How Delusions Can Actually Be Useful: Shankar Vedantam Reveals How

You know, computer scientists talk about things that are bugs and things that are features. Things that are bugs are things that are problematic. Things that are features are things that are useful. Self-deception turns out to be in that special category of its own where it's both a bug and a feature, and sometimes it's both a bug and a feature at the same time.

This concept, this little statement that our guest shared, might feel a bit Like a contradiction. It might feel strange, unimportant, or maybe it feels like a sciencey thing that isn't really worth the fuss. But, and I think you'll agree with me, Tim, it is one of the main reasons we love behavioral science. Captured in that simple statement, we see how complex our brains are, how the situation we put our brains in adds to that complexity. And even when we think we start to understand it, We come to realize that there is more to the story. It's— I just find it fascinating.

I couldn't agree more, Curt. That complexity doesn't always serve up easy answers, though. One thing that it does do is to make the investigation into the why we do what we do so extremely interesting and rewarding for us.

You're listening to Behavioral Grooves. The podcast that explores human behavior and thinking. My name is Curt Nelson.

And I'm Tim Houlihan. We like to explore life through a behavioral science lens with researchers, authors, and practitioners in a conversational setting in order to bring those insights to you.

We help you uncover behavioral tools and tactics that will help you lead a more fulfilling and purposeful life with over 200 episodes.

Curt, excuse me, 220 episodes.

Oh, I stand corrected. With 220 episodes under our belt, we bring you perspectives from around the globe, from many different fields, and from a variety of perspectives. And we've had the pleasure of interviewing some of the biggest names in behavioral science. So you would think, Tim, that we shouldn't get starstruck anymore.

Oh yeah, you— we shouldn't. And you might think that, but you know what, Curt, if you thought that, you would be wrong.

I am.

I'm often wrong. I know. I know, I know.

We were definitely starstruck with our guest today. Both Curt and I have been listening to the Hidden Brain podcast since it came on the airwaves back in 2015. The show, which airs on National Public Radio, is broadcast to over 350 stations and has become a staple for many people to learn about the ways in which our brains work.

And not just behavioral scientist enthusiasts, by the way.

Isn't that the truth? Shankar Vedantam, the developer and host of Hidden Brain, has been welcomed into our homes and our cars and our EarPods for many years. And if you've not checked out Hidden Brain, run, don't walk, run to your nearest podcast filling station and subscribe to it because it is a fantastic show.

Shankar's keen insights, on-the-spot questions, and innate ability to dissect large, complex behavioral science principles into enjoyable, fun, and easy-to-understand narratives has endeared him to millions of people around the world. Tim and I are no exception to that. You know how sometimes you don't want to meet your heroes for fear that they might disappoint, Tim?

Oh man, I know that feeling well.

Well, that was not the case here. Shankar was wonderful. He was full of insight, witty, and always able to synthesize those hard, complex phenomena into easily understandable stories that not only inform but capture our imagination.

Shankar came to Behavioral Grooves to talk about his new book, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. Our conversation with him explores how self-delusions, which are typically frowned upon and thought of as having a negative impact on our world, can actually be very useful. Delusions can actually allow us to live a richer, Happier and more successful life. Go figure.

Shankar, who calls himself a card-carrying rationalist, helps us understand not only how we delude ourselves but why those delusions can be helpful.

We hope you enjoy this episode, and we wanted to let you know that we have more episodes coming up with researchers and authors that Curt and I are definitely starstruck by.

Yeah, we're super excited about sharing these, Tim. Who should the listeners be looking out for in the upcoming episodes?

Well, Curt, let's start with the godfather of influence, Robert Cialdini, talking about the new edition of his international bestseller, Influence. We'll also have Olivier Siboney talking about his new book, Noise, which he co-authored with Danny Kahneman and Cass Sunstein. Who else, Curt?

Well, we have Philip Zimbardo, who many of you may know from his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. Katie Milkman, who is one of our favorite guests. Katie will be talking about her new book, How to Change, which, by the way, if you're listening to this podcast, it is required read for everyone. Everyone needs to go out and read that book. All right, Tim, who else?

I like that. It should be required reading. We'll end the little promotion here by alerting you to an upcoming conversation we have with the world-famous social psychologist Richard Nesbitt. whose work has helped us understand that a large portion of self-reporting is really more about what people think they're thinking about and less about what they actually think. That is going to be a fantastic discussion. That's just a sampling of the great guests that we've got coming on in coming weeks.

Oh, wow. I need to get this permagrin off of my face.

Oh, man, me too. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss a single episode, and you can probably earn some goodwill with your friends and definitely with us if you happen to tell them they should subscribe as well.

Oh, I like that idea. That's a great idea. Uh, go ahead and tell a friend. All right, and with that, we invite you to sit back with a warm cup of self-delusion and enjoy our conversation with Shankar Vedantam.

Shankar Vedantam, welcome to Behavioral Grooves.

I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Now, we are super— you don't understand how excited we are to have you.

It is really our pleasure.

This is just a fantastic opportunity. And as always, we start with the speed round. So I get the first question. Shankar, coffee or tea? Which do you prefer?

Tea for me. For some strange reason, I am somewhat allergic to coffee. And the smell of coffee makes me nauseous. And so very often when I'm sitting next to colleagues in the days before the pandemic and someone would have a cup of coffee sitting next to me at the conference table, uh, I would feel very sick because the smell of coffee makes me nauseous.

Oh my gosh.

I love the smell of coffee, but cannot stand the taste. The taste is unbearable, but, but the smell is wonderful for me.

That—

I've never heard of anyone who's got a nauseous experience with coffee. That's amazing. Okay. Uh, second question. What would you prefer to have dinner with your favorite researcher, athlete, or musician?

I'm boring. I'm going to pick the thing that I do for my day job. I would prefer to have dinner with my favorite researcher. No question.

Oh, fantastic.

You are the same as myself. So, you know, some will pick a musician, but I am on that researcher thing. All right. So, Shankar, this is from your book right here. So, will my relationship with my wife be better if I really believe, or in other words, deceive myself that she is the most beautiful woman on this planet?

No question.

We will come back to that. We will absolutely come back to that. And for our last speed round question, should card-carrying rationalists read your new book, Useful Delusions, or should they just stick to the myth that they're really rational about everything?

Well, I think they should read my book, but it might be good to play some mild classical music as they're listening because there are elements of my book that are going to give card-carrying rationalists some serious heartburn.

Excellent. Well, and you describe yourself as one of those card-carrying rationalists in the book. So how did you come about to actually write this book being one of those card-carrying rationalists?

Well, there's a deep irony here, Curt. As you say, I am a card-carrying rationalist. I believe in the world of logic. I believe in the world of science. But the irony here is that the world of logic and science suggests that Logic and rationality and science are often not the best way to the right answer. And as a follower of logic and science, you have to follow where science leads. And the science tells you that maybe logic is not the best answer in all situations. Being a good scientist or a believer in science means that you follow the scientists, you follow the science even there.

It sounds a bit ironic that to be scientific, you're being irrational.

It is indeed. I think there is a profound sort of mystery and irony there. Some of this book originated in some conversations I remember having many years ago with Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist. We were talking about evolution and he was just starting to work actually on the book, what became The God Delusion. So this was in the years before The God Delusion came out.

Mm-hmm.

One of the things that I was trying to argue with him, and in some ways it was the precursor for ideas that were in Useful Delusions was that, isn't it interesting that a process of evolution and natural selection has created the human mind, and the human mind seems so capable of self-deception? Isn't it interesting that a process that in some ways— we understand natural selection and evolution through the application of logic and rationality and science. But what it shows is that the brain that's produced as a net result of this process of natural selection in some ways is prone to great acts of self-deception. And not just that, many of these acts of self-deception turn out to be quite functional for us. And I remember asking Richard Dawkins this question. When you think about many people who are religious people, for example, and his book, of course, The God Delusion, was a critique of religion and religious people. I asked him, isn't it interesting that many religious people, in fact, studies show that they turn out better than people who are not religious? And so I said, is it possible that the process of natural selection in some ways might favor those who in fact don't believe in natural selection? Which sort of would be a profound, profound irony.

It really is a profound irony. And one of the things that you argue, I think, in your book, which is, I think, tied into that, is this, that people with self-delusion tend to live a happier life in general, and that even pointing to research that says, hey, you know, people with depression have a more realistic worldview than people who tend to be happier on average. So Is there a point, though, where that deception, that self-deception, that self-delusion becomes a negative, where it goes beyond a point of actually being helpful and into a point of maybe having some negative causes or outcomes from it?

I think that's an excellent question, Curt, and a profoundly important one. And the answer to that question is yes. But in some ways, it's actually even more complicated than yes. There's no question that self-deception and delusions can cause great harm. Even a cursory glance at the history of the last 100 years can show you all kinds of ways in which delusions can cause war and lead to genocide and just profound harm across the planet. You know, computer scientists talk about things that are bugs and things that are features. Things that are bugs are things that are problematic. Things that are features are things that are useful. Self-deception turns out to be in that special category of its own where it's both a bug and a feature. And sometimes it's both a bug and a feature at the same time. I think this is what makes it so complicated, which is it's absolutely the case that self-deception and delusion can cause great harm, and we should do our best to try and stamp out dangerous delusions. And it's simultaneously true that sometimes the very same delusions and self-deceptions can also produce great good. So both these things are true simultaneously. I'm not sure there's a clean dividing line where you say, you know, self-deceptions are always good in this case, they're always bad in that case. I think it really is context dependent.

I was hoping you could offer us a rubric for how to separate the good ones from the bad ones.

It's really tricky, Tim, because I think— take this common self-deception that I like to talk about, and I think this is something that many people can relate to. Many of us have children, but even those of us who don't have children, we have parents. And so all of us in some ways are intimately familiar with the parent-child bond. In some ways, it's the most common bond that all of us are familiar with. Anyone who has been a parent for sure, but I think most people who are also children will sort of appreciate this, that parental love for children involves great heaps of self-deception and great heaps of delusion. I know that when my own daughter was born, I truly believed that she was the most special child in the entire universe. When she was born, I really had the sense that she was the most profound miracle of all the miracles that had ever taken place in the history of the universe. You can see, of course, that this is, of course, a self-deception. It's, of course, a self-delusion. It can't possibly be the case that millions of parents are simultaneously correct in believing that their own special child is the most special child in the universe. It's obviously a self-deception, but you can see how useful this self-deception is because it turns out parenting is actually remarkably hard.

Yeah.

It's time-consuming. It's difficult. It's frustrating. It's expensive. Minus the delusion that parents have about their children, if you allow parents to make a purely rational cost-benefit calculation about their children, many of them might well decide, you know, this is more trouble than it's worth, and they might walk away from it. And you can see from the point of view of natural selection, from the point of view of survival, why it is natural selection has imbued parents with this mad love for their children, this insane obsession with the uniqueness of their children. Now, you can also simultaneously see how sometimes parental love can tip over into something that's deeply dangerous.

Hmm.

You know, I grew up in India. One of the most famous Indian epics, the Mahabharata, is a story about a king who was so in love with his own son that he failed to see the son was actually a truly evil person. And he failed to see the son was pulling the kingdom into ruin, and his love for his son was so great that he allowed the kingdom to fall into ruin. And in the myth, the Mahabharata, the epic, the king is actually literally blind, and his literal blindness is a metaphor for the blindness that he has toward his son. So now you could say, clearly that's an example of parental love gone awry. Clearly, it's an example of how self-deception can lead to great harm. But here's the question: how do you know when parental love has gone too far? Because if you were to wave a magic wand and remove all self-deception from the brains of all parents, I suspect we would have a world that's much worse than we have today, not a world that's much better.

Yeah, there's that continuum, right, from the purely rational to the purely delusional. And there's some point in between where it may switch. But how do you determine at what point does that extra You know, delusion changed that from a, a positive, healthy delusion into one that is more negative. So I hear that and you see that, but it's really hard. Now, you talk about this parental being a positive one in general. Are there other delusions that you think are particularly important for us to keep in our lives, ones that On average, help us more than they harm us?

Well, we can talk about several, I'm sure, and I'm sure we will in the course of this conversation, but let me give you one at sort of in some ways the other end of the spectrum at the very large level. Most of us, I think, find it difficult to think of nations as delusions. We think the nation seems like it's a real construct, but if you define a delusion as something that's principally the invention of the human mind, an invention of the human mind that depends for its existence on the human mind, it has no reality outside of the human mind and also believes and also depends in some cases on large numbers of people believing the same thing, you see that the nation checks all those boxes. Nations in fact are inventions of the human mind. They have no reality apart from the human mind. If humans were to disappear from the planet tomorrow, there would be no more nations instantly. Of course, the reality of what constitutes the United States and what constitutes Mexico and what constitutes Canada depends on the beliefs of the people living in the United States and Mexico and Canada. There's a shared agreement that sort of says, here's where the United States ends and here's where Mexico begins. Here's where the United States ends and here's where Canada begins. Now, the United States is in some ways a delusion, but I would argue it's a very useful delusion because as a nation, we're able to do many things together that we would not be able to do on our own. For example, if there are parts of the country that are doing very well, those parts of the country, you can send resources and help to parts of the country that are not doing so well. If there's a natural disaster in Texas, somebody in New York feels, I need to help the person in Texas. Why do you feel like you need to help the person in Texas? You're never going to meet them. them, you're not related to them, there's no connection with them. Well, you feel like helping them because you say, well, we're both Americans. We have a shared identity. The nation basically is a useful construct to create this shared umbrella of beliefs and values and norms that allow large numbers of people to work cohesively together, allows us to accomplish great things. Now again, as I said, only a quick glance at the history of the last 100 years can show you all the terrible things that nations have done. All the genocides and wars that nations have brought about. So you can very easily make the argument that nations, the delusions that we have about nations can produce great harm. But I would argue that that's an example of something in our daily lives where my life would probably be worse off if all of us did not believe in the existence and reality of the country in which we live.

I loved that. I love that in the book, the way that you brought this national identity and this shared dream, this American dream thing into the story was fantastic. And a really wonderful insight to me because I really had never kind of thought of it from that perspective. It also gets me thinking about, are there particular delusions that really are helpful in our lives that we should focus on, that we could, for lack of a better word, enhance or favor? In your work in writing the book, did you come to some that you just felt, no, we should really hold onto these and maybe even emphasize them?

Yeah, I would say that one of the things that I feel like turns out to be a really useful delusion is sort of the ways in which many of our mothers or fathers taught us to talk to one another. When you're a small child, your parents teach you to be polite to other people.

Mm-hmm.

They teach you to be gracious to other people. When someone comes to your home and gives you a gift, you're expected to say that you like the gift even if you didn't like the gift. When someone comes home and has— comes to a dinner party at your house, you're supposed to say, thank you so much for coming. It was a pleasure to have you. Or if you're the guest, you're expected to say, that was a lovely evening. Thank you for having me over. Now, sometimes these, in fact, are deceptions because, in fact, you didn't have a great time at the dinner party, or you didn't like the gift, or you didn't like what your colleague just said. But it turns out that people who simply speak what is on their minds, people who have essentially no filter between their brains and their mouths, You could describe them as fearless rationalists and truth-tellers, but we all know people like this in our daily lives, and these are people who are unpleasant to be around. Many studies have found, for example, that workplaces where people do not have a filter between their brain and the mouth, these are not happy workplaces. These are workplaces, in fact, which actually produce discord and rancor. If you're a manager speaking to a subordinate, for example, it's useful to basically, before you criticize a subordinate for something that he or she has done wrong, to sort of emphasize the value that they bring to your team and the things that they have done right and to couch your criticism in a certain amount of praise. Now, you could argue that that's deception. You could just simply come out and tell people exactly what you think. But all of us understand that when we are spoken to, we like to be spoken to politely. We like to be spoken to courteously. We like to be spoken to empathetically. And we learn to do the same thing in return. If you think about many of the worst excesses of social media that you see today, when you go on some social media platforms and you see what people say and do to one another, another, the thing that always strikes me is that these are people who would never in a million years say those things to one another if they were actually sitting in the same room with one another.

Right.

If their children were sitting in the same room with them. We understand that this would just be deeply socially inappropriate to do. These would be cruel things to do. I think that the rules of social conduct and social norms, good manners if you will, are actually a kind of useful delusion that I think not only do I heartily endorse, But I wish we would see more of that. One last aside, I'm not making a political point here, but I think both conservatives and liberals appreciate that Donald Trump was not someone who basically had a filter between his brain and his mouth.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people, regardless of whether you agree with him or disagree with him, understand that when you don't have a filter between your brain and your mouth, the things that come out of your mouth can come across as deeply harsh and deeply cruel. And it can end up hurting people a great deal. So even if you believe the policies that you believe in, there are ways to express those policies in a way that doesn't come across as cruel.

Yeah, that idea of learning how to operate with others in that social environment in a way that, as you said, may not necessarily be truthful, but is a way that helps make sure that that relationship, that those relationships are strong and positive and have that benefit of saying, hey, you know, I, I didn't really like that pound cake that you sent me for Christmas, but I'm gonna let you think that I did. And that just keeps that relationship positive and moving forward. It's kind of what I do with Tim every day. So it's one of those things.

You didn't have to say that out loud. Oh, I see that.

That's where that filter doesn't come in again. I, I knew there was something. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Shankar, we had a question. Tim and I were thinking about this beforehand. And one of the things about delusions is that, you know, they're delusions and we don't often know them. Is there a way— have you seen in the research, is there a way that we can orchestrate them for ourselves? So we know that there are some delusions that are good for us. And are there ways that we can actually make them, or is the act of actually being conscious about having a delusion in our life kind of negate the value of it. I don't know if that is clear in the question, but—

Yeah, it is clear. It's a very good question, Curt. And I think in general, I think the insight is— your insight is correct, which is that delusions work best when we don't realize that they're delusions. So the fact that the nation is a delusion, the fact that we don't think of the nation as being a delusion is part of what makes the nation a very effective delusion. We're not actually thinking about it as being something that's an invention of the human mind. But I would believe— I do think that there are many situations where you can actually consciously, if you will, walk yourself to certain beliefs that turn out to be functional. Let me just give you a simple example. A lot of studies find that a daily practice of gratitude is something that is really important for people for their psychological well-being. Sometimes it's hard when you've had a tough day and you've not enjoyed your work or things have gone badly or your personal relationships are you know, not doing great, it's very hard to feel like there's anything in the world to be grateful for. And yet, the research seems to suggest that people who basically make a practice of carving out a little bit of time, perhaps at the end of the day, of basically saying, you know, yes, there are things about my day that didn't go well, there are things about my life that I might not be happy about, but let me list 3 things that I'm actually grateful for. The practice of listing the things that you're grateful for turns out to change your orientation to the world. It changes the way you relate to the world. It changes your perception of the world itself. You start to think of the world as actually being a more hopeful place, a place which is filled with kindness, a place that is filled with people who might reach out to help you. And it turns out that when your orientation to the world changes, the world itself changes around you. So in some ways, it's sort of ironic, but the practice of gratitude, even when it's forced, can sometimes change our relationship to the world. Such that the world then gives us things to actually do feel grateful, that we actually should feel grateful about. So in some ways, I think, you know, we have this impression that when we look at the world, our responses to the world are simply our responses to external stimuli. One of the central ideas of my book is that the ways we respond to the world changes the world in profound ways. And the ways the world— and the ways in which the world changes in those ways changes then our relationship to the world. So our experience, our feelings, our beliefs about the world changes the world in which we live and then changes our satisfaction with that world.

Sometimes we talk to really great researchers, people like Roy Baumeister and George Loewenstein, who have had years and years of great research behind them in psychology and economics. They oftentimes confess that many of the things that they pursued were personal interests to them. potential issue, a hangup, or something that they sort of wanted to figure out in their own life. And I'm not trying to be impertinent, but just curious, at what level was Useful Delusions a product of your own exploring something that you wanted to solve in your own life?

That's a great question. I mean, the old joke in psychology is that psychologists don't do research, they do me-search. You're drawn to things that affect you. I'm not sure necessarily the book was trying to address a problem necessarily that I was having, but I will say that I did observe in my own life that my own behavior deviated regularly from what I would consider rational behavior.

Wow.

I noticed that my behavior tended to deviate from what I would consider logical and rational, usually at times when I felt vulnerable or afraid or scared or anxious about something. So let me give you a very simple example from my life. In fact, this happened after the book was written, but I think it's a very good example for what I'm talking about.

Great.

Some months ago, I was traveling some distance away from my home, several hours away from my home in Washington, D.C. I suffered an impact injury right beneath my eye, and over the course of the next 24 hours, I started to see a shadow come across my eye. Now, I have a family history of retinal problems, and so I intuited that what was happening was I had suffered a retina detachment. And for people who are not familiar what a retina detachment is, the retina is the screen behind your eye that essentially processes and picks up the light signals coming through your eye. And once that screen— if that screen detaches from its hinges, you essentially lose sight in your eye altogether, and that cannot be recovered afterwards. Now, as I said, I was several hours away from my home in Washington. I was in a part of the country where I couldn't find any doctors or I didn't know of any doctors. And as my vision started to vanish literally, literally before my eyes, I felt like I was going blind. I started to panic and I started to be greatly afraid of what was going to happen.

Yeah.

I eventually managed to find a doctor in a city that I'd actually never visited before. He very kindly opened his practice for me at 9 o'clock in the night and diagnosed me and then wheeled me into surgery minutes later to get the retina detachment addressed. The whole experience was really scary. As it turned out, he was a He was a wonderful doctor and he ended up saving my eye, for which I'm profoundly grateful. But the reason I mentioned this story is that as I was experiencing this moment of great vulnerability, I wasn't very rational about what was happening. I was happy to pray to every god in the world to basically protect my eye, to save my eye. And of course, this speaks to that old aphorism that there are no atheists in the foxhole. And I think this is one of the central ideas of the book, which is that it's very easy, I think, for people like me who are who are rationalists, who are logical, who are scientific, to sometimes sit in judgment or even sit in contempt, to have contempt for people who engage in self-deceptions and in delusional thinking. I think what people like me sometimes fail to pick up is the life situations that cause people to reach for certain self-deceptions. One of the insights that I had as I was writing the book is that a fearless recommendation for rationality and logic is not just the sign of an enlightened mind, it's also the sign of a privileged mind. So when you have a lot of privilege, if you in fact have not been through a lot of suffering, it's easy in some ways to recommend unflinching honesty and courage. But were we in the same storm as the people to whom we are lecturing, were we to experience the traumas and terrors that they're experiencing, perhaps we ourselves would turn to beliefs that would comfort us.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting, your story about, again, praying to any god that you can think of in, in the moment of your distress, because, uh, we got an early version of, of Noise, the new Kahneman, uh, Tversky, and Sunstein's book, talking about that. And one of the quotes that they had in there is that a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.

Mm-hmm.

And so Actually, the question we were going to ask is like, how does mood impact our believability? And it sounds almost as if your experience is, is contrary to that idea that, that in a point of distress, that maybe there is this element of delusion that comes in, maybe even more so than, than being able in a good mood. And I don't know if you've, you've researched that or looked into that, but if If any thoughts on just mood and its ability to impact our delusional state or likelihood to believe in a delusion.

Yeah, I think you're identifying sort of a really interesting tension here because I think the Kahneman book and others have noted interestingly and correctly that people in a good mood are more prone to swallowing BS. They're more prone to basically accepting ridiculous ideas. Whereas people in a bad mood are more likely to be skeptical. The point that I was just making is how sometimes when you're in a bad mood or you're at least in a very anxious frame of mind, you're more likely to reach for deceptions. It seems superficially that those 2 things are in tension with one another. But let me give you a way to perhaps resolve this tension and perhaps bring them both— pull both these ideas together. Think for a second of why it is that we have emotions in the first place. Why do we have— why does natural selection come up with the idea of having emotions? If you believe in the idea of natural selection, selection, you believe that your brain is the result of many, many thousands of years of natural selection and evolution, the reason that you experience fear and I experience fear, or you experience love and I experience love, there have to be evolutionary reasons for this, right? So there are evolutionary reasons that drive our emotional response to the world. When you look at it this way, it's easy to see that sometimes our emotions can be guides that can help us to deal with difficult circumstances. That's partly what our emotions are designed to do. A catalog of what's happening around us, but they're also in some ways our defense mechanism as we respond to the world. Many of us have been through, of course, a terrible pandemic this past year, and we've learned a lot about our immune systems and the way our immune systems mount a response to biological threats. It turns out our minds do exactly the same thing. Our minds have a defense system as well, but this defense system is an emotional defense system. So confronted with great threats, threats that we cannot control, threats that are outside our ability to influence, many of us use our emotions unconsciously. We turn to our emotions unconsciously as a defense mechanism. So for example, I did not have a way to fix my own retina detachment. I could not perform surgery on myself. I had no means to basically help myself. It was outside my control, and I could see my eye literally, my vision literally slipping away from me. At that point, it wasn't emotionally functional for me to basically accept the full reality of what was happening to me. In fact, it was only producing despair.

Mm-hmm.

Basically, I turned to hope. I turned to belief. I turned to all kinds of things that would prompt me to believe that there was hope in sight. When I met this doctor, for example, at 9 o'clock on a Tuesday night, I didn't have a chance to review doctor reviews. I didn't have a chance to get a second opinion. I did what all of us would do when someone throws you a lifeline. You grab onto the lifeline and you believe in the lifeline, and that's what I did. That's what my emotions trained me to do, that in some ways my emotions said at this point, this is what would be most functional for you. It turns out when you're in a very good mood, our emotions sort of function in the opposite direction. So for example, there was an interesting study that I remember we featured some time ago on Hidden Brain where students were asked, do you want to get tested for a sexually transmitted disease at a school?

Mm-hmm.

And we would make this test It would be free. It would be anonymous. It would be confidential. It would be accurate. But you would find out whether you have this sexually transmitted disease. And what the researchers found, among other things, was that students who were in a really good mood did not want to get tested. And the reason they didn't want to get tested, again, it makes perfect sense. When you're in a good mood, everything's going great, do you really want to be told that you have herpes? You know, that would presumably put you in a bad mood. And it also makes sense why people in a good mood would be even more likely to reject the test because they can perceive that the herpes diagnosis would mean an even steeper fall because you are higher up on your emotional scale.

Yeah.

So I think emotions are sort of a complex thing and they perform a variety of different functions for us. I think sometimes they're designed to sort of buffer us against the challenges that we face. And sometimes, ironically, they can also keep us from seeing reality accurately. One of the great and interesting things is that I think that many of us associate mental health with seeing the world clearly, but the example that you just gave is so telling, Curt, because what it shows in some ways is that we might actually see the world more clearly when in fact we are depressed. We might be able to see the world— we're less able to see the world clearly when we're in a good mood, precisely because the good mood keeps us from seeing reality for what it is.

Wow. That's fantastic. I was just thinking that I want to go back to privilege because when Curt and Mary and I were talking about the book in advance of our discussion today, we all arrived at this idea that when you write that forgoing self-deception isn't merely a mark of education or enlightenment, it's a sign of privilege. We thought that that was a catalyzing moment for us. And I wanted to know, What was the catalyst for such a discovery in your own life? What brought you to that perspective? I think it's an elegant statement.

Well, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that, Tim. In many ways, I think I was turning over, as my co-author Bill Messler and I were writing this book, we started with a story that grew out of a con that basically unfolded over many years. And the con had sort of a very interesting twist to it, which is when the con was finally brought to light, and the conman was put on trial, several members of the people whom he had conned showed up at his trial to defend him. They wanted to keep the con going. So that was the starting point, if you will, for the book. But then as we started thinking about this and thinking about why it is self-deception is so ubiquitous, we then sort of realized over time that there were many areas of our lives where self-deception was not just ubiquitous, but self-deception was functional. And in some ways, that's what led me to the realization that if it's functional, It's functional precisely because people are experiencing difficulties. And so when I look back at my own life and look back at all the times that I had been contemptuous of people for the self-deceptions that they had, I realized it's really easy for me if my child is not dying from cancer, it's easy for me to mock the beliefs of people whose children are dying from cancer or the beliefs that they might hold or the superstitions they might engage in or the rituals they might pursue because they are confronted by something truly terrifying. And of course, when you see it that way, you quickly realize then that what you present to yourself as brave self-enlightenment and courage might only really be a manifestation of privilege, the good fortune that you have of actually not being in the foxhole with the people who are there.

Yeah. So Shankar, I love that. And part of the reason that I really enjoyed this book is because I think you bring up a number of really large philosophical questions in the book. And one, I'm going to I want to just quote from the book because I think it, for me, it epitomizes, I think, some of the key insights from this book. And I just want to get your thoughts on this. And here's the quote. So the point of a bottle of wine is, after all, to produce subjective pleasure. Does it really matter if the subjective pleasure is produced because the wine in 2 bottles is objectively different or because people experience more pleasure when they pay extra for the same wine? To put it another way, Regardless of whether your enjoyment comes from the physical properties of the wine or the story of the wine, isn't the money you pay producing heightened pleasure? And for me, it just looks at this from a very pragmatic way that as long as it doesn't hurt you or others, does it matter if the pleasure that I, I get from the wine or from that, that story of the wine? It doesn't really matter. It's, it's the pleasure at the end of the of the thing. And I think that's a huge question. So I just wanted to get your take on that.

Yeah. So I think it's a— thank you for raising that. That was an interesting experiment, and I'll describe it in just a second. But just to step back for just a second, just think about how the brain operates. I just ate a meal just a little while before this conversation, and I found the meal delicious. And as I was eating my food, I realized my sense of taste, is actually a delusion, right? Because the food itself has no taste. The food itself does not have— there's nothing sweet about sugar. There's nothing salty about salt. Minus the human brain, none of those perceptions exist. Those perceptions exist precisely because the brain is taking signals coming from your tongue, and evolution has taught your brain, interpret this signal in a positive way by sending a reward burst to the reward center of the brain, and you experience it sweet or delicious. So in some ways, our entire perceptions are basically shaped by the ways in which our minds are perceiving reality.

Yeah.

This is true for everything that we perceive. So to the extent that all our perceptions, almost everything that we know— I mean, there are some things that we might know separate from our perceptions, but nearly everything that we know comes to us because of the perceptions that we have. And those perceptions in many ways are constructions. They're constructions of the human mind. that the thing that I ate was a hallucination. I'm not talking about it as being a delusion in the sense of a serious psychiatric disorder. But I'm saying that the everyday things that we experience in the world that we think of as real, in fact, are creations of the human mind. Now, when you buy that idea now, you start to say, all right, now let's look at different ways in which we perceive subjective experiences. The study that you're referring to where the wine experiment, I believe this was a study where where researchers poured $10 wine into a bottle that was marked at $90.

Yeah.

And then some of the volunteers drank the $10 wine out of a $10 bottle, and some of them drank the $10 wine out of a $90 bottle. And unsurprisingly, people who drank the $10 wine out of the $90 bottle thought it was better wine than people who drank the $10 wine out of the $10 bottle. And what was interesting about this experiment was that they conducted brain scans of the people as they were drinking the wine, and they found that people drinking the wine out of the expensive bottle actually experienced the wine as better. The centers of the brain that process reward actually were more activated. And so this raises an interesting question. When you're drinking a $90 bottle of wine, what exactly is producing pleasure in your brain? Is it the wine that's producing the pleasure, or is it the cost of the bottle that's producing the pleasure? And of course, the truth is you cannot distinguish between the two, because as far as you're concerned, when you're drinking the wine and you're experiencing the pleasure, you're experiencing just one subjective answer. How much of that was driven by the price of the bottle and how much of that was driven by the wine? is outside of your ability to disentangle. I think this is true for many different things in our lives. When you listen to a musician playing in a street corner for free and you drop $2 in the musician's basket versus going to a concert hall and paying $200 to listen to a musician play, is the quality of the music really explaining the $198 difference that you're paying? Or is it in fact that you are yourself a different person? when you're sitting in that concert hall. And the person whom you are, what you are bringing to the experience in the music hall, is partly why the music you hear in the music hall is entirely different.

Yeah, I think there's an implication on this in a number of different ways. And marketing is one of those implications. Marketing is not just about influencing people to buy. Marketing can actually have an influence over people's perception of the product that they're doing based upon how they're positioning it and how it gets placed in people's brains. Again, and you bring up a wonderful example of Geo Prism versus Toyota Corolla, which are exactly the same car with just different placemats, you know, the decals on them. But I think it, it changes the way that, at least for me, when I read it, and I think what struck me about this was it puts the world in a different perspective when we think about that our reality is formed through, as you said, you know, these neural processes that are going on in our brain. And it doesn't matter if that is based in reality or if it is based because of whatever our brain is doing and the delusions that we have, because the end result of that is the same. And so it's fascinating to me. And I think it's one of the big questions that I just absolutely loved about this book.

Well, one thing I will say, Curt, and just piggybacking on something that you actually said earlier, it's really important to potentially draw this line between things that are of subjective interest to us and things that are affecting other people. So for example, For example, if I find a bottle of wine more tasty because it's marked $90, and you drink the same wine and it costs you $10, but I feel like I'm happy with the purchase that I've made, you can feel happy that you have saved yourself $80 on your bottle of wine. I can feel happy that I have drunk wine that is delicious. We both come out fine. There's no one who's really been hurt. The problem, I think, with some deceptions, some self-delusions, is when my beliefs affect So in other words, if I believe, for example, that people who have your skin color or your age group or your religion, that there's something wrong with you, now my self-deceptions are not just affecting my subjective experience of the world, they're affecting you. They're affecting how I treat you. They're affecting how I behave towards you. In many ways, I think we should focus much of our attention on self-deception and delusion on areas of our lives that impinge on other people. Because I think it's where they impinge on other people, especially where my delusions, my self-deceptions harm you, that's where the delusion becomes dangerous. I think it's where it tips from benefit to harm that I think that the tipping point has— that might be the dividing line between where self-deception is a feature to where it becomes a bug.

I can't help but think about the QAnon and the raid on the Capitol on January 6th as being sort of a group delusion.

Right.

And a whole bunch of subscriptions to self-delusions coming to play in with large crowds. And I don't know, I guess I'm not sure what the question is, but you live in the Washington, D.C. area. How difficult is this for you to kind of on a daily basis to sort of be aware of and be sensitive and try to keep your life in order Yeah.

January 6th was a truly wild day in Washington, D.C. And I think we all saw things on our television screens that I don't think any of us ever expected to see in our lifetimes. And conspiracy theories, I think, are a sort of special case of self-deception, which I think they can easily tip over into things that are deeply harmful. So let me say 2 things. One, I have sort of an interesting way sort of to combat conspiracy theories.

All right.

But before I get to that, let me just say one thing before that. It is absolutely the case that the people who marched on the Capitol, the insurrectionists on January 6th, that they believed something that was delusional. I think that is true. But I think if you step back and look at it from a slightly larger perspective, if the nation itself is a delusion, if the nation itself involves acts of self-deception, it is the case that I think the people who believed that the election was flawed or was not correct were suffering from a delusion. But in some ways, what we're describing here is sort of a battle of different kinds of delusions, right?

Yeah.

In other words, if you had sort of someone visiting from another galaxy for a second, just imagine that you had an anthropologist who comes to us from a distant galaxy, travels across millions of miles of empty space to arrive at this little tiny speck of a planet and finds that this one species on the planet, one species out of 8 million species on the planet, believes that it is so dominant that it has divided the planet into 190 different territories and believes in these territories so deeply and so passionately that they've armed themselves with nuclear weapons and are willing to destroy themselves and the entire planet over the integrity of these 190 different lines in the sand. Surely this anthropologist from another galaxy would describe our relationship to our countries as delusional.

Right.

They would say these are profound delusions that are potentially going to cause great harm. That's the larger context. I think in some ways, it's easy for us to basically sit in judgment of people who have self-deceptions. I think very often it's very hard for us to perceive the things that hold our own lives together that in fact are also self-deceptions, that are also delusions. I will say though that when you look at delusions that are dangerous, the mistake that I think we often make is to try and confront those delusions with logic and reason. I remember some years ago I was having dinner with a friend of mine whom I'd known in my college days, and he was firmly convinced that the United States was behind the 9/11 attacks, that the FBI and CIA had carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Wow.

And I remember arguing with him for 90 minutes over dinner, and at the end of that, I hadn't convinced him. If anything, he was even more fervent in his belief that the United States was behind the attack, and perhaps our friendship had frayed a little. I think if I was to do it over differently, I would do it— I would approach that conversation differently. Instead of telling him that he was an idiot and a moron and trying to throw logic at him, I would ask him many more questions. I would ask him how he came to the belief that he has. I would ask him how he knows what he knows. I would in some ways ask him to explain his belief to me. Psychologists sometimes call— have an interesting— have come up with this interesting idea of something called the illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion of explanatory depth is that we all believe we can explain the world better than we can actually explain the world. For example, if I were to ask you, how do your glasses work? Or how does your microphone work? We might come up with— we might say, yeah, I sort of broadly understand how my glasses work. We say, okay, fine. Draw a pair of glasses for me, or draw a microphone for me, or draw a bicycle for me. It turns out when you ask people to actually demonstrate their knowledge, people quickly realize that they actually know much less about the world than they actually do. This is called the illusion of explanatory depth. One of the values of asking people questions where, in some ways, they are answering and revealing what it is that they know is that it starts to put a seed of doubt in their own minds about the Hmm. The certainty they have of their own beliefs. I think when it comes to conspiracy theories, many of us believe that the challenge is to persuade other people about the error of their beliefs. I think the real challenge when it comes to conspiracy beliefs is to get people to challenge their own beliefs.

Hmm.

The process actually has to begin from the inside out rather than from the outside in. And I think you're more likely to start that process by starting with not just questions, but a certain amount of compassion and empathy to basically ask How is it possible that this conspiracy theory is actually performing some kind of valuable function in your life? Let me try and understand it from your point of view.

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's the best advice ever. I think that we need to continue to reiterate that, to try to keep people— keep all of our relationships intact, especially among those that we love, by just backing our foot off the gas pedal on logic and facts. I wanted to go to one little tiny little reference that you make in the book about the Fleetwood Mac song, Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies, this Christine McVie song. She actually later admitted that, she said that the idea of the lyric was that if she'd had a chance, she'd do it differently next time. But since she couldn't, she was just going to carry on and let the person lie to her. I'm asking because, you know, Why does such tension exist in our brains, do you think? I'm also using it as a segue to talk about music, by the way.

Well, I think in many ways our brains are trying to mediate between our internal needs and our external needs. Curt asked the question at the top, is his life going to be better off if he believed that his spouse was the most beautiful person on the planet? I think the answer to that question is yes, because in some ways our brains are mediating between the external reality of the world. And our internal needs and goals and hopes and fears. And in some ways, sometimes that's well served by seeing reality for exactly what it is. And sometimes it's well served by, in fact, shading reality a little bit. A number of studies find, for example, certainly when it comes to romance and love, that in fact we are better off in believing that the people we love are more beautiful, are more intelligent, are more compassionate, are more kind, are better people than they actually are. People who have those beliefs about their partners are not just happier in their relationships, they're more likely to stay in their relationships. The beliefs that you have about your partner are likely to become true. On the other hand, when you evaluate your partner as a stranger might evaluate your partner and see your partner exactly for who he is or who she is, that person might come to a less charitable conclusion about your partner. If the 3 of us, Tim, Curt, and I, If the 3 of us went out on a road trip this coming year and we visited every couple getting married in the United States on their wedding day and we stopped by each of those weddings and we asked these couples, what do you think the odds are you're going to get divorced? The logical and rational answer should be to look at the global statistics and say, somewhere between 40% and 50% of all couples get divorced.

Oh, yeah.

There's no reason to think that I'm particularly special. I put my odds of divorce at about 40% to 50%. I would bet that no one who's getting married on their wedding day is going to tell you their odds of divorce are 40 to 50%. And I would tell you, anyone who says their odds of getting divorced are 40 to 50% on their wedding day, that is not likely to be a very happy marriage.

And then that's the marriage that will actually end up in that divorce. So yes.

Can you briefly tell us about— do you have a COVID playlist these days? Are you listening to any music?

That's a great question. I'm not sure. Music is sort of an important part of my life, but it's often sort of a background part of my life. I'm often not choosing the music I play. I often have various playlists playing that are automatically choosing the songs for me. I will say that during COVID like many people, I think I've experienced great moments of anxiety and despair and worry. I grew up in India, and as we're having this conversation right now, now, in late April 2021, things look very bad in India in terms of where the pandemic is going. And I think I've often turned to music, I think, to soothe my own anxieties. And in fact, this might be one of the last examples of the useful delusions we talk about, which is why is it, for example, that just a handful of notes or a song can change our moods, right? I mean, take out songs, just think about instrumental music.

Yeah.

So classical music or instrumental music, there's There's no content to the music whatsoever. How is it that basically it has such a profound effect on our moods? Why is it that music can make us sad or make us relieved or soothe us? And I think in some ways it speaks to the profound ways in which our brains are constructed, or our brains in some ways are— in some ways antennae that are picking up on these signals from the outside world. And it turns out that music turns out to be a very effective way to hijack those signals. So, you know, during this past year, I think, like many people, I have tried to find music that in some ways is peaceful, or music that in some ways reassures me that the world is not as dangerous or as, you know, as bad as things can be. And of course, some of this you would have to believe is sort of a delusion, because of course, things in fact have been very bad, and the pandemic has been very difficult. But just in the same way that I think, you know, some people might medicate themselves with with a shot of whiskey at the end of the night, I often find that listening to music, especially classical music, really ends up soothing me and makes me feel much better.

Shankar, I just thank you. I think we're going to end on that because I don't know what we could say that would be more appropriate for Tim because I'm sure he is just beaming out of his mind right now as he's listening to you talk about music and the impact that that has. But thank you. This has been truly, truly a pleasure and an honor for us, and we appreciate your time and your just wonderful insights. And just thanks.

Thank you for all that you do, Curt, and thank you, Tim. This has really been a pleasure to be on your show.

Welcome to our Grooving Session where Tim and I groove Groove on what we learned with our discussion with Shankar, have a free-flowing conversation, and talk about whatever else comes into our wonderfully deluded brains.

Fantastic.

You know, it, it, it was fantastic. This whole conversation was fantastic. As we mentioned in the intro, this— we were going into this with a little bit of stars in our eyes of being able to talk with Shankar, who we had been following for many, many years. And he is every bit as exceptional in person as he is on air. I just have to let everybody know, it was just fantastic.

There you go. I think that we don't have to say anything else because, because that was it. He absolutely is that kind, gracious, smart. Oh man, just, just fantastic.

Well, and he has such a wonderful— hey, his voice is just so calming and, and great. But then the way that he tells his narratives And the stories that he brings in to highlight the concepts, it just makes everything so clear and easy to understand, even when these concepts are pretty complex. They're pretty— they're contradictory in some manner, and yet you don't necessarily feel that because you go, oh, he told the story about his eye retina and that makes perfect sense in how we're thinking through this and all those other things. And you just go, he pulled that out of thin air, and he was just able to articulate it in such a wonderful way. Anyway, enough of our little fawning on, on Shankar. We, we're going to be fawning on so many guests in the upcoming weeks, it's just gonna be crazy.

But anyway, oh yeah, oh yeah.

What did you find particularly interesting outside of every sentence that Shankar said in this conversation? What did you find particularly fun or insightful?

When Delusions Are Useful.

Aren't they always useful? Shouldn't we just delude ourselves 100% of the time and live in la-la land?

No, of course not. Of course not. But that, like, just seeing the title of the book was shocking for, for me because it was like, he's a card-carrying rationalist. How, how the hell could he say— how could he write a book with With useful delusions on the COVID So are you a card-carrying rationalist?

Would you consider yourself more of a rationalist than a—

So I did up until the time that I read the book. And well, actually, you can still be a card-carrying rationalist, I think, to some degree, because I wasn't going to talk about this now, but he does say science led him to believe that delusions are good for us. Yeah, so, so he's still following the science.

Which I love, right? It's that fact of, well, if the science points to us being delusional as being good, we should follow the science, which is everything. You know, some of our favorite guests, Gary Latham, uh, John, John Barge, you know, some of those, those people who are saying, look, this is Just follow the science, because when we do that, that's the power of getting to the truth, which is actually a little bit contradictory with this idea of self-delusions. But the ideas that are— that Shankar talks about, I think, are really important. And I love this idea that, yes, these self-delusions that we have can actually be helpful for us, that they're there for a reason. And I loved at the beginning when he talked about his— the idea of, of natural selection and natural selection creating the brain that we have and how evolution formed that. And yet the brain is prone to these self-delusions. So if, if this process that would weed out these things that aren't useful to us most of the time—

Yeah.

Of, of natural selection on our brain didn't, then there must be something there. And I loved that concept of what, what spurred his thoughts around exploring this in, in detail. And I think that's so true, right? So let's figure out if we have these, if these are— if we're prone to these as a human species, then let's figure out why they're useful. And that's, I think, really cool. So what else did he talk about there?

Well, uh, I just want to say that it was really great to, to hear him talk about, uh, it's, it's a good delusion to think that our newborn baby is the most amazing thing that's ever been created in the whole world. That my wife, that, that, you know, my experience with Katie is like, she is the— I, I say it to her all the time, she's the best thing that's ever happened to me.

Mm-hmm.

You know, she is the most beautiful woman That I could ever imagine being married to. Now, objectively, that can be argued, right? We could say, well, is she actually more beautiful than, say, Ingrid Bergman? Well, we could have an objective argument about that, but I love holding onto the delusion that she is the most beautiful woman in the world. I love it. I love the delusion of my kids were the most amazing things when they were born. Now, they That soon went away when they became toddlers.

Same thing with my kids. Um, you know, but, but here's the thing, and this is the piece that I think is really fascinating about this and part of the research that goes into this. It's not necessarily a delusion because it's your idiosyncratic belief about this. And so for you, Katie is the most beautiful, wonderful person in the entire world. And the way that you interpret that is, is not— it's not delusional. It is, it is reality for you. It's the— and I keep going back, and we will probably talk about the damn wine experiments in here all of the time.

Yes, yes.

But it's one of those things that it's fascinated me for years since I first heard about these studies that are the Yeah, we've always known that we can, we can trick people through these blind taste tests. And it's— isn't it funny that we put these $10 bottle of wine and we fill all these glasses and people drink them and they— we say one's more expensive and they like that one better and you go, hahaha, that's, you know, this idea. But I love this idea that these research studies that put people in fMRI machines And are actually looking at our brains as we're processing drinking these wines show that our brains are activated differently and that our brains aren't the— we're actually experiencing these wines differently. And so the experience of the wine shouldn't matter if we're experiencing it differently because there has some objective difference in the qualities of the wine. Or if we're experiencing them differently because of our perceptions of the wine. And so that is useful.

Yeah, well, let me go back to a conversation we had with Linda Tunström when she was talking about, um, willful ignorance versus self-deception, and thought it might be good just to, to sort of define. Self-deception is when we are lying to ourselves to make ourselves feel feel better, right? And in the case of the wine, we're not lying to ourselves because our experience of external reality is actually molded by what our brains are processing. So it's not that we're actually lying to ourselves. Our actual experience of the world is influenced in a delusional way.

Yes, yes.

Right?

So we talked about this before going on air, the idea that if I have a dinner And dinner with my significant other, and we're on vacation and we're out by the seaside and it's a beautiful moonlit, you know, soft breeze night, and we see this, the lights shining off the waves, and we have this wonderful, uh, sea bass and whatever else dinner.

Wow, I'm liking it.

Yeah, doesn't that sound fantastic? And maybe a wonderful glass of wine, and we're going back to the wine. That meal will taste very differently if I took the exact same meal cooked by the exact same chef and somehow transported that chef over to my house with my family and 2 kids, and they're running around and we're rushed for time and we have all these other things. That meal will taste different for me. And yeah, literally, it doesn't seem And yeah, that doesn't— if you, if you told people that, they would say yeah. I mean, I don't think that's as big of a stretch. And I think this is part of this whole conversation of, is that a delusion or is it just part of actually how our brain is processing these, these pieces? And I, I think that's really central to what Shankar is saying here, is he's saying, look, you know, objectively, if we were just rational robots that were looking at this, they would say, well, the food is exactly the same, it should taste the same. The wine is exactly the same, it should taste the same. But that's not how our brains work. That's what he's talking about. Our brains don't work that way. And there's positive aspects of that. This idea that we sometimes have bigger beliefs in ourselves than, than others. This idea that you said our kids are the most wonderful kids in the world, that our our spouses are the most kind and beautiful and great people ever, right? There's— objectively, you could go in and say that's not the case, but subjectively, I— there's value in that, and, and there's truth in that.

You also talked about currency and nations, and these are great delusions that we have. And the cool thing about things like currency and nations is that they are collective delusions. There's this wonderful aspect of how we, to some degree, we all buy into the idea that if I hand you money from my country, in my country, it's going to be worth something. It's worth exactly what it says, and it's going to buy goods and services. I can trade it. And we all buy into that. And that's a pretty powerful delusion to have.

Because if we didn't, they would be worthless, right? Or they would be worth exactly whatever the metal is that's in them. to pray for others. Yeah. You know, and part of this— and this would be— we didn't talk to Shankar about this, and I don't know if he talked about it in his book. I don't remember reading it. But this idea that sometimes there, there's this aspect of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? This idea that our— that these delusions might actually help us achieve. In other words, if I look at the base rates of people starting restaurants or starting a small business, They're horrible. And yet we go, you know, there's millions of people do that every year.

And fail.

And many of them fail, but many of them become successes and many of them go on. And if we all just sat there and looked at, wow, the success rate of a new restaurant— and I'm making this up— is 18%, you know, the vast majority of people are going to say, I'm not going to do that. But this idea that, all right, well, I'm different, I'm going to you know, overcome this because of my uniqueness and my speciality, that can be really powerful. And it leads people to try things that they may not normally try. And part of that then may be the self-fulfilling prophecy that I'm, I'm better, that my idea is unique enough. And that may lead it to actually happen. And then you can add on to that the Pygmalion effect, right, which is this idea that I, I love the, the, the research behind this where they went in and told teachers, oh, by the way, these kids, they, they scored really high on these, you know, intelligence tests, when they in fact hadn't. It was just random. They just picked random kids. And but at the end of the year, by all of the standards of objective measures, looking even at IQ tests but then also just grades and everything else, those kids performed Significantly better than the kids that they didn't say that. So just this idea, this deluded idea of planting this false fact in somebody else's mind influences the outcome is really fascinating. And it's not even having to be implanted into the person. It was— those kids weren't told that they were extra smart. It was just their teachers that were told that they were extra smart. And so they started to differentiate how they interacted with those kids and different factors, which has a whole nother— we could do a whole episode on that. And we should at some point figure out somebody who's an expert in that and find out.

We should. That also relates to this illusory superiority, the Lake Wobegon effect.

Yeah.

You know, this ties into it where we kind of believe that, you know, we're all above average. You know, the, are you an above-average driver? Oh, of course I am. Of course I'm above average. But But 78% of people answer with, yes, I'm above average, and only 50% can actually be above average.

So 28% of, of people, not me, are wrong.

So that, so that, that might be a place where the, the delusion isn't always a good, good thing.

Well, which gets to—

It could be harmful, right?

And I think there are times, and I think Shankar, you know, talks about this, right, that Illusions aren't always beneficial. The, the alcoholic who is, is deluding him or herself about the impact that his or her drinking has is not helpful, right?

Right.

There are times where your idea is so freaking crazy, and yet you're deluding yourself that you're gonna be a billionaire in 2, 2 weeks. If you launch this new website, that delusion isn't necessarily beneficial to you or to anybody else. And I loved his differentiation too when it gets to useful delusions, when they, you know, when they have some negative impact on others. Um, and even I think to a certain degree you can look and say when they have negative impact on you, right? When your delusions objectively in the long run of your Have a negative impact. And those aren't— those are not necessarily good things.

We've met those people. We have— we have those people in our lives.

And they are ourselves. Oh, that's where you're going. And we've met those people and they are us.

That wasn't exactly it, but, but, uh, there's a certain amount of humility that if we bring— if we bring a certain amount of humility to the, the, our, our lives, like we, we practice daily gratitude, for instance, that, that can help us possibly overcome some of this harmful delusion.

Yeah.

That, that we might, we might be able to hold a mirror up to ourselves and actually have a little better view if, if we're honest and humble in the way that we approach, uh, the, the, the view that we have of our own selves. And that could lead to taking some of those harmful delusions and reducing the impact in our lives.

I think that's an interesting concept, and it's one that we discussed with Mary actually even before this, this episode, this idea of holding a mirror up. And I think you're absolutely right that at certain times and, and pieces of our— we need to make sure that we're holding that mirror up and that we're looking at ourselves with less of a delusional perspective and more of a rational objective measure. But then there's times, and I think this is partly what Shankar was saying, is that there are times when we don't want to hold that mirror up. We don't want to really explore if our kids are truly the most wonderful, unique kids in the world. We should just believe that because that has these extra benefits. And, you know, this idea that was talked about, um, you know, that when— what did Shankar say? He said, um, delusions work best when we don't realize that they're delusions.

Right, right, right.

You know, it's this idea that if we know that it's a delusion, then we have a little self-doubt about it. And if we don't even realize that we're deluding ourselves— in other words, And you were doing this whole thing about, uh, the wine tasting that you've done every once in a while and the $3 chuck.

Yes.

Right. And, and saying, oh yeah, we did this. But you knew that one of them was a $3 chuck when you just had 3 different wine taste tests.

And so, and so, and that could have contributed to me picking out the one that, you know, tasted like, you know, mineral oil.

Uh, and, and maybe, maybe it did. Maybe it did.

Because I knew, I knew it was there. But you—

but if you didn't know it was there, and if somebody had said, you know, that this was a $50 wine, that might have changed that entire experience for you.

Yeah, so that's also not a harmful delusion, you know.

No, that is not a harmful delusion. And, and those are the things. And so holding up that mirror, I think, is one of the things that— do we do that? I mean, Shankar's story about when he was— his eye and, and various different things. And this idea of, do I hold up that, uh, you know, that mirror and say, is this doctor who I haven't had any experience with, is he gonna do a good thing, bad thing? And all of a sudden, all that does is lead to additional stress and worry when there's not much you can do. It's kind of a Stoic kind of perspective, right?

Yeah.

The only thing that we can control is our attitudes, and sometimes If we don't know things, that might be even better. We don't need to know the truth of everything.

So, well, and he used that vulnerability, he used that experience of being incredibly stressed and vulnerable at the time to turn it back around and, and say, maybe it's not okay for me to mock people who have kids who are dying of cancer, who have these beliefs that I think are completely superstitious and irrational, because they're going through something that's It's terrifying and traumatic. And so sort of what's the value of me standing on the sidelines and criticizing them or mocking them in some way when I'm not in that situation? That was fantastic. That was a really great reminder of be intentional in your life to the degree that you just get yourself out of your own little, I'm perfect in every way. And I know that that's hard for me to do.

The fundamental attribution error.

Yes.

When he talked about that, it made me question how I do that, because I, I feel the same way. I sit there and go, my God, yeah, you're offering thoughts and prayers when you could be sending money, you know? And I go, that's just idiotic. But I don't understand where those people are coming from. I, I don't live in their shoes. I, I can't view the world as much as I would like to believe I can through their eyes. And I need to have some humility about that and be less judgmental. And I think that is a key piece of all of this. And so it's holding that mirror up to ourselves and understanding that that mirror is just a reflection on us. And we can't necessarily say that what we're looking at is what other people would be looking at when they're looking into their mirror. And I think that's really kind of, kind of cool. Which, my final piece that I wanted to, to talk about is just this whole concept of emotions.

Oh yeah.

This idea that, A, these self-delusions are impacted by the emotional state that we are in. So at some points, as Shankar said, he is— was very emotional in this opportunity when his eye retina was, was going on. And so his ability to delude himself was, was there. But then there was this whole element of, well, when you're in good moods, we're more— we're less likely to be skeptical about it.

Yeah.

And, and again, Shankar, with such grace and insight, kind of brought both of those concepts back and saying, yeah, it seems like a contradiction, but it's not. Really, because there are these 2 different spectrum parts and our brain responds differently within those, those points. And I just felt like, oh my gosh, this is again why we love Shankar and the ability for him to be able to do that. But I also really wanted to go back and go— not go back and go, but I really like the part that he talked about that emotions again are there for a reason. That we've evolved to have emotions and, and they're to buffer, as he said, what, you know, um, they're in some ways our defense mechanism as we respond to the world, quote unquote. And I love that. And yeah, that I think is really key to all of this as well.

It reminds me that studies that have been done about pessimistic people and optimistic people, that the pessimistic people actually have a clear view of what reality is. That pessimism is actually, well, more accurate lens of what reality is.

Objective, yes.

Yeah, it's a more objective lens of what reality is. And yet the optimistic people, well, they tend to live longer, they tend to be happier. That optimism, which I'm conflating here a bit with being a little bit more delusional, is actually a secret sauce for actually having a good life.

Well, and what's interesting is I think that those research studies, And correct me if I'm wrong, and people, please don't quote me, or if you know that I'm wrong, please let me know. I think they've even looked at it from the causal perspective that it is the optimism part. It's that part of not looking at the world as objectively as a pessimist is that actually creates that happiness, that actually creates those longer life outcomes and various different pieces of it. So it's not just correlational, there's a causal component of this. To your point, being an optimist, if you're not really objectively looking at the world, oh, that is, uh, you know, that's a little bit of a delusion. So yes, there's positive aspects of that. I love that idea.

I do too.

Anything else, Mr. Houlihan? Anything that— I mean, we could go on forever.

Oh my gosh, yes, there's, there's so much. However, I think it's a good time to say thank you to everybody for listening and hang on tight because we got a bonus track coming right up.

This is Curt with our bonus track and groove idea for the week. Our discussion with Shankar was truly mind-blowing. As a card-carrying rationalist myself, it was challenging for me to think about self-delusion as being useful. However, delusions can make my relationships happier. They help me carry through the struggles of parenting, and they can make me want to reach out and help strangers on the other side of the country who are struggling. But what really struck me about Shankar's discussion with us was the empathy and compassion with how he approached the topic, and how fundamentally he is challenging all of us to adopt more of it. Instead of judging someone's belief or rituals, notice first our judgment comes from a position of privilege. Delusions are often harnessed from moments of despair or vulnerability, and until we have experienced those moments of despair and fear, we can't fully understand what it means to cling to hope. Shankar also brought to light the world-changing practice of daily gratitudes. Not only does reflecting back your day help you focus more on the positive aspects than the negative, but over time, your relationship with the world actually starts to shift, and we become more satisfied with what is around us. So, for your groove idea for this week, knowing that delusions can be beneficial, why not try the practice of daily gratitude? Observe something good and say something nice. Even if it feels like a forced exercise at first, It will help you by reframing your day before you go to sleep. Oh, and one other thing before you go to sleep, why don't you turn to your partner and tell them that they're the most beautiful person in the world? Your relationship will last longer if you do. We hope you've enjoyed our conversation with Shankar as much as we have. And this week, please go out and find your groove.