesday and found, again, that she had different pants on and had another accident. And then on Wednesday and then on Thursday. So I found the teacher and said, what's going on? She was perfectly potty trained. What happened? And the teacher explained that on Monday she'd made an interesting observation that the girls peed sitting down, but the boys peed standing up. And she thought to herself, I want to learn how to do that too. And so all week she had been

5:31practicing peeing standing up. Now, this is a really charming story, but I want to draw your attention to Tanya's thought process as the week unfolded. On Monday, when her child came home wearing different pants, she came up with one explanation. Her daughter had had an accident. But when the same thing happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, Tanya came up with a different explanation. Maybe her daughter was regressing on her potty training. Finally, when the teacher explained what was going on, Tanya now had one simple story that unified and explained everything. As a researcher, Tanya is fascinated by how our minds yearn for such stories and explanations and what happens when we can't find them. And one very mundane example that I can think of

6:20is the experience I had when I was trying to find parking as a professor at Berkeley, where I taught for many years. And people who live in the area know that parking can be a challenge. And so I would develop all of these pet theories that maybe if it was noon on a Tuesday, then this particular parking lot was probably a good place to park because at noon, I bet the law school professors go out to lunch. But the engineers, they probably don't go out to lunch. So I shouldn't try the lot by engineering. And so I would develop these pet theories to try to figure out what was going on. And perhaps a given pet theory would work for a week or two. But then by week three, it no longer worked. And I had to say, maybe there's not much

6:59patterns here. Maybe I'm picking up on noise. You cite the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gold, who once said that humans were primates who tell stories. What's the connection between the world of stories and the world of explanations? I think both stories and explanations are ways that we really try to make sense of or understand the world around us. The way I think about them is they're sort of two ends of a continuum. You know, a good story is one that's full of detail and creates visual images and emotions. A good explanation tends to be a bit more abstract. It might appeal to general features of the world. If we're thinking about science, it might appeal to scientific laws or regularities.

7:40And I think if you look at everyday cases of explanation, we do a mix of storytelling and appealing to these more general features of the world. So, for example, if you see a friend arrive late to work and you say, why were you late to work? The friend might appeal to some general ideas like there was traffic. But she might also tell you how she woke up five minutes later than she intended to, and then she was rushed, and then she burnt her toast. All of these very concrete details that really help you understand from her perspective what her morning was like and why she's in the emotional state that she's in, and so on. So I think often we do both of these. We do the storytelling, which is very concrete in particular, and we do the explaining, which is much more about extracting the structure of

8:30the world in a way that's generalizable. And when you say extracting the structure of the world in a way that's generalizable, what I'm getting from you is that explanations, and to some extent stories as well, are about constructing models for the world. They allow us to cut through confusion, to distill complexity into simplicity. Yes, I think part of what explanations do is that they relate our observations, which are highly variable, changing from moment to moment, to something more like a simple underlying structure that allows us to predict how things might go in the future. It's a way to try to extract order and regularity from what might otherwise seem disorganized and unsettling. The more Tanya thought about it, the more she realized that our capacity for explanations

9:19needed to be studied carefully. Our drive for explanation itself needed explanation. For instance, there are times when this drive can make us curious, help us discover new things. But there are other times when our hunger for a simple story can make us leap to conclusions and become less curious. So an everyday example of this that might be familiar to people is the experience of interviewing someone for a position. When we interview people, often I think even without realizing it, we construct a whole story about the kind of person this is and how they're going to do in the job and how they fit into what we're looking for. And that's one kind of evidence that we might use for deciding who to hire. But then we also have things like their resume and their letters of

10:08reference. And perhaps we tend to over-rely on our own story that we construct and under-rely on these other sources of evidence that may or may not fit into our story so nicely. So this is not just saying that explanations are sort of deductions we draw from the world. It's really saying that explanations are the way we actually see the world. We actually see the world through the explanations and models we build of the world. One way to think about it is that explanations are the currency in which we understand things. We're presented with all sorts of information, but we need to do something with it. And the way we do something with it is to construct some sort of a model, an explanatory model, one that we find explanatorily satisfying.

10:50And that's what we use as a basis for thinking and reasoning. Well, we'll talk soon about the experiments that you've conducted to analyze our capacity for explanation. But I want to start with a story that illustrates so much about our drive for explanation. You once drew a link between your daughter's personality and what you knew about her before she was born. Can you explain, Tanya? Sure. So when I was pregnant with my first daughter, I discovered around seven months into the pregnancy that she was breech. For those of you who haven't gone through this process and aren't familiar with it, that just basically means her head was up rather than down, and that's not where you want it to be before birth. And so being a good scientist, I did all sorts of research on how

11:34she might be able to turn around and the probability that she would turn around before birth and so on. But in fact, she was very comfortable in just the position she was and did not turn around prior to birth. This daughter is now 10, and we still joke that this illustrates her wonderful persistence and stubbornness. You know, she's very steadfast in the best way that I think will make her an amazing adult and sometimes frustrating child. You know, of course, on some level, I don't really think there is a connection between her having been in a breech position before she was born and her being a persistent, stubborn child later. But it's so tempting to draw these connections and to see these patterns and

12:20to try to make sense of what we observe now in terms of what we know about the past. And what I love about this is it shows how indiscriminate we are in coming up with explanations for things that otherwise feel inexplicable. I think that's right. I think very often the world presents us with ambiguity. And what we do is we try to connect the dots in a way that tells a compelling narrative and that allows us to have a sense that there is order. When we come back, we look at the great benefits and the great dangers that are contained in our drive to explain the world. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen-tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks.

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14:24or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When you were a kid, you probably asked a very important question all the time. Why? Why are there clouds? Why does water boil? Why do I sneeze? If you're a grown-up, you might still ask why, even though the questions might be different. Why is my colleague late? Why does my dog seem sad? Why is my neighbor more successful than I am? At Princeton University, psychologist Tanya Lombroso studies our powerful drive to understand what is happening, to explain the world, and what our search for explanations can reveal about us.

15:20Tanya, your father was trained as an electrical engineer, and during business trips to Japan, he would sometimes bring back mysterious little electronic gifts for you to play with. Tell me what you did with them and the connection that you have made between that childhood experience and your research today as a scientist. Well, my father had a rule when he came back with these mysterious gifts, which was that if my brother and I could figure out how they worked, we could keep them. And this was a challenge because everything was in Japanese. And often they were very unfamiliar. I remember one time he brought back something which we eventually discovered was an alarm clock. But it had a series of numbers right on one side and numbers on the other side and lots of little switches for each of the numbers.

16:06And so with the right combination of numbers, you could sort of specify what time you wanted it to sound. And so what we had to do was basically look at the features of these artifacts, try to figure out what different buttons they did. Think about why someone might have designed it in that particular way. What might it be for, given that it designed it in that particular way, right? What might it be for, given that it was designed in this particular way? And that sort of process of reverse engineering, of looking at something's behavior, what it looks like, how it behaves, and then trying to think backwards to what its function must be, such that you can understand why it has those properties, that's very much what a

16:42psychologist does, looking at human behavior and then trying to figure out why the mind works the way it does. Tanya doesn't just do this with other people's minds. She does it with her own. For example, she once woke up in the middle of the night because she heard some mysterious sounds. Of course, she did what any of us would do in that situation. She looked for an explanation. So this was when my daughter was probably around three, and my mother was visiting. And when I heard noise, I went outside of my bedroom door and I found my mother and my daughter sitting in the dark having a full-blown tea party with stuffed animals around the table and pretend cake and so on. So I was very puzzled.

17:34I also know that my mother would prefer to be sleeping at 3 a.m. So how had this happened? This seemed to be something that called out for explanation. And what did you find out? What was behind it? What I discovered was that my daughter had woken up and was very enthusiastic that her grandmother was visiting. So went straight downstairs to wake up my mother. And when my mother was woken up, she didn't think it was strange that it was dark because my daughter often woke up before the sun came up. So she just thought it was morning. Now, you could just say at this point, this is unacceptable. It's three o'clock in the morning. Go back to bed. Send them both back to bed and go back to sleep. But in some ways, that was inadequate for you.

18:21You actually wanted to know why they were there. It was important to you for you to find out. Explaining what happened is actually really important to knowing what the correct response is to the thing that you're seeing. Absolutely. I think it's also very important to being able to anticipate when it will happen again, to being able to bring it about more or to prevent it, depending on whether it's an outcome that we want or prefer to avoid. So I think that there's a lot we get out of an explanation for an event, especially when it involves people and concerns about responsibility and blame. And knowing exactly why someone acted the way they did is incredibly important. We talked earlier about the value that

19:00explanations provide us in terms of producing a world that is more predictable. Can you talk about this idea a little more? I'm thinking about the world of sports. Good combination of attacking and defending from both guys. You know, if you understand the strategy an opponent is using, not just sort of responding to whatever your opponent is doing in the moment, but understand the strategy behind your opponent's actions, it becomes much easier to compete and much easier to win. That's a great example. I will confess, I do not understand the world of sports. So I will take your word for it, but that makes sense. But I think it's generally the case. I mean, if you think about trying to anticipate somebody's

19:37behavior, right? Perhaps you have an arch nemesis and you're trying to anticipate their next move. If you understand what's motivating them, why are they acting the way they are? What's their goal? If you have answers to those questions, you'll be in a much better position to anticipate what they're going to do and potentially to prevent it. And as I was reading your work, I was realizing that, you know, we don't just benefit from the explanations that we discover. We benefit from the explanations of many human beings who came before us. I mean, you might even argue that culture is a mechanism to transmit explanations from one generation to the next. Absolutely. I think typically when we think about learning from explanations, what we have in mind is learning from the explanations that we receive from other people or from books.

20:29I think it's perhaps less recognized but equally important that we also learn by trying to get explanations ourselves. Sometimes that motivates us to get evidence and make new observations. But sometimes we can learn something new just by trying to explain to ourselves. There's a phenomenon called the self-explanation effect that I think most people have probably experienced. And that's the experience of coming to understand something better as a result of trying to explain it to yourself or to somebody else. Part of what's sort of mysterious and amazing about the phenomenon is that that's a kind of learning that occurs even though you're not getting new information from anybody else or from the external world.

21:10You're just rearranging and scrutinizing what's already in your head. And in the course of doing that, you can sometimes have one of these aha moments and come to realize that you understand something better. Or sometimes come to realize that you thought you understood something, but that there's actually an important gap in your knowledge that you need to fill. One of the reasons for this is something called the illusion of explanatory depth. And you hinted at this just a second ago. Can you unpack what that idea is, Tanya? Yeah, absolutely. Many of us feel like we understand how a lot of the devices in our everyday life work. We understand how a bicycle works. We understand how a microwave works, how a zipper works, and so on.

21:55If you ask people, they'll typically say, yeah, I understand how a zipper works. And then you say, okay, can you please explain it? And what happens when people actually try to explain something like how a zipper works is they start to appreciate all of the ways in which maybe they really don't have the full story of how a zipper works. And the process of trying to generate a good explanation helps us appreciate that we're really falling short. I've seen experiments where you ask people to draw a bicycle, for example, and people will draw a chain that connects the two wheels of the bicycle together, which, of course, would make the bicycle impossible to actually ride. And you realize very quickly that even when it comes to extremely basic things,

22:40we might actually not understand very well how they work, but it actually requires us to be put on the spot to be able to reveal this gap in our knowledge. That's right. Psychologists sometimes talk about what's called metacognition, which is sort of our cognition about our own cognition. And this is the case where our metacognition is often wrong. We often think we know something that we actually don't know. And in the process of trying to explain it, we can get better calibrated and appreciate what we do and we don't know. And in the process of trying to explain it, we can get better calibrated and appreciate what we do when we don't know. I think that's one of the reasons trying to explain can be really powerful.

23:12But I think in other cases, it can also actually help you not just recognize gaps, but even fill them. Tanya cites a scene from the PBS TV series, Beecham House. It's set in India in the late 18th century. An Englishman has been accused of having stolen from the emperor and he's put in a jail cell. And so he's in his jail cell trying to explain to himself how this happened. And he's thinking to himself, you know, who could have betrayed me? Why would they have betrayed me? How could the emperor have known where the stolen property was in my house and so on? And from that jail cell, he doesn't get any new information. He doesn't have any new piece of evidence. And yet just thinking it through and thinking about all of the pieces of evidence he already had

24:02allows him to have the aha moment where he realizes who has betrayed him. With this new insight, the Englishman confronts the true perpetrator of the crime. You know there are innumerable candidates. I have arrived at one simple question. Who had the most to gain? I realize now, you did not meet my mother by chance at the docks in Calcutta. You were there by design. You knew exactly where she was going and when she would leave. You'd probably be monitoring her for months. So sometimes we learn by getting new evidence or by asking other people, but sometimes we learn just by thinking about things in the right way. It's a process I refer to as learning by thinking. In this case, learning by trying to explain to yourself.

24:54You know, some time ago on Hidden Brain, we spoke with the researcher Vera Tobin. She studies the techniques that storytellers use to take advantage of our cognitive systems. And she said something that is very close to what you just told me a second ago. I want to play you a short clip of what she said. What a story can do for you is construct this insight experience where you feel not that something has blindsided you or that you were just taken by surprise, but this experience that feels as if you have a real aha moment about how things fit together. And that is something that humans like a lot. So the two things that jump out at me when I hear Vera say that, Tanya, is that storytellers are doing two things.

25:36One, they're actually constructing a story that has mystery and confusion and uncertainty built into it. And because we find those things aversive, it actually serves as a hook that keeps us listening, keeps us watching, keeps us reading. And then when the explanation is provided, it provides us with this burst of pleasure because we suddenly understand that the mystery is resolved, the puzzle is solved. Yes, I love that example. And I would also add that science can often have that character as well. So in the case of a good story, there's an author crafting the story to have just the right form. But I think part of what makes science very satisfying is that some of the time we get that experience as well of having all of these clues and then getting the satisfying theory that makes all of those clues fit together in a way that makes sense.

26:32I want to talk a moment about situations where explanations do not feel pleasurable. We've all had the experience of watching a magic trick and being amazed, and then discovering the explanation behind the trick. And invariably, this does not produce wonder, but it produces disappointment. Something that in fact appeared wondrous turns out to be, you know, pedestrian. What do you think this reveals about the explanatory system in the brain? One thing that I think it tells us is that there might be cases where we actually find uncertainty and mystery and awe somewhat pleasurable. I think if you think about an emotion like awe, it has possibly a kind of negative tinge, right? It can be kind of scary to have uncertainty and not understand something.

27:13But there's also a way in which it can be pleasurable. It tells us there's something to learn here. Here's something that's worth paying attention to. So when we have something that seems to defy the laws of physics or the laws of probability, and it turns out it was just something completely mundane, I think there's a violation between our sense that there was something really amazing to be learned or discovered, and then the reality that actually it was just business as usual. So one thing that we find is that people are more curious about the answers to questions about science than about religion. They think that we should answer science questions more than we should answer questions about

27:57religion. If I ask you, why is rust red? And I say, it's a mystery. That just seems wrong. But if I say, why does God say, it's a mystery. That just seems wrong. But if I say, why does God exist? It's a mystery. Why did Jesus walk on water? It's a mystery. For a lot of questions about religion, it's not just that we don't know. It's that we seem to be much more comfortable with the idea that we can't know and perhaps that we shouldn't know. And what do you think spells the difference? Why is it that for some things we actually think that it's unacceptable that you tell me that there's no answer to this? And for other things, I feel like it's unacceptable that you tell me that there is an answer to it. I think there's a few factors in play. I think one of them is that our beliefs play

28:44all sorts of different kinds of roles for us. One reason that we have the beliefs that we do and that we aspire to have particular kinds of beliefs is because we want to be accurate and represent the world in a way that will give us a model that allows us to predict what will happen. But our beliefs also play important social roles. They play important moral roles. They play important personal roles. And I think sometimes in a case like religion or relationships to particular people or institutions, demanding an explanation might compete with other kinds of goals related to relationships and trust. We also have evidence that there are some cases where people are uncomfortable with the idea that science

29:20could fully explain the human mind. So for example, people seem to in general be very comfortable thinking that science could explain why we forget things or how stereo vision works or how motor control works, but they're much less comfortable with the idea that science could explain our religious beliefs or our moral behavior or spiritual experience or appreciation for art. So all of these phenomena are phenomena that we have a rich internal experience that we feel like we have special access to as the person who's experiencing them. And for those phenomena, it also seems like people think there might be a sort of threat to the idea that somebody outside of our own mind who isn't having those rich personal experiences

30:05could provide a full explanation. I'm wondering, tell me what you think of this hypothesis that part of what we're doing when we're trying to explain things is we're trying to make the outside world comprehensible to the inside world. But there are things in the inside world that already feel comprehensible to us, and for those things, an explanation from the outside does not feel welcome, but it actually feels like an intrusion. I think that's a really interesting idea. As a psychologist, of course, I want to resist that because my job is precisely explaining the internal world. But I think what you describe is capturing something of many people's experience. Sometimes people talk about the idea that we are intuitive dualists like Descartes.

30:48We think of the mind as somehow fundamentally separate from the body. And so part of what's going on in some of these cases, I think, is that by trying to give an external or scientific explanation to our internal experience, we are crossing those levels in an uncomfortable way. We're trying to explain aspects of the mental by appeal to aspects of the biological or the physical. When we come back, how our drive for explanations can sometimes lead to disaster. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go.

31:52Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu slash brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side, and share feedback like, I want someone with more hands-on experience. HiringPro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash hb. Terms and conditions apply. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Human beings seem to possess an innate drive to come up with explanations for things.

32:50This drive makes us curious, helps us discover things. But as much as our capacity for explanation is impressive and useful, psychologist Tania Lombroso has also found there are important ways in which this drive can lead us astray. Tanya, some years ago, researchers from the University of Wisconsin had kids listen to a children's story. It was from the series Clifford the Big Red Dog. One day Clifford and his friends discovered a new dog who wants to play with them, but this dog is different from them in an important way. I want to play you a short clip from the television version of the story. What a nice guy. He's only got three legs, Clifford. Oh, my gosh. What should we do, Clifford? He wants to play with us.

33:36So? Let's play. I don't know. So, Tanya, what did the researchAT study ask and what did it find? In this study, people were interested in children's ability to extract the moral or the lesson of a story. And as you can probably imagine in this case with Clifford and the three-legged dog, part of what the story was going for was a general lesson about accepting others who might be different from ourselves, about inclusion and so on. But in fact, overwhelmingly, when children were asked about the lesson, they drew a blank or they drew a much, much more specific lesson or moral, like, you should be nice to three-legged dogs. Which is not a completely unreasonable conclusion to draw. Absolutely not.

34:23I think it makes enormous sense. But of course, if that's the lesson you draw from it, you might wonder about the value of reading Aesop's fables and other lessons to our children, right? If all they're learning about is how you should act towards tortoises and hares, a lot of what we want is for them to extract some more general lesson. To put this another way, you can have different levels of explanations. Sometimes your explanation might be correct in a literal sense, but you miss the larger meaning. Other times, we may focus too much on the big picture. Think about what happens when the fire alarm goes off in your office. Instead of drawing the simple explanation that something is wrong and you should evacuate the building,

35:04you might sit around and wait for a bigger explanation. Is this a real emergency? A drill? I think we often face a trade-off between gathering all of the information and learning as much as possible versus acting in a way that's efficient. And we have to decide when we're going to decide that we have enough information and just act. In the case that you just described, there are a couple of different types of errors that you could make. And those errors have very different kinds of costs, right? So one kind of error that you could make is failing to learn something that might have been valuable, like whether or not the fire alarm was caused by microwave popcorn being left too long or by something else.

35:46But another kind of error that you might make is spending too much time trying to figure out what happened and not leaving the building. And that is a very costly error. So in that kind of case, it seems like you'd probably be making a mistake to err on the side of trying to learn extra rather than act safely or cautiously. But there's going to be other cases where the cost of failing to learn is the cost that you might want to try to avoid. You've also found in other studies that people dislike explanations that are generally very good, but that have certain exceptions to the rule. It seems like one thing that we like in an explanation is that it be broad and exceptionless. And so one thing that might happen is that if you have an explanation that only accounts for

36:32why your friend acts the way they do on Monday and Tuesday and Thursday, but not on Wednesday, you're going to think I'm missing something, right? That can't be the whole story. There's something unsatisfying about that. And you're going to keep looking until you find something that accounts for more of your evidence. But I'm also thinking about how this could actually affect us adversely, which is that the real world, in fact, is a messy place. And there are times when a very good rule might actually explain 80% of a phenomenon. That could be an excellent rule. But the fact that it has 20% of exceptions to that rule, if we start to rule those out as good explanations, we might rule out things that could actually be very useful.

37:11That's right. So one danger of trying to look for a good explanation is that the world is not always well-behaved, as you point out. Sometimes the world doesn't provide good explanations. Sometimes things just are coincidences or are chance or don't have elegant explanations. So we've found in our research that sometimes that can be a good thing because people persist in trying to find a good explanation. And in the course of doing that, they might discover important things about the world. But other times, it might lead them to perseverate in trying to find a good explanation when there's just none to be had. And if you buy the idea that explanations in some ways provide us with pleasure, there is also potentially a risk here because it could be that some explanations, in fact,

37:55are more pleasurable than others. In fact, they feel like they fit better. They're more enjoyable to contemplate. And if we're drawn to explanations in part because we derive pleasure from them, it's quite likely that from time to time we're going to draw the conclusion that the pleasurable explanation is the right explanation when in fact it's not. I think that's right. So in my own work, I sometimes talk about explanatory virtues, which are properties like simplicity that make an explanation good and that are often things that we should be seeking in science and in everyday life. But we also fall prey to explanatory vices, characteristics of explanations that are seductive and that draw us in, but maybe aren't really good guides to how

38:36we ought to think about the world. How does this body of work play out when it comes to things like polarization and partisanship? Well, I think explanation is sort of a funny process in that it can lead to two very diametrically opposed consequences. So typically when we try to explain something, we're trying to accommodate it in the context of what we already believe. Part of what's going to make it simple and compelling is that it fits in with the assumptions that we're already working with. But sometimes trying to explain something might lead us to realize an inadequacy in our current theorizing. And so it might be the impetus for us to revise our beliefs. And you sometimes see this in the history of science. So explanation on the one hand can be

39:21a way to assimilate everything in the context of what you already believe. And it can also sometimes be a mechanism to spark belief revision and change. And I think what we see in the case of politics is that overwhelmingly it ends up being a force that allows us to assimilate things in the context of what we already believe. Because often political beliefs are deeply ingrained, tied to people's identities, and so on. I do think that explanation does have the potential to lead us to change our beliefs, not just to confirm the beliefs that we already have. But I think the political discourse we see right now makes it difficult for those kinds of conditions to obtain. And it's also the case that when we have strong views about something

40:06and we see a disconfirming piece of evidence that comes in, in some ways it's easier to sort of find a way to discount the disconfirming piece of evidence than to revise the model that we have built up, especially if that model has been built up over time and with effort, right? This is why it's so hard, not just in politics, but in science as well, to let go of path theories. And You've spent 20 years developing a theory. It's incredibly painful to let that theory go because some new fact has just arisen. Absolutely. Often this is referred to as explaining away, right? So you see a discrepant observation and it's easy to think, oh, well, there must have been a mistake with a microscope that day, or somebody must have made a mistake copying down that number. So we find an alternative explanation that doesn't

40:49threaten our core beliefs in that case. And I can see this happening all the time in politics. You have a president whom you don't like, and there's nothing that the president can do that can possibly make you think that this was a good decision because you're filtering everything now through the model that basically says this president is an abomination. That's right. And you also see it in the way that we think about social groups and stereotypes. So if you come across an individual who violates your views about a particular stereotype, you could revise the stereotype. But often that's not what people do. Often what people do is say, oh, well, this person doesn't fit the stereotype for such and such reason.

41:26They come up with an explanation for why that person is an exception. And doing that then allows them to maintain the belief they had about the general group and to preserve the stereotype. You've also cited research about how our drive for explanation and storytelling works in the criminal justice system. Can you talk about that research, about how storytelling and explanations shape the practice of justice? Sure. There was a really influential model of juror decision-making called the story model that was introduced by Pennington and Hastie. And their idea was that if you think about what a juror is doing as they have evidence presented to them, as they hear testimony, as they hear the prosecution

42:04and the defense and so on, is trying to construct something like a mental model that's a story of what happened. And the way people decide whether they're going to convict or not is by evaluating which story is better, which does a better job of accounting for all of the evidence. That may sound sort of innocuous, but it leads to some problematic consequences. So one of them is that if you change the order in which people hear testimony such that it makes it easier or harder to construct the story that's consistent with the prosecution, for example, that will affect how likely it is that participants think that that story is the right one. In other words, both the defense and the prosecution, you know, hypothetically are presenting the same facts, but one of them is constructing the story of the facts better than

42:53the other one. We're more likely to believe the side that presents the better story. That's right. And in this case, what makes it a better story is just the fact that it was presented in the right temporal order in which the events unfolded so that it was easier to construct that story in your mind. On September 11, 2016, this was 15 years after the World Trade Center attack, someone took a photo of the 9-11 memorial tribute in light. Two very powerful blue lights representing the Twin Towers were beamed into the sky. And at the top, there appeared to be a strange, glowing figure. I want to play you a short news clip. Two powerful lights soar into the air as a tribute to lives lost on 9-11.

43:36But look closer. There's an image atop the lights. The photo is now a worldwide sensation. Is this a trick of the light? Jesus? An angel? A cross? Beautiful. Amazing. Can you talk a moment, Tanya, about the role that some explanations might play in providing us with, in some ways, an emotional defense system, a way of sort of reconciling ourselves to things that might otherwise be very painful to contemplate? There's some evidence that when people feel uncertainty or a lack of control in their own lives, one response that they might have is to try to latch on to their ideology or an explanatory framework that gives them a sense of order in the world. And for some people, that might be religion. For other people, it might be a sense that the government is a very stable, powerful force that can provide order. It could be the idea that science gives us a very orderly picture of the world. But it does seem like the idea that there is structure and order and regularity is something that we're drawn to in the face of moments that seem anxiety-provoking and to suggest that maybe the

44:45world is just random in a very uncomfortable way. I'm thinking about the study that Jennifer Whitson and Adam Gilinski did several years ago. They induced a feeling of a lack of control among volunteers, and they found that compared to a control group, volunteers who experienced a lack of control showed increased pattern recognition in noise. So in other words, when they were shown like, you know, the static on a television screen, for example, they thought that they could see images in the television screen. Or when they were shown sort of random, you know, gyrations in the stock market, they felt like they could detect patterns in what was going on. And Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky thought that there was some connection between these two

45:29things, that in the presence of a feeling of a lack of control, we actually seek to impose control by seeing patterns where none exist. Can you talk about how this phenomenon connected to your work is potentially behind some of the conspiracy theories we see circulating in the world today. One idea, and I will confess this is somewhat speculative, but you might think of conspiracy theories as an error of over explaining. Many conspiracy theories have the characteristic that they take lots of observations that might all have independent explanations that might sometimes be partially due to chance, and they connect them all to one underlying individual or group that has a particular intention and is carrying out that intention.

46:18And so that's a case where maybe there is no satisfying explanation for why these five independent observations came to be and how they unfolded exactly the way they do. But the conspiracy theorists impose one. And certainly I think you see that these kinds of beliefs can be heightened behind the 9-11 attacks, for example, you know, the complexity of what would be involved in having a conspiracy like that actually work. I mean, I live and work in Washington. I know that you can't tell anything to a group of three people in Washington and expect it to be kept a secret for very long. You know, Washington is full of leaks. And so the idea that hundreds or thousands of people across the federal government could have

47:10kept this massive secret is just completely implausible. But of course, that's precisely the conspiracy theory that circulated very widely after the 9-11 attacks and was embraced by large numbers of people around the world. I think that's an interesting example because it illustrates a point that we spoke about before, that there's many different ways in world. I think that's an interesting example because it illustrates a point that we spoke about before, that there's many different ways in which you might think that an explanation is simple or complex. So in one way, that conspiracy theory is extremely complicated because all of the details of how the government's plan would have been carried out and carried out effectively in

47:41a way that's consistent with the fact that we didn't have leaks and so on. That's all extremely complicated. But the part that's very simple is that many outcomes are all attributed to one underlying entity, in this case, or an organization rather than a single person with a particular intention. And so in that sense, it might be a relatively simple explanation in that it reduces many observations to something that's sort of a simple root cause, even though the details of how that root cause manifests in what we observed is extremely complicated. We talked earlier in our conversation about the power of explaining and helping us understand things, that it actually could be a mechanism for learning.

48:28And you've talked before about how we can utilize this in some ways to combat some of our biases. So it is the case that we often seek explanations that match our preexisting views. But how can we use explanations to combat this bias, Tanya? I think there's a few ways in which explanation can help us. One way it can help us relates to a previous example. We talked about the case where children will draw the lesson from a story that you should be kind to explain different parts of the story, why the characters acted the way they did, why something was the right or wrong thing to do, that can lead young children to re-represent the story such that they realize it's not just about a three-legged dog, but maybe more generally a story about social inclusion. So that's an example of explaining, leading us to

49:26change the way we're representing something in a way that helps us appreciate something at a broader level of abstraction. And it's interesting when it comes to something like fighting conspiracy theories, we really don't practice what you just suggested. You know, we often believe the way to combat a conspiracy theory is to throw evidence against it. But really, the more effective approach might well be to ask the person with the conspiracy theory to actually explain it in depth to us and to have them in some ways discover the gaps in their own beliefs, you know, that are surfaced by this illusion of explanatory depth. That's right. In fact, there's some evidence in the political domain that asking people to explain policies,

50:09like how a particular tax policy would work, for example, helps them to appreciate that maybe they don't understand it as well as they thought they did. And that can induce a kind of humility or an appreciation that you might not be in the best position to have a very firm... perspective on that political issue and perhaps be more open-minded and willing to revise your beliefs. There's been some work that shows that when we come up with explanations for things, we're more likely to actually believe those explanations. In other words, if I'm in a debating tournament, for example, and I'm randomly assigned to make one case, I'm more likely to believe the case that I'm making. So genuinely, the act of coming up with explanations and arguments prompts me to actually believe what it is that I'm arguing. And you and others have talked about the value of essentially,

50:56if you want to de-bias yourself, one thing to do is to try and make arguments in favor of both sides, that the effort of coming up with an argument in favor of both sides allows you to see the virtue of different positions that you might not otherwise choose to do. Absolutely. So the strategy you just described is sometimes referred to as consider the opposite. And it sounds very, very simple, but it's also very powerful and very broadly applicable. And part of the reason it's so powerful is because it's not something that we tend to do spontaneously. So if you're asked to consider a particular view or coming up with an explanation for a particular observation, you tend not to spontaneously think, but how might I be wrong?

51:40Or what might some alternative perspectives be? But doing that can be a very powerful way to avoid some of the kinds of biases that you refer to. I'm wondering if there have been times in your life where, looking back, you realize that you leaped to the wrong conclusion or drew the wrong explanation. Have there been moments like that when you've looked back at and sort of said, uh-oh, I fell prey to the same things that I'm studying? I can think of one example when I was a college student. So it was my birthday, and my boyfriend had planned what was supposed to be a nice dinner for me. And on the way to our dinner, he said, oh, you know what? I just need to get these books from the library.

52:17Do you mind if we just stop by and pick up these books? Here, you take these call numbers so that we're fast. And my immediate temptation was to fit this into a frustrating pattern of having taken second place to immediate work concerns and so on, right? This was supposed to be my birthday. We shouldn't be doing this errand. And I very shortly discovered I had to revise this assessment because it turns out that my then boyfriend, now husband, had hidden my birthday presents throughout the library at Stanford University under different call numbers. And so as I was walking around the library trying to get these books, I was discovering the hidden gifts hidden in the library. What a lovely story. And I

53:01feel like this tells us something really important because, of course, the story that we're painting about explanations is not just a story about how we think about politics or how we think about science, but it's also about how we think about the people in our lives, our colleagues, our partners, our children, our parents. And so often we're drawing these very quick explanations about why they're doing what they're doing. And very often these conclusions are actually wrong. And we really need to slow down and ask ourselves, how do I know what I think I know? That's right. Yeah, absolutely. I think asking ourselves how we know what we think we know and thinking about alternative explanations are both very powerful tools for trying to overcome some of our tendencies to leap to conclusions and go with our familiar explanations.

53:54There's another domain in which we should ask ourselves how we know what we think we know. It has to do with the stories we tell about ourselves, stories about who we are, what we are capable of, and what our lives should look like. Recently, we heard from a listener named Julian. He's lived with depression for 16 years. Over time, it has shaped how he thinks of himself. He remembers one phase where he just felt numb. It made him feel helpless. Then, Julian's therapists gave him a different way to think about it. The way that some of my counselors framed it is they're like, the numbness was to protect you. You could not bear that much pain every day. So anyways, I just think that this reframe is so important because it's empowering

54:40and it just shows you like this is part of the normal human experience. I was lucky to have people frame it that way to me, and it really did help a lot. Often, when we're anxious or depressed, we have thoughts about our feelings. I wish I wasn't so stressed out. Or, why can't I just feel happy again? These critical thoughts about our feelings can lead to even more negative feelings. But what if we asked ourselves a different question? What are my feelings telling me? When we come back, listeners share their thoughts and questions about how to reframe the low points in their lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

56:14Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Thank you. protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily, based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers. Keeping more of your revenue, your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe

56:44at stripe.com slash radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' Safest New Car Brand. To learn more, visit mazdausa.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. We often think of sadness as a problem, something to fix. But at Cornell University, psychologist Jonathan Rottenberg says a different way to think about sadness is that it's a system in the brain that is designed to alert us to problems.

57:53Jonathan is the author of The Depths, The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. He was recently on the show in an episode titled Rethinking Depression and in a Hidden Brain Plus episode titled Flourishing After Depression. Today, Jonathan returns to the show to respond to listener questions and comments about his work. Jonathan Rottenberg, welcome back to Hidden Brain. Thanks for having me back. Jonathan, depression is often characterized as a chemical imbalance in our minds. You argue that this so-called defect model provides us with an incomplete picture. Why is that? Well, we've been looking for the biological defect, the cognitive defect, the defect in how people are functioning in their relationships with others for many, many decades, and it's not

58:50been found because it's not as simple as that, because depression is connected, as you alluded to, to a broader system of mood that helps us navigate the world, which can be triggered by a whole host of things, including this perception that my whole life path is under threat or in serious doubt. You argue that depression can sometimes be a useful guide or tool. How so? Well, it's no accident that we have this mood system. We share it with our mammalian friends. It's served us well as an adaptation for millions and millions of years. It's there as a tried and true system, much like our system to help us preserve our body, give us pain when our tissues are being damaged. Our mood system is there

59:42to help us navigate really intractable kinds of problems. Most obviously, when there are situations where there isn't anything that people can do immediately, like in a famine. But more broadly, when people are in very complex, even interpersonal situations where there is no obvious solution, the mood system is there to make you retrench and make you think about where you are and what you can do. And it's a very cognitive kind of behavioral stop system that has, as I said, worked well for millions of years, but it also gets people into trouble in the sense that there are people who have chronic depression and severe depression, and it could have very destructive impacts as well. Isn't it possible that there are people who are depressed who are not, in fact, experiencing

1:00:35any kind of life challenge? Psychiatrists and psychologists point to people who come into their practices all the time whose lives are going pretty well, but suddenly they are feeling extremely depressed. Yes, I believe that's the case. The mood system is integrating a whole host of different factors, things that weigh on us. So that includes our environment, our immediate social relationships, our life chances, but it also integrates our biology. So if you, for example, have a serious illness, and so there are absolutely many people who have depression, and it turns out that there is a physical dysfunction that explains that. But the question is, is that the majority of people? Or in the majority of cases,

1:01:21does it have to do with environmental adaptation or some interaction, a connection between a person's disposition, so your temperament, how you tend to see the world, are you temperamentally anxious, and the environment jointly, both conspiring to make a person experience longer periods of depression than, say, the average person. Now, some people can hear you say that if depression can teach us things, then depression is a good thing. Is that what you're saying, John? I think that we have a long history of treating depression simply as pathology, meaning that it would have nothing to teach us, and that simply doesn't connect to how people experience these episodes. It is the case that people are active in these episodes and they're trying to learn, what does it mean that I have

1:02:16this mood? People ask this question all the time. And in some cases, it is a meaningful question to ask and it does lead to meaningful life change. That doesn't mean that every instance of depression is good. How could that possibly be true? Or that we always should interrogate every single time that we're feeling low mood that this must be pregnant with cosmic meaning. I don't think that's the case. But we do tend to err on the side of not asking the question, what can I learn from this? So we received a number of messages from people experiencing depression. Here's one from a listener named Mandy. I am deep in a really pretty debilitating depression right now. I'm just coming up to an anniversary of my divorce from a marriage that I did not want to leave and I am in a profession

1:03:13that as a single person makes it difficult for me to support myself so I'm having to face leaving something that I love to do and I, very, very upset about it all. And so much so that I actually called a suicide number, which I have never done before, simply because I have been feeling like I just don't want to feel anymore. I really feel like my life doesn't have purpose or meaning, and nothing really matters. So it's very difficult for me right now to absorb anything in this mental state. So I really feel for Mandy, John. She's going through a very difficult time. As someone who went through a crushing depression yourself, what insights could you offer Mandy? Well, first of all, just to acknowledge the humanity. Mandy is grappling with something

1:04:23that, like I experienced, I feel that it's a force larger than yourself that you can't control. I think it does illustrate the more general problem that depressed moods do have a rhyme or reason to them, even if we don't completely understand them. Because Mandy does talk about the dilemmas that she's facing in her work and in her relationships, and there's a sense of not knowing what her next step precisely is. And depression is kind of keeping her, I think, in this holding pattern, trying to resolve, trying to think what my path out might be. But in the meantime, it's very painful. By her own accounting, her suffering is not meaningless, that she knows that she's in a tight spot and her feelings are horrible, but they on some level make sense to her. I would advise her depressions do end.

1:05:30They just end. They don't end always on your timetable, but they do end. And I say this particularly to anyone out there who is feeling like they're at the end of what they can tolerate. So Mandy alluded to calling a suicide hotline, which I recommend anyone who is entertaining these kinds of thoughts do as one very useful thing. Because time is on your side. I know it can be hard to appreciate that when you're in the grips of something terrible. But I would say from my experience and the experience in doing research on depressed people is part of the illusion of a depressed episode is that it is going to go on forever, but it's not. It will get better. It may not get better on your timeline. It may not get better to the degree that you

1:06:24want it to get better. But there are so many things that one can do in terms of different kinds of therapies, discovering what works for you in terms of your daily activities. And then, of course, also to the extent that it does have to do with some intractable life dilemmas, people do find, for example, the new activities, the new pursuits that do provide that meaning that might be missing in the present, either on their own, just with time, with the support of other people, with the support of a therapist. These mood states do tend to moderate in the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of cases. They moderate. One of the tricky aspects of depression is that many people experience shame around their

1:07:16depression, so they feel bad about feeling bad. Here's listener Joshua. I found myself living with depression from a very young age. And it was very challenging. And I think a lot of it had to do with the comparisons that I would make of myself to others. And I did some pretty intense therapy, which through that process, I discovered that my depression was actually a symptom of something greater. And my body telling me that something's not right, something needs to be better, something needs to change. I was able to start making those changes. I was able to give it a name. I was able to be kind to it. I was able to welcome it back instead of cursing it when it reared its ugly head. And that changed things a lot. It really revolutionized the way that I think about

1:08:04my sadness. And just to say, I own this now. This is mine. It's part of me. John, can you talk about how shame can keep us from being thoughtful about depression and how owning our depression, as Joshua puts it, can potentially help us work through it? Sure. I think that Joshua's comment really illustrates how the way that we talk to ourselves about our depression as we experience depression has profound effects. And it sounds like when he was earlier in his journey, he was very down on himself for being depressed. And part of that is making comparisons to other people and feeling that you're inferior to other people because of this mood. And it may actually bring up feelings of shame. But that way of talking to yourself doesn't have to be. And it sounds like in his case,

1:09:04he became more compassionate to himself. So understanding that it made him the person that he is today and in some ways a stronger person. But I would say as a culture that we still have a long way to go as far as themes of shame being very deep, deeply connected to depression, and this being a complicating factor because depression itself, the feelings are, they're horrible, they're unpleasant, they're hard to deal with. But then on top of that, feeling ashamed about the feelings, that the feelings themselves are unspeakable or unnameable, that's a double burden. We talked in our previous conversation about how depression can sometimes come with silver linings. Listener Jenny says she's been dealing with depression on and off

1:09:55since she was 13. Medication has helped, but she's recently found herself feeling depressed again. And with each bout, she says she forgets how she came through the last one. It's difficult because every single time you go back into one, it's almost like you forget that you survived the others. But then when someone reminds you, and in this case it was my psychologist, she said, you've done this before. And I think there's a strength and a power in knowing that whatever you're going through, no matter how difficult it is, the fact that you got through something, got through something as bad as where your brain was telling you that you didn't deserve to be alive. There's a power and a strength in that.

1:10:38And there's comfort and reassurance because there's resilience. So John, this echoes something you told me when we talked last. You too came through a terrible depression with a thought, you know, I'm still here. I'm still standing. Absolutely. So I think Jenny is very wise. She understands that there's a little bit of an illusion that happens when you have recurrent episodes of depression, like it's almost Groundhog Day. You have this perception that you're waking up to the same thing day after day after day. But she has also a realization that it isn't the same because she has gotten through this in the past. And I think there is an expectation that eventually nothing is going to stop her because she has actually, like a lot of people who struggle

1:11:29with depression learned a bit about how to cope with these episodes and also be able to put them in some perspective in terms of the longer arc of her life so when i hear jenny talking i'm i'm hopeful i mean i'm sad that she's not uh having having the best time of it right now, but her spirit is a good one. When we come back, how to find your way through the darkest of times. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Thank you. No quarterly activations, no categories to track, just unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com slash smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc.

1:12:42Some restrictions may apply. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. What connects a hidden Amazon laboratory, giant pandas in China, ocean research, and communities living along wildlife in India? Discover their stories on season six of Planet Visionaries, featuring explorers, scientists, and conservation leaders addressing research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in amazing Thank you. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Depression can be a terrible affliction, but is it also a tool we can use to change our lives? At Cornell University, Jonathan Rottenberg offers a hopeful take on depression. Today, he's responding to listener questions and comments about his work.

1:13:58John, depression can change how we view ourselves. Listener Anu received her first depression diagnosis in high school. She's now 27. I don't know who I am without my medication and I've been trying to stop and I want to find a way to feel who I am regardless of the depression. Not as something to fix, but as something to live with chronic, whether it's just episodic, is not a bad thing. And so thank you for helping me feel that. So John, I'm wondering how you feel about Anu's question. You yourself took medication for many years, and you found it helpful. Absolutely. I want to answer Anu's concerns as a human being and as a scientist, not as a treating clinician. I know she's working with someone, and we'll help her

1:15:01figure out if she does want to taper or stop her medication. But I do want to speak to the issues of identity that are very interesting that Anu's raising. This is a long arc from high school to age 27. And if you've been taking medication all this time, I could understand if you had some question about who you are under all that medication, and would you be a different person? And so what I hear in her dialogue is this question about whether she can accept depression as part of life and even that she has this propensity to be depressed that's built into her personality. And I think that's a very difficult thing to wrestle with. It's a very difficult thing to wrestle with. It's a very profound thing

1:15:49to wrestle with. I want to pivot to another idea, John. We frame depression as a chemical imbalance, but we heard from listeners who also point to environmental factors in shaping their depression. So listener Sarah writes, I have struggled with depression since my teen years. The experience was indescribable, frightening, and caused me to experience suicidal thoughts. Later, I realized that if I eat certain foods like sugar or gluten or milk products, they could trigger depressive thoughts in my brain. Sleep would also affect my anxiety. If I was with friends, I would have no signs of it. Winter was worse. Summer, pretty much non-existent. So Sarah also told us that her depression would change based on the time of day or if

1:16:34she listened to music. Can factors like these in our environments shape our feelings of depression, John? Absolutely. So the systems that are making for clinical depression for really severe mood states are the same. They overlap with the systems that are generating a normal mood. So we know absolutely that if your sleep is disturbed or if your diet is poor, that that can affect your mood. What I hear in Sarah is someone who's searching to better understand the sources of mood. And I do think broadly, the chemical imbalance kind of theory tends to blind people and or it tends to make people not try to search for the sources of their mood when one can learn. I hear a kind of a learning journey in what Sarah is saying, that she's

1:17:29over time learned that certain foods, sugar, that certain sleep patterns or certain times of the year are trouble spots for her. And so again, this is pointing to the ways that people are actually quite active in confronting their depressed mood states. And this is empowering to have this ability to know what is the key factors for me. But absolutely, these quasi-biological but also behavioral in sleep factors are definitely part of the equation. I mean, what I find so relatable about Sarah's comments is that depression often feels like it's outside our control. But as you say, if we can be curious about our moods and ask when we're feeling what, in some ways it gives us a little more control. I mean, we can't control

1:18:18the weather or the season, but we can decide to spend time with friends or to get more sleep. Yes. But a number of the comments have really underlined this kind of a dialectic or a tension between wanting control and accepting that I will never have perfect control. Because moods are not something that you can dial up or dial down, like pushing a button for climate control that you want it to be 67 rather than 66. The knowledge and the will to try to change the things you can, but the wisdom to know when there is going to be some need to accept some level of depressed mood is this kind of wisdom that I think people can evolve over time to have both, both controlling what you can't control and accepting that you won't have perfect control, but you'll have some.

1:19:17So John, artists like Vincent van Gogh or Sylvia Plath or Amy Winehouse experienced considerable mental distress in the course of their lives. Listener Jeffrey is 55 years old and says that he's experienced depression his entire life, but he thinks the creativity it produces might be a silver lining. What I've come to realize is that the depressive times of my life have been the most introspective times. And the periods coming out of depression have often been my most creative periods. And so while I don't relish depression, I'm suspicious of people who want to remove depression from our experience, who want to cure us of our depression, because I think that might cure us of our creativity.

1:20:12So I know there's research on the relationship between bipolar disorder and creativity, John. What do you make of Jeffrey's thesis? Well, there are a lot of people who have extraordinary talents in one domain or another, and certainly art is one, who feel, and I think the data do support, that there is some connection between being able to create great poetry or novels or paintings or music and having a somewhat elevated propensity to depression and bipolar mood disorders. But I think the more profound insight that Jeffrey is raising is that this is kind of a double-edged sword, this predisposition. It's part of who you are. It's part of what makes you an amazing person. But it's also the sword can cut you.

1:21:03So the question is, how can you know that this is part of who you are, this vulnerability, while also minimizing its destructiveness? So you have less depression rather than more depression and more like the periods he describes coming out of his depression where he was very creative and feeling much better about life. So there are some people who can still function despite having really intense symptoms. That wasn't the case for me, and that isn't the case for a lot of people. So depression can manifest differently for different people. And I think it can be problematic to generalize from one person. So I would never generalize from my experience to the millions and millions of people who experience depression.

1:21:55When we come back, listeners weigh in on how to think about depression. and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful. Does it feel like your student loans are a permanent part of your life? It doesn't have to be that way. With SoFi, you can consolidate your student loans and refinance with a shorter term, potentially becoming debt-free sooner. Join over 580,000 members who have already refinanced their student loans with SoFi to take control of their financial future. Getting started is easier than you think.

1:23:03View your rate at SoFi.com slash next today. SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank N.A., member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Jonathan Rottenberg is a psychologist at Cornell University. He's the author of The Depths, The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. John, we received some critiques about your work. A listener, Mark, writes, I know that was not your guest's intention, but framing depression as something with a silver lining that can actually be beneficial just makes me feel more ashamed that I haven't turned my depression into anything positive. For me, depression has only caused bad decisions, destructive behavior, and suffering.

1:23:52This is exactly the wrong message for some people who are already depressed. It doesn't help. It piles extra guilt and shame on top of the pain. Now, John, I'm not hearing you say that if people feel sad and miserable about their depression that they're doing something wrong. Obviously, people going through serious mental illness have a lot on their hands, and the last thing they need is for someone to tell them that it's their fault if they can't see the silver lining. But how would you respond to Mark's heartfelt criticism? Well, I love the point. And maybe it allows me to clarify that what I'm saying is that depression can have a silver lining and that the scientific community has really ignored even the possibility that depression can have a silver

1:24:37lining by exclusively focusing on the obviously destructive outcomes that can be associated with depression as well, whether that's other mental health problems, problems with your physical health, and God forbid, suicide. So my research really is intended to help provide realistic hope, meaning that there's a recognition both of these very bad outcomes and the possibility of good outcomes. What I'm saying is that to a perhaps counterintuitive or to a greater degree than one might expect, depression often is connected to our life story, to what our mood system is designed to do, which is to help us navigate the often rocky shoals of life. A sociologist named Douglas wrote with a concern that your thesis leaves out the structural

1:25:33factors that shape depression. He writes, The episode's central insight that low mood may serve an adaptive function strikes me as both important and humane. At the same time, I found myself wishing the episode had engaged more deeply with the broader social context in which depression is experienced today. In the American context, when the good life is defined in highly individualistic and often unattainable terms, widespread experiences of anxiety, disappointment, and depression are easily interpreted as personal failures rather than as responses to a disordered social environment. My concern is that an exclusively adaptive or evolutionary framing, however well-intentioned, may inadvertently normalize what are in fact structurally

1:26:22produced conditions of distress. What do you think, John? Well, in some ways, I couldn't agree more. So part of the environment is a bigger environment where it's sensible to have some degree of depression and anxiety. I understand that things like a war or an economy that is not producing life chances for people like it used to, or the recognition that our environment is being despoiled. I mean, I think those might be some of the structural factors that he's alluding to. And I think that's a normal response in many ways. But I very much believe that depression is not only an individual experience, that it's something that is happening because many people are in the same scenarios. And in part, there are social scenarios, or even you could say

1:27:14national or global scenarios. So I think actually my thinking is very potentially compatible with Douglas's sociological perspective. I think also that when you think about these problems as having environmental or structural factors, as Douglas points out, it also raises questions about how we respond to them. So for example, if people are going through a very bad economy or they're going through a war, for example, and they're experiencing depression and trauma, it's a little problematic to say, we're locating this problem entirely in this person's brain, and we need to fix the chemical imbalance in their brain while ignoring the structural factors that are causing the problem in our brain. Completely. And one thing that really amazes me is when you've looked at periods where collectively there was a massive shock.

1:28:11So, for example, the Great Depression, World War II, you would expect with such a difficult environment that there would be millions and millions of people, there would be a big spike in depression and anxiety. But I don't believe that was the case. And it's very interesting why that wasn't the case, because people actually saw it as a collective problem that I'm not uniquely facing this, I'm facing this with others. And there's a lot of bonding that happens between people when we're going through a struggle together that reshapes the nature of that suffering and makes it more tolerable. If 25% of people don't have a job, you're in such good company, it makes it a lot easier than if only 6% don't have a job,

1:29:04or if it's just in this one demographic of young people. And so, you know, I think there is a lot to be said for understanding that we have a choice sometimes of seeing our problems either uniquely us as an individual or part of a collective problem. And I'm not saying that we should see every single, every time someone is depressed, it means that it's a common dilemma. But again, I think we could use a little bit more of that. Hmm. We also received a question from a listener named Sam. He's a physician and frequently works with people grappling with suicidal thoughts. He questions the idea that depression really serves an evolutionary purpose. While I'm a proponent of evolutionary theory, I see a growing tendency

1:29:56to attribute all ailments to evolution, even when they don't serve evolution's primary goal, which is the survival of the species. One could even argue that if we must assign a purpose to suicide and depression, it would be the removal of the individual from the reproductive cycle. However, the reality is that evolution is often random and does not always serve a constructive purpose. As a physician, Sam also says there's a big difference between low mood and clinical depression. Depression as I see it in clinical practice is debilitating dark cloud that often robs a person from the ability to reflect or change. In the suicide cases that have managed, the state of mind is closer to a temporary insanity fueled by despair.

1:30:57While we may not fully understand the root cause of depression, evidence-based medicine shows that chemicals are the primary culprit. We should never minimize the value of medication and counseling by reducing depression to a merely evolutionary product. What do you think, John? Yeah. So I think that we do have this adaptation that's given us a mood system that is part of our equipment, and it leads us to be susceptible both to normal range of depressed mood and these more severe depressed periods. And it's a lot of the same factors that push people into quote-unquote normal depression versus really severe depression. And this doesn't mean that every instance of depressed mood is serving the individual or serving the species. I think there can actually be a mismatch between

1:32:01our adaptation, which took millions and millions of years to come about in our current environment. And in fact, I talked a little bit about that in the episode, but that may be what's driving people to have so much more depression than in the past, including some really severe episodes of depression. So I quite agree with Sam that depression can become so intense that a person can even become disconnected from reality. There is a thing called psychotic depression where someone might believe that they're not just a bad person, but that they're the devil or that they're responsible for all the sins of the world. So I absolutely think that there are destructive forms of depression, but they are built from, to a greater extent than maybe contemporary medicine would like to

1:32:56acknowledge, out of this perfectly good adaptation. So I think I hear Sam saying that in what he heard from the episode, he heard you minimizing the importance of treatment, the importance of medication, the importance of psychotherapy. There is some tension here because at one level you're saying, you know, be curious about your depression. Ask yourself if your depression can teach you something. Is there a silver lining in depression? But you're also saying depression is terrible and I'm not averse to treatment and medication. What is that balance that you're trying to reach here, John? I think it's just based factually. Our mood system is open to different inputs. So part of being literate about your mood is to know that your

1:33:40own efforts to understand your mood and to change your behavior can be part of what gets you through the night. For other people, psychotherapy is extremely helpful in better understanding the sources of your mood. And for still other people, medication is extraordinarily helpful. Clinical depression is a quite formidable adversary, and I'd be the last person to discourage people from getting any kind of help that they find useful to them. And what I find really encouraging is that we actually have lots of different levers to move the mood system. So rather than really fighting over, is medication okay, or should people not take medication, I would be one to celebrate the data that seem to show that at least for a

1:34:29significant subset of people, medication is a very useful tool. But if that doesn't work for people, there are other brands of therapy, other brands of psychotherapy that have been shown to be helpful. So I see it really more as an all of the above kind of approach rather than prescribing what people should or shouldn't do. I want to end on this note from listener Angela. She says she learned something important about her depression from her four-year-old daughter. There was one afternoon after the darkness had lifted, after my life had returned back to normal and I could care for my family, my three young children. That afternoon I was cutting vegetables, preparing for supper when my daughter, who was four at the

1:35:17time, caught me off guard by a profound statement. She said, broken crayons still color mommy. I yeah I didn't know what to think. I've had forgotten that I had taught her that she could color with a broken crayon when she had been in tears one day when one had broken. Then I couldn't help but thinking that I felt like a broken crayon. And so if I were to write a book about my mental health journey, that would be the title, Broken Crayon Still Color Mommy. But I wanted to share, even with my bipolar diagnosis, I can live a life that even if I feel like the stigma of it, that I'm no different than anybody else. I just learned to live with it. And I am not bipolar. I am me. And I'm a mother. I'm a wife. I'm a friend. And there is hope. So if I would share anything, I would want to share hope with whoever is struggling out there.

1:36:33This is my story. I was so moved by that note, John. What do you hear in Angela's story? I think children are very wise. So a four-year-old really said it all. I love the title of her book. I might suggest a slightly different title than The Broken Crayons Still Color. I see it as not only do they color, but despite the terrible challenges you've had, that you're beautiful. We see you. You're beautiful. Your child sees you. And that despite, and maybe because of the things you're beautiful, we see you, you're beautiful, your child sees you, and that despite and maybe because of the things you've overcome, you're even more beautiful than you were before. Jonathan Rottenberg is a psychologist at Cornell University.

1:37:29He is the author of The Depths, The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. John, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. It was such a pleasure. We also heard today from Tanya Lombroso. She's a psychologist at Princeton University and author of the book, Why We Ask Why, The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

1:38:27If you liked this episode, please be sure to share it with a friend or family member. And for more Hidden Brain, please check out our YouTube channel. You can find us at youtube.com slash athiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantham. See you soon. Does it feel like your student loans are a permanent part of your life? We'll be right back. financed their student loans with SoFi to take control of their financial future. Getting started is easier than you think. View your rate at SoFi.com slash next today. SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank, NA member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. To every clinician finishing notes at 9 p.m., there is a faster way. Whisper Flow is a voice-to-text app. You talk, it types, in your EHR,

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