How to Adapt When Life Throws a Curveball & Understanding the Flow of Time

What if one of the best-performing investments over the last few decades wasn’t stocks, real estate, or gold — but LEGO? It sounds absurd, yet when researchers tracked the resale value of LEGO sets, they found returns that beat many traditional investments. We begin by looking at which sets gain value, why they do, and what makes some toys unexpectedly valuable. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0275531921001604 Life rarely goes according to plan. Careers shift, relationships change, health issues arise, and unexpected events force us to adapt — often before we feel ready. Since change is unavoidable, the real question becomes: how do you respond when life throws you off course? Maya Shankar joins me with powerful insights on navigating uncertainty and finding meaning when plans fall apart. Maya is a cognitive scientist, former senior advisor in the Obama White House, Senior Director of Behavioral Economics at Google, host of A Slight Change of Plans, and author of The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans (https://amzn.to/4qAad5U) Time is one of the few constants in life — yet our experience of it is anything but constant. Why does time seem to fly on vacation but crawl in traffic? Why do many people feel that time speeds up as they get older? And what is time, really? Sten Odenwald helps untangle these questions. He’s a longtime astronomer, Director of NASA’s STEM Resource Development Project, and author of The Essential Book of Time (https://amzn.to/3N6qNfm). And finally, legendary relationship researcher John Gottman says long-term relationships don’t succeed because of romance, passion, or even communication skills alone. Instead, they hinge on just two essential qualities — and without them, relationships are likely doomed. Listen to find out what they are. https://www.businessinsider.com/lasting-relationships-rely-on-2-traits-2014-11 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 0:30Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, could investing in Lego sets be more profitable than investing in the stock market? Then, how to better handle those difficult life changes that feel overwhelming?

• 0:44Speaker 02

  When we do catastrophize, when we think, "There's no way I can possibly get through this." Research shows people are often far more resilient than they think on the other side. It's true that the good stuff is often not as good as you think it's going to be, but the bad stuff is often not as bad as you think it's going to be.

• 0:59Mike Carruthers?

  Also, the two most important things for any successful relationship. And, understanding time. What is it exactly? And why does it seem to go by faster as you get older?

• 1:12Speaker 03

  The pace at which time passes between when you're young and when you're old is very different. And it all has to do with novel things being presented to your senses.

• 1:24Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:29Mike Carruthers?

  Now, here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in shop cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in shop cash.

• 1:58Mike Carruthers?

  And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with a thousand chances to win a thousand dollars, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win.

• 2:42Mike Carruthers?

  That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:07Mike Carruthers?

  If you were to walk into my house, you will notice fairly quickly that there are Lego sets built around the house. Some that my son has built, some that I've built. They're a lot of fun to build. But what you may not know is Lego sets can also be an excellent investment. And that's what we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. I'm Mike Carruthers, welcome. So there's some surprising data that shows that some Lego sets have been excellent long-term investments. A large academic study of the Lego resale market found that retired Lego sets increased in value

• 3:49Mike Carruthers?

  by about 11% per year on average over several decades. That's comparable to, and in some cases better, than returns from stocks, bonds, or even gold during the same periods. Why? Well, scarcity and nostalgia. Once a popular Lego set is retired by Lego, the supply stops. But demand from adult collectors often keeps growing. Now, it's only a small number of sets that drive most of the gains, especially large, licensed, or limited-edition kits. For example, some sealed Star Wars sets that originally sold for a few hundred dollars are now worth several thousand.

• 4:32Mike Carruthers?

  But only if you keep them unopened. Once a box is opened, resale value drops dramatically. With that said, this isn't a guaranteed strategy, because most Lego sets do not skyrocket in value. Plus, you've got to store them somewhere, and if you do want to sell them, that takes some effort. So you might want to think of it less like investing and more like collecting with some possible upside. The bottom line is that Lego won't replace stocks or gold, but as collectibles go, the data shows they've been surprisingly strong performers if you pick carefully and don't open the box. And that is something you should know.

• 5:18Mike Carruthers?

  A lot of people say they don't like change. It brings uncertainty, disrupts routines, and forces us to deal with things we didn't plan for. And yet, avoiding change isn't really an option. Life rarely unfolds exactly the way we expect. Something always shifts, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways. Change is constant, unpredictable, and often uncomfortable. So the real question isn't how to avoid it, but how to live with it. How do we adapt when life makes other plans for us? Here to explore this is Maya Shankar.

• 5:58Mike Carruthers?

  She's a cognitive scientist who served as senior advisor in the Obama White House. She's been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, and Forbes, and is currently senior director of behavioral economics at Google.

• 6:14Mike Carruthers?

  She's also the host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, and she is author of the book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. Hi Maya, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, Mike.

• 6:29Mike Carruthers?

  So here's what I find so intriguing about this topic of change is you so often hear that people say, "I don't like change. I don't like dealing with change. I'm not good with change." But we are pretty good at it because, well, because we have no other option. When change comes along, we have to deal with it. And over time, I think we get pretty good at it.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, it's a very beautiful and elegant way of seeing it. You're exactly right. Our brains are not wired to like uncertainty, and change is often accompanied by a lot of uncertainty, and that can be a very destabilizing thing. One of my favorite research studies shows that people are more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100% chance of getting an electric shock. So, we would rather be certain sometimes that a bad thing's gonna happen than to have to grapple with any of that uncertainty. And yet, like you said, the human mind is incredibly resilient and adaptable, and we, by virtue of having a ticket to planet Earth,

• 7:36Speaker 02

  have been doing this change rodeo for as long as we've been alive. By brute force, exactly like you said, we have no choice. And so, our psychologies have adapted to find really excellent coping mechanisms and way to, ways to process this new landscape that we're operating in, in ways that ultimately can be very beneficial, right? All the people that I interviewed, despite having been through really harrowing experiences, are deeply grateful for the person they became on the other side of their experience. They're not necessarily grateful for what they had to go through, which of course makes a lot of sense, right? Why would you ever invite illness or loss into your life? But they do feel that they ended up better and more enlightened on the other side, and there's something so inspiring in that message.

• 8:21Mike Carruthers?

  But it is so weird that when you think about it, that you're, it's not that you're grateful for the change, but that you did get something good out of it. But going into it, nobody ever thinks about that because change usually means, and this is my question, when we're faced with a change, we so seldom think, "Oh, man, this is fabulous. I can't, I'm so glad they fired me, now I can..."

• 8:44Speaker 02

  (laughs)

• 8:45Mike Carruthers?

  You know, it's always, you always catastrophize about the, what's coming next. "I'm gonna lose my house, I'm gonna..." You know, just, you do all this stuff that's so unproductive, but I don't know how you not do it.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  First of all, I'm one of these people, right? So, one of the reasons that, as a cognitive scientist, I'm so interested in studying change is that I myself am afraid of change. I, I'm going through something right now, and I found myself doing some of that catastrophizing. And I have to bring myself back to a couple of basic principles. The first is that research shows we are very bad cognitive forecasters. What this means is that we're terrible at predicting how we are going to think and feel about certain events in our lives. And that's actually reassuring in moments like this because when we do catastrophize, when we think, "There's no way I can possibly get through this," research shows people are often far more resilient than they think on the other side.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  The, it's true that the good stuff is often not as good as you think it's gonna be, but the bad stuff is often not as bad as you think it's gonna be. More importantly, one of the biggest reasons why we get this forecasting, with these predictions about how we'll respond, incorrect, is that we ourselves are changing alongside the change experience. So, we tend to think of ourselves as these static entities, right? We imagine current DeMaya with all of her preferences and values and abilities navigating the full arc of the change. But the reality is that when a big change happens to us, it also leads to lasting change within us. And we, you know, it's interesting, there's a psychological illusion called the end of

• 10:26Speaker 02

  history illusion, which says that while we greatly appreciate that we've changed considerably in the past, so, you know, I look back at 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I can hardly even relate to that person, we do tend to think that the person we are right now is done changing, that we're the finished product. Of course, that's not true. And of course, a big change in our lives can accelerate internal shifts. And so... One thing I'm holding on to for myself in this moment is, yes, it feels so daunting. I don't know if I, Maya, am capable of navigating this moment, but I'm actually going to be a different person as I navigate this experience. I will be a new person on the other side with different values and perspectives and abilities and ways of seeing the world.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And if I can shape that trajectory for the better, I can actually end up better in all of this.

• 11:15Mike Carruthers?

  That's so interesting that we think we're, that we're not going to change, that we are who we are and that's it. And yet, we always do. We always change. We're not the people we were a year, five years, 10 years ago.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  So, one thing that's really interesting is when we think about a negative change happening in our lives, it can often feel like an apocalypse of sorts, like a personal apocalypse, like the world we knew is no longer available. And what's so interesting about the genesis of the word apocalypse is that it comes from the Greek word "apokalypsis." "Apokalypsis" actually does mean revelation. And this etymology is instructive because it teaches us that while change can absolutely upend us, it can also reveal things to us. Things about ourselves that were hidden from view until this moment, until the demands and stresses and novelty of our new environment cast a light on a part of ourselves that either we weren't fully aware of

• 12:14Speaker 02

  or we weren't attending to, or we just didn't have the wherewithal to try to improve. And I have found this in so many moments in my life where a really bad thing happened and it did reveal something to me about maybe habits of mind that weren't optimal or perspectives on the world that needed to be updated or beliefs I'd been carrying my whole life that had to be challenged. And that's a wonderful experience, you know, to have this force enter your life and encourage you to actually change the way that you see the world around you and the way you see yourself.

• 12:53Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it's interesting too that when, when bad things happen or you perceive some change, like an illness, like you get sick, something bad happens and you perhaps start to blame yourself. Maybe if I had eaten a better diet, or maybe if I hadn't, whatever. That somehow it's your fault and, and maybe it is, but maybe it isn't.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  It is very common in the aftermath of a negative change to self berate and to assume that we were the ones that caused this, even when in many situations, the situation was completely out of our control. And whether or not we do this depends on where our locus of control lies. So psychologists have this concept. If you have a really strong internal locus of control, you believe that you dictate outcomes, that you're in control of how your life turns out. If you have a strong external locus of control, you believe that there's a lot of external factors that are determining how your life turns out. So one mentality involves a very firm grip on the steering wheel in which you are the one that is dictating things.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  And the other is a slightly more open-minded posture of, yes, I can control certain things, but the universe is actually controlling a lot of other things. It turns out that when you have a stronger internal locus of control, when you feel that you're the one in charge, it can be associated with higher well-being because your life is filled with maybe more purpose or more meaning because you do feel like your inputs matter. The downside of having that relationship with control is that when a really unexpected negative thing happens, your brain naturally thinks, well, this must be my fault. If I was responsible for the good stuff, I must be responsible for the bad stuff. And there's a huge freedom, actually, in adopting a more balanced view of how any person's life turns out.

• 14:46Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about the inevitable changes we all must face in life and how to best handle them. And my guest is Maya Shankar, author of the book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 15:57Mike Carruthers?

  So Maya, when the change that you're facing has something to do with your identity, like you lose your job or you're going to get a divorce, there's something about that kind of change that seems particularly difficult.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  I think by nature, we tend to define ourselves by what we do, by our labels, by our roles, right? I'm a teacher, I'm a doctor, I'm a mother, I'm a member of my community. The challenge is that when a big change happens, it can actually threaten that self-identity. And this can leave you in a very paralyzed state because you feel not simply that you've lost the thing in this change moment, but you've also lost a fundamental sense of who you are. I remember having this experience as a little kid. So I was an aspiring concert violinist. When I was young, I was studying at Juilliard under Itzhak Perlman. My big dreams were coming true. I was soloing with orchestras and everything was looking bright.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  And then I had my own slight change of plans when I overstretched my finger on a single note and had a career-ending injury. And I remember in that moment, Mike, not just grieving the loss of the instrument, but also the loss of myself on this more fundamental level. Fast forward a couple decades. After almost six or seven years of trying to start a family, my husband and I were unsuccessful. We had to deal with many obstacles and disappointments and heartbreaks and pregnancy losses with our surrogate. And it's been a really challenging experience to navigate that. And again, I felt like I wasn't just grieving the pregnancy losses, I was grieving the loss of this future identity that I had for so long aspired to hold, which was mom. And what I've learned from these experiences, really only in hindsight,

• 17:40Speaker 02

  is that it can be more stabilizing to define yourself. Not simply by what you do, but by why you do those things, or why you have even the dreams you have. So what do I mean by that? Let's take the violin, for example. I asked myself, well, what was it that I loved about the violin? Human connection was at its core. I loved that music was a vehicle for me to build deep emotional connections with people, whether it was my fellow musicians or people in the audience. Just because I've lost the violin didn't mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place. That part of me stayed firmly intact. I am a person who thrives on emotional connection. When you define yourself in those terms, then the exercise simply becomes, where else can I find ways

• 18:25Speaker 02

  to express this part of myself, right? How else can I feed this desire for human connection? Well, it turns out that I have been able to, through my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, where from the closet in my apartment, I was able, I've been able to connect with people all over the world about their change experiences and to cut through all the platitudes and go straight to, you know, the deepest moments of their lives. All of these pursuits have been anchored around this fundamental goal of feeling closer to other human beings. And so I would urge everyone listening to ask themselves, what is their why? What is the thing that makes them love what they do? Is it giving back to people? Is it learning a new skill? Is it witnessing progress because you've improved at a skill?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Is it expressing your creativity through some means? And that why will remain even in the face of change. And it's just a matter of finding new ways to express that why. It can actually serve as a compass that helps guide you forward.

• 19:24Mike Carruthers?

  It is interesting that, I mean, I don't imagine there is a person on earth who's lived thirty years, twenty years, and hasn't had some fairly profound change happen to them. And it just seems impossible that you would get very far in life without getting some detour that you never planned on. And yet, it's such a, like, it's gonna happen, and yet we seem so unprepared for it.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  It's such an interesting question because the reality is that if you're living life, you're navigating change. Those two things are intertwined in a way that's impossible to break, right? That bond can't be broken. And when I've been going through a hard experience, I've heard the mantra, the well-known mantra, you know, you can't change what happens to you, but you can change your reaction to what happens. And it is meant to be empowering, but in my moments of grief and frustration and anxiety, it registered as a platitude. I was like, okay, that sounds great, but how the heck am I supposed to actually think and feel differently about the big changes in my life, right? How is that actually going to unfold? And it's not like there's some sort of switch in my brain that I can flip on that will suddenly

• 20:34Speaker 02

  make me feel more peaceful or more hopeful or filled with a greater sense of possibility about the road ahead. And so my goal with this book actually was to give people a roadmap.

• 20:47Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I heard somebody say, and I liked when I heard it, I still like it. And that is that, you know, your life is kind of like your car in the sense that you know something's gonna go wrong. You just don't know what it is. And that's what makes change so difficult is, yeah, we know that changes are coming. Things are gonna happen. We're gonna get detoured. But we don't know what is gonna get detoured, just like, you know, something's gonna go wrong with your car, but you don't know if it's gonna be the brakes or the radiator or what.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 21:20Mike Carruthers?

  And so you never know until you know, and then it's like a baseball bat to the gut.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  We tend to fixate on the risks that are very salient to us, right? Like the known risks in our lives. We know that we have this health condition. We know that that our job is gonna come to an end, right? But we forget that there's so many unknown risks that are just lingering all around us all the time. They're in the same way that there's background radiation and then an X-ray is just a marginal amount of radiation on top of that. There's so much background risk that remains silent to us on any given day unless we think really hard about it. And we somehow have come to live comfortably in that environment, right? Every time you leave, you get out, you leave your house and you hit the road, you're gonna be facing all sorts of risks. And so I also try to remind people,

• 22:09Speaker 02

  and I'm trying to remind myself as well, just because a risk in your head feels very prominent, remember that actually... The well of risk was already quite full just by virtue of living on planet Earth. And you're just adding a couple more pennies into that well. You're not going from having had no risk to a risk-filled state.

• 22:29Mike Carruthers?

  But when we have these changes and we catastrophize and think it's the end of the world and then it turns out not to be, it's almost like we don't really learn from that for the next time. Like, the next time there's a big change, we still go through the same, the same stuff that we did the last time, not realizing that the last time we handled it pretty well.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I also want to make clear that while the specifics of your change might be different from the past, right? When you feel like, "Oh, wow, what I'm going through is truly unprecedented," you should remember that the same strategies and techniques that served you well last time could very well serve you well this time. I have found that there is so much more commonality across people's change stories that don't look at all the like on their surface than I would have appreciated before. When someone's going through something, we tend to point them towards other people who are going through exactly that same thing. "Oh, you're going through a divorce." "Oh, I have a friend who went through a divorce, talk to them." "Oh, you're dealing with loss." "Oh, go to the bereavement section of the bookstore."

• 23:31Speaker 02

  But actually, because we have a shared human psychology and because we're grappling with the same stuff when it comes with change, things like uncertainty, fear, grief around the life we used to have and the loss of identity that we're having to experience, anxiety, all of these things are so universal in their nature. And if the problem state is universal, then you could easily imagine that the solution set will be similar as well. So, for example, one thing that is really tough for us in the throes of change is rumination. We tend to spiral. We get into these really negative spirals in which we are rehashing the past, we're filled with regret, we're anxious about the future.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Our brains trick us into believing that we're actually making progress on solving our problem when in actuality we're making no progress at all. That's essentially the definition of rumination. So, if you're the type of person who, after a big change, wakes up at 3:00 in the morning and tries to outthink the problem and ends up in a worse state, that's rumination. And so, I provide strategies for... Overcoming rumination so that we can see our problems more objectively. Things like mental time travel, in which you travel to the past or into the future in order to contextualize your present day problem and to see it as more transient. Psychological distancing tools in which you can actually breed that sort of important distance you need between you and your problem so you can see it with more clarity and actually poke holes in the narratives that you're building.

• 24:59Mike Carruthers?

  Well, one reason I think it's so great we've had this conversation is that when people are hit with big changes in life, and I know this from my own experience, you tend to think you're the only one and you're struggling in a way that nobody else seems to have to struggle with. But clearly, everybody has to struggle. Everybody does struggle with change. And as you say, many times you come out the other end feeling better. I've been talking with Maya Shankar. She is a cognitive scientist. She served as senior advisor in the Obama White House, and she is author of the book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Maya, great. This was fun. Thanks.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Okay, thanks so much, Mike.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 26:45Mike Carruthers?

  Time feels like the most predictable, reliable thing there is. It just keeps moving. We mark it with clocks and calendars and schedules, but what exactly are we measuring? What is time really? Why does it only seem to go in one direction? Why doesn't it ever slow down or stop or run backwards? And how is time connected to space and gravity and the universe itself? These questions may sound abstract, but they affect everything, from how the universe works to how we experience our own lives. And some of these questions lead to ideas that sound like science fiction, like time travel, but may not be as far-fetched as they seem.

• 27:30Mike Carruthers?

  Here to explore all of this with me is Stan Adenwald. He is director of the STEM Resource Development Project at NASA, a longtime astronomer and author of "The Essential Book of Time." Hi, Stan, welcome.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Well, hello, Mike. Thank you for having me.

• 27:47Mike Carruthers?

  Sure. So I think all of us have a pretty intimate relationship with time, right? Time is in every equation. There's always the time element. But from an astronomer's point of view, what is it? What is time?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Well, to be honest with you, we really don't know what time is. And yes, there's part of it that's a subjective experience, but what we've found out is that there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and we're just starting to understand what the pieces are.

• 28:17Mike Carruthers?

  Well, why that answer is so fascinating is time seems so simple to me. I mean, just living my daily life, time must be, otherwise my life wouldn't move forward. My life would be a photograph, not a video. It would just... there would be nothing. So what's the mystery? What is it that you're trying to understand? Or what is it about time that baffles us?

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Well, the thing is that it's all linked into the second law of thermodynamics, which is about entropy. Basically, things get more complicated...

• 28:55Speaker 03

  From simpler things. And so, the Big Bang actually had very, very low entropy. Very little confusion, as you would call it. But now we live in a universe that has an awful lot of complexity. So entropy increases. And time is intimately related to that particular experience. That's one way of looking at it. It's not terribly helpful, because I think most of us don't really have a gut feeling for what entropy is. So we're just throwing one imponderable after the other. And that doesn't feel very satisfying. I kind of like to take a step back. First of all, the way that the brain works, the brain only exists and only perceives now.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  And that now lasts about 100 milliseconds. Um, the experience that we have of time is the way that the brain enhances now by remembering something from the recent past, which is already stored in our brain, and then trying to predict what's going to happen in the next few seconds. So, our experience of now is sort of imbued with a sense of what's about to happen and what has already happened. So that's why we have a sense that the present moment is part of a continuum. And this continuum is what we call time. So that physiologically is what's going on with the brain.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  But, the thing is that all of these processes are embedded within a universe where we claim time has some kind of an objective reality. The only thing that we can identify that has any objective reality is the idea that things change from simple to complicated, because that's the direction that entropy moves in our universe. You know, you have to chase this literally all the way back to the Big Bang. You know, why did our universe start out with having three dimensions of space and then this fourth dimension, where entropy seems to increase along it? And, um... We're beginning to think that that's analogous to the problem of why are we here?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  You know, existentially, if the universe had started out slightly differently, we wouldn't be here to really perceive the differences. So the fact that we're asking the question, what is time, is rooted in the fact that our universe started out with this thing as part of its initial conditions. It could have started out with something else, in which case we wouldn't be here to argue the differences. So, you see, we get into these really complicated sort of cycles of what seems to be circular reasoning.

• 31:34Mike Carruthers?

  If you could figure this all out, if science was able to wake up one morning and say, aha, we've got it, what is it? What is it that people who study this are hoping to discover?

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Well, that's an excellent question. That's the question of sort of, you know, practicality, of what practical use is this? It's also the issue of, you know, sort of completing the circle. You know, we know a lot about the parts of our universe, we know a lot about its physical laws, but there seem to be things that the universe started out with that we really can't understand why they started out that particular way. You know, if there is some reason for there to be something like time, we want to find out what that reason is.

• 32:22Mike Carruthers?

  Does everyone experience time more or less the same way? Or are there people who experience it differently? I can't imagine how that could be, but do they?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, most of us, through evolution, have been imbued with a brain that processes now, you know, connects it with an anticipation of the next second and a memory of the previous second. And we all do that very reliably. If we didn't, we would have been extinct a long time ago, because we would never been able to figure out our environment, learn from our mistakes, anticipate where a predator is going to be in the future. So we all come equipped with a basic, you know, version 1.0 brain that processes information in the senses and figures out that there is something like time going on, at least subjectively. Then there are people that have pathologies, brain pathologies, which are really quite

• 33:21Speaker 03

  fascinating. Some people literally only live in now. They have no memory of past events older than a second. And what they do is they are constantly babbling, trying to confabulate what they're experiencing now with what they just experienced a few seconds ago into some kind of a consistent coherent story. And this is a brain pathology that's heavily studied. And it shows that there's a way in which our brain is not able to process something as simple as time ordering. And so the subjective aspect of time is something that's really quite fascinating to study.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  A lot of ways in which we can misconstrue what happened, which two things happened before each other, you know, cause and effect, and stuff like that. And we're learning a lot about subjective time just by studying the pathologies. But yeah, you know, I think we all generally perceive time as a subjective thing in the same way. The same way that we probably all experience color the same way. And some physicists think that time, subjectively, is a qualia, just like color is. Color doesn't exist in the outside world. It's purely a feature of how the brain tags and processes information. And for subjective time, it might also be a qualia, just like color.

• 34:48Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it would seem. I mean, I experience time differently. I heard someone say, you know, "An hour in the dentist's chair is not the same thing as an hour, you know, at Disneyland." I mean, it moves at a different rate, even though it's moving at the same rate.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Well, the brain researchers know that the pace at which time passes between when you're young and when you're old is very different. And it all has to do with novel things being presented to your senses. When there are a lot of novel things being presented to your senses, your brain spends a lot of time processing each now event because there are no patterns that it really has in memory to tell it what's going on. But as you get older, you've seen just about everything you're going to see. And so everything that you see is something that the brain has already processed. And so it doesn't spend very much time belaboring over, you know,

• 35:47Speaker 03

  "Why is that chair red?" and stuff like that. So the pace of time is slower for adults. Who are not processing very much novel information and very fast for young people who are processing a lot of novel inputs all the time.

• 36:02Mike Carruthers?

  Is that a theory or is that pretty well accepted by science?

• 36:07Speaker 03

  It's pretty well understood, yeah, in terms of neurophysiology. That's sort of an accepted paradigm at this point. It doesn't seem that the brain really cares about time in an absolute sense. It does care about the memories that it stored for, you know, any given chunk of daily experiences that are novel. It's this novelty aspect that the brain really gloms onto and really essentially determines the sense of how time is passing for you.

• 36:39Mike Carruthers?

  But time passes for other things too, right? I mean, the old barn deteriorates over time, the tree gets taller over time. It's not any human perception, it's reality.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's called entropy. And the fact that we live in a universe where entropy is lower when the universe was younger and higher as the universe gets older. It's this sort of direction in which things erode, you lose information, things are crystal clear when they're formed, but then as they age, which is a time thing, they become more scattered and eventually decay into dust. And that's the increase of entropy over time. And we live in a universe where, ever since the Big Bang, the Big Bang was a very, very low entropy state, and today the universe is in a very, very high entropy state.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  So the direction seems to be in the same direction as what we call, you know, the past to the present to the future. It's one of the arrows of time, as astronomers call it.

• 37:49Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, the arrow of time. And, you know, and people say, well, why isn't time travel possible? But in fact, it is possible because we're doing it all the time. We're moving through time, but we can only go one way at one rate.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Well, actually, we do have limited time travel going into the past, but it's strictly our recollection of...

• 38:12Speaker 03

  You know, things that have happened to us as individuals. I mean, I can, I can go back to when I was five years old and remember birthday party with, you know, quite good clarity. And everybody has that experience of being able to time travel into their own personal past. So we have access to the past. We also have access to the deep past because there are these curious people called archaeologists and historians. And they seem to have a logical way of organizing things that they find today into a pattern that stretches back into, you know, human history. So we can recover past in the human scale of time.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  And astronomers, we do that with, you know, anytime, you know, we study a distant galaxy, well, that's the light from it when it was, you know, 150 million years younger, you know, sort of a thing. And so we time travel just by looking at things in the sky. So the future is, is a haze of quantum probabilities and possibilities that allows free will. The past, it's already happened. It's like that hologram you're talking about. And you can't travel into the past any more than you can travel into a photograph in your photo album or into a hologram. Those things have happened, they're gone. And the only thing that we have today is records of what they were like in the present moment as an archaeological evidence.

• 39:40Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't there a theory of time, though, that the future has already happened? That we're, that everything is already done?

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's the theory called, well, it's called eternalism. And basically, it says what we call space and time or spacetime is, you can think of it as like a watermelon. You know, the entirety of the evolution of the universe, past, present to future, is like the volume of that watermelon. And if you slice it, that slice is now.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  But essentially, everything in the future is already there as well. It's just that we've decided to pick out a particular moment as now. The only problem is you can't do that over the entire universe. There is no such thing as now in the universe because of relativity. Everybody, every particle carries their own clock and it's all synchronized to the Big Bang, but it's not synchronized into the future because everything is moving, everything is in flux. And so you can never find a particular space which represents now. So this whole idea of eternalism has fallen out of favor because it really doesn't make any sense.

• 40:54Mike Carruthers?

  So knowing what you know about time, what science has discovered about time, what do you do with that? I mean, other than being a scientific curiosity and hope we learn more, does it have any practical application?

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Well, the practical application for me as a physicist, as an astrophysicist, is that it helps me sort of sneak up on one of the outstanding questions that we face in astronomy. And the biggest one, of course, is why was there a Big Bang? And so I would like to investigate anything that takes me closer to answering that particular question. And I really don't want it to be that the Big Bang happened because we are here. If we weren't, if the Big Bang didn't happen, we wouldn't be here. I mean, to me, that is an answer that has absolutely no content to it whatsoever.

• 41:55Mike Carruthers?

  Do we know that time exists in the same way everywhere in the universe?

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Well, the one thing that is something that I learned long ago as an astrophysicist and understanding quantum mechanics and relativity is that there is no master clock in the universe. There is no, you know, uniform time standard across all galaxies, stars, atoms, molecules, planets, and people. That's not the way the universe seems to be put together according to relativity. So any idea that there is this master clock that ticks out the seconds in the universe... You know, I don't, I don't think in those terms anymore. I also don't think in terms of, you know, time travel. You know, I don't think of getting into a box, you know, pushing a button and going back to the fifth century.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Because that isn't consistent with, with virtually all of the ideas that we have today in physics about how time and space actually work.

• 42:54Mike Carruthers?

  Well, help me understand this idea that the universe has no master clock. Because it would seem, if you went anywhere in the universe, that time would still continue to, to transpire, that you would still continue to get older, that you would be in a place where things move forward. So, isn't that a clock?

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Well, it's not that there is no clock. The thing is that you have to think in terms of everybody carrying their own clock. And my clock, because I'm in one part of Earth in a gravitational field, sitting in a chair, is going to be very different than the clock that's carried by an astronaut in the International Space Station, 400 kilometers above the surface. That's guaranteed by general relativity. So those two clocks are not synchronized, and they're only, you know, 400 kilometers apart. But yet, we carry on perfectly good conversations with the astronauts, and we do physics experiments with them and all that. Up to the point where that difference makes a difference.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  And that difference is on the order of microseconds. You know, if we tried to coordinate experiments on the ground and in the space station to better than a microsecond, we would not be able to do that, because there are two different clocks, and we can measure very accurately how they're carrying on time measurements, and they're not the same. So that's why you can't say that there is a single coordinated universal time, you know, that's good to, you know, a nanomicrosecond across several light-years. That, that just doesn't work. But there is an overall clock that says, "Today is 13.85 billion years after the Big Bang." You know, and that's something that you can pretty much count on.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Now, we don't know why we're living at a time that's at that time. Why aren't we living at a time that's a billion years earlier or a billion years later? That's the mystery of why there is such a thing called "now," and we have no idea why "now" exists.

• 44:58Mike Carruthers?

  Does now even have a definition? I mean, other than an experience of now? I certainly know what now is, but now it's gone. And what was that?

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Well, it was replaced 100 milliseconds later by another now that your brain processed information about, and gave you a complete picture of your environment, and so on and so forth. But your sequencing of nows is different than mine. I'm geographically in a different place. My brain operates perhaps a bit slower than yours, because I'm a little bit older, I would suspect. And so now is a slippery thing, even at the biological level. So it's better to say that no two people share exactly the same nows.

• 45:48Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is something that really captures people's imagination. And that's why there's so many books and TV shows and movies about time travel. To understand the science or what we're trying to understand about the science of time is really interesting. I've been talking to Sten Adenwald. He is director of the STEM Resource Development Project at NASA, and he's author of The Essential Book of Time. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Sten, thank you. Thanks for laying all this out for us.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Well, thanks, Mike. It's been a great pleasure talking about one of my favorite subjects.

• 46:27Mike Carruthers?

  There is a lot of research on what makes relationships thrive or fail. And according to psychologist John Gottman, who is a noted authority on this and has been a guest on this program, it all comes down to two things: kindness and generosity. That's it. Couples who express kindness and generosity to each other, and do it often, do well. Those who don't, don't. And here's something else Gottman discovered. While we've all heard that partners should be there for each other when the going gets rough, it turns out that being there for each other when things go right is actually more important for relationship quality.

• 47:09Mike Carruthers?

  How someone responds to a partner's good news can have dramatic consequences for the relationship. On the other hand, contempt is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partner completely miss 50% of the positive things their partners are doing, and they see negativity when there isn't any. Being mean is the death knell of relationships, and that is something you should know. Hey, you could do me a big favor. It's something that would really show support for this podcast, and that is to spread the word. Tell someone, share this podcast using the share button on the player, or talk to people about it.

• 47:53Mike Carruthers?

  We're always trying to grow our audience, and you are the best way for us to do that. A recommendation from you goes a long way in getting new listeners. I'm Mike Heruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 48:09Speaker 00

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• 48:36Speaker 05

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