Changing Our Mental Maps

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In February 2024, 2 German tourists visited Australia. During one section of their trip in Queensland, they turned off the main road on the advice of Google Maps. They figured that the road up ahead was closed because of a rising river, and the detour would take them to their destination. As one of them put it later, They trusted the map. We decided, okay, let's follow Google Maps because Google Maps knows maybe more than we know. The tourists told an Australian TV station and other media that they took a dirt path known as the Langi Track. At first, things looked fine. Their off-road vehicle seemed up for the terrain. But about 40 miles in, the 4-wheel-drive Nissan Navara got bogged down. Its wheels sank into the mud. The Germans were stuck, and they found they couldn't reach anyone for help. Recognizing they were in serious trouble, they decided to abandon their vehicle and trek back in the direction they'd come. I feel like in a movie, like in a bad movie. We tried to build a shelter, but that didn't work really well. So we slept, like, under the sky. Rain poured down on them. They had to watch out for pigs and snakes and crocodiles. The 40-mile journey took several days. The tourists made it back safely. Rangers later helped them retrieve their vehicle. But they had learned an important lesson: a map that's wrong can sometimes be worse than no map at all. In today's episode, and in a companion story on our subscription feed Hidden Brain Plus, we explore the maps inside our own heads. What happens when these maps, which we have constructed ourselves, lead us astray? Misdirection, minds, and maps. This week on Hidden Brain. 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. Take 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/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. It's human nature to make plans, to generate expectations, to imagine how things will go. But life often has other plans in store for us. What happens then? Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. Over many years, he has studied how we plan for the future and what happens when our plans are derailed. Norman Farb, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much, Shankar. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Norm, your maternal grandparents were born in Poland. They were Jewish, and they experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. After surviving the concentration camps, they moved to Canada. to start a new life. They knew what they wanted for their daughter. This is your mother, Linda. Tell me about the world your grandparents constructed for her.

Yeah, so they wanted things to be very safe for their children, as you might imagine. There's literally no extended family. They're the sole survivors of both their family trees. For their daughter, they brought with them the somewhat kind of antiquated view that her job was to be a really good girl growing up, be a help to her mother, and then find someone to marry and manage a household. And I think she really internalized that if she just was a good girl and married, you know, a nice man and had a good household, then life would turn out just great for her and she would be happy.

Linda's life didn't turn out the way her parents imagined. She and Norm's father fought.

I remember growing up in a period where there would be calm and, but then also really stormy periods where my parents are fighting a lot. And ultimately that led to their divorce right around the time I left for university. And by the time I was done my undergraduate days, my parents had completely split and my mother was living on her own. This was a catastrophic change in the narrative that she expected for herself.

Talk about that. I mean, she was raised with the notion that if she was a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother, that was the responsibility she had. And in turn, she would be looked after. She would have security. She would have stability. And in some ways, She had done her part, but life had not responded in the way that she thought it would.

Exactly. So for her, there was this massive disruption of the story she expected for herself and for the way her life unfolded. And she lapsed into a deep depression. So she would tell me in these phone calls that she felt like, you know, it was just unbelievable that her life had turned out this way. We would talk on average once a week and go into these really deep soul-searching conversations where she tried to explain to me why she didn't deserve this, that someone was supposed to take care of her and what was going to happen to her now. Often she'd be in tears, so really emotionally dysregulated and upset and sad. And with that sadness, was this urge to make sense of what had happened, that she had done her best, but it wasn't good enough, and it was unfair and just really unreasonable. It was just so almost incomprehensible that life had turned out this way, almost like an unwillingness to accept that she was now single and living on her own and isolated.

So by this point, you had started to study psychology. So you were learning about ideas about the mind and the brain. And I'm wondering, did you try and share with her the things that you were learning, the models you were learning about human behavior?

I've been studying a lot of things around existentialism and people negotiating their own meaning in life on the philosophy side. And I've been studying psychology and about how people make meanings for themselves and how much we construct the own our own narratives of our lives. So I would try to reason with her and say, okay, these things happened, but can we see from a practical point of view that the more time you spend rehearsing all of these hurts, these slings and arrows from the past, the more you end up suffering as though they are still happening?

Mm-hmm.

And this is where these conversations would take 30, 40, 50 minutes. And there were times I really felt like I At an intellectual level, she's following me. My mother's a bright woman as well and would be able to say, I see this, I see this. Maybe I should stop focusing so much on what your father did. And then there'd be a pause, and then, but you know what he did this other time. And so it was almost like it didn't really matter if there was some sort of intellectual understanding. This This rupture of her model of the world was so catastrophic that it had a gravity of itself that just demanded her attention. When she wasn't effortfully thinking about something, it would just suck her right back into this litany of slights and hurts and wrongs.

And I'm wondering from your part, it's difficult at any age to be handling a situation like this, but at 20, it must have been especially difficult. But did you feel, you know, I'm giving my mom good advice, she really should listen to me, it clearly does make sense to live in the present and not in the past. And were you frustrated in some ways that she was not learning from you or taking your advice?

Yeah, I think I moved from a position of benevolent intentions and a conviction that we're going to get through this together and we're going to figure out how to pick up the pieces to a sort of first frustration that the way out of this cell that you're in, like the door is open here. There's a Rumi quote, the door to your cell is open, why don't you go through? And I remember just getting so frustrated thinking like, we've been here before, we've gone through this Reasoning, you've recognized that what you're doing is harmful to yourself and perpetuating your suffering, and you agree that it would be better to do something else, and then yet you persist. And I got to this point where I really started to resent the interactions, and I just didn't want to have this role anymore of being her counselor. Like, I'd put in my time, and it just wasn't working despite trying to be inventive and approach it at different angles. And I remember if the phone would ring on the weekend at the time when she would normally call, starting to feel this real negative feeling in my body, like an aversion or repulsion almost. And at the same time being like, oh, what's happening now? I feel like my relationship with my mother, my own mental health is being compromised by being drawn into this rumination pattern over and over again.

Well, it seems to me at this point that both of you in some ways had come up with maps. She had a map for how her life was going to turn out and was really upset that the map did not seem to conform with the reality of her life. And you had a map of how you could help her and how psychology could help her. And when she did not follow that map, you were getting frustrated. In some ways, both of you had these maps and were upset that real life was not conforming to them.

I think so. At the time, I would've said it was all about her map being, her holding onto her map. But I did have this insight at one point that also I was starting to fall into my own sort of script, right? And that I had a map of Being the smart, helpful son who was going to help pull her out of her depression, and that I was going to fix her in some way. And so there was, just as you said, actually 2 violations. There's the violation of her narrative of being cared for for the rest of her life and her marriage continuing on happily ever after, as idealistic as that was. And then there was also this violation of my efficacy as a good son who's going to help her and pull her out of things through my sheer ingenuity. And I realized that I too was running along a script. And the result of me running through the script of trying to play psychoanalyst, of pushing her to change, of pushing her to accept certain facts, was actually causing me to suffer and probably also causing her to suffer. Because then every— imagine every time you talk to someone, you have to grapple with the hardest parts of your life and you're being asked to confront it and change, and then you can't do it. So both of us were actually suffering more not just as a product of her own expectations or model of the world being violated, but of me stubbornly clinging to my model of being able to come in and fix things. And realizing that I had a part to play in what felt like the degradation of our relationship was a really important insight for me at the time, because I was becoming convinced that the way I was going about things was doing more harm than good. And at that point, I think it really became an opportunity to think about practicing what I'd been preaching. So if my mother's not able to let go of her expectations and update her model of the world to accept the reality of this situation, maybe I could work on myself and accept the reality of the situation. It wasn't my job or my ability to fix her or save her. And what would it be like to have a phone conversation with her and just stop the whole process, like break the script of trying to fix her?

Hmm.

And it was a more radical way of being with her in the moment, which is like, you could be anyone today, and I'm going to let you be anyone today. And that means you might be fine today. So just call it and just really just listen, like, how is she doing? And not reward the rumination or buy into the blame story, but at the same time, not engage in this kind of therapeutic delving and And more try to model what a healthy interaction might be like, which is just telling her I love her, I care for her, telling her a bit about my day, directing attention back just to our ongoing experience. Because what I realized is my model was also one that began from a place where there was something horribly wrong. And so we're both starting with this assumption where things are wrong. So what would a model look like where I like let go of that? And what if there was nothing wrong in the moment with the fact that she was alone and depressed and having these ruminations and I was feeling resentment? And what if all that was going on and then we're still just going to have a nice conversation? And over time, what I noticed was, I wouldn't say like they were the funnest conversations I ever had, but they became much less aversive. We would just kind of have small talk and chat and communicate that we still felt connected and loved each other. And something totally unexpected happened, which was the conversations became shorter. And I felt like I could initiate contact with her more often. So as opposed to the whole narrative being like, if I can fix her, I won't have to have these painful conversations all the time. I could just— I would say, you know, it's like Thursday, but why don't I just call and check in with her? Because I knew it would only be like 5 or 10 minutes now. And we ended up starting to talk more days than not. But in a much sort of lighter, definitely less expectancy-laden way. And in some ways, that really shifted the trajectory of our relationship, which until that point had been heading downhill.

Norm's mother was still upset with how her life had turned out. She was still stuck on the past. Norm was upset his mother wasn't following his psychology advice, which could make things better for her in the future. But when their conversations focused on daily events, it automatically downplayed both the past and the future and focused them on the here and now. Their conversations started to have more variability. Some days they talked about sad things, other days about happy things or funny things.

Because she was so isolated, like, our social interactions really were contributing a huge amount of the interpersonal quality to her day. So if those interactions were stressful, her day was going to be stressful. And so eventually you'd just be like, how's your day? And it'd be like, it was fine. We weren't rewarding attention into the story about the past, but we weren't trying to prevent it. And so we just started to get on with our lives together. Yeah, to the point now where, yeah, she'll have good days and bad days, but we still talk quite frequently. And it just feels like— normal, which is something I was desperately trying to achieve and sort of ironically failing to do when I was trying to play therapist.

The maps we use to navigate through life are enormously useful. Sometimes, however, they can lead us astray. When we come back, the curious brain science of how our minds come up with maps and what happens when reality tells us that those maps are wrong. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or 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. As we move through the world, it's easy to imagine we are processing everything that happens around us and then deciding how to respond. But it turns out this would be incredibly complex and time-consuming to do. Our brains are designed to save energy, not waste it. At the University of Toronto, psychologist and neuroscientist Norman Farb studies how our brains efficiently navigate the world by coming up with maps. So Norm, let's say I'm commuting to work every day. I drive or I take public transport. The first day I do this, it's novel. The third day, it becomes familiar. By the tenth day, It's a routine. At a conceptual level, can you talk about what happens in my mind as my commute goes from being new and strange to familiar and commonplace?

Sure. One of the main things that our brains have evolved to do, which is to take any sort of pattern in our reality and automate that process. So yeah, that first time you're driving, the problem you're trying to deal with is, OK, I'm going somewhere new. Where do I have to turn? What's traffic like? But once the route becomes familiar and you're like, oh, yeah, when I see the green bush over there, it's getting time to slow down and turn right, before you know it, you're doing it without even thinking.

And of course, this is all not limited just to physical navigation. Your first day at work is nothing like your 264th day at work. So our maps are not just about physical terrain. They're about what we do.

Yeah. The idea that the brain is trying to set up a model of the world that lets it predict what's going to happen next applies to all facets of life, from figuring out how to speak to someone who's a bit prickly at work to the most abstract things even of what should we think about, what should we care about, what is worth devoting our emotional energy and attention. All of these decisions become automated over time so that any leftover resources can be used to deal with the unexpected.

Norm and other researchers have identified a network in the brain that is involved in this process. It's called the default mode network. At the risk of oversimplifying things, the default mode network is the brain asking itself, can I take what just happened and fit it into a pattern, a model of the world?

Yeah.

So the default mode network is a constellation of brain regions that seem to be most active when we're not up to anything in particular, when we're given instructions to rest and just do whatever comes natural for us. So this is part of the term default. It's what happens to us by default. So we have this sense that the default mode network is instantiating a habit and in our brain so that as things become familiar and our predictions can mostly just cover what we need to do next and we don't have to do a lot of conscious processing, this is the brain network that becomes most active to deal with the expected input/output from the world.

So one way that the default mode network can get us in trouble is when we start to feel like our map of the world actually is the world. Can you talk about that for a moment, that in some ways we are doing things, we're doing things repetitively. After some time, in some ways we build a model of what this thing is because we don't have to do it effortfully each time. But after some time, the model comes to substitute for the world itself, for the thing that we're doing itself. Can you talk about how that process happens, which is in some ways you're training the autopilot function on the plane, so to say, but after some time, the autopilot just simply starts flying the plane, and we forget that actually there is a pilot available to fly the plane as well?

Yeah.

I mean, I think we have moments of this. We'll just sort of walk into a room and start doing something and then realize it's not what we intended to do. So we have glimpses that sometimes the autopilot takes over. at a behavioral level. But I think what we don't often realize is that our habits are not just habits of behavior, they're also habits of perception. So where should I look when I walk into a room? Who should I pay attention to? What sorts of things should I think about? What sorts of plans should I consider? And by extension, we're also filtering out many, many other possibilities. So the default mode network is not just looking at habits in terms of, do I exercise or not? Or how often do I bathe? But also really fundamental habits for what parts of our reality we interact with. And these are the things that we have most deeply modeled. We practice doing it over and over again. We don't consider turning left on our way to work if we always turn right. We don't wonder what is going on to the left of us because it's irrelevant. We've learned that it's irrelevant. And at a social level, we've learned that some topics are irrelevant. They're not that important to us. Some people are irrelevant or not that important to us. And even when we're talking to someone we know and have some affiliation with, there are certain things we're used to discussing with them and other things that they're just not the kind of person I would share that with, or I wouldn't make the conversation go in that way. And that all comes from just how we perceive the world around us and filter what matters and what doesn't matter in that context. And the default mode network is doing that too. So in a way, this greatly simplifies the problem of like, what am I doing in every given moment? But it also— the way it simplifies things is by creating massive blind spots as to what are all the other things that are possible in this moment, which has big implications for our ability to change.

I'm thinking about the story you told me about your mom. She recognizes from time to time, it might be better for me not to dwell on the past and not to have so much animosity towards my ex-husband. I should move forward with my life. You sort of know these things at one level in your mind, but at some level, your default is to spring back into this model that says, here's the world that I was promised, and the world didn't turn out that way. And my mind keeps returning to that groove of feeling betrayed and let down.

Yeah, the idea of a groove or a channel that it's just easier for our thoughts to flow that way, I think, is a really good metaphor. We know that we have certain mental habits that we would like to change. So at the times that we're effortfully concentrating, we're using our attention to choose Differently. We have this sense of agency, but our attention is a very fragile thing. And as soon as we're no longer paying attention, we become distracted, or especially if we're stressed and fixated on something else, then what's filling in all the background of what to do, what to think about, what to recall is the default mode network. So I know I shouldn't think about this negative event because I'll become upset. And just the momentary instruction of like, well, this actually isn't skillful right now, has very little power compared to all of this machinery saying, you should think about it more, it's about you. And we know from other research that thinking about the self gets the highest priority over any kind of other thinking because those are the types of thoughts that are by definition relevant for our survival.

I mean, I'm imagining that if you're driving on a street, for example, and now we see a red light, most of us are not going through the effortful process of saying, all right, that's a traffic signal in front of me, the light has turned Red is supposed to mean that I'm supposed to slow down and stop, so I should come to a stop because it's a red light. All of that is happening automatically. And really what you're saying is that the same thing happens at the level of interpersonal relationships, for example. We have these defaults where we see people, we've had certain patterns of conversations with them, and the default mode network in some ways is putting us into the same mode that we are in when we see a red light and we automatically come to a stop.

Right. And it's not that there's zero awareness on a red light, it's more like, let's shortcut through all the reasoning and just give you sort of a basic feeling of like, you need to do this now. And it might be dangerous or unpleasant not to. And this is the default mode network trying to simplify things for us.

Hmm.

That comes with trade-offs because this network is almost like a feeling of certainty in our minds, but the world itself is an unstable and changing place. So it can make it very difficult for us to change if that learning is now being overgeneralized, or even if it's like the same person, but let's say that person has changed or the situation has changed. It's going to be hard for us to change that programming.

I mean, as you pointed out when you were talking to your mom, it was easier in some ways to start with the default of saying, she is in trouble. She is depressed. I need to help her. She's in need of therapy, as opposed to say, Let's see where she is today. Let's pay attention to what's actually going on today. That's a much more effortful process of actually reading where things are rather than assuming you know where they are.

Yeah, so it's much more effortful to go in assuming you know nothing about a person and be open to this flood of information and not knowing what to pay attention to and not knowing who this person is and starting from beginning each time is a hugely effortful and also kind of scary process. Safety in knowing who people are and what they're up to and what they might say or do to you. And to entertain the possibility that anything could happen kind of makes you vulnerable, right? And what if that means you could have to respond in different ways, right? There might almost be a fearfulness in letting someone just show up totally differently because we want to assume that we're going to be the same person tomorrow and that other people are going to be consistent. What if they're not?

So you've conducted a number of neuroimaging studies of people who have experienced or are currently experiencing depression. You put them in the fMRI scanner in your lab so you can see what's going on in their brains. In one study, you put people in this brain scanner and you asked them to watch very sad film clips. What were these clips and what did you find, Norm?

Yeah, so in order to be a good prediction machine, the name of the game for the brain is to associate whatever's happening in your momentary experience with other past events so that you can contextualize and interpret those events. And this is why we think we see the default mode network activating, lighting up in the scanner when people are exposed to sadness is They see something happening. We show themes of loss. We show clips from Terms of Endearment, the mother saying goodbye to her kids because she has terminal cancer, for instance. And the brain is sort of saying, oh, okay, I'm getting this interpersonal interaction happening. What's happening here? Oh, a mother is sick and she's having to say goodbye to her kids. And we immediately relate that to our own experiences of loss, of having to say goodbye to loved ones, of the fragility of life, our own severed relationships. And this helps us go from just seeing pixels moving around on a screen to really feeling immersed in a story. This is why we enjoy stories so much because they aren't just about the protagonist in the story, they're about us. And that's the default mode that we're kind of filling in like, wow, look at how richly this particular stimulus, this particular event or experience is actually a candidate for many other experiences or a prototype of many other experiences that have It's a ubiquitous kind of response to try to think about, you know, how can I make sense of this experience in terms of what I already know about myself and the world?

Now, you did find a difference between people who were prone to depression and people who were not showing signs of depression, but it wasn't in the default mode network, but in another region of the brain. What did you find, Norm?

Yeah, so this really surprised us that the default mode network wasn't driving our prediction of who is depressed and who wasn't. We thought, of course, people who are depressed are so sucked into their negative life stories that this is causing depression, and it just wasn't. I had to sort of open up my own set of expectations, my map for what was going to happen and say, okay, well, if I'm going to make something out of this study that tells us something about depression, maybe I should look for what else is happening in the brain. And when I started now looking at what parts of the brain were deactivating, where we actually saw less activity during sad films compared to neutral films, we saw that it was the parts of our brain that represent what's happening in our bodies that tend to be turning off. So there's parts of the brain that we know across almost every person represents what's happening on the surface of your body. And we know that there's parts of the brain that represent the internal feeling state of the body. And it was these regions that were deactivating in response to the sad film clips. And what really convinced me that there was a story here, because this is not how I think even the general scientific community would think of depression vulnerability, it's still thought of as being the triggering of threat signals that then trigger you into your defensive habits. So What really convinced me that this was important was when we looked at what parts of the brain had activity that correlated with or helped us predict whether someone was depressed or not, it was this pattern of deactivation in body representation regions that was significantly associated with whether people were depressed or not. And it did not seem diagnostic to look at differences in how much people were activating the default mode network.

Mm-hmm.

It just seemed that what might be pathological or harmful is doing this to the exclusion of continuing to process and update yourself with information about how your body is feeling.

And when you say how the body is feeling, you mean everything from, you know, are my eyes seeing color? Are my ears hearing sound? What is the feeling of the carpet on my feet or the desk under my arm? It's all of the feelings and sensations that are flooding into the brain. You're saying that in people who had a propensity for depression, These areas were suppressed. These signals were being suppressed.

Right. The most pronounced places that were associated with depression were specifically the regions for what am I feeling in my body right now? So as you know, how do I feel lying here in the scanner? Am I hot or cold right now? Do I feel sensations like in my gut? Does my heart ache? My throat feel constricted? And if we think about our strong emotional responses, you feel it a lot of times in your chest and in your gut. And if this signal is being suppressed while you're thinking about your sadness, it's that kind of perfect storm that's actually associated with depression, which poses its own sort of conceptual mysteries for us to understand, because it's not at all what we expected.

It's almost at that point like you have a brain without a body. Your brain is full of its own thoughts, its own activity, its own self-perception, but it's not paying attention to signals coming in from the body.

That's right. In the case of depression vulnerability, what's happening is people are saying, well, I want to protect myself from these negative feelings. bad or threatening or just icky. And so I'm going to just for now, I'm going to pause taking in new information just while my brain thinks about this model of me being sad. And meanwhile, the default mode network is saying, I'm just going to keep thinking about all the reasons I should feel sad right now. And I've felt sad in the past and link all this information together until I get interrupted by new information. So you have this kind of recipe for turning on the sadness machine and then locking all the doors for other visitors that might might interrupt sadness. So there's this ironic perpetuation of our sadness by conceptualizing it and cutting out the sensory aspects of it. The default mode network is not in the business of changing unless it has to integrate new information, and now we're not letting it integrate new information.

To put this another way, the brain is doing 2 things. It's taking in information and then using that information to improve its internal maps of the world. People with a propensity for depression seem to stop taking in information, leaving the brain with only its own internal maps. If those maps are filled with ruminations about an unfair, unkind, unhappy world, that becomes the only world we can see. Even if good things happen to us, even when we catch a break, our internal map continues to paint a picture of gloom. When we come back, how to update our internal maps. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 are not allowed to create accounts. Your teen will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey, with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. With Zindel Segal, he's the author of Better in Every Sense: How the New Science of Sensation Can Help You Reclaim Your Life. Pop psychology talks a lot about the differences between the left brain and the right brain. But Norm says the more important distinction might be between the front of the brain and the back of the brain. The front of the brain is where a lot of our mapmaking happens. The back of the brain is mostly where the brain picks up information from our senses.

Among people with a propensity for depression, Norm says the mapmaking part of the brain is very active, while the part that processes sensory information The more stressed we become, the more we start seeing that the front of the brain becomes active and many parts of the back of our brain are becoming deactivated. So I think you can think of it as a tale of 2 partners that are trying to work together to help get you through life. And one of these partners is the default mode network. It really uses a lot of the mental machinery that, you know, makes us more kind of evolved thinking beings in the front of the brain. And its job is to make a really good model of the world and help us use that model to efficiently get through life. But this other partner is the sensory parts of our brain that are still open to the fact that the world is changing. It's almost like this force of chaos. And we need to have chaos because the world is changing and our models are going invariably to be wrong if they do not adapt to change. And so, What seems to be happening when people become stressed or you feel like you're stuck in a rut or you wonder why you keep doing the same things or having the same interactions play out the same way, it seems to be the case that the part of our brain which we think is driven by default mode network activity has become too dominant. And it's happening at the expense of the sometimes scary process of letting the chaos of the world, and that could change our models of the world, which also means changing us.

At the same time, I think this might explain now why someone who has a certain map of the world sort of finds themselves not able to extricate themselves from it. Part of the problem might be that they simply have stopped taking in information that could tell them that their map is wrong.

Right. So if your response to a stressor is to think, okay, I don't have a lot of time to learn something new right now. I have to deal with this situation? What do I already have in my toolbox to deal with this sort of situation? Someone is being aggressive towards me, or I've just experienced a failure and I'm worried about what the future holds. We're driven to use what we already know. But if the problem is that what we already know is leading us to repeatedly get into conflict or to run into failure or to descend into the pits of despair, then we just keep reaching in to the toolbox that is the same tools that are causing the problem in the first place.

I'm also imagining, let's say you have a fight with someone who is close to you, and the fight is very painful, and you're flooded with all kinds of sensations. Your cortisol levels are elevated. So there's a lot of signals coming in from your body that, in fact, something very unpleasant has happened. And now your default mode network kicks in. You're telling yourself a story about how this fight came to be and what your relationship is like with this other person. You have now the elaboration of the map. You have a map of the fight. The fight, in addition to the fight. I think what you're saying is that 2 hours after the fight is over, the body has stopped sending you signals that a terrible fight has happened. The body has gone back to baseline, but the story of the fight, the map of the fight continues in our heads. And for some people, that map becomes so powerful that the fight now persists, and now it has a life that basically is lasting a week, a year, a decade when the bodily sensations of that fight in fact have dissipated.

That's exactly right. And then the insidious thing is that because you're telling this story even after the body's calmed down, your body doesn't know the difference between you telling the story about the fight or the fight. So it thinks the fight's happening again. So you do actually get more cortisol and more stress hormones released into the body as you hold onto this over and over again. And so yeah, it's really just like this irony that It makes sense that we want to get away from feeling bad. We want to move things into a kind of conceptual realm where we can manipulate them and think about it in terms of a story, and it's less energy intensive and all these things. So it makes sense that we do this, but then before we know it, exactly as you said, now we have this model of the fight that we can carry with us wherever we go. And that's what happens in real life. Someone says something at work and then your body kind of calms down, but then driving home, you think about it again and the body reacts.

Yeah.

And then you go home and you tell your your loved one about it. And so now it's happened again. And then you call your friend and you say, do you know what this person said to me? And it happens again and again and again. So we are inflicting the fight over and over again, even though it was only 2 or 3 minutes of our day.

I'm thinking about this story that is ascribed to Buddha and Buddhism. There's a story of something that's called the second arrow. The Buddha is supposed to have said, as we go through life, we're going to be struck with arrows. Unfortunate things are going to happen to us. Tragedies are going to strike us. But what we shouldn't do is we shouldn't take a second arrow and plunge it into the site of the first injury. Really, what you've just described, you have the fight at work, but then you're reliving that fight now 20 times. Each of those 20 times, you're plunging a new arrow into the site of the old wound.

I think there's a really nice parallel there. It's these stories we tell ourselves about the negative events that are like the second arrows, potentially, if the stories we tell are negative or disempowering. And of course, we learn what stories to tell to interpret events very early on in life through the modeling of the people around us.

Norm says that being disconnected from our senses, can keep us from feeling connected to other people. The more we live inside the world of our internal maps, and the less we pay attention to how our interactions with others make us feel, the less happy we are going to be.

And it's kind of catastrophic because we know that our reasoning is never able to take everything into account. And there's times we can have, you know, perfect reasons for our actions and be doing drastic harm to our sense of relatedness or connectedness. So we're not taught to balance this sort of reasoning with, well, what does it feel like while you're being right? What does it feel like while you're showing that your model is the correct model? And I guess as Atron is saying, the signal that things need to change is often a sensory signal. It's this feeling that there is something amazing and great about feeling connected to other people, for instance, and to feel that rupture and realize that something's wrong no matter how right you are, like some symbolically and logically, that's a really powerful motivator to put down your model for a little bit and think about, what am I assuming here?

Yeah. And when you think about so many, both interpersonal disagreements as well as partisan disagreements that we have, so much of that is about my map versus your map, as opposed to asking, how does this affect the relationship between me and you?

Yeah, I really think, I mean, what many of us want, I can only say, and I can say definitely what I want is to feel connected and loved and accepted by other people. And that's a real feeling, right? In the times that I am most satisfied with my life, I feel like I have that connection and it's able to be there reliably. And the times that I've felt at my lowest is when I feel alone. Not to be too melodramatic, but like Shankar, we just met, but I can feel a connection right now as we speak, and that's motivating me to open up more and share more.

Hmm.

And it's meaningful. And I just feel like we don't even have a great vocabulary for that. We're not taught that to the same extent we're taught, you know, math or spelling. And we don't have a culture that checks in on that feeling of connection or disconnection as being as important as maybe some of our outward indicators of health and success. And I really think it's this felt sense of connection both to ourselves in the world, but by extension to other people, to other living beings that's often missing when people feel like life has gone awry somehow.

The solution, Norm says, is to deliberately and consistently reconnect with the world of the senses— to feel, to hear, to see. The more attentive we are of our bodies, the less likely we are to get trapped inside our internal, outdated maps. Norm says he has embraced a tactile practice each morning to help him be present with his family instead of letting the models inside his head tell him how to behave.

In the morning, when I am tired and grumpy, I needed something that would just break right through and remind me that I had some intentions about how I wanted to be in the world. So what I learned to do is associate the feeling of cold tiles on my bathroom floor touching my feet with a reminder that I can be intentional about my relationships. And I've used that especially in times I felt really calcified in my relationships. If I'm stuck in a pattern where I'm getting into quarrels with my kids, for instance, then I would use touching those tiles in the morning as a way to remember today's a new day, it's a chance to look at things differently. Can you stay open right now?

I understand that there was a morning recently when you and your kids were running behind schedule and you felt yourself getting increasingly angry. This had happened before, and your mental maps were saying, they never listen to me. We're always running late. Describe what was happening in your mind and what you did at that point, Norm.

Yeah, so I pride myself on being an engaged parent, and I want my kids to learn about punctuality and have a model that I should be able to get them to school on time. And I would find that the harder I pushed them to get ready, the more they would kind of flop around and be playful and bicker with each other. And I would just be losing my mind. I would feel like this rage building up, this frustration of like, why won't you do this basic thing for me? Don't you even care about me? And at the same time, I have a meta-rage, but I'm studying mindfulness and I'm supposed to be open to these things and just let the feeling go. So I'd notice like, okay, I'm just going to notice my rage. And then like 3 seconds later, it'd be like, get your freaking shoes on. Right? So just attending to the rage and being open to the feeling of anger actually wasn't just going to take care of this problem. What I needed to do was actually be more exploratory. And I remember looking at my kids and being like, they don't care about getting to school on time. They just want to play. And I was like, well, what's it like to feel like you want to play? And feeling this kind of warmth and this sparkle again of instead of rejection of them, sort of othering them as people who are thwarting my plans, feeling like, well, I want to be connected to them. I want to play too, but we also have to get to school. And then realizing like, well, then really what I just need to do is get them out the door with this kind of feeling of connection and playfulness. How could I do that? I bet you if a big scary monster showed up and was threatening to tickle them, they would be really motivated to get out the door, but it wouldn't be like angry dad time. So I felt the anger, but I also felt this connection to my kids. And I learned to become this kind of tickle monster when they were kind of messing around getting out the door. And eventually they started to be like, oh, he's turning into the tickle monster. Get your shoes on really quick because you're going to get tickles. And it was like a totally different way around the problem that wasn't about being stricter or having more consequences or lecturing them about responsibility or other things that little kids just don't care about and are actually connection disrupting. So yeah, foraging isn't as simple as just like, if you get into sensation, all your problems are solved. It's the beginning of starting to explore, right? And then remembering like, what are you actually exploring for here? Like, are you willing to be surprised that the way to get this kind of connection, the way to have this feeling of positivity, it's not the way you expected it to look, but it's probably available if you're willing to to let go of what you know and try other things.

Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. With Zindel Segal, he's the author of Better in Every Sense: How the New Science of Sensation Can Help You Reclaim Your Life. In our companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we look at a series of techniques to put us in closer touch with our senses. We will look at how to combat phobias and how to deal with recurring pain. If you're a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus, that episode should be available in your feed right now. It's titled Making Sense. If you're not yet a subscriber, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial at apple.co/hiddenbrain.

Thank you.

Or through our Patreon membership page at support.hiddenbrain.org. Norm, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much for having me. It's been wonderful to get to share these ideas.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by Discover. Our story comes from Jesuit priest Jim Martin. In 2000, Jim's father was diagnosed with lung cancer. One of the people he will never forget from that time was a nun named Janice Farnham. Janice was one of Jim's professors in theology school and had become a family friend. She had a special fondness for Jim's father.

And right before he died, Janice said to me, well, I'd like to come visit him. Now, she lived in Boston. And, you know, she's on a Catholic sister's budget, right? They take a vow of poverty. And Janice got on a train, took the train down 5 hours to Philadelphia, took another commuter train, found her way to the hospital, spent time with my dad, got back on the train and went back home. And I thought it was one of the nicest things that anyone has ever done for me. And I said, you know, I can't believe you did. And she said, of course. You know, why wouldn't I want to come down and see your dad? So this just really gracious, generous gesture of love, and the fact that a Catholic sister would come down and visit my dad was a big deal for him. It was very moving. And I think it prepared him for, you know, his death. He died, I think, a week or two later. So I think it's a reminder that, you know, someone said 99% of life is showing And that these gestures that we make really stick with people. You know, one of my rules now in life is when it comes to funerals or weddings or baptisms or certainly visiting people in the hospital or anything like that, if I can go, I will go, right? If I'm able to go, if I'm there, I will go. And never underestimate that— what we call in the Jesuits ministry of presence, just showing up.

Jim Martin is a Jesuit priest. He lives in New York City. His unsung hero, Janice Farnham, is a retired professor of church history. This segment of My Unsung Hero was brought to you by Discover. Discover believes everyone deserves to feel special and celebrates those who exhibit this spirit in their communities. I'm a longstanding card member myself. Learn more at discover.com/creditcard. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to check out our free newsletter. In every issue, we bring you the latest research on human behavior. Plus, we always include a brain teaser and a moment of joy. You can sign up at news.hiddenbrain.org. That's n-e-w-s dot hiddenbrain dot org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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