Shankar Vedantam: Useful Delusions

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Hello and welcome to today's virtual Commonwealth Club Humanities Forum program. My name is Dacher Keltner. I'm a faculty member of UC Berkeley's Psychology Department and founding director of the Greater Good Science Center. and host of the Science of Happiness podcast, and I'll be the moderator today. And what a privilege it is. It is a privilege to welcome Shankar Vedantam. I know many of you know him out there. He's the host and executive editor of the award-winning Hidden Brain podcast, and I'll talk a little bit about that, and radio show. Shankar spent 10 years as a national correspondent at The Washington Post and 9 years as a social science correspondent with NPR. His latest book, Useful Delusions: Will Change Your Mind, it is a provocative tour of neuroscience and judgment and decision-making and myths and rituals and all the latest science and philosophy on these fascinating topics. And it really tackles this question that people have been thinking about in many different social scientific disciplines, which is, why do we deceive ourselves? And why do we let ourselves be deceived? We're going to be covering a lot during the next hour, from rituals to religion to lying and other things, and even a little bit on love. So submit your questions in chat, and we'll take about 15 minutes at the end of our hour to ask Shankar questions from the audience and see what he makes of them. So Shankar, I wanted to first of all welcome you to the show, and what a pleasure it is to be in conversation with you.

Thank you so much, Dacher. I'm so thrilled to be here, and thank you to the Commonwealth Club for hosting us.

Yeah, and congratulations on your book. And first of all, I just want to say, you know, on behalf of so many social scientists out there, Thank you for the work that you do, sort of advancing the cause of social science. It really matters a lot to us. It's my view, I think you have brought our discipline to the public awareness like no one else in our field. So thanks so much. And I'll add, when my daughter heard me on Hidden Brain, my standing went up in her adolescent eyes quite a bit. So I'm grateful for that. I have to ask you, first of all, Why the social sciences? What do they mean to you? Why are they relevant today?

Well, let me start by saying I think we have a mutual admiration society here because I feel like my work is made possible by researchers like you and the work that you do. And it's the work that you do that is actually endlessly fascinating. I've just been the messenger of that work for many, many years. I've long been interested, I think, in human behavior, Dhakar. I feel like I was always the person who would go to a party and spend half my time observing what other people at the party were doing rather than being part part of the party myself. I've always been a student of human behavior. I love science. I love the scientific process, and I love the idea that you can marry together, which is what the social sciences do, marry together an interest in human nature, human behavior, the things that human beings do on a day-to-day basis, but marry that with rigor, with science and the tools of science. The combination of those 2 things, I think, is incredibly potent.

Yeah, it's been uplifting. There have been various so-called crises in our field and questions about the nature of data and so forth. Your show, I think, has been, for the practitioners out there like myself, a reminder of what we're relevant to, which has been really wonderful. So I wanted to start on Useful Delusions. And what a wonderful book, and congratulations.

Thank you, Seth.

You seem to have a particular fascination with con men. And everywhere— they appear everywhere in the book, from the Church of Love to questions about religion. What strikes you about con men?

So I think there's something deeply fascinating about con men, and maybe I'm alone in this, but I just find them fascinating. I find the whole phenomenon of pulling off a con really fascinating. I find the reasons people fall for a con really fascinating. There's so much about the act of con men, of a con, that has things in common with magic tricks, because very much like a magic trick, you're basically seeing something that shouldn't work, that logically and rationally should not work, and yet you're pulled in. sucked in. And at the end of it, there's a part of you that almost marvels at how the whole thing was put together. Now, I take away nothing from the fact that many cons are deeply harmful to people. There are phishing schemes all over the world that bilk people of their retirement income. Clearly, there's great harm that's done by con men in this world. But I think at a psychological level, it's deeply interesting how con men go about what they're doing, but also, more interestingly, how we fall—

Exactly.

—and how, in some ways, we are complicit. in how cons actually unfold.

Yeah, and I think it's one of the really subtle questions that you pose about, you know, what is the role of con men, and then why are we conned? And I think you're gonna— you arrive at a, a counterintuitive and more complex answer than the easy condemnation of them, which is wonderful. So I want to start with something simple, and we're gonna— we're gonna— actually, it's not simple. We're gonna start with lying and make our way through, you know, myths and rituals and stories and and, uh, end up at the big question of religion, which is a very interesting topic right now in social science. Um, and you, you really start with this, this literature on deception. And, you know, in the non-human signaling literature, which you talk a little bit about, there's a lot of deception about sort of dissembling size and attractiveness and the like. Um, when you turn to the social science, you know, work by Bella DePaulo and others kind of surprised the field And I remember when I first heard about this work, I actually was a little morally upset because I was so invested in integrity and honesty. Turns out people are lying quite a bit. What do you make of that?

Yeah, so I think the interesting thing is this tension between our beliefs about honesty, our values about honesty, and what our actual lives look like. So when you tell most people that in fact there is a significant amount of dishonesty in their daily lives, most people get upset. Most people say, that's not true of me. That might be true of other people, but it's certainly not true of me. me. But researchers like Bella DePaulo and others have conducted research experiments where you ask people to go out and try and spend a day or a week without telling a lie. And you find very quickly that it's really difficult to do. If you're really honest about it, if you're honest about telling the truth, you will find that it's very, very difficult to stick to telling the truth. And not for any nefarious reasons, not because you're trying to con anyone or you're trying to deceive anyone. Many of the most ordinary lies we tell come from acts of human kindness.

Yeah.

So we are kind to one another. We ask one another, how you are? And how was your day? And I hope you have a nice day. And I hope you enjoyed the meal. And thank you for inviting me over. And sometimes these things are true, but sometimes they're also required of us to say by the norms of social convention, by the norms of social discourse. And if you truly said exactly what was on your mind all the time, you will find very quickly that not only will you have no friends, but people will come to like your stuff. a lot less. And I think this is a fascinating tension, I think, between the way we think about honesty. You know, the famous story of George Washington and the cherry tree. According to myth and folklore, George Washington as a lad cut down his father's favorite cherry tree. And when the dad came home and said, what happened to the cherry tree? Washington is supposed to have said, I cannot lie. I cut down the tree, Father. Now, as it turned out, this story is fictional. It was made up by somebody many years, you know, to capitalize on the craze on all things Washington. But it's really telling that I think that our The canonical story about honesty in the United States is itself based on a lie.

You know, it's— I, I, I'm curious, and there's this interesting tension in your book, or you really, you know, you kind of grapple with both perspectives. Like, you know, when you ask people what are the most important moral truths, being authentic and telling the truth in the great spirit of, you know, authenticity is, is important. At the same time, you know, being polite and civil is, is grounded in half-truths or white lies or the like. Um, where, where do you kind of land on this? How do you think about this interesting tension? What did you tell your daughter when you were raising her, like, knowing of the science that you do?

So I think it's really interesting, and the question of parenting, I think, and how parents talk to children about honesty, I think, is really interesting because I think parents send 2 different messages to children. The message at an explicit level, at a conscious level, is tell the truth. honesty is the best policy. Come clean, be honest, be transparent, be forthright.

Right.

But in our day-to-day behavior, we actually communicate in all kinds of implicit ways the importance of taking into account how other people are feeling, how other people are thinking, what is appropriate to say in a social situation. And we expect children to learn those things. When, you know, your child receives a gift from someone, you will prompt the child to say, thank you, I really love the gift, regardless of whether the child actually likes the gift, because this is expected. If the child's grandparents gives them something, it's appropriate for the child to say, I think this was really thoughtful. Thank you, Grandma, for this, for this wonderful gift. Not, this was the most tasteless and silly thing that I could have imagined. Why are you giving this to me? Yeah. So I think we have these conflicting messages when it comes to honesty. Very often the implicit is carrying the message of how we're actually behaving, and the explicit is carrying the message of how we think we're behaving.

Yeah, yeah, well put. You know, one of my favorite scholars on this, and I'm— I don't know if how much you've read of him, is Erving Goffman, just about, you know, the dramas of public life require these performances that children, uh, find their way in.

Yeah.

I wanted to talk to you about the placebo effect, and it was really striking to me, um, and I loved your take on it because, you know, when you are in the world of social science or you're studying meditation or mindfulness, or, you know, we do work on the benefits of being out in nature, ah, there's always this question of like, can you beat the placebo? It's hard. It's actually hard to— it's hard often for meditation to be really tightly controlled placebos. You cite these amazing studies of— and it dispirited me having gotten knee surgery, but a placebo knee twice. I was like, what? The placebo knee surgery condition does as well as knee surgery. You get the same result with heart surgery. It made me think a lot about the work on SSRIs that shows that they're having trouble beating placebo in terms of dealing with major episodes of depression. What do you make of all this? Why is the placebo actually maybe a good thing to be thinking about in healthcare?

Yeah, so the pharmaceutical industry has long used placebo-controlled trials to judge the efficacy of medications. And so before your drug gets approved by the FDA, you have to have 2 positive trials where you're basically showing in a controlled setting, you're giving half the group sugar pills, half the group your medication, and your medication is outperforming the sugar pills. And typically when the medications don't outperform the sugar pills, we call those a failed trial and we say, all right, the medication doesn't work. In reality, what we should be saying is that the effectiveness of the medication is limited to the placebo effect. So when medication equals placebo, it doesn't mean that there's no treatment effect whatsoever. It means that whatever treatment effect you have is limited to the placebo effect.

Right.

As it turns out, that effect is far from zero.

Yeah.

And as you hinted at a second ago, this is true not just when it comes to pills and medications, it's also true with all manner of different kinds of medical interventions, up to and including surgery, which is just, I mean, I agree with you, it just seems astonishing that that's the case. But there have been very few placebo-controlled surgery procedures that are conducted, procedures to evaluate the efficacy of surgery where you're conducting essentially sham surgery in one arm of the trial and quote unquote real surgery in another arm of the trial. We typically don't do that. On the occasions that we have done that, we have found surprisingly that people on the placebo arm who are receiving sham surgery respond very powerfully to the intervention. Now, I want to be very cautious about what this means. This does not mean that all treatments are ridiculous and sham and there's nothing of value from surgery or medicine. Far, far from that. My book is not a polemic against science at all. It's really a—

No.

I'm a believer in the power of science and the value of science. But it does make the case that I think we underestimate how important it is, the relationship between doctor and patient, when they're actually talking about the healing process.

Yeah.

We've all been to doctors, I think, who are very smart, who know the latest science, who can tell you about the latest peer-reviewed studies, but you go to them and you come back from them and you don't feel like you've actually been looked after by another human being. You don't feel the hand of compassion extended to you. And I think there's something in our minds that responds to that. I remember, you know, the doctors that I remember the best, who I often think of as the best doctors, often what I'm remembering is their bedside manner, the fact that after, you know, they came and saw me or I went to see them, I left feeling better. I left feeling comforted. Because I think when we think about diseases, there are really 2 elements of disease. There is a physical component for disease, but there's also a psychological component to disease. How we respond to the fact that you have a broken ankle.

Yeah.

How we respond to the fact that your knee is hurting. That psychological experience is pain in and of itself. And sometimes a skilled doctor who has a skilled bedside manner is able to relieve you of some of that psychological suffering.

And I can't help but weigh in here, Shankar. I mean, your framing of how we respond to surgery and medical treatment dovetails with this striking new neurophysiology of social connection, right? That if I feel trust in you, the safety networks in my brain are activated. If I feel suspicious of you or distrusting, the amygdala, other regions of the brain, vagal tone is activated by feeling trusting with others, which is very good for the body, reduced inflammation. So I think there's such a deep, neurophysiological grounding to what you're describing that I think your book helps kind of bring the medical community's attention to. You wanna say that rituals are important too.

I do. And, you know, just speaking about what you just said a second ago, all of us practice rituals in all kinds of ways. You know, some of us are religious and we practice religious rituals, but lots of us practice rituals all the time. You know, when we're having a Zoom conversation now over the last year, many of us have developed rituals in terms of how these Zoom conversations unfold and what you're supposed to do and what you're not supposed to do. It's a really interesting thing of why it is all human societies have rituals. When, of course, when you step back and look at rituals logically, rituals by definition have no value. They're not actually accomplishing anything. So when I wear the shirt of my favorite sports team right before a game, I know that it makes no difference to the outcome of the game.

Right.

And yet wearing the shirt, participating in the rituals makes me feel better. You were talking a second ago about all of the neurophysiological elements of the placebo effect. Think about the practice of gratitude a ritual, right? So the practice of gratitude, even when you don't feel grateful, if you express gratitude and make a practice of expressing gratitude, you eventually— it transforms your own mindset to actually feel like the world is a more positive place. It boosts your self-esteem. It boosts your confidence. It boosts the way you engage with the world. And ironically, it makes it more likely the world will give you things to actually feel grateful about.

Yeah.

So I think the dilemma is I think many of us think about our mental responses as merely responding to the world. But I think what the body of science is showing is that in many ways, our mental responses end up creating the world in which we live.

Yeah.

So you express gratitude and go make a practice, a ritual of expressing gratitude. There's a reason so many religious practices involve ritual acts of gratitude toward other people or ritual acts of gratitude toward God. It's because there are psychological benefits that come from these rituals, even if, you know, a scientist can look at it and say, I don't see any material, and I don't see any chemical, you know, one chemical affecting the next. Give me the molecular pathway. You might not be able to demonstrate that molecular pathway, but even so, we know that these rituals are incredibly powerful.

Yeah, and I think that, you know, your readers are going to enjoy— there's— it's such a fascinating science too, you know, the fire walking study of studying heart rates of people who are sort of watching, uh, individuals in Spain engage in a fire walking ritual. It's such a an incredible new science that speaks to a lot of the paradoxes that really are at the center of this book. So I got really excited when I got to your story section of the book because I'm a huge fan of stories. And, you know, there's the terrific research of Dan McAdams that life is a story, and Jamie Pennebaker— I'm not sure you've covered him— of, you know, the power of telling stories to handle stress and trauma. So important today in COVID. And, and you, in a sense, And I'm really curious what your ultimate take is on this science. You problematize stories in a sense when we get to brands and, you know, the stories we tell about consumer products, and we'll get to myths in just a second. And, you know, I was just astonished by the study where, you know, in the literature that you review, where you can present a bottle of wine, and if you tell somebody it's worth $90 and they taste it, they like it more, they smack their lips, they Do whatever wine connoisseurs do. And then the medial frontal cortex, a region of the brain that's active during reward, is more activated than if the bottle of wine is described as a $10 bottle of wine. I started to get agitated, like, God. And then, you know, if you're playing with the Nike golf clubs— I'm not much of a golf player, but, you know, golfer— you play better. So What do you make of this? Is this manipulation? Is it— is this a good thing? Should we—

Yeah, you know, on Hidden Brain, we actually recently had a 3-part series looking at the power of stories and storytelling and all the ways in which stories are part of our lives. In many ways, you can understand your own life as a series of stories, and reforming and reformulating what those stories are can change how you understand your own life. I've come to really believe that stories are an integral part of almost everything that happens to us in our lives. It's absolutely the case in medicine. When you go to see a doctor, part of what you're engaging in is an act of storytelling. But it's also the case when you buy a car or when you buy a bottle of wine or you sit down at a restaurant, you're actually hearing a story of something that is actually unfolding. You know, a few weeks ago, I came by this interesting— this has been out for a very long time, centuries in fact. It's called the Ship of Theseus. Are you familiar with this philosophical conundrum?

No.

So many, many centuries ago, Theseus was supposed to be a great Greek warrior. And, you know, when he finally returned from his various his ship was stationed in the harbor as almost like a museum piece. And over the years and decades, the ship decayed and planks rotted. And when they did, the people took out the rotten planks and put in new planks. Now, eventually, this is the thought experiment and the philosophical conundrum, every plank and every part of the ship of Theseus was replaced by a new plank, by a new piece.

Right.

And so the question that philosophers starting with Plato have asked is, is this new ship that has been constructed of all new parts, is this still the ship of Theseus? ship of Theseus, or is it an entirely new ship?

Yeah.

An even more deep problem is, let's say you take— could take all of the old parts of the ship of Theseus and reassemble them into a new ship. Is this new ship now the real ship of Theseus because it has all the old parts, or is the old ship, which has all these makeshift parts put together, is that the real ship? And the reason I'm thinking of this in the context of storytelling—

Yeah.

You can draw an analogy between the ship of Theseus and our own lives as human beings.

Definitely.

So at a very basic biological level, our cells are replaced and turned over, over and over again. Who you are right now, Dhakkar, at one point in time is not physically who you were 10 years ago.

Yeah.

But more important than that, who you are psychologically now is not who you were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. So when you say, who is Dhakkar? Who is Shankar? Who are these people that we think of as individuals? When you think of you're the same person, what's really holding this whole thing together are really a series of stories. And we have a series of stories that link us to the past. link who we were in childhood with who we are 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road. In many ways, we are all walking versions of the Ship of Theseus.

Just gave me goosebumps, Shankar. That's amazing. When I teach human happiness at Berkeley, that's my last conversation with the students is life is a story. You are an author, write the story, and it's such a challenge. I want to press Back a little on the wine study and then just get your philosophical position on this. You know, this kind of relates to an old question in philosophy, as you nicely described, and then the social sciences, which is, you know, we have these sensory emotional responses to things out in the world— a taste of wine, a smell of rosemary, you know, a view of a sunset. And I wonder how big you think this story effect is, or this construction effect is, right? How much is really sort of in our kind of basic sensory reaction to things versus kind of this conceptualization of what we're perceiving. What's your, what's your position, or how do you think about that?

That's a really interesting question. I, I, I'll push back in turn just a tad because I think in some ways you're drawing a distinction between things that might be quote-unquote natural or neural versus things that are constructed in terms of stories. I would argue that what's happening at the neural level is also a form of storytelling.

Yeah.

And it might not be the kind of storytelling we think of as storytelling, but when I bite into a delicious dessert and it tastes delicious, the dessert has no taste. The dessert does not come with taste. The dessert is just a series of chemicals that are interacting with the receptors on my tongue. My brain is interpreting those signals and perceiving it as delicious. So my brain in some ways is telling the story of the chocolate ice cream that I'm eating and perceiving that story as delicious. Because again, in our evolutionary history, our brains have learned over many, over many millennia that learning to ascribe certain kinds of tastes to certain kinds of things is functional. I would argue it's all delusion, it's all storytelling. It's just that sometimes it can be very functional in terms of leading us to, to eat certain kinds of foods or avoid certain kinds of foods or choose certain life paths and avoid certain life paths.

But if that, if that was the case, wouldn't you— would you— I mean, we do see a certain degree of universality, you know, in the stories that we tell about Things we should fear and things that taste good. How does that make sense with this argument that you're advancing?

So there— I think, I think in our evolutionary history that turned out to be very good for our ancestors. So famine and starvation was such common features of our evolutionary past that our brains evolved to pay very close attention to anything that had calories in them. And it turned out that sweet things tend to have a lot of calories. And so over many millions of years, our brains learned to develop reward systems that rewarded us when we ate sweet things because it had a survival value attached to it. Now, as it turns out in our modern day and age, this is no longer a huge advantage. It's no longer a huge advantage because we're surrounded by a glut of calories. And so something that served our ancestors well, that story no longer serves us well today. But I would argue that it's still playing a fundamentally functional role. So when I tell myself a story about who I was and the life path that I've chosen and how one thing led to the other and how there's a clean linear path between who I was when I was 15 and who I was when I'm I'm 50, that story is playing a functional role of creating a sense of a unifying sense in my life, that I have a sense that my life has a path, it has direction, it has meaning, it has purpose, it's going to go somewhere in the future. I suspect it's all storytelling.

Yeah.

Because if we truly looked at it and looked at all the contingent ways our lives evolve and change, the truth is that our lives are probably much more chaotic than the stories we ascribe them to. But the stories play a very powerful role in giving our lives purpose and meaning.

Wow. You know, and I have to say, it's, it's interesting how your, your reflections on the many layers of stories is, is really dovetailing with, you know, a direction that neuroscience is going, looking more at patterns of kind of, uh, representations. And so, uh, it's— I'm, I'm increasingly convinced. All right, we're going to turn to a topic, and it broke my heart to read about it, which is love. Um, tell us about the Church of Love. I, I was astonished. I was glad I wasn't a member. I initially, when I heard about the— read about the Church of Love in your wonderful book, um, I felt sorry for the people who might fall prey to it. And in the end, it's more complicated.

It is more complicated. So the Church of Love was a con that unfolded very slowly over a period of many decades, and it was created by a balding middle-aged guy in Illinois whose name was Donald Lowry. And he was a writer and a playwright, so he fancied himself to be a gifted writer. And he invented various characters, young women, he called them angels. And then sometime in the late '60s, early '70s, he hit on this interesting business idea that if he wrote letters to people in the voices of these women whom he had created, he could start essentially creating these— essentially a correspondence scheme with various people. So he wrote letters on behalf of these young women. They went out largely to a clientele men. And many of the letters started out sort of just introducing the women, but eventually they became very affectionate letters. They became love letters. They became letters of affirmation and praise. I know you're going through a difficult time. I'm here for you. I believe in you. I want you to do well in life. And for many members, at its height, the Church of Love boasted as many as 30,000 members across the United States. Many of the members, over a period of weeks, months, or years, fell in love with the people that they thought they were corresponding with. So the members often wrote back to the women that they thought were writing to them. They formed and forged very close relationships. The most astonishing part of the story, Dhakar, is that when Don Lowry was finally arrested and brought to trial on charges of mail fraud, several members of the Church of Love showed up at his trial to defend him. They actually testified on behalf of the defense. And some people said the Church of Love and the letters from the angels had saved them from alcoholism, from addictions, A couple of people said the letters had saved them from suicide. And I have to say, when I first heard the story of the Church of Love, it seemed like such a bizarre story. Yeah. And my reaction was exactly the same as yours, which is, these poor pathetic fools, how could they have let themselves be fooled by this con man? But as I read some of these letters and talked to the members, I realized there's a more nuanced and complex story at play. And certainly the fact that people said their lives were saved by this con prompted me to start asking the question, is it possible that at least for some of the members, the Church of Love in fact had played a salutary role? Now, that was a very disturbing question for me to ask myself, because I think of myself as a deeply logical and rational person. And the idea that self-deception could ever do any good in the world sort of bothers me to my core. But the more I started to look for examples of this, the more I found many, many examples, you know, much less dramatic than the Church of Love, where self-deception can play a functional role in our lives.

Um, you know, as I was reading this, it just— it brought together kind of a very interesting science of love. And I want to ask you, I think you're in some sense implicitly raising this question of, to what extent is love a delusion? And to what extent do we enjoy the delusion as long as we can? And then I'm going to ask you about your daughter again and what advice you would give her. But it's so fascinating, just this thesis that you have of You know, these complicated relationships require deception. There may be no more complicated relationship than, you know, pair bonding with somebody and entering potentially to raising a child or several. And what we know from the science of love is, you know, one of my favorite findings in the literature— first of all, you cite the work of Sandra Murray that, you know, we tend to kind of attribute really excessive virtues to the people we're in love with. We overestimate their talents. I don't know if you know the work on— by Art Aronoff. I think it is, where when you imagine somebody you really love, the amygdala shuts down. You know, the amygdala, this threat region that's detecting danger and peril— when you're in love, it's just, it's just silent, you know? And you don't see the tattoos or whatever it is. Um, you know, I was like, man, you know, I— where's the kind of the poetic noble story in all of this? But, um, what do you think is Is— are we deluded when we're in love? Is that— is that—

Yeah, I think we are deluded when we're in love, but I, I don't use the word delusion in a purely pejorative sense. I think we're deluded in the sense that we're not seeing reality clearly. I think that is true. I think when we are in love, there's a reason we've known for centuries, you know, the phrase love is blind. It's basically the same idea, that love fundamentally is not about seeing reality for reality. It's actually seeing the reality that you want to see. However, I don't use the term pejoratively because I think Yeah. I believe that this self-deception that we have, or the delusional beliefs we have about love, play an extraordinarily functional role in keeping couples together and allowing us to have happy relationships. If you and I, Dacher, once the pandemic was over, if we went on a road trip and we stopped by every wedding that was unfolding in America, and we stopped by and asked the couples getting married, what do you think your odds are of getting divorced? How many people would give you the logical and rational answer, which is 1 in 2 marriages end in divorce. There's no reason why I'm particularly special. So 50/50. I would wager that anyone who basically says they have a 50/50 chance of getting divorced on their wedding day is probably not going to have a very happy marriage. And I think part of what's involved, I think, in the leap of faith involved in starting a long-term relationship with someone, with all the uncertainties and challenges and ups and downs that life is going to bring, is in some way an act of faith. And that act of faith might not be exactly what reality— it's not about reality, but in some ways it has the ability to construct reality. And I think that's where the love, the self-deception that is built into love, is incredibly powerful. And of course, you know, I'm sure we're going to talk about this in a moment, nowhere is this more powerful than in relationships between parents and children.

Yeah, yeah, well put. All right, I'm going to put you on the spot. Speaking of parents and children, You have one daughter, or— yeah. So in light of this science, and she comes to you for the wisdom on, you know, not only the meaning of life but what really matters to young, young people, which is love, what do you— how do you translate this science into, uh, wisdom for a young person?

So I think, you know, there's 2 ways to sort of understand the parent-child relationship. And you can understand it very scientifically, and you can understand and just through experience. And I think the two actually provide you with different answers.

Yeah.

From a very scientific level, you know, it makes perfect sense that a process of natural selection would prioritize two things above all else in organisms. One is the drive to survive. So in other words, once you're born, you would build into organisms an incredible survival mechanism so that people, organisms of all kinds, try and survive as long as they can. All of us have a very powerful survival mechanism. We're descended from a long line of survivors, of people who survived and various other species that survive all kinds of threats. The second thing you would want to build in is an insane love for your offspring, because your offspring are the way your genes find a way to go from one generation to the next. And so again, if you were designing— you know, I have this thought experiment in my book. If you were designing a line of self-replicating robots and you wanted to send them off to live on some distant planet and you were never going to see them again, but you wanted to ensure that they would survive and thrive into the future, you would want to build in these 2 biases. You would want them to have a mad drive for survival, survive against all the odds.

Yeah.

And second, have an insane love for your offspring, protect them at all costs.

Yeah.

Believe they're the most wonderful things in the world. And this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. Now, from a human perspective, I will say that when my daughter was born, I thought that she was the most special child in the history of the universe. Now, if you asked me, you're a logical person, Shankar, you're a scientific person, Shankar, is it possible that you are logically correct, that she must be the most special child when millions of other parents think exactly the same thing? I would say, no, it's probably the case that I'm delusional, but the delusion felt completely true to me. In fact, it still feels completely true to me.

Yeah.

And I think this is, I think, the dilemma, which is on the one hand, we have brains that are able to understand that we are captive to self-deceptions, that we are hostage to self-deceptions, but we're simultaneously brains also that have to live as human I fall in love. I love my child. I love my sports team. I participate in rituals. I reach for, you know, theories that help me explain the world or stories that help me explain the world. Because besides being a science journalist and interested in science, I'm also a human being. And I go through life, you know, sugar doesn't taste less sweet to me just because I know the brain's reward systems are lighting up when a certain chemical signature hits my taste buds.

Yeah.

The experience of sweetness is different from the understanding of how sweetness comes about. about. So that's how I think about love. You can think about it very scientifically. Some people say that diminishes your capacity for love. I certainly have not found that at all.

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I don't know if you know, there's this remarkable work coming out speaking of this, this kind of special, kind of transcendent experience that you talk about early in Raising a Child, of Feldman coming out of Israel, which is that, you know, Mothers, fathers, gay relationships, straight relationships. Now, once you have a baby, 6 months, both parents get this boost in oxytocin, this wonderful neuropeptide that helps us feel oceanic towards each other and see the beauty. And despite the spit-up and sleep deprivation and everything, it seems to be—

But it's not probably despite the sleep deprivation and the spit-ups, it's probably because of the sleep deprivation and spit-ups. Because in fact, if parents did not have this insane delusional love for their children, Parenting is incredibly hard to do. It's time-consuming. It's expensive. It's difficult. It's annoying. It's frustrating. You lack sleep. If you didn't have this insane delusional love for this other creature, if you're just doing a cost-benefit analysis on a day-to-day basis—

You're out.

You'll be out of there. Nature has realized this. And so nature has endowed us with a delusion, which in some ways is deeply functional.

Yeah. And supported by my favorite neuroscientific discovery in the 1990s of oxytocin. I have a few final questions, and then we'll turn it—we'll get into the Q&A from our audience. And I hate sharing the floor. This is so much fun, but but I'm very eager to see what our audience members are thinking about. You have this amazing section on myths, and you know it's interesting. In in a lot of Western societies, if you will, in East Asian societies, we think that we've. we kind of moved from the age of myth, and we're in the age of enlightenment, and now it's the scientific era. And myths are always with us, right? And they— myths about our identities, or our cultures, or what is sacred to us. And you chart, again, both the kind of the sort of the awe-inspiring power, but then the peril of the myths and the paradoxes, as part of your title of, you know, suicide bombers have these myths about the sacred relationship that they have to a political cause.

Mm-hmm.

We have myths in the United States about the fact that maybe this is a meritocracy or there's always upward mobility for anybody, and social science is posing problems to that myth.

Mm-hmm.

What do you— I struggled with this because there are also myths that we just saw in the recent political election, right? That the myth of the election was stolen despite the facts saying, uh, there was no such evidence. So how do you grapple with this inevitable tension that you're always grappling with with respect to myths, that they're so powerful, they can— they give us a sense of what's sacred, they can lead us astray?

Yeah, that's such a great set of questions there, Dakar. Um, you know, let's just look at the, the myths around the nation-state, because you brought up the idea of the nation-state. You know, let's imagine you have an anthropologist that comes to us from another galaxy, not just from another planet, but from another galaxy. And this anthropologist travels through vast realms of, you know, space and time and, you know, millions of light-years and arrives at this tiny, tiny, tiny blue planet around this lonely planetary system around this lonely star. And they come to this planet and they find there are 8 million species on the planet, but one of these species believes that it is so special that it has divided up this planet into 190 different territories. And these 190 different territories are seen as so important and so sacred secret that these— this one species is willing to go to war and destroy not just one another, but destroy the entire planet with nuclear weapons because they believe so fervently in the integrity of these 190 little human creations. Now, of course, when you think about it this way, you know, surely the anthropologist from another galaxy is going to say—

Yeah.

The nation-state is a profound delusion. Clearly it is a delusion. It is— in some ways it's a creation of the human mind. Nations are a creation of the human mind. I think when you think about the myths of the nation-state, there are 2 ways to sort of think about it. You know, if, if there's a challenge that you're experiencing in California, let's say for example, you know, the COVID pandemic is out of control in California, you know, but there's a huge vaccine manufacturing plant in Maryland. When you're part of the same nation, the myths of the nation allow the nation to help each other. So people within the nation, someone from Maryland can say, someone from California is somebody who I should care about because we're part of the same construct. We're part— we're both Americans, right? So I mean, the nation accomplishes a number of things because it allows large numbers of people to work together, to work cohesively together. Many of the things that nations build together— infrastructure or enterprises or great cities or great art— are made possible by the fact that we are sharing in this myth. It might still be a myth, but it's shared by so many people and believed by so many people that it produces reality that is incredibly powerful. Now, myths are not always good. You only have to travel back through the history of the 20th century and see all kinds of ways in which myths of the nation-state have led to war and to genocide. And still in the 21st century, you can see all the ways in which nationalism, petty nationalism, even in the context of the COVID pandemic—

Yeah.

How destructive and dangerous it is to sort of think about viruses as belonging to country A versus country B. I mean, I mean, it just frustrates me no end when people talk about something being a virus belonging to one country, as if in some ways the virus is respecting the borders that human beings have invented.

Yeah.

I think the tricky thing is wanting to come up with a neat answer that basically says the myths of the nation-state are always good, or the myths of the nation-state are always bad. Myths are powerful, and they have an immense ability to stitch people together. But that power to stitch people together can clearly be used for good, but it can clearly be used for great evil as well. So when it comes to the myths that we talked about, the myths that led to the insurrection, for example, on January 6th, I think it's important to confront these myths partly because they are powerful. But I will say one thing. The way we go about confronting these destructive delusions is often— we often have the wrong approach. We believe that presenting people with facts or arguing with people or showing them contempt or sitting in judgment of them is the effective way to dismantle these delusions.

Yeah.

that that's totally— that's completely ineffective. Far more effective would actually be to exhibit compassion and to exhibit curiosity and to ask the question, not just what is the delusion, but what is the psychological purpose that the delusion is serving? Because you have to get in some ways one level underneath the delusion to see the anchors that are holding it in place.

Yeah.

If you don't get one level under the surface, if you're only at the level of the delusion, you're very upset by the content of the delusion, but you're not going to be very effective at dispelling it.

Yeah, and it's such a rich commentary on the culture wars of today, Shankar, and I applaud you on it. I mean, we try to think about it as conflicts in values, but it really may be just 2 different approaches to representing reality. And there's kind of a more data-driven, empirical, statistical, et cetera, that you and I might gravitate to. And then there's this mythological approach that has a deep power, and both are needed, both are true. And it's hard to make progress in, you know, speaking across these divides with these 2 different epistemologies. It's fascinating.

Yeah. Dacher, I think you and I are old enough to have lived through the 9/11 attacks. And I think both of us remember something remarkable happened psychologically to the country in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, which is it was a moment of very bitter polarization, political polarization, in the aftermath of the election of George W. Bush. But when the 9/11 attacks happened, the next day nobody thought of themselves as being Republicans or Democrats.

Wow.

Suddenly everybody thought of themselves as being Americans. And it's not that being an American is somehow a greater or more accurate reality than being a Republican or a Democrat. In some ways, these are all human inventions. Political parties are human inventions. Nations are human inventions. It's just that when we pick and choose which myths we subscribe to, they can change our relationship with one another. So I think when we think about the conflicts we're having in societies, we often make the mistake of assuming assuming the way to confront those is to basically dismantle the myths. Yeah. Whereas the more effective way might be to ask, what is a better myth that can replace the destructive one that we have?

Yeah. And, and I, I hope, I hope listeners out there are taking that into consideration. It's such— I think it's a— coming out of COVID it's going to be an interesting time to be thinking about our, our culture's myths, if you will. So my final question before we turn to the wonderful questions questions and observations from the audience that are streaming in has to do with The Grand Illusion, which is religion, one of your chapters. And it's this fertile area of social science, thank goodness. I think it's one of the most exciting areas in archaeology and big data and evolutionary thinking. And you refer to the work of people like Azim Sharif and others. And I want to kind of talk— just get your thoughts on this interesting tension, um, that really I always begin my social scientific treatment of religion in, which is, on the one hand, you know, religion is, um, a human universal. Uh, you know, Robert Wright's Evolution of God, really nice treatment of how in almost every society that's been studied, there's some kind of cosmology and supernatural force. Uh, it's good for health. Uh, there's pretty good data it's good for lower levels of depression, it boosts happiness. And then there are the new atheists, if you will, or the skeptics of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others that religion is this toxic delusion. And you can cite evidence for that. Such a complicated story. Where does the social science you treat in Useful Delusions lead you in, in sort of tackling this question of what we make of religion?

You know, Dacher, I think the problem that many people have when they talk about religion is they start by asking themselves, do I believe in religion or do I not believe in religion? That's a fine question to ask. Yeah, but in many ways it's actually not the most interesting question to ask because, okay, you believe in God or you don't believe in God, fine. But, you know, then you people go out and start becoming prosecutor where they look for evidence to back up their particular point of view. Yeah, you know, the more interesting question to ask is what you just observed, you know, why is Why is it in every human society you have beliefs in the supernatural? And this goes back not just in contemporary times. It goes back hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years. And the myths have changed. The gods have changed. The religions have changed. But the capacity of religion to flourish has not changed. And just from a purely point of view of curiosity, isn't this a wonderful and curious thing? And you ask the question, why is this? Why would this happen? There has been a wealth of new social science research that is suggesting suggested, that religion in many ways is a social innovation that plays a profoundly useful role in helping to regulate societies in different kinds of ways. It may be that the formal religions, as we know today, came into existence as humans were transitioning from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to being larger groups of people.

Right.

So when we transitioned from being bands of 150 people to 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 10,000 we came into contact now with many more people who were strangers. And now the social systems, the rule of law, and norms, and police departments that we have didn't exist then. So religions in some ways arose as a way to regulate human interaction, as a way to create in some ways a set of laws that people could ascribe. Now, as it turns out, the human mind has all the hooks and grappling hooks to hook onto religion.

Yeah.

It turns out that it fits very well. well with the psychology of the human mind.

Yeah.

But I'm just fascinated by the fact that religion in some ways has played such a profound role. I do think that Dawkins and Hitchens might be right in pointing out some of the excesses of religions, but I think they're profoundly wrong in underestimating the role that religion plays on a daily basis. My 2 political heroes are the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. And I don't think of myself as being a particularly religious person. but I know that my life would not have been possible without those 2 people, and their lives would not have been possible without a deep and abiding faith in religion. So I think we can appreciate in some ways what religion gives us, and whether we are religious or not in some ways I think is a secondary and perhaps a much less interesting question.

Well put. And, you know, and you— what you— your answer highlights, I think, the relevance of social science here, which is in this religiously charged era, you know, and it is a complicated time to think about religion, you know, the science gives us this new way of thinking about why it is, why it's universal, and why it's just part of humans. Well, I'm going to transition to the questions coming in from our Commonwealth audience. And one flows right out of what you just talked about, which is the social scientific perspective on religion right now is interested in things like rituals and beliefs about omnipotent gods, collective effervescence that Émile Durkheim— and you talked about rituals. and the shared physiology of rituals. What about storytelling? Um, how, in light of the prominence that you're, you're giving storytelling to the mind, um, how do you see storytelling playing a role in the nature of religion?

Yeah, I mean, when you think about religious stories, I mean, isn't it striking that so many of them in some ways not just have stories about how the religion came into existence and how the various gods and goddesses, you know, interacted with one another. But all religions have a story of how we came into existence.

Yeah.

So religions in some ways provide us with stories. Now, you could argue that modern science has contradicted some of those stories and basically challenged them, and that's fine. But you can also say that for a very long time, these stories played a functional role. They helped people in some ways say, okay, I now have an understanding of how it is I came to be and what my relationship is with other people. Certainly, I think growing up in India and raised in a household that was a Hindu household, the stories and myths in Hinduism are just—

Wow.

Not just staggering, but they're staggeringly beautiful. You could argue that many of them contradict one another, and they are interlocking stories and myths that come from the various epics. But the stories themselves are an endless source of understanding of human nature. And modern psychology is sort of understanding this. When we read a book of fiction, part of what happens when we read a great novel is it transports us into a world world that would normally be alien to us. So I can become a woman, I can become a Russian peasant, I can become somebody who lived in, you know, the— in South Africa 300 years ago. I can become any number of these people because the book transports me to these different worlds. And by transporting me to these different worlds, the book allows me to understand and deepen my own understanding of what it means to be human. In many ways, that's what religious myths and stories do. They're basically ways of understanding how people behave. There are conundrums, there are dilemmas, there are paradoxes, and they put us in a situation where we say, what would I do in this situation? How would I react in this situation? Would I agree with this side or would I agree with that side? And I think the fact that religions are inviting us into that conversation is partly how religions help us think about what it means to be a good person. Whether you believe in the literal truth or not of religion, to me, is sort of entirely beside the point. And I think this is where the New Atheists get it wrong. wrong. They are so literal-minded that they focus so much on whether on a literal level is it factually accurate what you read in the Mahabharata or in the Bible. I think that misses the point entirely because you can read the Mahabharata or the Bible and derive great stories that have great value to your life, even if you happen to not be religious yourself.

Yeah. Let's hope that the science that you're talking about and the wisdom that you're offering— I mean, Darwin fought a lot of fights, of course, too. He was challenged various derivations from the Bible. And I think that, um, this newer science of— and it's a thrilling science about, you know, how religions emerged out of daily rituals, work coming out of Oxford and Azim Sharif's work. And, you know, um, it's— I think it kind of ushers in a new discourse about the utility of religion as a different way, not a, not a factual utility necessarily. So we're going to move from a very small question of religion to another small question from the audience about consciousness. Um, Which is, you know, an eternal question or a perennial question. Um, and I love this question, and, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say about this. Um, in light of what you've been saying, are you willing to say that our entire consciousness is just storytelling? Is consciousness storytelling?

Yeah, that's a profound question, and it's quite a profound question because in some ways it actually has, you know, you, you could We could spend the next hour trying to unpack that question.

Yeah.

I think storytelling is clearly a part of what consciousness is. I think absolutely it's clearly a part of it. But I think it might also be an element of attention and how attention works in the brain.

Right.

There are theories that suggest that part of what consciousness is, is sort of essentially an ability to focus on story A versus story B. So I think, yes, it's partly stories, but which story do you focus on? Do you focus on the story of what your taste buds are telling you, or do you focus on the story of what your spouse is telling you, or the story that comes to you from your culture, at different points, attention moves from stories or between stories or helps to meld these stories together. So I would say that, yeah, I do think that consciousness probably is some amalgam of storytelling, probably with elements of where we focus our attention.

Yeah. And it's worth quoting William James, who really felt that attention was right at the heart of consciousness and character and happiness, if you will, or the good life. life is how we direct our attention. Practical question from the audience, really important. There are some places where we need to tell the right story, the factual story. Climate change, climate crisis is kind of the obvious example. And so the member of our audience is really interested in, what do we do about— how do we use Useful Delusions, this wonderful book written to think about climate change denial? I mean, what— how would you take that on?

Yeah, it's such a wonderful and important question. Thank you for that question. There's a section of the book actually that talks about climate change and talks about sort of our approach to climate change. And I think in many ways, Dacher, I think we've made a mistake in sort of our approach to climate change. And it's the same mistake that we've made when we try to dismantle conspiracy theories or dangerous delusions. We believe that people who are climate change denialists can be persuaded by presenting them with even more evidence. So even though the first 676 peer-reviewed studies have not convinced someone, we believe that the 677th study is gonna convince them. And at some level, you have to admit that this is itself a delusion. The fact that, you know, the first 676 studies don't work and you think the 677th study does work, that in itself is a delusion. You know, I've often— you know, I'm a sports fan. I don't know if you follow sports, Tucker, but I'm a sports fan.

Oh yeah.

I'm often amazed when I'm watching football in January in, like, you know, Green Bay, Wisconsin, You have people standing in the stands. It's like, whatever, 6 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you're lucky.

Yeah, if you're lucky. And it's snowing. And they're standing there bare-chested with their tattoos on their chest for their favorite sports team. And you have to ask yourself— the question that I often ask myself is, where's the same passion when it comes to climate change? When do you see people standing bare-chested in the snow saying, I need to save the planet. And when you think about it, isn't the planet many, many, many orders of magnitude more important than your sports team?

Yeah.

Why is it that certain things in our culture have managed to harness in some ways the passions that people are capable of exhibiting, whereas other things, often the most important things, have not done so? And I think the answer in some ways is that we have gone about the process of climate change by recruiting only the logical and rational rational portions of our minds. And that's profoundly important to do. I'm not taking anything away from the importance of the science and the importance of the science telling us what the right direction is. But it might be that we actually have to harness the power of myth, the power of storytelling, perhaps the power of religion—

Yeah.

—in some way to turn the protection of the planet not just into a cost-benefit equation, but into something that's a sacred value. Because of course, when it comes to sacred values, What could possibly be more sacred than the survival of the planet?

Yeah, so well put. And it was interesting to just feel the culture shift a bit when the Pope, I think, came out with a big treatise on climate change. And, you know, and Saint Francis of Assisi was a great naturalist or an environmentalist. I think that that's a wonderful observation, that we need kind of the power of mythos, as you're talking about. I have to insert a question of mine, and then we're going to have— we come to the time in the program where we'll just take on one more question from the audience. You know, there's— it's this— you take on with all these new studies and these wonderful stories that you've woven together in Useful Delusions. I think one of the big questions, uh, in social science, which is, uh, you know, the question of, uh, how, how adaptive are illusions and delusions, uh, or is it really— is the organism better served by sort of tracking reality in a faithful way, a factual way, a non-distorted way? way. Um, you know, this was a kind of a conflict that arose with Shelley Taylor, who wrote a very influential article, say, with Jonathan Brown, that we need illusions. It's good for us. We're happier if we, we think we're superhumans and have a lot of control. What do you— where, where do you stand today after working through all these delusions? Are they, are they good for us?

Yeah, I think the, the dilemma I think that I've experienced as an author, a doc, is I wish there was a simple answer to to that question, but there isn't a simple answer to the question. Because I think simultaneously, yes, it is absolutely the case that some positive illusions and some self-deceptions can in fact be good for us.

Yeah.

And it's also absolutely the case that some self-deceptions are not just bad for us, but they're profoundly bad for other people and bad for the planet as well. I wish there was a simple way to basically say self-deception always good or self-deception always bad, but I don't think that exists. And in some ways, this makes sense. When you think about what our brains are doing, our brains in some ways are playing a mediating role between our internal needs and hopes and fears and drives and the reality of the external world. In some ways, we think of the brain as being a computer or a camera or a microphone, but it's actually better to think of the brain almost playing arbitrage between the needs of the internal world and the needs of the external world. Now, if you focus only on the needs of the internal world and you reject the external world altogether, together, you're going to get eaten by a lion really quickly because there actually are lions out there. And if you don't pay attention to the lions out there, you're going to get eaten by a lion.

Yeah.

However, if you only take in the external world and you ignore completely your internal needs and drives, you're also not going to be successful. So in some ways, successful living involves some kind of balancing act between processing reality, but also being able to process reality in such a way that it's not so demoralizing or so dispiriting that you feel like crawling into a shell and pulling the covers The most difficult aspect of this book, I think, is sort of the research looking at mental health. For a long time, people thought that people who had mental illnesses were seeing the world with a delusional pessimism. But more recent work has suggested that people with some mental illnesses, at least like depression, might in fact be seeing the world more realistically than people who are, quote unquote, mentally healthy. And in some ways, that's a powerful metaphor for the larger message of the book, which is that sometimes, in some doses, depression is a certain amount of self-deception is actually good for you. It actually helps you perform well in your life.

So I've been granted the luxury of 2 final questions. This is a really interesting one. And we've talked a lot today, Shankar, about parents and children and romantic partners and people living in our hypersocial ways. And so the question is, how do couples— and I would broaden out to think about friendships and families and multiple generations of families, we all have these delusions, right? And, and part of being a family is to have myths and rituals and so forth. So how do you think about how this applies in a practical way to family life, romantic life? What would you tell your young daughter as she heads into, you know, uh, her life as a romantic partner and family member and community member, uh, about the shared nature of Yeah.

You know, my daughter is someone who's actually one of the most empathetic and kind and emotionally aware people that I know, far more than I am. In some ways, this book has been almost a user's manual for myself because I am so logical and rational in everything that I do. In some ways, this book has been a reminder to me in some ways to behave more like my daughter. So it's interesting that you asked me what advice I would give my daughter. I actually would it on its head. I think this book is sort of an attempt in some ways to learn from her, because in a very practical way, she sort of embodies what it— what it means to not just be an aware person who is taking in reality well, but is able to balance that with a real emotional richness, with a capacity for empathy and compassion for other people. I aspire, as I say in my book, when I grow up, I'd like to be like my daughter.

Well, this is a related question, and it comes— it's the last question that an audience member has offered us. And it's— I think it's really a question for our times, which is, you know, in many ways we live in, I think, the most data, fact-rich era ever. You know, when you think about the knowledge we have about ecosystems in the brain and the nervous system and the atmosphere and so forth, and it's stunning. You know, the science and the facts that your daughter and my daughters learn today didn't exist when I was in college.

Yeah.

And they're transcendent.

Yes.

And at the same time, and I suspect a lot of the audience out there is drawn to that, is persuaded by that, but at the same time, we live in, you know, in particular with the digital world, with the myths that are propagated, the religions that are still alive, the QAnon, and those are the pernicious kinds, but there are all kinds of myths out there that we still adhere to. So how, what's your Confucius-like sort of piece of advice an audience member asks us? Like, to be a full human, how do I navigate these 2 worlds in making choices?

There was a lovely line from Sigmund Freud. He sort of once sort of made and drew an analogy between the mind and the city of Rome. He basically said, very much like the city of Rome, the mind is built in layers. So, you know, the city of Rome, layer upon layer has been built. And so modern Rome today sits atop ancient Rome. And Freud basically argued that the same thing is true of the mind, that in some ways the layers of the mind are built one on top of the other. Now, many ideas from Freudian psychology have been discredited by modern neuroscience and psychology, but I think there's a great truth in this idea that in many ways there are some faculties of the mind that in fact are very, very ancient. So the circuits in the brain that determine fear, for example. example, are almost evolutionarily identical. They go back tens of millions of years. It makes perfect sense because once nature has figured out how to make animals afraid for their survival, why would you mess with an algorithm that's working beautifully? You would just keep it going forever. We also have some faculties that in some ways are newer faculties. I think of these as sort of the newer buildings in the city. Our capacity for reason and logic and scientific thinking might be some of these newer buildings in this very ancient city. And I think many of us have this illusion that because reason and science are the skyscrapers of the city that we are in today, that they're all of the city that matters, that they're the only part of the city that matters. But in fact, the new city of Rome sits atop the old city of Rome. All the ancient algorithms in the brain that have been handed down to us by millions of years of evolution still exist in the brain. Our tribal loyalties, our loyalties to friends, our insane affection for our children, our capacity to be moved by myths and storytelling, all of that, those capacities are still in the mind. So just because you have the skyscrapers doesn't mean the foundations have gone away. I think in some ways a more healthy approach to understanding what it means to be a good human, to be a successful human, is to not think of these 2 things as being at war with one another, but to ask how can they actually coexist. It's absolutely the case that the skyscrapers of reason and science and logic can in fact see further into the future. They can see better into the future. But it may be that in order to be able to get there, we need to harness more of the ancient mind, more of the world of, of the mythos, in order to get to where we want to go.

Well, Shankar, every time we're in conversation, um, I learn so much. Uh, I am exhilarated by by your mind's interpretation of the social sciences. And I have to tell you, I'm scribbling notes about the next studies I need to do and things that I need to work on in the lab. So I wanted to express my personal gratitude for all your wonderful work. Thank you, Shankar Vedantam, host of the award-winning Hidden Brain podcast. For those of you listening, I would really recommend picking up Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Shankar Vedantam's new book. We just scratched the surface of the depth and the cultural histories and the wisdom in it. It's really a wonderful read. And for those of you listening, if you'd like to see more of the virtual programs of the Commonwealth Club, please visit commonwealthclub.org. I'm Dacher Keltner. Thank you so much for joining us with Shankar Vedantam.

Thank you, Dacher. Thank you, Shankar.