Loss and Renewal

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. So many of us spend the present planning for the future. We approach life like a game of chess, plotting each move with care and deliberation. But even the best-laid plans can go off track. We study hard but don't get into our dream school. We lose our job and have to begin anew in a totally different field. A pandemic hits, and we start to rethink where we live and how we spend our time. When the ground shifts beneath our feet, it can feel profoundly unsettling, destabilizing even. Maya Shankar knows this feeling well.

I was really devastated to lose something that I was completely in love with and so passionate about, and that had really constituted such a large part of my life and my identity. You know, I was first and foremost a violinist.

Maya is the host of a new podcast called A Slight Change of Plans. It's a show about how people navigate disruptive moments in life. She has conversations with well-known people like Hillary Clinton and Kacey Musgraves, and she also shares stories about people like the young cancer researcher Who had to navigate a stage 4 diagnosis of her own. One of the reasons I'm excited about the show is because our Hidden Brain episode about Maya's own slight change of plans has long been one of our favorites. If you've ever felt like life is throwing you curveballs and you want to figure out how to adapt to them, I think you will enjoy this story. Loss, And renewal. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want: a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started 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 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.

My grandmother was an Indian classical violinist, and so my mom had her old violin in our attic for many years.

This is Maya Shankar.

Each of my 3 older siblings had rejected the violin, saying that it wasn't cool enough, and my mom finally gave me the instrument. I was immediately taken kind of by the tactile sensation of the instrument. I mean, the wood and the bow. I just loved the feeling of playing the violin.

Even as a child, Maya immediately loved everything about the violin. The way it looked, the way it felt, the way it sounded. Maya's mother didn't know much about Western classical music, but she signed up her daughter for lessons using the Suzuki Method. The focus was on playing by ear. and making beautiful sound. Maya practiced constantly.

I had a special schedule at school to lump all my classes together so that I'd come a little bit early and get a little bit more practice in. And especially with all the traveling, most days were devoted exclusively to music.

She got good. Very good. Now the part of her musical education that was missing was the formal part. She didn't know how to read music very well, but she had a fine ear and she had ambition. In the pursuit to find a teacher who would take her to the next level, Maya's mother did something quite daring.

Yeah, so my mom, she was really a go-getter when it came to my violin life because, like I said, she didn't really have a lot of experience or exposure to the music community and kind of had to innovate in order to find opportunities.

They were in New York one day close to the Juilliard School, one of the world's most famous and exclusive music institutions, when her mother came up with an idea. She said—

Why don't we just go to Juilliard? I mean, why not, right? What can we lose?

Just walk in the door.

We just walked in. So we walked into the building, and just by happenstance, we happened to run into a student in the elevator who studied with a music teacher. And my mom talked to that family in the elevator and said, would you mind if we just had about 5 or 10 minutes at the end of your lesson where Maya could play for your teacher? And they were really gracious, and they said, sure, no problem.

Of course, you know what happened next. Maya played for the other students' music teacher, wowed the teacher, and got accepted into a summer program. Soon she was taking classes at Juilliard. She was playing with other talented musicians. She was even being featured on NPR. Joining us now is the Juilliard Pre-College Violin Quartet. They are 17-year-old Emily Gendron from Glastonbury, Connecticut, 15-year-old Maya Shankar from Cheshire, Connecticut, Maya, by the way, is a From the Top veteran. She's been with us since the early '50s. She had found her classical music home. She was talented, hardworking, and the path before her seemed clear.

I really wanted to be a violinist. I was so passionate about it. I never felt more comfortable than when I was performing. For some reason, that's where I experienced flow and, you know, the ability to spend a lot of time you know, practicing and trying to perfect the art, and then you go on stage and you kind of just surrender and, you know, you play to the best of your abilities. There's just something beautiful and elegant about that process, and I just really, really loved it.

She was so good and so enthusiastic that opportunities kept presenting themselves. One day, her teacher at Juilliard arranged for her to play For a famous violinist. A very famous violinist.

I nearly fell over in my seat because no, no reasonable musician thinks they're going to get the opportunity to meet Itzhak Perlman, let alone play for Itzhak Perlman.

Do you remember what you played?

I played the Barber Violin Concerto. I played the first movement.

Perlman decided to take her on as a student.

In addition to Saturdays, I was also going to New York multiple times during the week, either for studio classes at his home in Manhattan or for private lessons or chamber music lessons. And at that point, it was very clear to me that I wanted Well, I remember that she sounded—

she had a very lovely way of making music. And that for me was the most important thing.

To concert violinist Itzhak Perlman, it was okay that Maya had learned to play music by ear rather than by reading music. The technical stuff was important, but it could be learned.

You know, it's more important for me to have somebody musical. And let's say that technique-wise has you know, you have to work on the technique, but the important thing is the music. And I felt that she had a very lovely way of phrasing and so on and so forth. And so we worked on that, but then we also worked on, you know, how do you accomplish technically certain things. For example, in the Barber Concerto, the last movement is a little bit tricky. So how do you practice that?

But Perlman didn't just teach Maia how to play the violin. He taught her something much more important: how to teach herself to play the violin.

I remember lots of lessons where instead of telling me, Maya, okay, clearly you're unsatisfied with that phrase. Here's what you should do to make it better. He would instead say, Maya, clearly you're unsatisfied with that phrase. What do you think you should do in order to make that phrase better? Let's talk about it. Let me hear what your aspirations are for the arc of this musical phrase. What tools do you have at your disposal, either with your bow arm or your vibrato or your tone, in order to make it beautiful? And it's really frustrating. I mean, in the moment you're thinking, Okay, man, like, you're the expert here, you know?

Just tell me what to do.

Please just tell me what to do and make this easier for both of us.

So the more you learn to think for yourself and to try and solve problems on your own, the better it is for you for the future.

It was all going so well. When Maya was 15, she was practicing at a program run by Itzhak Perlman.

And I was playing a passage from a very challenging Paganini Caprice. And I simply overstretched my finger on one note, and I felt a kind of a popping. And so I overstretched the tendon, and it didn't really heal as expected.

And so how did you spend the next months? What did you do?

Well, Mr. Perlman was such a gem. Because I had injured my left hand, he continued to teach me violin just with my bow arm. So for over a year, I went to him, and we just worked on perfecting my bow arm, and I would just play open strings in every lesson, and he would teach me about how to produce a beautiful sound.

You know, you always feel that, you know, it will resolve itself. So usually what happens if one hand doesn't particularly, you know, respond or anything like this, you work on the other hand. you know, not to waste time, just to do so. If you've got your left hand that has a problem, then you work on the right hand and vice versa. But, you know, her attitude was, you know, I mean, obviously she wasn't— I mean, I'm sure that she wasn't feeling good about it, but it was never like, what's the use?

Maya's hand didn't heal. Doctors finally told her she had to stop playing completely.

I was really devastated to lose something that I was completely in love with and so passionate about and that had really constituted such a large part of my life and my identity. You know, I was first and foremost a violinist. And so I was anxious because I was worried that I would never find something that I felt as passionately about as I did with music.

Just like that, Maya's dream to become a concert violinist was over. Back home for the summer in Connecticut, she started to ask herself how she could pick up the pieces. Would she ever find anything that could make her as happy as the violin? 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 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. 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. 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.

This week we're looking at loss and renewal. We're zeroing in on the unexpected moments in life that shift our trajectories. Before the break, a young violinist named Maya Shankar learned that she could no longer play her instrument because of an injury in her left hand. Up until this point, her whole life had revolved around music. Not knowing what else to do, Maya retreated to her parents' home in Connecticut. Her life felt in disarray.

The summer before, doctors basically told me I had to stop playing completely. And just by luck, I was helping my parents clean their basement and Chester, Connecticut, and I stumbled upon an old course book of my sister's. It was called The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.

Maya started reading, and the more she read, the more excited she became.

It was remarkable for me to learn about just how complex our minds were and just what was required in order for us to have our day-to-day experiences. And so it really whet my appetite for learning more about the mind and for exploring in more depth Kind of the brilliance of the brain.

She started to study cognitive science. She went on to get her PhD at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. She got a postdoctoral fellowship. A promising career in academia lay ahead of her. But here again came another unexpected turn.

So over Thanksgiving break of the final year of my postdoc, I was at home and I was visiting my undergraduate advisor from college. Her name's Laurie Santos. She was telling me about the U.S. Department of Agriculture's efforts to get free and reduced-price lunches, school lunches, into the hands of more eligible students.

Students were going hungry because the process of getting certified for the lunch program was cumbersome. The Department of Agriculture came up with a simple idea. Instead of having a multi-step signup system, states could use information they already had about poor families, to help enroll children in the lunch program.

And it's just a matter of data matching and cross-enrolling these students. But as a result of this common-sense reform, you know, 12.4 million students as of 2015 were automatically enrolled into the school lunch program and had access to lunches and were able to thrive at school. And I remember being so moved by this example.

To Maya, it was magical.

It was just like a light bulb went off in my head, and I thought, okay, this is what I need to be doing with my life. I want to be taking research insights from the behavioral sciences and allowing them to find their way into public policy so that they can be in the service of Americans and people around the world.

So how do you break into the world of policy? When you're just a lowly postdoc, Maya knew nothing of politics. She didn't have connections in the world of government. But she did remember a lesson her mother had taught her standing outside the Juilliard School years earlier. She tracked down an email address for Thomas Kalil, who was helping the Obama administration with its science policy.

I sent Tom, again, a cold email.

This is the Juilliard method again.

This is my mom's Juilliard. I get to give her full credit for this. totally fearless and kind of inspired this trait. And I went over to his home, and he asked me to pitch to him ideas that I had around interventions where behavioral science could improve public policy outcomes.

What did you tell him?

I talked to him about a number of things, like the importance of using social norms to motivate behavior. So we know from research that if you tell people that their neighbors use less energy than they do, right? They're more likely to use less energy. And there's a lot of domains in which just telling people what the data shows about people's actions and decisions can actually drive actions that are more in alignment with people's long-term goals or with policy objectives. And something that struck me about that conversation is I had been talking for years with my academic colleagues about the potential applications of using behavioral insights to improve people's lives. And this was the first time that when I told him an idea that I had, his response was, oh, we can find a way to do that.

Maya joined the White House. She was asked to put together a team that could marshal ideas from social science research and apply them to public policy challenges.

So we have been working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and also local school districts to redesign communications that they're sending to families to help promote the verification process so that their kids can stay on the benefit. So we've done a few things. So there's a few behavioral insights that we've used. One is, we've taken a very long list of, you know, action steps required for verification and condensed them into 3 easy-to-understand steps that you can take. 2, we've worked with school districts to translate the communications into multiple languages in order to support comprehension among the diverse population that this program serves. One issue is that, at present, families might only think the way to recertify or to verify their information is to send snail mail back to their— to the school district. And instead, there's the opportunity for them to take a picture of their information using their mobile phones and actually email it back. And we simply notified people of the opportunity to go through that process. And then in other instances, we included prepaid envelopes. to help ease the process of verifying eligibility.

So I'm trying to think about why it is we often have trouble sort of thinking about programs like this, because as someone who's been interested in human behavior for a while, it seems to me that programs like these really are, you know, no pun intended, a no-brainer, that this is really something that we should be doing. It seems obvious that we should be doing it. But I think part of the issue is that I think many people might say, if you want to stay in a program that's giving you benefits, and these are the steps you need to do in order to get the benefits, and you deserve those benefits, rationally, speaking, you should be willing to do those steps in order to get the benefits. And I think it fails to take into account the difference between how human beings are supposed to behave as rational creatures and how they actually behave. And I feel like that's the central divide that your work is trying to bridge.

And I think additionally, the onus is on the government to present information clearly, to present choices clearly so that people understand what program exists, and what their options are and can make the best decisions for themselves and their families. But there's one example that I wanted to point to, which is a phenomenon known as summer melt.

This is the phenomenon where talented high school students who are on track to go to college at the start of the summer somehow lose their way and don't show up at college in the fall. Maya and her team have worked on simple, low-cost interventions that can help these students get to college. Their idea: send the students 8 text messages over the summer reminding them of impending deadlines.

What we found was a 9% increase in college enrollment rates as a result of 8 text messages. I mean, that is really profound. 8 text messages is what I send my best friend on any given day.

It seems to me that what you did and what happened to you actually happens to lots of people all the time, where doors close and they feel like it's unbearable that this door has closed because this is where I thought I lived. And then another door opens and you realize there are actually many, many houses in which we can live.

I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, one thing that violin— one of the great blessings of playing the violin is that It allowed me to see what it really felt like to be in love with something and to be really passionate about something. And so if anything, you, you see sort of features or traits that are extracted in you from engaging with that pursuit. And then your hope is that in the new explorations, those disciplines or those areas can extract those same qualities from you.

I'm wondering, as you think about your own life, do you feel that your career now has been set?

This is the house you're going to live in forever? Do you actually believe, on the other hand, that there might be many other houses you will one day come to live in?

Well, I've certainly never been happier than I am right now working in public service and using my background to help improve people's lives. So I think that that will continue to be a common theme of whatever it is that I end up doing and working in. That said, I think there are so many ways in which that passion can manifest, right? And I think that one thing the past has taught me is that the world has endless opportunities to positively impact people's lives. And along the way, I might explore various different paths in order to get there, but as long as I stick to that core value of trying to help people and improve people's lives, I think that there are many ways And of course, you have the cold call Juilliard method to aid you. Yeah. So I think that, yeah, again, thanks to my mom, I think that there is always that foolproof method of the standard cold call.

That was Maya Shankar. She served as senior advisor for the social and behavioral sciences at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama. Since then, Maya has left the White House and is currently a senior director of behavioral economics at Google. And now, of course, she's hosting a new podcast. It's called A Slight Change of Plans. If you enjoyed hearing Maya's story today, please be sure to check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Now, not all of us are going to be podcast hosts or concert violinists or presidential advisors, but I don't think any of those things are the real point of Maya's story. The reason I wanted to tell you the story is because all of us have chapters in our lives that close. And when they do, especially if it's a chapter we have known and loved for a long time, it can feel like the whole book is over, that there's nothing left to do, maybe even nothing left to live for. But I think each of us has stories in our lives that reflect the fact that the people we are today are not the same people we were a few years ago. We often underestimate our capacity to reinvent ourselves. I was talking some years ago with Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program. He's a paleoanthropologist, and something he said stuck in my head. He told me that the thing that distinguished early humans from other species was our remarkable capacity to adapt to different conditions. Uniquely, humans live in very cold places and very hot places, at altitude and sea level. Some of us live long periods underwater or even in outer space. Most of that is not about our physical abilities. It's really about the mind. There's a lot of truth in that old saying, when one door closes, another opens. I want to leave you with a lovely poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Singer Amy Mann reads it for us.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster. Places and names and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look, my last or next-to-last of 3 loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost 2 cities, lovely ones, and vaster, some realms I owned, 2 rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. Even losing you, the joking voice, a gesture I love, I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master, though it may look like, write it like disaster.

That was Amy Mann reading One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is someone who helped me reinvent my own life. Paul Ginsberg is a longtime NPR supporter. In December 2013, he came to me and told me I should be doing more than just weekly stories for radio. What about a podcast? he asked. Paul did more than just simply toss out an idea. He helped to make it a reality. He raised funds to help launch Hidden Brain, and he's been a trusted friend and advisor ever since. More than time and money, Paul gave me what might be the most valuable gift one person can give another. He helped me see something in myself that I had not seen on my own.

Thank you, Paul.

Thank you. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter at news.hiddenbrain.org. We bring you interesting research about human behavior, so you'll have conversation starters if you're just starting to schedule in-person get-togethers with friends. Plus, we always end on a moment of joy, so it might be the most fun thing you read all week. Again, you can subscribe at news.hiddenbrain.org. Thanks for listening. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.

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