262. This Is Your Brain on Podcasts

Neuroscientists still have a great deal to learn about the human brain. One recent MRI study sheds some light, finding that a certain kind of storytelling stimulates enormous activity across broad swaths of the brain. The takeaway is obvious: you should be listening to even more podcasts.

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

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:42Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me warn you right off the bat. While today's episode of Freakonomics Radio is a regular, brand-new episode, it is also a fundraiser. One of those episodes where we ask you to send money to WNYC, the public radio station that produces our show. We'll talk about that more later, but if you just want to get out of the way now, all you've got to do is go to Freakonomics.com and click the donate button, or you can text the word freak to the number 69866, and they'll text you back a donation link. In either case, you'll find all kinds of Freakonomics Radio swag available only to donors of this show. Thanks in advance. Now, moving on.

• 3:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  As you surely know, there is a lot of amazing research going on these days into the human brain, and a lot of amazing brain researchers.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Hi, this is Jack Gallant.

• 3:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  So why'd we choose Jack Gallant from UC Berkeley to speak with? I could pretend it's just because he's very good at what he does and very versatile.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  I have done everything. I mean, I've done computer science, I've done psychology, I've done neurophysiology, so I call myself a computational and cognitive neuroscientist.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  And all that would be true, but that's not why we chose Jack Gallant. We chose Jack Gallant because, well, because he's on our team, even if he didn't set out to be. And what team is that, you ask? It's Team Podcast. In his lab at Berkeley, Jack Gallant stuck research subjects in an FMRI machine, that stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging, and he had them listen to podcasts.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  There's no way I'm gonna excel drawing this McAdams' Essence. And I'm about to cry. Does she need Mary Kay, or does she need Jesus?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And I thought, no, that can't be it. That can't be all there is. And I quit the job.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  We use them because they're compelling. You pay attention to them, you want to know the resolution to them. They're very powerful stories.

• 4:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So on today's show...

• 4:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll learn some things we didn't know about how the brain works, especially when it comes to language.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  The brain areas involved in comprehending the meaning of language are very, very broadly distributed.

• 4:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we'll hear how people are impacted by the language in a podcast like, say, Freakonomics Radio.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  I don't think I would have made the Olympics if I hadn't listened to that podcast. Let's just put it that way.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  We're starting today with Jack Gallant. He is a psychology professor who has his own brain research lab at Berkeley.

• 5:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you an extraordinarily naive question. Let's pretend we take the brain in its totality as a three-dimensional machine that does all this stuff and is connected to all these things and has a history to, evolutionarily. And if we were to take that machine and turn it into either a pie chart or a graph that's got a 100% and it's got a 0%, where are we on that graph of truly knowing what's going on in the brain? Are we above 50% yet?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  That's the way I think about the problem, too. You know, there's 80 billion neurons in the brain. So here's the larger context. The brain is a computer, but it's not like your desktop computer. The brain processes information. It represents information. It represents information about the world and it allows you to interact with the world. So it's an information processing device, and therefore it's a computer. But it's a wet, squishy computer that evolved according to its own principles and its own history. And its operating principles are very, very different from the desktop computer that you have. So a desktop computer is what's called a von Neumann architecture, where the design of the system is such that the hardware, the transistors, and the software, the program that runs on the hardware, are as independent as they can possibly be.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  The brain works by very different principles. The brain is essentially just a collection of wires. And everything's just wired to everything else in this big gigantic tangled mess. Every neuron is connected to between 1,000 and 10,000 other neurons. There are feed forward and feedback loops. There's a multi-scale organization of the brain, so there are individual neurons. These are organized into local circuits. Those circuits are organized in layers and columns. Those layers and columns are organized in areas. Your brain contains, no one's quite sure, probably something on the order of 200 to 500 distinct functional areas. And any given area or piece of the brain has about a 50% chance of being connected to every other piece. So it's a hugely, highly interconnected network.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  And it takes about 20 minutes or so to grow a new synapse. So as you're listening to me speak and your thoughts are fleeting from one thing to another, you're essentially having those different thoughts as an, those different thoughts are an emergent property of information flowing over this fixed set of wires. So the brain has this dynamical property where information flowing over a fixed set of wires can interact with itself in order to give rise to this new emergent property of thought. And we have no idea how that kind of system works at this point.

• 7:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  You described the brain as a mess. If you were to be tasked with redesigning it, let's say we'll give you a budget of, you know, a couple billion in two and a half years and a staff of 40. What do you do, what are the most significant differences?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  That is one of the most entertaining questions I've ever heard.

• 8:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're welcome.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  I wouldn't redesign the brain because I don't think we have enough information to redesign the brain.

• 8:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, but if I'm going to give you the $2.5 billion anyway...

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Well, I would just use it to do basic neuroscience.

• 8:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what do you want to find out when you say basic neuroscience is obviously much less basic than I would imagine?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  So in any field of science, including neuroscience, there are sort of two large kinds of problems that can limit your progress. One is how much data you have about the system. And one is what your theory is about the system. And of course, in the end, if you have a complicated problem, you're limited by both of these things. But at any given point in time, one of these is more problematic. And in neuroscience, the real thing that's limiting our understanding of the brain right now is not theory, it's data. We have plenty of theories about the brain. The problem is, we can't constrain any of those theories with data because we don't have good enough data. After we collect an enormous data set, then it becomes a sort of modeling theory, machine learning problem, to troll through those data and try to understand

• 9:14Speaker 01

  the basic principles that gave rise to them.

• 9:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've had this totally idiotic theory for about 10 years now that I'm sure is wrong. And it's not really a theory, it's more just a metaphor. And I've said it to people, and it sounds smart, so they always nod. But I want to run it by you because you'll be able to prove, I think, how idiotic it is. But I'd like to improve the theory, so I'm coming to you for feedback.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Go for it.

• 9:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I think of the human today in 2016, and I think of the stimuli that any given person deals with on a given day, and granted, there's a huge variance if I live in New York City or if I live in, you know, one of any other million places on earth, and depending on everything, what kind of business, what kind of family, what kind of political structure, and so on, there's obviously huge variance. But we're dealing with a whole lot of 7 billion, you know, pretty similar animals who have this computer in our heads, as you put it. And I always think of that computer as being pretty good and fairly reliable hardware that is relatively old, because it's been evolving, you know, quite slowly for a long time.

• 10:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  But that the stimuli that we're responding to on a given day, which has changed a lot faster than we physiologically evolve, and those stimuli include all kinds of- Transactions and interactions and responses and behaviors that, you know, our ancestors never could have dreamed of. And I sometimes feel as if we're just trying to run, you know, version 18 million point 424 software on hardware 1.0. And that we do our best to accommodate, but that it's really hard and that would explain a lot of our biases and heuristics and so on, not all of which are bad, but would explain

• 11:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  why we're not, I don't want to say optimal, but why we sometimes don't act as though the most rational people among us argue we should act. And I'm just curious if there's any merit at all to that metaphor. And assuming not, if you could offer me a better metaphor to impress people within the future.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Well, that's an interesting problem. I guess I would have two things to say about that. First of all, human society's been evolving very rapidly, you know, for 50,000 years since the dawn of agriculture. Everything's been different since then, continuously different. The pace of changes may be accelerating, but things have constantly been different. And we've been dealing with these societal changes for that whole time because evolution has given us a very flexible computer system. We kind of have a fixed brain, but during development and even when we're adults, we can learn to flexibly use that system to solve novel problems. That doesn't say the system can't be overwhelmed or confused

• 12:09Speaker 01

  or, you know, operate suboptimally, but it's a pretty damn flexible system. And I think that's why humans have managed to push culture much farther than any other animals. I mean, certain species of non-human animals have culture in the sense that small groups of them will learn behaviors that they will pass on to their mates and that don't influence their genetics directly, except perhaps by increasing their fitness. But humans, you know, this is all of human existence's culture at this point, right?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Now, one more thing I'll add is, remember that in the human brain, the hardware and the software are intimately linked, right? So the hardware can only run the programs that are conferred by the hardware. It's very different from your desktop computer. So if you think about your desktop computer, if you have, you know, an Atari 64, you could try to run OSX on it. It wouldn't work very well. You could maybe hack on the OSX long enough for a few years and get it to limp along on Atari 64, but it would not behave well. We have, in some sense, a worse situation because we have an Atari 64 computer in our head, but it's running Atari 64 software. We're just trying to use it to solve modern problems.

• 13:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so plainly you know a lot about how we use our brains and how the brain works. I do just want to hear you talk about vision for a bit.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so, vision is a very interesting sense. Humans rely on vision more than any other sense. At the same time, vision seems completely trivial because, you know, you open your eyes, you see. What's the problem? I mean, you just walk around, you do stuff, you play sports, everything's trivial. It's trivially easy, so how hard can vision be? Well, it turns out, vision is a very, very difficult computational problem. And the reason humans are so good at it is that about a quarter of your brain is solely or largely devoted to vision. In humans, we think there are probably something on the order of 50 to 70 distinct visual areas. And like, there are a lot of brain areas devoted to vision that are simply involved

• 14:14Speaker 01

  with mapping the incoming stimulus that lands on your eyeball into the motor commands you need to move the muscles to, say, pick up an object near you, right? If you think about it, if you look at your desk and there's a coffee cup, where the coffee cup falls on your eye is completely irrelevant to you. What you care about is where the coffee cup is relative to your hand and how you need to operate the pulleys in your muscles of your arm and your hand to grab the coffee cup. So transforming from this sort of eye-centered coordinate system to this arm-centered coordinate system is a very complicated problem that's solved completely seamlessly in your brain. So, vision is a nice system because we know what it's trying to do. It's trying to do vision, right?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  If you think about looking at the prefrontal cortex of a human where, you know... There are brain areas involved in abstract thought and moral reasoning and planning. I mean, we have some vague idea of what they're trying to do, but it's very difficult to get your handle on that. Vision is a very solid system and easy to understand. And we share our visual system with a lot of other animals that have very similar visual systems. So as a consequence, scientists have learned an enormous amount about how the visual system is organized in non-human animals over the past 50 years. And that data can be used to help us understand the human neuroimaging data we're getting from this fairly new technology, MRI, which has really only been around 20 years.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  So the whole reason everyone uses FMRI today, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the whole reason people use it is because it replicates the results in vision that we know should be there from animal studies. And that justifies using this MRI method to study other things that are less well-understood than vision.

• 16:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Other things like language.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  It turns out that language is a very interesting system for two reasons. A, just like vision, language is hierarchically organized. So when you hear speech, it comes into your cochlea in the form of a sound spectrogram, which is just a frequency by time. And then from that sound spectrogram, you extract phonemes and morphemes, and you can extract syllables and words and syntax and semantics and narrative. All of that information can be extracted from spoken narrative that you hear. And that means since you can think about all of those levels of information, they must be represented somewhere in the brain.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So we decided to take the tools that we had developed for vision and to apply them to language.

• 16:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  This led to a research project, which led to a paper published this year in Nature by Gallant and his co-authors, Alexander Huth, Wendy DeHeer, Thomas Griffiths, and Frederick Tunison. It's called "Natural Speech Reveals the Semantic Maps That Tile Human Cerebral Cortex."

• 17:14Speaker 01

  So our stimuli came from the Moth Radio Hour. And this is essentially stand-up storytelling, right? Professional, semi-professional storytellers get up in front of the audience. They tell stories meant to sort of excite and interest the audience.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  But when I got close to about 40, I suddenly thought, oh, my God. This could be it. This could be what I end up doing. This could be on my tombstone. Tom Weiser, custom database application engineer. And I thought, no, that can't be it. That can't be all there is.

• 17:42Speaker 06

  So I get a phone call from my mom. And she tells me that my father is about to get on an emergency life flight from our home in Montana to go to Denver to get an emergency liver transplant.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Suddenly, I was just thinking, does she need Mary-Kate? Or does she need Jesus?

• 18:03Speaker 07

  It was really, really idyllic. Snow in Vermont and all sorts of stuff. And Michael, we're out on this little deck outside of it. And Michael's like, see that? Look at that buck. Look at that buck. Get the shotgun, Ethan. Get the shotgun. You know? And I'm like, what for?

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Two and a half weeks later, a black funeral wreath was delivered to me at my office with a note that said, "In memory of our son."

• 18:29Speaker 01

  These are largely autobiographical stories about love and loss and redemption. They're great stories.

• 18:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you use them because they're great? Or did you just use them because they were stories?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  We use them because they're compelling. They're interesting stories. You pay attention to them. You want to know the resolution to them. They're very powerful stories. So previous people had used these stories. Mainly Uri Hassan at Princeton had started using these stories. And he found that they elicited a large amount of brain activity because people are paying close attention to the stories. One of the problems you have in MRI experiments is oftentimes they're very boring. You put somebody in an MRI scanner, which is a very uncomfortable place to be, and then you flash a word at them every five seconds for an hour, they get bored out of their skull.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  But when I got close to about 40, I suddenly thought, oh, my God. This could be it. Two and a half weeks later, this black funeral wreath.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  These stories are very interesting. You're just lying in the magnet, you listen to these people telling these stories, you get lost in the stories. It's the best MRI experiment ever. And in fact, this is the only MRI experiment we've ever done where we didn't have to pay people to be in the study. They were just happy to lie there and listen to the stories. And that means you get a lot of signal. And in a regime like FMRI where we're signal limited, getting more signal is always better. It means we're going to have more information to model the brain.

• 19:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. And the information that you gleaned from the study in order to model the brain, how fruitful is that really for you?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, the data we got from this experiment is really quite remarkable. I'm now at the point where, in order to explain the results, I have to explain the method. Let me tell you how we analyzed the data, because that's important. So people are lying in the magnet. They listen to a couple hours of stories. We measure brain activity. We're measuring changes in blood flow and blood oxygen at 50,000 or so different locations across the cerebral cortex while they listen to these stories. And the essential problem is to figure out, for each location in the brain that we measured, what information in the stories is driving activity at that location in the brain.

• 20:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gallant and his colleagues divided the stories into two linguistic categories: syntax, or the grammatical structure, and semantics, or the story's meaning.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  So now we can probe each of the locations we measured in the brain to find out if it responds to different kinds of syntax, or if it responds to different kinds of semantics, or both. So, this is a data-driven approach in which each location in the brain will tell us, in this procedure, which specific kinds of features it prefers. And when you play this game, you find out that, exactly as you'd expect, these very simple features, like spectral features and phonemes, are represented in primary auditory cortex, which is the first location in the cortex where auditory information comes from the ears.

• 21:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  But they also found something they weren't expecting.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  This higher level semantic information, the meaning of the stories, isn't really represented in primary auditory cortex at all. It's represented further downstream in a large constellation of brain areas that represent different aspects of meaning. And that's actually the most interesting thing about this study, is the representation of semantics. And we have information about the representation of all these different feature spaces. But the one very surprising thing from this study is that semantic information, the meaning of the stories, is represented broadly across much of the brain. All of those various areas of the brain represent different aspects of semantic information in these really complicated maps that are very, very rich, but fairly consistent across different individuals.

• 22:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, here's my lay interpretation of what you're saying. Extremely lay, super lay interpretation would be, podcasts or radio make your brain hum with mystery and delight. That's how I interpreted what you said.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  They make your brain hum. Whether that humming is mysterious and delightful kind of depends on whether you wanted your brain to hum or not. If you're trying to sleep, that might not be so good.

• 22:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what I really want to know is, how anomalous or how typical is this, I don't know, cross-network or broad humming in the brain?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Well, I have several things to say about this. First of all, it is traditionally thought, the lore in the language sort of world is that language is very left lateralized and very localized and not largely distributed. And that is true for production. The key sort of brain nodes, you need to produce speech at the sort of after semantics, the actual translating meaning into speech. Those are left lateralized, and those are bottlenecks. And damage there will cause severe problems with speech production. But remember, we're not doing speech production here. We're doing speech comprehension. And the brain areas involved in comprehension, comprehending the meaning of language, are very, very broadly distributed.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  I think more broadly than anyone had expected. So yes, when you're listening to someone tell an interesting story, an enormous swath of your brain is being activated. For example, imagine I tell you a story about a dog. Well, okay, you know a lot of things about a dog. All of this different information, both the information in the stories and the information that is primed by the stories, the sort of memories that are dredged up by a story, are represented in a constellation of many, many different brain areas. Auditory information tends to be represented in sort of certain locations in the brain and not others. Olfactory information is represented in certain locations in the brain and not others. Mathematical operations tend to occur in certain parts of the brain and not others.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  And if you're listening to a story that involves, you know, a dog barking and a dog smelling bad and a pack of dogs, well, that, a certain number of dogs, like four dogs, then that would activate different brain areas associated with all these different aspects of the stories.

• 24:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm guessing you're not going to want to give me any advice as to how to make this podcast stimulate enormous swaths of the brain, but I would be an idiot to have you on the line and not ask. So, you know, are there words or ideas I should embrace? Should I favor dogs over cats? It sounds like you're very pro-dog. Should I, for instance, stop using, you know, long words like externalities and heterogeneity? Do you have any advice for me, Jack?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Well, the underlying subtext of your question is that evoking large amounts of brain activity is good, and I have no idea if that's true, right? So, let's just start there, right? If you ask me, "How can I evoke lots of brain activity?", I can answer your question. If you ask me, "Should you?", I have no idea, right?

• 25:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  You really don't have any idea, or, all right, okay, I'll take what you got. How can I?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. If you choose to create a story that elicits as much brain activity as possible, actually, you already know how to do this. All journalists know how to do this. There's an old trope in journalism, "If it bleeds, it leads." Because journalists all know that human interest stories, especially involving something nasty, like a violent thing, attract people's interest. And one of the facts that we know about the brain from the last sort of 10 years or so of MRI is that not only are these, there are these rich representations of brain activity, but that there, these representations are modulated and actually transformed by what you attend to. So, social information is represented at many, many different locations in the brain, and people attend to bad social things that happen.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  So, if you want to evoke a lot of brain activity, you, you know, you put a murder on the front page.

• 26:14Speaker 08

  And that would attract everyone's attention and it would evoke activity in all of the socially related parts of the brain and you would have your solution.

• 26:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so here's what I've learned from talking to Jack Gallant. In order to ensure the ongoing success of this podcast, I should probably murder someone live on the air. But I'm not willing to do that. Maybe that's surprising to you, but I am not. So Plan B? Plan B's much better. It's simple, it's less bloody, not even illegal. All it takes is for you to make a donation to WNYC to help them keep producing Freakonomics Radio. Even though this show attracts great advertisers, to whom we're very grateful, the public radio business model also relies heavily on listener donations. So please

• 27:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  go to Freakonomics.com, click the donate button, or even easier, you can text the word freak to the number 69866 and they will send you a link to donate and to claim your Freakonomics Radio swag. We've got t-shirts, mugs, and our brand new Freakonomics Radio logo Titleist golf balls, all of which are only available to donors. So please do this, would you? Either at Freakonomics.com or by text. Again, the number is 69866, then you text the word freak. Now, if I were you, I'd be thinking, how much money should I donate

• 27:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  for a product that I habitually get for free? That is a great question. It's a question that a Freakonomics Radio listener named Gil Adler asked himself.

• 27:56Speaker 08

  I decided to apply the economic theory that I've learned in Freakonomics and apply it to how much I should donate. So I started with a theory that I would pay $1 per episode. And if I really enjoyed the episode, then I would donate extra. And if the episode was below the standards that I had come to expect from Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt, then I would subtract from that dollar. There was maybe an episode or two where I was so disappointed and so felt taken advantage of for my time, where I felt as if I should have been paid to listen to those two episodes.

• 28:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what number did Adler finally land on?

• 28:39Speaker 08

  It was, yeah, it comes out to about $238, I believe, for all the episodes that were produced at the time I had submitted my worksheet.

• 28:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Personally, I think Gil is being a bit generous. I'm sure there are many more lousy episodes than he's saying, but we do try hard around here and we do appreciate the generosity of Gil Adler and the many, many thousands of others who support WNYC. I sure hope that you are one of them. So remember, go to Freakonomics.com and click the donate button, or text the word freak to 69866. And thanks. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we hear from a bunch of Freakonomics Radio listeners who have used this show to their advantage.

• 29:26Speaker 09

  Honey, what's the ROI of buying a new mattress?

• 29:29Speaker 10

  I was having trouble with deep, complex thinking, and this is where your podcast comes in.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Ah, you know, I listened to one probably halfway through and then I stopped.

• 29:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh oh. Guess we need to do better. Anyway, that's coming up right after the break.

• 29:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:57Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:41Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 32:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Angie. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years, and they've made it easier than ever to tackle home projects. Their nationwide network has experts in everything from plumbing and landscaping to roofing, remodels, and more. You can read verified reviews and request and compare quotes to find your best price. So join the millions of homeowners who use Angie to get the job done well. Download the Angie app today or visit A-N-G-I dot com.

• 32:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Welcome back to our special fundraising episode. We already heard from the Berkeley cognitive neuroscientist, Jack Gallant, about how podcasts affect the brain. We also asked Freakonomics Radio listeners how our podcast specifically has affected their brain or other body parts.

• 33:03Speaker 11

  Hi, Freakonomics Radio. My name is Davina. I'm from Grenada, but I live in Austin, Texas. I was actually really inspired by your hidden side of online dating episode, and I started my own online dating account. And actually, a few days later, I met Philip, who is on track to become my first and most serious relationship. So it's crazy for me to think that a podcast may have led to me finding real love.

• 33:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was Davina Bruno. Here's another listener named David Bell.

• 33:32Speaker 09

  It was probably less than a year ago, and I would just blissfully fall asleep, wondering why the sky was blue, or what that coworker meant in that last confusing email. Now, when I lie in bed, I'm wide awake because of Freakonomics, and I'm thinking about something, trying to engage my wife in conversation, like, what are the optimal names for our future children in order to maximize their earning potential? Or, honey, what's the ROI of buying a new mattress?

• 34:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here is Kelsey Warren.

• 34:08Speaker 10

  I was in a car accident in March of 2013. I broke my back, my neck, my femur, punctured a lung, and most dramatically, suffered a trauma called brain shear. My brain injury had knocked me back in time. Basically, I thought I was a kid, and I acted like one. When I progressed closer to normal—I'm 26 years old—I hit a wall. I was having trouble with deep, complex thinking, and this is where your podcast comes in. I started listening to Freakonomics, and after a few months, I developed into a more inquisitive, culturally aware, and thoughtful person. I can talk about anything now with sincere curiosity and patience, very much interested

• 34:51Speaker 10

  in the hows and whys that I was oblivious to just a year ago. So, thank you.

• 34:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're welcome, Kelsey, and I hope your healing continues. There's one more Freakonomics Radio listener I'd like you to hear from, a pretty new listener. Hey Anders, it's Stephen Dubner. How's it going?

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Ah, not too bad. How about yourself?

• 35:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good. Nice to meet you.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Nice meeting you, too.

• 35:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anders Weis is a 23-year-old athlete. His sport is rowing. When you first started rowing, what were your aspirations?

• 35:19Speaker 04

  I wanted to go to Youth Nationals and then get recruited to college. You know, getting recruited for rowing, you know, it simplifies the process quite a bit, but I wanted to do well at Youth Nationals. In my senior year, I placed third, so I considered that a success. So I wasn't the best when I was growing up, but I wasn't the worst.

• 35:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Weis got recruited to row at Brown University in Providence, and he qualified for the International Under-23 Competition, the U23s.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  I think the moment I decided I wanted to go to the Olympics and knew I could go for it was at U23s when one of the coaches said, you know, "I expect to see a lot of you at 2020." And I said to myself, "Oh, that's way too far away. That's not going to happen. I'm going for 2016." You know, you're a young kid. You haven't really faced a lot of defeat, and you're just... I was arrogant at that time. I was like, "I'm going to do it."

• 36:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  And this was how long before the actual 2016 Olympics?

• 36:11Speaker 04

  This was in 2013.

• 36:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you were 20 years old or so?

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right? And you're thinking, "No. Yeah, I'm going to get it this time."

• 36:21Speaker 04

  That's so far away. No way.

• 36:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  After he graduated from Brown, Weis did get an invitation to go to Princeton to work out with the US Rowing Squad and try to qualify for the 2016 Olympics on either the eight-man boat or the four-man boat. He knew his chances weren't terrible.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  I would say like 25% because, you know, going from collegiate to the senior team, it's a whole different ballgame. And I was never really exposed to that level of speed. You just can't get exposed to that level of speed before you actually immerse yourself in it. These guys are best in the world. Some have been training out after college for four-plus years. A lot of them have Olympic medals. Three of them had Olympic medals. So it's a, it was a very, very strong crew. And so being the young guy who had good success at Brown, I was like, all right, I'm just going to transfer that here. That's not always the case.

• 37:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  And let me ask you, what is the average or what is the median age at which rowers peak, would you say?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  I would say around 28, 27.

• 37:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you are hoping to qualify for the four or the eight. You're one of 26 people with 12 slots, right? Talk about decision time, when the team actually gets chosen, and walk me through that.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  I remember the coaches sent the boats out in the water and he was like, all right, you three guys or you four guys, you're going to go ERG, which is the indoor rowing machine. I was like, oh, no. He's like, oh, I need to speak to you after practice. And I was like, oh, God. You never want to hear that. And he said, you know, basically, you're not going to make the eight or four. I think you have a lot of talent for 2020, but right now, you're out of contention for the eight and the four. And I was like, oh, God.

• 37:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  How'd you respond internally and externally?

• 38:02Speaker 04

  I was angry. I was very angry. But, you know, you can't blame the coaches. That's, that's, you know, they're, of course, they're trying to make the fastest boat. And if they don't see you being the fastest person, then, you know, that's, that's the way life goes.

• 38:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now Weiss was facing a long and sad drive home to Rhode Island from the Olympic training camp in Princeton.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  I was so upset. I said to myself, I can't spend four and a half hours listening to Bieber or Taylor Swift or something like that. I needed something to take my mind off roan.

• 38:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Had you ever listened to a podcast?

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Ah, you know, I listened to one probably halfway through and then I stopped.

• 38:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then what made you end up listening to a Freakonomics Radio show on that very happy trip back to Rhode Island?

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Well, I opened up my phone. I went to podcasts to look at the ones to download and it, you know, Freakonomics, one of my friends from college listened to you guys. And I looked at the titles you had and I was like, all right, this one sounds interesting. That one sounds interesting. Let's load them up.

• 39:03Speaker 12

  What was the name of the episode, do you know?

• 39:05Speaker 04

  It was How to Be More Productive.

• 39:06Speaker 12

  Gotcha. And why'd you pick that title?

• 39:09Speaker 04

  Because everyone wants to be more productive.

• 39:12Speaker 12

  Good answer, yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  So I was like, all right, here we go. You know, I'm always trying to learn something new and this seems like a good podcast to listen to to do that.

• 39:21Speaker 12

  We released that How to Be More Productive episode in April as part of what we called Self Improvement Month. It featured an interview with the writer Charles Duhigg.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  It was a very small segment of the podcast. I think it was like five minutes where it talked about marine army rangers, I believe, and how to get leaders out of them. They didn't say you're a natural leader or something like that. You said you're hardworking and your success is built off hard work and not talent or not how a natural leader you are.

• 39:49Speaker 12

  So this drill sergeant told me that he never tells someone who's a natural athlete that they just ran a good race. He only tells like the small kind of wimpy kids that they just did a great job running. The Corps as a whole never tells anyone that there's such a thing as natural born leaders, because that implies that you don't have any control over whether you're a leader or not. Instead, what they do is they compliment shy people who take a leadership role. And they say to them, look, I know it was hard for you to do that, but you did a great job.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  And growing up, I was always decently athletic and I always had pretty good success in athletics. And the same was true in high school and college. And so I put in the work. You know, you can't not put in the work, especially at Brown. So it was like, okay, I put in the work, but at the end of the day, all my success is going to be attributed to how good my body is for rowing. And after that podcast, I sort of had to do a 180 on that. It was more of a, okay, my talent's definitely helping me, but my total success is going to be determined by how much work I put in. And there was also another podcast there. I think it was How to Be Great at Anything, how much dedicated practice I was putting

• 40:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, it sounds like you were a hard worker, but if I'm reading you correctly, it sounds like you're saying that even though you worked hard, A, you could work harder, and B, you could work kind of more strategically or engage in what we call deliberate practice. So was that kind of the light bulb that went off for you, which is, oh, yeah, it's not like I'm lazy, but I can get a lot more out of me than I have been in the past?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so rowing is basically steady state. That's how we train. It's a lot of steady state. And if you sort of let your mind wander during all those hours, instead of, okay, this is what I need to do to fix my technique, or keep you engaged, you can row the hours and you can get the heart rate that you need to be, but you're not going to make the technical changes that you need to. And it's not like I was zoning out, but it was like, okay, this technical change isn't really working that well. I'm going to just go back to steady state press, instead of, all right, I'm going to practice this over and over for the two hours I'm on the water now, and then the two hours I'm on the water in the afternoon, I'm going to nail it down, no matter how long it takes.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  And so it was sort of a shift away from doing the steady state to do the steady state, get the heart rate, to doing the steady state to improve, to put in the hours that actually would improve my speed, instead of relying on how well my body was made to row.

• 42:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  By the time you got home to Rhode Island, having failed to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in the four-man boat or the eight-man boat, Anders Weis was already thinking about one more option. He could try to qualify for the two-man boat, the Coxless pair. In that event, the coaches don't decide who qualifies. It's only your time that matters. He got hold of a potential partner, a veteran US rower named Narek Guregian.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  The partner I got, Narek, he's a very hard worker. And so he drew up our training plan, and I was like, all right, let's do this. This is what's going to make us win the trials. And I think if it was before that, before the podcast, it would have been, okay, I'll do this work, but I don't know if it's really going to make us faster. I think it's really decided by our body build and how talented we are at rowing. And so it was, I tacked the workouts that we had with a little more purpose. Maybe I would have pulled the same splits on the Yerg, but the technical changes I made on the water with this new mindset stuck, and we got so much faster as a result of that. And so it was that mentality shift, instead of working hard to work hard. You know, you're working hard to win a race.

• 43:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And did you tell Narg that you had a new approach?

• 43:35Speaker 04

  Uh, no. I didn't want him making fun of me. He was one of the older guys, so I was one of the younger guys. I was just like, all right, let's do this.

• 43:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would you imagine that he would say, like, oh, you're finally discovering Anders, that you actually have to work on your technique?

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, pretty much, pretty much that. He would have, he would have made fun of me for, for a bit.

• 43:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I'm just curious, like, did you come to feel at some point in this process that, man, I really have just been relying on my genes and not really, you know, I don't know if trying is the right word, but did, did you feel that you'd been kind of failing to tap a lot of your potential?

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. I mean, I could even see that, which is how much speed the, the pair that we were rowing got. You know, we were pretty quick to start with, but we just, we really started improving our speed, our top end speed quite a bit throughout the months we had together.

• 44:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Weiss and Guregian had to go to a series of time trials. Finally, the moment of truth, the Olympic qualifying race with only one team going to Rio to represent the United States.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  We got to the starting line and, you know, I think my heart rate there was like 160, 165 just before the start. We had a very good start and we did what we did best and kept pushing. There was a pair from a club in Pennsylvania, from Philadelphia, that was incredibly fast. And we knew they were going to be our main competition because they beat us in the time trial.

• 45:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are how many boats in the final?

• 45:05Speaker 04

  There was four. And so we were feeling pretty confident, but that other boat was always, how fast are they going to be? And they beat us in the time trial, so it was, anything could happen. One of those things where it's, it's do or die. And so got to the 1,000 meter mark. We were a little bit ahead of them and, you know, I wanted to win very badly. But Narg, you know, the, the pair partner that chose me, he's been training for six years. And so I said, you know, I gotta do it for him. And that was sort of that extra kick to keep going, even when, you know, I couldn't really see that well. And, and my body was just saying, please stop, please stop, please stop. But to be the best and to eventually beat the best, you have to go to those lengths.

• 45:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you just talk about, is this a commonly known danger among rowers? Is that your, your body is doing such crazy stuff that you literally lose your sight temporarily?

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wouldn't say it's very common, but it has happened before. And it's one of those, you know, usually happens at the Olympics or leading up to the Olympics or world championships. You have people that go crazy, that want to win and will do anything to win. And that's the lengths they need to go to, to win. That's the first time it ever happened to me and it's not going to be my last.

• 46:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what did it actually look like from your perspective then?

• 46:20Speaker 04

  The way I experienced it was sort of the peripheral started going and then there's the one spot just took pretty much center stage and that was all I could see. And yeah, it was just, it was, it wasn't sudden, but it was definitely noticeable. Once it was like, okay, I can't really see anything besides this one little dot on my partner's back.

• 46:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  How long did it last?

• 46:41Speaker 04

  I think it was like 300, 400 meters to go, which is, I think, a little over a minute. And then, once we stopped, I probably had my vision back, I think like 15 to 20 seconds afterwards, after I could just lay back in the boat and do, and do nothing.

• 47:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you worried for a moment that you had somehow lost your eyesight for real? Or did you just know that, that you would be okay?

• 47:09Speaker 04

  I knew, you know, at that point I was like, yeah, we're going to the Olympics. Yeah, we did it. I remember when I was a little kid, you know, watching the Olympics and being like, oh, I want to go that. I want to, I want to be an athlete. I want to do that. And I hadn't picked up rowing at that time. So I was looking at, you know, basketball, all those other sports. And it was one of those things where it's just so cool. You're going to be on the biggest stage in the world, doing what you probably do best against people who are the best in the world. And so when I crossed that line, I gave a little shout and then I sort of just passed out a little bit.

• 47:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so you're realizing now, you're going to the Olympics, you're going to Rio. Me, I'm listening to your story, a little selfishly, I'm thinking, if I understand your story correctly, because Freakonomics Radio played this role in reorienting you and getting you to take up Coxless Pear, go on the two man boat and eventually make the Olympics. If I'm reading it correctly, I think our role in this means that essentially I'm also an Olympian. Would you say that's fair?

• 48:11Speaker 04

  I would definitely agree with that. I don't think I would have made the Olympics if I hadn't listened to that podcast. Let's just put it that way.

• 48:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anders Weis and his partner, Nara Gregian, didn't medal in the Rio Olympics, but they did pretty well, making it to one of the final heats. And you should definitely keep an eye out for Weis in the 2020 Olympics. Now, we can't promise this Olympian level of success for everyone who listens to Freakonomics Radio, but I do hope that listening to this show over time has made you at least a little bit more curious, a bit more optimistic perhaps, or more skeptical, or maybe it's just helped you pass the time in a slightly more meaningful way. If so, do me a favor and make a donation to WNYC so that we can keep producing this

• 49:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  show. Just go to Freakonomics.com and click the donate button, or text the word freak to the number 69866. And thanks.

• 49:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio, is innovation overrated? Should we be spending more time and more money on maintenance?

• 49:24Speaker 13

  People always think more about how new ground can be broken than they think about how existing institutions can be sustained, or existing facilities can be maintained.

• 49:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  In praise of maintenance. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 49:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Caitlin Pierce. Our staff also includes Jay Cowett, Merritt Jacob, Christopher Worth, Greg Rosalsky, Noah Kurnas, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, and Harry Huggins. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. And please come visit Freakonomics.com, where you'll find our entire podcast archive, along with a complete transcript of every episode ever made, also music credits and lots more. Thanks for listening.

• 50:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 mg, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings. You know, US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings are bank accounts that work harder for you. You get better savings rates, fee waivers, and rewards from day one, so you spend less

• 51:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  time worrying about money and more on what matters. Sign up for US Bank Smartly Checking and Savings today at usbank.com/smartly. Member FDIC, copyright 2026 US Bank. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility, it's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and

• 51:52Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 52:06Speaker 14

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