The Magic of “Once Upon a Time” & The Power of Collective Intelligence

Have you ever noticed that when two people walk together, they often fall into step without even trying? Or that people in conversation sometimes begin to mirror each other's movements? Humans have a curious tendency to synchronize with one another, often without realizing it. Why does this happen, and what does it reveal about how we connect? https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/social-synchronicity-37695 You've heard all your life that reading is good for you. It expands your vocabulary, sharpens your mind, and makes you more knowledgeable. But reading fiction may do something remarkable that other kinds of reading don't. There is something about the way fiction is written and the way our brains respond to it that produces some surprising benefits. Even the simple words "Once upon a time" can trigger something special. Andrew Piper, professor at McGill University and author of Why You Should Read More Fiction: What Data and AI Tell Us About the Value of Storytelling (https://link.amazon/B01VixDmx), joins me to explain what fascinating new research reveals about the power of fiction — and why picking up a novel may be one of the best things you can do for yourself. We've all heard the warning about "groupthink" — that putting people together to solve a problem can sometimes produce worse results than letting them work alone. But what if the problem isn't collaboration itself, but how we collaborate? Research into collective intelligence reveals that under the right conditions, groups can become remarkably good at solving problems, generating ideas, and making decisions. The trick is knowing how to bring people together so their combined intelligence actually works. Damon Centola, professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how this happens. He is also the author of Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence (https://link.amazon/B05J8lAqo). Listen as he explains what makes some groups smarter than others and how we can use this science to work better together. Why does time seem to speed up as we get older? You look back and wonder where the summer went, or how five years could have passed so quickly. Interestingly, research suggests that time doesn't necessarily feel faster while we're living it. It's when we look back that things seem to have flown by. So what's going on in our brains that creates this illusion? And is there a way to make life feel like it's moving a little more slowly? https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-025-02833-z PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS NATIVEPATH: NativePath Bone Health Collagen is a simple addition to other important bone-supporting nutrients like calcium and vitamin D. Go to https://GetBetterBones.com/SYSK to save up to 48% and get a frother, shaker, free shipping and a 365 day money back guarantee! AQUATRU: Head to ⁠⁠https://AquaTru.com⁠⁠ now and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK AquaTru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back! BEAM DREAM: Beam’s Dream Powder is made with clean, natural ingredients formulated to fall asleep and wake up refreshed! Go to https://ShopBeam.com/SYSK and get 50% off during Beam's Cyber Sale! TREES. COM: Right now, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Trees.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠have great deals on planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get 20% OFF their purchase when using the promo code SYSK at checkout. KA'CHAVA: Ka’Chava’s new Salted Caramel is the perfect balance of mouthwatering flavor and benefits. Embrace your salty side. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://kachava.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get 15% off your first order! VINTED: Ready to clean out your closet and make some extra money? Download the Vinted app for free and start listing! With no seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn and for a limited time, enjoy free shipping in the US on Vinted. QUINCE: Give the gift of quality this holiday season at Quince! Download the Quince App for exclusive offers or go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! DELL: Shop at https://Dell.com/deals for Black Friday and find great PCs like the Dell XPS 13 laptop with a long battery life, beautiful design and powerful performance with Intel® Core™ processors. Upgrade your whole setup for less! PLANET VISIONARIES: In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts! INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 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.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, the curious way people tend to synchronize with each other. Then, what reading fiction does to your brain, like when a child hears "Once upon a time."

• 1:42Speaker 01

  As we get older, not all stories begin with "Once upon a time." But fiction has these very legible signatures that signal to us that, yes, we are in this imaginative space of "what if", we become more open to possibility.

• 1:56Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why time seems to go by faster as we get older, and one way to slow it down. And what is collective intelligence? And is it a better way to find solutions?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Collective intelligence really begins with a question. If I do the smartest thing that I can think of, and everyone else I know does the smartest thing they think of, do we collectively produce something that is way smarter than any individual could think of?

• 2:22Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:52Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:23Mike Carruthers?

  You know, there are times when you're in sync with other people and probably don't realize it. But you will after I tell you about it. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So the next time you're walking beside someone, pay attention to your feet. Without either of you trying, there's a good chance you'll gradually start walking in step with each other. Humans have a remarkable tendency to unconsciously synchronize their movements with other people. Two friends walking together may match their footsteps. People rocking in chairs can fall into the same rhythm. And I'm sure you've been part of an audience

• 5:04Mike Carruthers?

  where everyone is randomly applauding and gradually they begin clapping together. Researchers have even found that synchronization tends to increase after people cooperate with each other. It seems our brains are constantly picking up rhythm and movements of other people around us and subtly adjusting our own behavior to match theirs. It isn't just limited to movement either. In some situations, people interacting with each other can show synchronization in things like breathing and other physiological activity as well. So the expression that "two people are in sync" isn't entirely a figure of speech. Sometimes, quite literally, they are.

• 5:49Mike Carruthers?

  And that is something you should know.

• 5:54Mike Carruthers?

  From the time you were a little kid, you've probably been told that reading books is good for you. It makes you smarter, improves your vocabulary, expands your knowledge. We've all heard that before. But what if reading a good novel could do things for your brain and your relationship, and even the way you understand the world in ways you never imagined? And here's the really interesting part. It seems to make a big difference whether you're reading fiction or nonfiction. Why would that be? After all, reading is reading, right? Well, apparently not. There's some fascinating new research that suggests reading fiction has some surprising benefits

• 6:36Mike Carruthers?

  that go far beyond simply enjoying a good story. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a good story. It just has to be fiction. When you hear what these benefits are, you may want to pick up a novel and start reading. Here to explain is Andrew Piper. He is a professor at McGill University and author of several books, including "Why You Should Read More Fiction: What Data and AI Tell Us About the Value of Storytelling." Hi, Andrew. Welcome to Something You Should Know. So let's start by talking about the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Because everyone's heard that reading is important, but I have never heard until today, or until I knew I was going to talk to you,

• 7:21Mike Carruthers?

  that it matters whether it's fiction or nonfiction. So dive into that.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  When we've talked about concerns about people's reading and continuing to read, and who's reading, and maybe people are reading less, I think we fail to differentiate the differences between nonfiction and fiction. So fiction, short stories, novels, thrillers, sci-fi, fanfiction, there's a lot of different kinds of fiction. Nonfiction is more information-based. So we're thinking memoirs, biographies, histories, self-help books, just to give people a sense of what falls on either side of these terms. And the crucial concept, the way fiction is so important in particular, I think for our attention and our minds,

• 8:10Speaker 01

  is through this concept called embodied cognition.

• 8:13Mike Carruthers?

  Which is what exactly?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  So embodied cognition, it sounds more complicated than it is. So embodied cognition is the idea that our minds are not just these sort of disembodied brains. Our minds exist in an environment, and we use that environment to think with. So for example, our acoustic environment really matters, whether it's loud or quiet, but also our physical one. So the tools or materials we surround ourselves with, whether we're surrounded by plastic or wood, computers or books, paper or pencils, even the people around us are part of that environment. And all of this impacts how we understand the world, how connected we feel to it, and how distracted we are. There's a kind of wonderful book on this topic by Anna Murphy-Paul

• 9:00Speaker 01

  called "The Extended Mind", and she likens the mind to a magpie rather than a computer. So if you ask a computer a question, and it's on your desk, and it gives you an answer, and then you move the computer, say, out to your yard, and ask it the same question, it's going to give you the same answer. People aren't like this. We think differently in different environments. And the reason she uses this idea of a magpie is that magpies do this too. So they build their nests from any material that's surrounding them. It doesn't matter what it is, they will utilize it. And fiction is kind of like this. It's an amazing teacher in how to connect more deeply to the world around us through our bodies and our senses to help us think more like magpies than computers.

• 9:44Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I guess what I'm trying to understand is like, what's the difference between a true crime story and a fiction story? I mean, they're both, they both kind of read the same, they're both... Have the same elements to them, but one just happens to be true and one just happens to be made up. Why would there be a difference?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  This is what a lot of our, my lab has been studying over, you know, years now, which is what does make them different? And in theory, it's, they could be identical and you just sort of change the names and now it's gone from being true to imaginary and so forth. But that's not really how fiction works. There are a lot of different strategies that fiction uses and that writers of fiction use to open our minds and kind of deepen our attention. So, one of the strongest ways it does this is by slowing down our information processing. So, for example, on average, fiction uses shorter sentences, shorter words, simpler, more everyday words than nonfiction. So, the example you just gave, that true crime,

• 10:49Speaker 01

  nonfiction work and that fictional thriller are actually going to read very differently. And the fictional work is going to just flat out be much more predictable. So, with one sentence, our models can tell whether you're reading fiction eight times out of 10. By five sentences, it's nine times out of 10. So, you can liken this, you know, when you, when you tell your kids a bedtime story and you always sort of begin with "once upon a time." What's happening there is you are signaling to their brains to slow down, to enter a kind of what-if space of imagination. And what you're doing from a brain perspective is you're activating what's known as the default mode network. And this is the state

• 11:31Speaker 01

  when our minds are at rest. And there's actually a real reason why fiction can sometimes put you to sleep. It's great bedtime reading and it's why we tell stories to our kids before bed. We don't read them the news or try and teach them a lesson. As we get older, not all stories begin with "once upon a time," but fiction has these very legible signatures that signal to us that, yes, we are in this imaginative space of what-if. We are not going to be processing true information and thinking about sort of real-world problems. And we're going to settle down into this default mode where we can imagine, we can dream, we can rest, we can let our minds wander, become more open to possibility.

• 12:13Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it seems like what you're saying is part of the benefit of reading fiction is that you can tell yourself, "This isn't real," whereas if you're reading the news or you're reading some nonfiction something, that it's kind of like, "Oh, what's wrong now?"

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Whereas what fiction does is it says right away, it says, you know, "Just, just turn that part of your brain off. Settle down and pay attention to this imaginative world that I'm going to create for you." So, you know, I get the allure of thinking, "Oh, this really happened. That's crazy." But I think what fiction does, and the reason I, you know, really, really hope that more people pick it up and spend time with it, is it puts you in a very different mindset. And that mindset brings with it a host of cognitive advantages. So, to be concrete about it, what fiction will do, what that imaginative thriller needs to do, because it's not real, because you're not in an

• 13:10Speaker 01

  information-seeking mode, it's going to spend far more time having characters navigate space and build worlds for your mind to inhabit. So, we found in our lab, for example, that fictional characters spend about twice as much time touching, moving, looking, sensing. These are in fact the key differences between, you know, your hypothetical thought experiment between the true crime thriller and the fictional thriller, is in fiction, we're reading about people doing all of these physical perceptual things. And that puts us into a very different mind state. It encourages us to see the world through their eyes and it's not just about information.

• 13:51Mike Carruthers?

  What happens if the fiction I'm reading says right on the cover, "Based on a true story"? Well, now it's fiction, but yeah, but it's not necessarily fiction. So, does that change anything or not?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  It will. In other words, there's just a really strong pattern that the moment someone says, "I'm going to tell you a fictionalized version of something," they introduce all these techniques that we've been discovering in our lab that, that have really strong, what we call sort of brain correlates or cognitive correlates. In other words, they're going to double down on introducing you to what characters are doing with their bodies, how they're feeling their way through the world. And one of the things it does is it activates what are known as mirror neurons. So, when characters are moving, your neurons for movement are actually firing. And what that does is it puts you in that person's

• 14:48Speaker 01

  experience. And so, that true story is just going to rely more on information, whereas the fictional story is going to rely more on experience, on an individual person's physical experience in the world. And that's what puts you in their shoes. That's what puts you in their, you know, you start to see the world through what they're seeing, but not just, you know, in their minds, but literally kind of through their, through their bodies. I can give you a really neat example of one salient data point about what really makes fiction unique, which is, this flows into all the different things that show up in fiction. So, if I asked you, "What do you think is the most common object in novels today?" What would it be?

• 15:33Mike Carruthers?

  Novels today, meaning written today? I would guess smartphones, cell phones, some technology of some sort. And I want to hear the real answer and we'll do that when we come back. You know, we all try to eat well. I try to eat well, but I sometimes wonder, "Am I really getting all the nutrition I'm supposed to every day? Am I getting enough protein, fiber, greens, all that stuff?" And I'm sure you've wondered the same thing. This is one of the reasons I love Kachava. It's a whole-body nutrition shake. Just two scoops and some water gives you plant-based protein, fiber, greens, and a lot more. It's

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• 16:56Mike Carruthers?

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• 17:38Mike Carruthers?

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• 18:15Mike Carruthers?

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• 18:59Mike Carruthers?

  "Why You Should Read More Fiction." And you asked me a moment ago, "What do I think is the most common object, physical object, in novels today?" And I said, "Smartphone, technology, something like that." But I mean, it could be so many things.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  So, the answer is doors.

• 19:20Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, that was going to be my next guess.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  And you might be, you know, you might think, you know, if you're a student of literature, you might think, "Okay, okay, I get it. You know, a door is like a portal. It's, you know, it's like a entry point to another world." And, you know, sometimes they are. But most of the time, they're just doors. Like, there are ways we can study kind of what doors do from a plot perspective or from a style perspective. And they really are just there so that people can move through them or they can listen through them. And they're, they're what we call these kind of cognitive niches. I mean, this is sort of a fancy term for thinking about, "How do we use objects to facilitate our imagination and our creativity?" So, a really good example of this that's used in the field is to talk

• 20:06Speaker 01

  about bartenders and glasses. So, if you're a bartender, you've got all these drink orders coming in really, really fast. How do you keep track of them? Well, you do it through different kinds of glasses. And the physical shape of the glass is where you offload your ideas, right? It's where you offload your memory and you put it in the glass. Doors are kind of like this. Doors are where we allow our minds to get situated in these imaginative spaces and then we can navigate through them. And then we can start to do that work of inhabiting these spaces and, and again, deepening and immersing our ability to concentrate and focus.

• 20:42Mike Carruthers?

  So help me understand something. When you talk about, you know, the effects of reading fiction versus nonfiction, is part of it the person's understanding that they're reading fiction? Or it's the way the fiction is written? Or is it a combination of the two?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  It's a combination of the two. It's exactly that. In other words, we find that the way fiction is written, and this has been true for about the last two centuries. Now, if you go much further back in the human record, myths and folktales and things like that looked very, very different than, say, novels do today. But we've been sort of converging on a value or a set of values around fiction for the last two centuries. And this, in some sense, triggers certain kind of reactions in readers. And so this is what I mean by this kind of once upon a timeness when you're reading fiction, is writers are doing very familiar things to put your mind in a particular kind

• 21:45Speaker 01

  of state. And that's where you get this kind of like fictionality effect, you know, the benefits of reading fiction.

• 21:53Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I believe what you're saying, but it seems like such a subtle difference. Whether or not you're reading fiction or nonfiction, why fiction would have all these benefits?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Well, I think for people who don't read a lot of fiction, and they may be thinking, you know, something along the lines of what you were thinking, which is, you know, what's the point of it? And I think that's where, you know, I'm really, really invested in showing people, it really doesn't matter, in some sense, what you read. I think some of the things we learn in school, and certainly my training, was, you know, the harder, the better. Like, hard, you know, hard literature, difficult literature, it's better for you. It'll make you a stronger person. And I think that's complete bunk. Any kind of fiction is doing fictional things. And it's the fictional things, it's the once upon a timeness, which is where we really get the benefit.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  So, you know, you can read the classics, you can read romance, you can like sci-fi, you can like fanfiction. All of that is joined by a set of very characteristic habits focused on feeling, focused on this idea of embodied cognition, that really activates these kind of cognitive advantages that I've been talking about. And the beauty is, it's so abundant. Like, fiction's like a renewable energy source. It's just like everywhere. There's no, there's no limit to it. It's constantly being produced. And there's so many different types. And so I just keep telling people, just find something you like and dive in.

• 23:24Mike Carruthers?

  But it seems that in the world of fiction, there's a lot of variation, and some of it's really crappy, and some of it's, you know, really good. But from what you're saying, it's like, it doesn't matter, just read it anyway.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yes. Crappy is subjective. You know, one person's crap is another person's jewel. That's true for antiques as much as it is for fiction. And I really do mean this, that it's all of the traits that whenever people signal to, whenever a writer signals to you, this is a made-up story, by and large, they're going to do these very consistent tactics. They're going to emphasize the character's movement. They're going to emphasize their characters feeling their way through the world. The single best way we've found to predict whether a work, sort of a work that you're

• 24:17Speaker 01

  reading, or a book, is fiction, is the degree to which perception, the representation of characters' perception, is dramatized. The more perception, the more likely it is you're reading fiction. And what that tells us is that this tool, in any shape or form, is helping guide your mind to focus on the world through somebody else's experience, through somebody else's embodied, physical experience. And that has huge payoffs for our minds.

• 24:46Mike Carruthers?

  Well, we've been talking for the last 20 minutes about how important it is to read fiction and the benefits you get from it. But let's recap what those benefits are.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  In terms of the duration, I think it's basically like any habit or practice, right? To get the benefits, you have to do it. It's not like you read a novel and the rest of your life, or for the next six months, you know, it's not like a vaccine or something like that. It's really something you want to build up and make a part of your daily life. I read before bed, little chunks, helps me, puts me to sleep, puts me in a good mind state before I go to sleep, but I do it every day. The way I kind of formulate this is, it will help deepen your sense of concentration. You're following a single character over many, many pages. That alone is training your mind to really concentrate in on somebody else's experience.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  It will kind of open your mind and put you in this what-if space, this kind of dreamy space, as opposed to, I need to get something done, I need to process information, I need to do this thing efficiently. It kind of opens up that creative side as well. Another really nice advantage is, one of the key things we haven't talked about, which is how much fiction likes to play with time. We rarely tell a story exactly in order. And what that's doing is teaching us to be more flexible, how we think about time, how we think about the ordering of information. And so it helps us come to terms with this really heavy human experience of time. I mean, time is, time only goes in one direction, but not in fiction, right?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Fiction gives us a more playful relationship to the burden of time. And I think the last thing it does is, you know, a lot of what people talk about is the ideas of empathy, it puts you in the mind and perspective, all that perception of somebody else's experience. I think that's really, really important and really can't be valued enough. But it also does something else with its predictability. You know, every time you read fiction, we're always emphasizing, like, surprise and novelty and something new that's going to happen. But what's really happening is these highly predictable structures. Like, fiction is excellent at activating what we call archetypes or schemas, things you've seen before, right? That's what, that's how fairy tales work. You've seen this before, and yet it's still enjoyable to go through.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And what's happening there is it's teaching you the way information is ordered and structured. It lets you see the patterns. And so the more fiction you read, actually, the better you're going to be at seeing the way people are kind of trying to convince you of something, trying to sell you something. Because fiction is so predictable, it's a great way to train to understand those schemas and shapes of how information is kind of moving around and trying to move us to do something.

• 27:38Mike Carruthers?

  Have you ever looked at the difference between when you look at fiction readers, whether they're reading an actual book or they're reading off a screen?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  So I have an earlier book called Book Was There. And that was all about the physical experience of reading. So I was very, very fascinated, this was many, many years ago, when e-readers were starting to come out, and had this intuition that this very, very long tradition of physical reading, we were going to lose some things as we moved to screens. And the research has subsequently borne that out. People remember things more strongly when they're reading a physical book, their attention is heightened. And a lot of this has to do, again, with this idea of embodied cognition. We're not computers. And so what the materials that we are reading with and through, that geometry of books,

• 28:29Speaker 01

  really helps our memory, it really helps our comprehension and our attention. And so, for example, in my classes, I don't let them use devices. They can't bring them to class, I encourage them to read on paper. And that really does make a big difference. That said, reading fiction on an e-reader is still better than not reading fiction. In other words, I don't think the effects of screens are so negative that you should just steer clear of them and read nothing at all. But if you can choose, choose print.

• 28:56Mike Carruthers?

  Well, if you had not come around, I would have never known this was a topic to talk about. I thought reading was reading, and reading books is a good idea. But the idea of, you know, drilling down into why fiction in particular is so good, I really enjoyed hearing this. Andrew Piper has been my guest. He is a professor at McGill University and author of the book, Why You Should Read More Fiction: What Data and AI Tell Us About the Value of Storytelling. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Hey, Andrew, great. Thank you for coming on.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Thanks, Mike. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate it.

• 29:33Mike Carruthers?

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• 31:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 31:41Mike Carruthers?

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• 32:22Mike Carruthers?

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• 32:45Mike Carruthers?

  We've all heard the expression, "Too many cooks spoil the broth." And when it comes to solving problems or making decisions, there's a widespread belief that people often think better on their own. After all, groups can fall victim to group think, where everyone just goes along with everyone else. But what if we've got that all wrong? What if bringing people together and allowing them to influence each other's thinking can actually make everyone smarter? And what if the secret to solving really difficult problems isn't finding the smartest people, but figuring out how to connect them?

• 33:26Mike Carruthers?

  There's some fascinating new research that challenges much of what we think we know about how intelligence works. Here to explain it is Damon Centola. He's a professor of communication, sociology, and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies social networks and collective intelligence. He's author of the book, "Good Think: The New Science of Collective Intelligence." Hey Damon, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Hi Mike, thanks for having me.

• 33:56Mike Carruthers?

  So, explain how collective intelligence works.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Collective intelligence really begins with the question, if I do the smartest thing that I can think of, and everyone else I know does the smartest thing they think of, do we collectively produce something that is way smarter than any individual could think of? So, we think of this oftentimes with something like voting. We each have a preferred candidate, we have reasons for preferring that candidate. But when we take all of our votes together, do we make a decision that chooses the best candidate for the collective, which is like the country? And this gets even more interesting when you think about scientists. Each scientist is kind of working on their problem and their research. And they're aware of what their scientists are doing, but they're pretty much focused on their own work. But if you take all the scientists together and ask, are the teams working in the field

• 34:45Speaker 02

  of network science today, producing the most important innovative science they could produce? Or are the teams working in the fields of biology and psychology and political science, making the most important breakthroughs they could make? You can ask questions about whether or not restructuring those teams might actually produce better science overall than what we're doing today.

• 35:06Mike Carruthers?

  But if you have, let's say you have 10 people, and they're individually working on a problem, they're trying to solve something or create something, but they're all working alone. And then at the end, you bring them together and they talk about what they came up with, and maybe collectively they come up with something better. Versus, you have a group of 10 people who from the start are working together as a group to solve this problem, is that group going to come up, do you think, with a better solution than the first group?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  The answer to that question for the last couple hundred years has been, no. You should let people work independently, take their answers, and then after everyone's done, combine them using some sort of mathematical equation that says, okay, these are how we're, all these answers are going to fit together, and then this is what the group answer looks like. This is known as the wisdom of the crowds. And that literature which carries through to our discussions today about political life and polarization and everything else, basically argues, things get much worse when people start talking to each other. Because I might be right about a lot of it, but I also will have some mistakes and some biases. And other people will be right about their parts, but also have mistakes and biases. Now, if we're independent, our mistakes are sort of random.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  So when we add people up, we kind of cancel each other out on the mistakes, and our right parts sort of emphasize one another, and we wind up with a good collective answer. When people talk to each other, your bias can start to influence my bias. And now we start to both kind of agree the same wrong things. And that can happen as more and more people talk. And now you get this sort of, what's referred to as like a group think phenomenon, where everyone starts to kind of believe the same thing, and it gets farther and farther from what is true. So, no, the common position has been, it's a really bad idea to let people talk to each other and share ideas in these situations. You get the best response from letting everyone be sort of independent in their reasoning.

• 36:59Mike Carruthers?

  And now, we're turning that on its head?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:03Mike Carruthers?

  Because I've always heard and believed that you can tell when something's been done by committee. You know, that there are real superstars in every field, and you should let them do what they do by themselves. Because when you dumb it down with other people who throw in their two cents, it's never going to be as good. And I think a lot of people, like me, believe that.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, the old joke about, we're not trying to make a camel here. What's a camel? It's a horse made by committee.

• 37:34Mike Carruthers?

  Exactly.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  And what I would say is, those things can certainly happen. And here's where, you know, the science gets interesting. Because the goal of science isn't to say, look, everyone, everyone's just wrong. It's to say, well, the reason everyone thinks that is because there's this other piece of machinery guiding human collective behavior. And we just haven't noticed it before. And so, when things do go wrong in that way, there's an explanation for why. And the explanation isn't social influence. The explanation is the structure of information networks.

• 38:06Mike Carruthers?

  What's an information network?

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Well, it's just simply, if you and I are in conversation, but you're also in conversation with some other people, and we're kind of debating something about, you know, whether to put in, you know, new rain gutters on our houses, or whether to put in solar panels. You have some thoughts and information, other people have thoughts on pricing, some people have thoughts on environmental impact. And everyone's sort of exchanging ideas about whether our community should put in solar panels. And one way this can happen is in a meeting structure where there's one person who seems to know more, or at least has more charisma and authority than the rest, and kind of guides the conversation. And that we refer to as like a centralized structure, because one person is sort of in conversation with a lot of other people, but that person's sort of guiding the direction of the conversation. By the way, this is what a lot of social media looks like when we talk about influencers. There's one person connected to a lot.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  A very different kind of structure, you could think of as like a town meeting structure, where there's a bunch of people, but everyone has sort of equal influence in the conversation. So lots of different ideas can be surfaced. And someone who's maybe not that charismatic, or even interesting personally, can say something that's actually really helpful to the conversation. And that idea can sort of percolate through people's opinions and actually carry the day in the group decision. And so, one structure, the latter, is a little bit more egalitarian in terms of fairness, in terms of who has influence in that sort of group decision-making process. Whereas the first one is a little bit more centralized and hierarchical. And those two differences actually wind up being deeply important. And we actually never even knew this until the last 20 years.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Like, a lot of research has been done in the last 20 years that surfaced in both mathematical models and then large-scale experiments with tens of thousands of people. Exactly how changing the same people's network, sometimes more centralized, sometimes more egalitarian, radically alters the trajectory of their collective decision-making, sometimes making it much worse when they're centralized. And then taking those same people, putting them to egalitarian structure, and all of a sudden, they collectively make much better decisions than they would have independently.

• 40:00Mike Carruthers?

  So drill down on that a little more, because I have a sense, but I don't necessarily get what you mean by a centralized group or an egalitarian group. So, so, explain that.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Well, let's start with something that everyone kind of thinks about every day, which is echo chambers. We know that there are political groups, we know that political groups tend to hang out with one another. So, if Republicans talk to Republicans, Democrats talk to Democrats. Now, when you look inside those sort of groups, what you see is sometimes, inside an echo chamber, there's one person who's really the leader of the group, who helps direct the conversation, upstir the topics we're talking about. And that helps to kind of govern everyone else's thinking about what they're doing there, and what kinds of contributions they make. And as a result of like one people, one person influencing many, you wind up with a group opinion that's largely a reflection of the person in the center.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  It's a very different thing if you take that same group of people who all start off with the same political biases and the same basic beliefs. And instead, you make it into like, a little bit of a lattice, or like, you know, fishing net network. So, everyone has a couple of contacts they're talking to, but those contacts are overlapping with other peoples and other peoples and other peoples. So, it looks like this sort of grid network. And at that point, there's no one person who can talk to everyone at once. It's little neighborhoods of people talking to each other. And what you find in that situation is that in those neighborhoods, it's often the more moderate people who wind up being influential. And it's a really interesting kind of influence. Because unlike the classic influencer model, where one person would sort of push their

• 41:36Speaker 02

  idea out to many, what happens in the sort of lattice, is that one person winds up just kind of holding their ground. They have an idea, they think their idea is true, they don't have to convince everyone around them. Because as people are talking, everyone's revising their opinions and evaluating what they believe. And if they just kind of move a little bit, they just adjust their opinion a little bit, the person who stays still, who doesn't move, winds up becoming sort of a center of attraction, a kind of gravity well, in the conversation network. And people start moving towards him. And then other people start doing the same thing in other little neighborhoods. And you get these sort of little emergent gravity wells throughout like, the network. And those wind up being centers of intelligence throughout the community. And now, all of a sudden, the community's getting smarter and smarter, because the

• 42:20Speaker 02

  most accurate, most informed people, who may not be the loudest, are nevertheless the people who are kind of pulling everyone else toward them. That changes when a network is highly centralized, because if one person's the center, governs everybody, then there's no opportunity for other voices, minority voices, or more timid people, to make sort of any contribution to what the collective thinks.

• 42:41Mike Carruthers?

  So, what's an example of that, that kind of network? A real world example that I would recognize?

• 42:47Speaker 02

  The most famous cases are like neighborhood networks. One of the cases I study are different neighborhoods, like in the South Side of Chicago, where you can see there are some neighborhoods that give way to repeated gang violence and poverty. And there are some neighborhoods that are sort of right next door, where the neighborhoods are very successful at getting connections with political leadership, and bringing money and resources into their community, building the schools better, and getting their kids off to college. And what's interesting is that, you know, demographically, economically, those neighborhoods look identical. The people are the same. What's different is, one neighborhood tends to sort of, centralize around sort of, certain high-profile community leaders, who have certain views about, you know, gang loyalty in their communities.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  And other neighborhoods look much more like a grid, you know, neighbors sharing with neighbors. They're sort of the borrow a cup of sugar neighborhoods, where people watch out for each other's kids, people help out when someone is sort of engaging in vandalism, they walk into the street and stop the person. And there's nothing different about the people who live in these sort of nearby neighborhoods. It's just that in one of the neighborhoods, people sort of see the neighbors to the left and to the right, and they see that everyone has the similar kind of interests and similar kinds of cares that they do. And they wind up feeling a sense of social responsibility for their neighbors. Whereas when there's one person at the center, everyone kind of defers. No one takes sort of responsibility for the community. And as a result, you see very different sort of cultures emerging out of these communities. And the ability to sort of solve problems looks really different.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  And this is all, you see exactly the same thing within organizations. There are organizations that have a really hierarchical structure, where everything is top-down leadership, and the people who are sort of at the bottom, don't really have much autonomy to make decisions or influence the policy of the firm, versus organizations that are much flatter, where people have a lot of autonomy and a lot of ability to sort of influence the trajectory of the firm. And as a result, a lot of good ideas surface from people who aren't necessarily high up, but their ideas have the ability to sort of percolate through the networks and sort of convince people there's a new direction to go in. And those firms wind up being much more adaptive, and also just much more intelligent, the kinds of new products and ideas they bring to market.

• 44:50Mike Carruthers?

  So, a great example that you write about, that I think paints a really good picture of what you're talking about, is the study of clinicians in hospitals. So, so, talk about that.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  There's this process in medicine called e-consults, which, a lot of hospitals, your hospital probably does it, my hospital does it, which is that a physician, when they're unsure what to do, can put in a question and sort of submit it to an online platform. And what often happens is it goes to an expert in the area, and they write back advice. And that advice is used to then guide your patient care. But, oftentimes, in fact, all the time, what really is going on inside a hospital, is there's a really strict hierarchy. The more sort of senior, you know, director of surgery is the person who's been there the longest and has the most information and most seniority. And as a result, their opinion winds up governing the opinions of the attendings, but also, you know, the residents and the interns. So, all down the hierarchy of medicine.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  And this has been a real problem for issues that we've come to take seriously in the last couple decades, like, race and gender bias in medicine. And one of the things about this kind of bias, is we use the word implicit. The idea is, when we see African-American patients, and particularly, female African-American patients, being treated worse than white male patients, and there's dozens and dozens of papers with these statistics, the hard thing is, why is it happening, and how do we stop it? Because the most obvious thing, which is, you know, people are making racist and sexist decisions, isn't accurate. It's not that doctors are reasoning different in any conscious way about these patients. It's more that, the routines in the hospital, and the things they're familiar with, the kind of implicit decisions, sort of favor one kind of patient over another.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  And the question is, well, if it's unconscious, how, how do you get to it? How do you access it? And historically, and this goes to the classic model of education and rational thought, is that you give doctors tests on what's called the implicit association test, that surface their biases, and then give them training programs that force them to confront their biases, and then give them the tests again, so they perform much better. It's essentially teaching to the test. Then when they go back to work, lo and behold, they exhibit all the same biases they exhibited before. In other words, if you treat them as individuals with problems, you're never going to alter the culture of medicine. If you take those same doctors, and this is the experiment we did with 3,000 clinicians, and then put them into these sort of more egalitarian networks, where every doctor

• 47:15Speaker 02

  has the same opinion, in other words, can only talk to a couple of peers, so they can't talk to everyone at once. Every doctor has the same influence, so they can only, only talk to a, a small number of peers, as opposed to the whole network. Then, every person in the network can make a suggestion, and there's no authority, there's no status, we've committed anonymous. And now, and in, a first-year intern can make a suggestion about patient care, having just come out of medical school and just being taught a lot about cultural competency and race and gender bias, that would be really different than the suggestion that comes from the senior surgeon. And if that, if that idea then has influence on their peers in the network, then that actually can pull the population towards the opinion of the more junior person, just

• 47:58Speaker 02

  by virtue of information percolating in the network. And that's shown to be, in a really significant way, and this is of course replicated, you know, dozens of studies, thousands of physicians. In every case, you find that, the networks become much less biased, patient care increases dramatically, both patients who used to be sent home are now admitted to the hospital at a higher rate, and also patients that were given too much care, like sent for surgery, are sent for surgery at a lower rate. So, it's sort of correcting at both ends, and bringing care into alignment with the guideline-recommended care. And that's amazing, because these experiments only last about 15 minutes. And what you see is a real collective shift in belief. And what's compelling to me about that, and why it is collective intelligence, not individual intelligence, is you haven't taught people anything individually.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  You didn't sit them down and train them, or tell them they made mistakes. You just let them learn from their peers, in the right kind of network. And the kinds of ideas that are best for patient care in these settings, really just kind of emerged to the surface. And when people are anonymous, they're much more likely to learn from their peers. There's no status threat, there's no difference between the opinion of a junior and the opinion of a seater. There's just, which idea seems right? And in those kinds of settings, the idea and the best argument can kind of rise to the fore and guide the entire population, even among a group of experts like physicians.

• 49:15Mike Carruthers?

  So, this concept, and the, and these examples you've given are, are really intriguing. But now, what do we do with this? How do we take this idea and apply it to my life?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  For every organization in the world, wherever we are, we're sitting in some kind of building, there's some kind of hallway. And since there's a lot of managerial control over who's going to sit where, we can be really deliberate and intentional about how we structure those hallways. Who do we put onto which teams? And my favorite example, like that's the, I think, most concrete, practical example, comes from, I joined the faculty in MIT in 2008, and they just built the data center, which was this massive new complex. And what's interesting about it is just a decade earlier, what had sat on that same territory, that same place in Cambridge, was Building 20. And Building 20 was this a ramshackle plywood structure, and it was built during the Second World War in 1943, just for the development of radar. And then it was supposed to be torn down because it

• 50:11Speaker 02

  wasn't in compliance with Cambridge City Fire Code. It was just a plywood, you know, three-story structure. But it stayed standing for almost 60 years. And the reason is because what had happened was with the GI Bill, a lot of faculty and students were just kind of shoved in there. It was like an overflow unit. So people like Noam Chomsky wound up in like a corner office there, which was dank and dark and falling apart. And because the building was so poorly made, scientists could like rip walls down and run cables and like just use it as part of their experimental space. But it also meant that people from like every discipline across campus were shoved together into the space. It was like, you know, engineering was next to astronomy, was next to acoustics, was next to linguistics. And so because the space was so a-functional in terms of its design, people were wandering

• 50:54Speaker 02

  down the hallways constantly, bumping into each other. And what came out of it were these incredibly stimulating conversations that cross disciplines and cross ways of doing science. So that way of sort of building things, that you put hallways, instead of putting everyone in the same team or everyone in the same area on the same hallway, you actually mix it up. So there's a lot of diversity in each hallway. But then, interestingly, Building 20 was also kind of isolated from the rest of campus. So someone like Noam Chomsky, he didn't have a lot of network ties or influence from kind of the sort of more staid departments on the campus. So he was in this kind of weird amalgamation, this sort of island of misfit toys inside Building 20. And so they were sort of protected, too. As much as their interactions were diverse within the building, they had very

• 51:36Speaker 02

  few interactions outside the building. And so there's this deep lesson about like building office spaces, which is, sure, you want to be able to create diversity, but you also want to restrict the number of ties people have to influences that might be constraining or confining or limit the kind of weirdness and creativity of people's ideas. And that's really easy to do. You just, on Monday, go into the office, make a plan, start rearranging the offices so that people on hallways are from different groups, and then design meetings so there's not too much interaction from the group members, all the way back to everyone else in their same group. And it's a counterintuitive thing to do, because almost everyone would say, well, the best way to get innovation and intelligence is to let everyone know

• 52:18Speaker 02

  what everyone's doing. But the truth is, and this is where science becomes useful, when you do that with scientists, what winds up happening is everyone conforms really quickly. So Building 20 stands out because it was, for that period, the single most innovative structure in like US history. I mean, just the Bose Corporation came out of Building 20. You know, Noam Chomsky's theories of language and philosophy, the invention of gravity detectors and the Nobel Prize in Physics, the invention of the first video game, and the invention of hacker culture, like all these bizarre intersecting things came out of this one weird building. And I think, from a really practical point of view, those are the kinds of spaces that we're trying to create.

• 52:55Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this really goes against the grain of what I've always believed, and I think a lot of people believe about how collective intelligence works and what it does and what it doesn't do. I really appreciate this explanation. Damon Centola has been my guest. He is a professor of communication, sociology, and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of the book, Good Think: The New Science of Collective Intelligence. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. And Damon, great, thank you. Thanks for coming by.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Thank you, Mike. It's been a pleasure, and it's, I'm looking forward to hearing the show.

• 53:34Mike Carruthers?

  I'm sure you recall when you were a kid that summer vacations seemed to last forever. But as an adult, entire months just disappear in what feels like the blink of an eye. Part of the explanation may have to do with how your brain remembers experiences, rather than how much time actually passes. Researchers have discovered that our experience of time and our memory of time are two different things. When we're doing something exciting, time can fly by. But when we look back, the number of distinct experiences we remember can influence how long that period seemed to have lasted. In fact, a study published

• 54:17Mike Carruthers?

  in 2026 found that when people remembered more separate events from something they'd watched, they tended to judge the overall experience as having lasted longer. So here's an interesting idea. If you want your days to feel richer and more memorable, break up the routine. Visit somewhere unfamiliar, learn something new, do something different on the weekend. Research suggests novelty can help strengthen certain memories, although it doesn't guarantee that life will literally seem slower. And that is something you should know. Our producers are Jeff Havison and Jennifer Brennan. The executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Herthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 55:04Speaker 04

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